235 - The freedom of love

And yet it was a sword-to-their-own-throats threat. I presumed these people were Yeolis; any harm to morale that weakened the army hurt them too. I could ask them, “You would do this to Yeola-e?”

Even though I knew it might be better I never know, I couldn’t help but wonder who was in on it. Krero? Esora-e? Emao-e? Kamecha? Lurao—whose petition I had never heard more about—and other people whose kin Kallijas had killed? My preference would be to go to them before they came to me, to surprise and forestall, but without knowing who, I couldn’t do that.

And who was the writer? Sachara? My mother, throwing me off with the ‘as a warrior loves his commander’ line? No—she’d just tell me. Sach too—perhaps. I was sure I’d recognize the handwriting of either of them, even in Enchian, anyway. I read it many times over, trying to course the scent in the style of line and space and rhythm, to hunt by the tone of the words. It had to be someone who knew; but I didn’t know who knew, now.

All these things I filled my mind with, instead of sleeping, as a commander should the night before a battle. Tired though I was, I got only snatches. It was about a bead before false dawn that I’d give the first order, because the first action needed total darkness. It was a full moon, still, but the night had darkened with high clouds; if it stayed that way, I’d have the A-niah fly into the Arkan palisade to open its gate, and we’d attack as false dawn was beginning. Otherwise we’d go at dawn as usual, sparing the need for torches.

A high-quality Arkan bead-clock is a beautiful thing, counting off the hundredth-beads. After we’d plundered the Arkan camp last time, several of my warriors had presented it to me. I suspect it was Abatzas’s. I had it on my night-table; I’d thought I’d find the sound of the beads, which were all made of glass, running through glass channels between two sheets of glass, soothing. Now I wondered whether those perfectly-regular clicks, marking off increments of time passing, had helped keep me awake. I never forget that time is passing anyway, but perhaps this was too frequent a reminder.

I counted them down to the one that marked the time to move, and woke up Niku when it dropped. She’d look at the sky and make the decision. She watched for a while, getting a measure of how much the clouds would move, then said, “It’s good.” I put out the order, “Up and gear up, quietly.” The less roused the Arkans were when the flyers—ten of them, for surety—landed, the less likely they were to see. Opening the gate from inside a camp is harder than a city, Niku had taught me; in a city there are buildings with roofs to land on silently, and then you can scale down the wall, or use the fire-escape pole or cable if there is one, as there frequently is in Arkan cities.

There was no cover, so we just lit torches and charged straight in a line, with the rams to fool them. We were close enough that they wouldn’t have time to gear up unless they’d slept in armour, which most had not. They were jeering and shooting us from the palisade when both doors of the gate swung open, and we charged in like water through a broken dam.

So sweet and straightforward it was to just fight, after everything else, so simple the aiming of each cut or thrust, so clean the exertion and the risk. They had no time to get themselves into any sort of order against our lines and wedges, or to get themselves mounted against my Enchian horse, and so were again defeated from the start. Of twenty thousand, maybe ten thousand got away; we slaughtered all the rest, or if we left them downed wounded, the locals finished them. We got none of the Schvait; they generally have no compunction at all about fleeing when their general does, and soon learn to anticipate it.

I’d called off the chase and was poring through the biggest tent in the camp for plans or valuables when I heard a commotion outside, and frantic shouting in Aitzas-accented Enchian in a voice I knew. “No, Muunas help me, don’t take me to him, I’ll make it worthwhile to you, I swear, I am a close personal friend of the Imperator, ohhhh you wool-hair pigs picking through my quarters, no, please, not him, noooo!”

“We found him half-trapped under his horse, which had a broken leg,” the grinning dekakraseye who was holding Abatzas’s jewel-encrusted sword said, as they hauled him in front of me. “Stepped in a marmot-hole, poor thing. We put it out of its misery. Not him though.”

Another warrior did a pretty good Abatzas-voice. “Nooo, mercy, pleeeease,”—he mimed the frantic flinging away of the sword and throwing himself onto his knees—“I’m worth a lot in ransom, I am, a thousand gold chains or more, so you’ll get all sorts of reward, kiss that off if you hit me with that thing!”

“And whatever you do,” one of the others went on mimicking, and several others joined in to mock-beg in unison, “pleeeeease don’t take me to Shefen-kas!” They all roared with laughter.

They hadn’t forced him to his knees; he’d gone there himself, and looked at me with abject eyes. “Probably,” I said, in Enchian myself so he could understand, “he’s thinking of how I felt when he burned down my capital, and the place where I grew up.” Abatzas cringed like someone hit with a gout of scalding water. Any moment now, I was guessing, I was going to get hit in the face with the smell of him shitting himself. “Just find the Ikal people and tell them to truth-drug-scrape him, my order,” I said, in Yeoli, to spare myself at least the stink. “Then confine him.” A battlefield is such a loathsome place, in truth, that only the beauty of courage makes it bearable, and this was the antithesis.

I wanted to offer Kallijas the chance to speak to Abatzas, but first there were all the after-chores of a battle: the counting of dead and wounded, taking reports, allocating plunder, doing the after-battle command council. This time we had got all of Abatzas’s papers and his war-chest, which was nicely fat. Then when we were just finishing up the meeting, Krero said, “On the way here, one of my people asked me to repeat something to you… ‘Chevenga, you know what you should do to that shit-spewing general? What he would have done to you. Right in front of all of us.’”

I froze, my skin crawling all over. “But… that’s Arkan,” I said. “You think they want to see me turn into one of them?”

“You know, that’s your worst weakness, lad,” Emao-e said. “The weakness that is the other sword-edge of your greatest strength. You are so good-hearted you don’t understand evil or anger or vengeance, and you think all your people are crystal-pure like you. In that way you are out of touch with your own warriors, as the chakrachaseye should never be, and don’t know what they are feeling. Many would never admit it, for fear of what you would think of them, but I heard it many times myself, today, too, ‘I’d love to see Chevenga make that Arkan suck him.’” All the other Yeolis signed chalk.

“But… I’d have to let him touch me,” I said. I meant it seriously, but they all laughed, and it started to sink in that I might have to do this. Semana kra. Suddenly I wanted to throw up.

They debated. Misiali, Arzaktaj and Peyepallo all favoured it, to unspirit the enemy; Niku alone among the allies was against, and I knew it was only because she knew what I felt. The Yeolis were split but mostly in favour, to reward and put heart into our warriors. “If you were to take a vote among the army,” said Emao-e, “I can guarantee it would be chalk for this.”

“Only one way to find out,” said Hurai. Of course there was.

I called them to Assembly after everyone had bathed, to do the decorations—let everyone else begin to understand the importance of the A-niah here—and make the victory speech praising all as usual. Then I had Abatzas hauled up, to their jeers. “My people,” I said, “it was proposed to me that I do to him what I have come to call the Arkan thing, to the Ar—”

My generals had been right. There was such a huge roar of shouts of “Yes! Chalk! Do it!” that I had to hold up my arms for silence to do anything resembling a vote. The noise from those in favour outdid that of those against by at least double. I looked down at Abatzas, kneeling at my feet, his petulant-featured face full of horror; even in his syrupy thickness of a mind he understood what that thunder of clashing wristlets meant.

Some aspects of the act of war tend not to show themselves on a written page. It is a compact among warriors, as among healers and cremators, that the most horrific secrets of our work be spared those who need not live them. Yet war is a public undertaking; to my mind, nothing should be hidden from those who vote on it. So I believe, yet my heart shrinks from writing this as it shrank at the time from doing it.

Semana kra, I had to chant to myself, to make my hands unclasp my belt, to seize his narrow patch of long hair. The people wills, the people wills. He made barely even a show of defiance, his fear turning him so hungry and fawning in the way he seized my hips I wanted to wipe his hands off me like dung. But a human body will feel what it will feel, and so will a human soul.

He was Abatzas, but he was also Arko, and the hand of Kurkas, his minion, his friend, his representative. You who forced me to my knees before you, I thought, I now return the favour. You serve me; it is I who am power now. Who can help but feel pleasure at the reversal of helplessness, and delight in the desperation of the former oppressor?

He drew me in deeper than I thought possible, his arms wrapped around my legs, and the army, on its feet and dancing, began chanting my name. I drew Chirel, which made him go at it harder, his tongue seeming to touch my very soul; I raised it to the sky and threw back my head, and the chant grew to a shattering roar.

My people, I am your will, I thought, and felt their hate, their agony turned to anger, flash to my outstretched sword like lightning and burn down through me into him, though my hand clenched in his hair, through the sword-thrusts of my manhood into his throat. On his agony and their ecstasy and my own power over him I rode as on a wind. This is the most perfect joy possible in the world; I knew it in every cell. “Even that,” people would say to me afterwards, “you can make grand with every motion; even doing the Arkan thing, you look like a perfect semanakraseye. How?” I just said, like everything else: my heart’s completely in it. That’s all.

When I came, they all came with me, as one, emotionally if not physically; then wept and flung their arms around each other and jumped up and down as if all Yeola-e were free already. I pushed Abatzas off me, and he prostrated himself as if I were Imperator. I should say something, but my gorge came up so fast I felt I’d throw up mid-word if I unset my teeth. Suddenly I was shivering, as if I had a fever. I wanted to be alone; I wanted darkness; I wanted to die. I staggered down from the stand and ran to my tent, Niku and a few others hard on my heels. I found my voice only enough to say “Everyone leave me alone, no one come in here, that’s an order!” I threw up what seemed like everything I’d eaten for days before I could even get to the chamber-pot, and smashed my head on the ground. Not hard enough to see stars didn’t seem hard enough, so I did it harder.

“Sheng. No. Stop.” I felt warm muscle against my face, a gloved hand on the back of my head, trapping it gently between. “You are not corrupt, you have not become him.” I tried to wrestle loose; he held firm. There was another hand on my shoulder, smaller, cool. “Listen to him, Chevenga, omores, pehali, stop.” Kall’s hand was gone for a moment, then came back, naked. “Sheng, stop.”

I froze, right to the bones. I had never introduced them. “Em… that one, I mean you, must be… Shefen-kas’s betrothed…” His deep voice turned Arkan formal. “I am Kallijas Itrean, failed solas, and greatly pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“Yes, I’m Niku. Niku aht Tanra nar sept Taekun called Wahunai which means ‘Wild One,’ shall we get him off the floor and out of this mess?” They are both strong people. They hiked me up easily, got the puke and the demarchic shirt off me and laid me on the bed. I kept my eyes clenched shut. I wanted to be anywhere else in the world but here and anyone else in the world but me.

“There,” he said. “I’m sorry; he had mentioned your name but I didn’t catch it enough to know it. I hope you will forgive me.”

“Of course, and not at all,” she said. “Please don’t be embarrassed. I had hoped to make your acquaintance in truth; there are many things I’d love to ask you about. Chevenga stop pulling your hair.”

“I… I meant to introduce the two of you,” I said, so weakly there was barely voice in it. “I didn’t think it would be quite like this. I’m sorry.” I didn’t let go my hair.

Kallijas laid his other hand, now also naked, on my cheek. “You did what you had to,” he said. “They asked it of you, and you do what your people ask. I think you hate yourself only for enjoying it.” I pulled away gasping from his hand, only to find Niku’s on the other side. They had only just met and were working together as if they’d planned it. Tears caught me. “I don’t deserve so much love,” I said through my sobs. “I don’t deserve either of you.” I wanted to crawl under the bed. I tried, but they stopped me.

“You are good,” she said, “or else you wouldn’t hurt like this now. No matter how big that vileness feels, love, it’s not true. Hatred is the biggest lie.”

“Then why is that pleasure sweeter than any other?”

Though I’d screamed it, their touch did not waver. “Is it?” Kall said, and tapped the edge of his two fingers to the edge of my sword-hand forefinger, where it was curled in my hair. Niku’s hand ghosted onto the inside of my thigh. It was like falling off the edge of the Earthsphere.

Abatzas was compelled by fear, those touches said. I am inspired by love, which never compels. Which truly feels better? “You need his touch cleaned off you,” Kall said. “Right to the soul.”

“That’s exactly right, and we’re going to do it.” In unspoken unison, they moved to turn me over. Was there harmony between her and him as there was between me and him? If likes attract likes, it stood to reason. I resisted, but they were too strong. They both kissed me, in such a way that I gave up all protest, and finished stripping me.

As poisonous to the core Abatzas’ touch had been to me, filled with fear and hate, theirs was healing, filled with love and joy. Where I had found darkness in myself, they drove it away with light. Where I was ripped apart, they joined me back together. In place of corrupt and cruel pleasure, they made me feel true pleasure, that knows nothing but the freedom of love. When they had given me the shining, shattering final cure, I wept for a long time, with relief so intense I felt broken, and reborn.