633 - An education in vilification

When Niku left, Shaina and Etana decided to as well, taking Kima and their kids, for their safety. I could not blame them. Fifth was steadfast about staying with me except in summer, though, so he and Younger Kallijas became the only two youngsters in the Imperial section, and their bond grew stronger.

There are some who say I lost the stomach for Imperatorship after that. I don’t think I lost my spirit, but life was less full and rich, and lonelier. The Imperial bedchamber seemed cold and dead and too big with only two children in it, and no babies. (Haians say that you want the family you make to be like the family you grew up in; that would explain why no herd of running, yelling, frequently-pranking kids didn’t feel right to me.) Kallijas and Skorsas did all they could do to cheer me, which was plenty, but it occurred to me to fear for their lives, too.

The feeling that my life was a curse to other life near it worried at my heart for a while. So did the idea that Niku had gone to Yeola-e not only for safety, but in anger at me, and felt I was innately a danger to our children. “I think you are taking it too far,” Alchaen told me, when I went to him about it. “At the same time, your fear grows out of a correct intuition. It’s not like a stillbirth or an illness, that she could blame on fate or Gods. She is not Yeoli. To part of her, it seems like murder.”

Well! Trust you to say it right out, I thought. But she did it herself to Vriah… Vriah had lived. Probably, not being Yeoli, being from a hot country, Niku had not really imagined it was possible for the stream to kill a child, until it happened. I lay my head on my arm and wept for a bit, which I could do without a thought in Alchaen’s presence, of course.

“But if that’s true, it will always be between us,” I said when I could. “She will not be able to look at Rojhai Tennunga as he is growing up, and not think that there should be the other one too, growing up likewise… kyash, that’s not good for him, either.” Maybe the double name had been a mistake. I couldn’t imagine Alchaen was thinking anything but insane, barbaric custom behind his impassive eyes.

“Give her time,” he said. “Acknowledge what she feels, and don’t forget she loves you.” I wrote to her saying I understood, but I could not tell from her letter back whether it made much difference. Some things cannot be done over a distance.

Matters grew worse between me and the Yeoli hawks. It was around this time that they seemed to decide that influencing me was futile, which was fine, except that instead of giving up and accepting what I was doing, they set out to undermine me. Callous, naïve, cruel, ruled by emotion, tight-fisted, bloody-minded, stubborn, weak-willed, stupid, calculating, foreign-corrupted, competent only on the battlefield, a second Notyere, still insane, all these things they called me at one time or another. Inatalla and Faraiko Terero were the worst.

They set out to discredit me not only in Arko but at home; the first spawn-press in Tinga-e, in fact, was built with hawk money, though that was concealed. The ostensible owners were a nationalist group who gave themselves the name Yeola’s Children. Foreign corruption was rife in Yeola-e, their chronicle argued (in the perfect script of an Arkan machine), and its main instrument was me, the semanakraseye who loved Arko over Yeola-e, the only Yeoli who’d ever killed other Yeolis and not been exiled without safe conduct, the stubborn swordsman who’d been wilful from childhood, then had spent too long in Laka as a youth and Arko as a man, the Yeoli-averse lover who’d have sex with any shade of foreigner before he’d touch one of his own, the alliance leader who found he loved ordering around submissive foreigners and so cleverly played the voters of Yeola-e into chalking the invasion to make himself Imperator.

Their other main theme was that I was vainglorious, as if they were working in concert with the short-chainers in Vae Arahi. Everything noteworthy I’d ever done I’d overstated to carry my own legend; every word or act more meaningful than scratching my behind they called conceit or fame-seeking; the start of the war was my fault for going on the peace mission, the continuation for duping Yeolis into voting for it.

They made much of my supposedly considering myself divine, from being corrupted into it by Arkan tradition, then succumbing entirely due to being worshipped by the Enlightened Followers. It didn’t help that the Followers had grown to tens of thousands and were raising temples in every major city. When I learned that their choirs were trying to replicate the sound of my own singing wind, something as personal to me as the beating of my heart, I strengthened my resolve never to enter one of their temples, no matter how beseechingly I was invited.

Why so many people were joining them baffled me until I got an explanation from an expert whom I should have asked in the first place: a psyche-healer. “They do not want to think a mere man conquered their star-destined Empire,” Alchaen told me. “Especially a barbarian. So they must raise you to a God, and as Arkan a God as they can manage.” That made so much sense it almost felt like the flash from All-Spirit, and made it all much easier to bear.

The hawks and their allies gave me an education in vilification: the slight exaggeration of a true incident, the omission of extenuating facts, the ascribing of the worst possible motives, the holding of a person to a stricter standard than anyone else (especially themselves), the claim he has responsibility where in truth he does not have power, the beating of breasts as cruelly-oppressed victims, the appealing to fear, envy, anger and other aspects of the worst in people… and, of course, the endless hammering on the same themes. Say anything about a person often enough, and it becomes his reputation; so they set out to prove.

More subtle was the backhanded compliment, the “confirmation” of an accusation by a second incident when the proof was never properly made, the supposedly-generous admission that I’d merely inadvertently, not purposely, committed a wrong I hadn’t committed at all; the “friendly” sympathy for deficiencies I did not have, the debunking of claims I never made, the avowals that they had once been loyal and my friends—some were brazen enough to say they still were—and so forth. Every action a person makes can be viewed in an ill light, if someone can trick you into viewing his actions that way.

I wondered what the people who were reading these things would think of how the hawks lived, wearing gold, residing in many-roomed mansions, keeping whole farms full of slaves. But people pay more attention to charges levelled against a person whose name they know well.

It all got someone angry enough to smash the Children’s press and burn down their shop one night, probably a warrior who loved me. But that played into their hands, as they made the best of it; never until my time, they wrote, would such destruction of a device of free opinion have been committed in Yeola-e.

You might wonder who would listen to this. But some anger among Yeolis I could understand; my people certainly hadn’t sent me against Arko so as to lose me. I got pilloried over and over for allocating any money at all to the rebuilding of the city of Arko, rather than directing every chain to the rebuilding of Yeola-e—even though I had sent far beyond what they could have hoped to raise even within a measure of land equivalent to what they’d occupied in Yeola-e. The accusation here was that it was to assuage my personal guilt, when a semanakraseye’s personal concerns should have no bearing at all on such decisions. I couldn’t honestly say there was nothing to that.

As well there were those who were as Elera Shae-Tyeba had been, those whose souls suffer bitterly for anyone else’s victories or accomplishments, and so must find some way to shrink them, prove them false, find some flaw to prove you are not perfect and thus shrivel you in their minds to the same size as themselves. Such people drank up the slanderous words like water in a desert.