634 - I have betrayed all my children

I would be lying if I said I wasn’t at all down-hearted in that time. I also felt I was starting to hear the whisper of fate, as I had in Yeola-e before the war. Great change is coming, it breathed, but there wasn’t a feeling of personal helplessness about it, almost more an itch, as if it was me who must set that change in motion. But the sense of boredom and stagnation, I mostly put down to sadness and loneliness.

The worst thing in all the kyash with the Yeoli hawks was that Krero would listen to them. I had said from the start that I served both Yeola-e and Arko, and Arko especially when I was in Arko—that was how I read the mandate—but Krero agreed with them that in truth I should serve only Yeola-e, wherever I was, and interpret the mandate that way. He kept saying, “After everything Arko did to you… it boggles the mind.”

As if he didn’t already have a perfectly-good residence in the Marble Palace, they gave him a rebuilt house as a gift. Coincidentally it was right in their part of the Aitzas quarter. They were wise enough to deal with him not through Inatalla, whom he remembered all too well from the war, but though Rao Irae, a weasley and unctuous stick of a man from Asinanai who was one of the more subtle hawks. When I asked about it, Krero said, “He told me that considering all I went through, guarding the most fearless risk-taker in all Yeola-e, being wounded, having my lungs half-burned out with gas, and losing my very best friend, I had been rewarded a little… stingily. So they wanted to show their appreciation.”

“If you feel you were rewarded stingily,” I said, “you need only have said something to me.” He hadn’t complained to them, it turned out; he hadn’t thought it at all until they suggested it, not having thought such a huge reward possible. “You really think they’re doing this because they care about you, Krero?” I asked him. “It’s to ingratiate you and get your ear, so they can hurt me through you.”

But his heart had already accepted the gift as his due, and once that has happened, there is no arguing with it. “You know, Rao warned me you’d say that, Cheng,” he said. “And I have to wonder what sort of friend you are, if you think I am the sort of friend who can be so basely influenced.”

“There,” I said. “They have already hurt me, through you. That didn’t take long.” He spun on his heel and stamped out. I hoped when he cooled off and thought about it, he’d see through it. But I have learned, hard lesson though it was, that you cannot count on anyone’s mind to discern what yours does.

Having been given a house, he felt obliged to move into it for at least some of the time, putting him in their proximity as much as mine; then he felt he had a better base from which to court prospective wives, from the women of yeola-e sevini arkani, as they called themselves, “City-of-Arko Yeola-e.” The likelihood of him finding one related to one of the hawks, I knew, was fairly great. I couldn’t order him not to, and he wasn’t listening to my opinion of their character.

I answered Assembly this time without Veresinga’s help, since the questions seemed more straightforward than previous ones. Or perhaps it was just that I was more practiced, and more jaded. A full accounting of what precisely transpired in this slave revolt and subsequent events was just a matter of narrating it; a detailed explanation of my reasons for addressing it as I had was just a matter of explaining the situation as it stood and what would likely happen if I had let it be, same for why I’d had the slaves punished and how I reconciled it with the mandate; condoning bloodshed was hardly turning Arko to our way of governance. Answering what my plan was for the next time, if there was one, I wrote the truth: same. But I added that I had assigned Irefas to find out if there were any other towns where slaves were being kept in ignorance, to forestall another uprising for the same reason.

Like one blinding ray of happy light in the miserable gloom, Vaneesh came visiting, with Shadavie. The baby was about two moons old, with dark curly hair that might yet end up any colour, bright green eyes—where had she gotten them?—though they were the same shape as mine, as were her eyebrows and her chin. Her nose and lips and easy smile were Vaneesh’s.

Holding her tiny warmth in my arms, pulling faces at her, and engaging her in a long conversation about the importance of the semanakraseyesin and how it was not a giggling, shrieking or drooling matter was medicine for my soul. For the five days that Vaneesh stayed, I was more father to Shadavie than I had been to Roshten in my first five days, or more exactly evenings and nights, with him. Niku had only gradually begun to hand him off to me or let me change his diaper or burp him when I was persistent in asking her to; I gathered she was clinging to him out of fear of losing him too, a mother’s natural fear for one baby flared up ten or twenty-fold by having just lost another.

It would ease with time, I told myself, and so it did, but always when I held him I felt a sense of shame in my hands, and felt I would all my life. Because I had been there for his stream-testing; but I also had in the back of my mind I’d desert him before he turned six. In a sense, I have betrayed all my children by having them, or by not handing them off to someone else to raise entirely. But the semanakraseyesin requires it.

Easier with Shadavie, to whom I would be only an occasional parent, not one whose loss would be an all-encompassing shattering. It was a little bit like being a grandfather, as I was given to understand, more pleasure than responsibility. And the curse of the stream-test was not between me and her, and didn’t lie across her life, and her own future motherhood. Playing with her was an innocent delight that seemed too sweet to be true; she was without the worst of the trappings, but still mine.

“Those putrescent puddles of lard!” Intharas stormed into my office at the start of his regular half-bead, flung himself down and back up again with barely a break in his stream of words, some papers in his hand. “Oh, I’ve been sued for libel before, of course! By a stinking dirty crook for calling him a stinking dirty crook, every word we wrote my little professional God’s truth… ten or twenty times, that, it happens all the time. By an honest merchant that my writer was backstabbing as part of their feud so every word turned out to be my little professional God’s flying bullshen and I had to fire his leprous posterior… three or four times, that. And everything in between. But never a passle of arm-waving, mob-ruled, smelly-arm-pitted wool-hair politicians!”

In answer to my gaze of speechless incomprehension, he smacked the papers on my desk. They were from Sakrisas Lamen, a prominent Arkan advocate. (Arko has many many more advocates than Yeola-e.) He was writing on behalf of the plaintiffs who had retained him, “being thirty-seven Servants of the Assembly of Yeola-e.”