241 - The forces of history

When we had rested again, in each other’s arms, I finished taking him, as I’d promised. Again, I was very careful. Again it felt for both of us as if we lived on the flame within us. Whatever it was to an Arkan to be reconciled to life this way, he felt to the bone. Then the grief broke open too, like a half-healed wound, as can happen after sex. He wept unrestrained as I urged him to, with shrieking cries that those he mourned could probably never have imagined him capable of. Their souls probably weep for you, I thought, forsaken by your nation and left alone but for your worst enemy.

He clung hard, as I clung to him. His crying took a long time to fade.

“I should be glad that he is in Celestialis, in Aras’ hand, safe,” he finally whispered. “But I miss him already.”

“I know.”

“He hurts no more.”

“But you hurt, for him being gone.”

“What have I ever done to deserve such pain? Gods, what?” I tightened my arms around him.

“I know exactly what you mean,” I said. “My healer on Haiu Menshir told me, to some questions there can be no answer. Meaning, that is sufficient. That was whenever I asked, ‘Why me?’”

“There is only pain,” he said. “Not answers.”

“You did nothing to deserve it. Nothing. That I am clear on.”

His voice broke again. “I want to cry out like a child, saying, whatever it was, I take it back! I take it back… I’m sorry…”

His head was on my shoulder. I pulled him closer. “It’s the answer that rips out our hearts. This happened even though you did not deserve it.” He lost words for sobs again, and I cradled him.

“Aras forgive me for taking comfort from you, who are going to do what you are going to do,” he whispered when he had words again, lifting his head slightly.

“Since Aras is an Arkan God, not a Yeoli one, may I suggest that Yeola-e being set free is none of His business,” I said.

“I don’t mean that,” he said. “I mean when you conquer us.”

I froze. It seemed as if there’d been a dark flash across my mind, like the momentary shadow of a bat’s wing across a moon. “Kallijas,” I said. “When I was a ringfighter and out of my mind, I said a few things which perhaps got into the Pages, or the Pages of the lip. I was forgetting that I cannot and never will decide such a thing. My people will.”

He took in, and heaved out again, a long quivering breath. He wanted to say something to me, I saw, that made him nervous. “I wish Aras would transform me into someone who could love you without all the darkness,” he said.

“What darkness is there in your love? Only darkness I see in you is being harsh on yourself.”

“I am Arkan. And that is part of it.”

I thought I knew what he meant, but wasn’t sure. The harmony between us was failing, slightly, something that had never happened before. “I don’t hate all Arkans. Some, yes, but not all.”

“I know. Sheng...” I felt him swallow, and lick his lips. “The Arkans you hate...”

“You want a list?”

“No.” Of course not, I thought. “I… it’s not fair of me... but as a solas, I swore to the duty of defending all Arko, however I do it.” He drew back, and locked his clear blue eyes on mine. “Could I beg mercy for even them?”

I felt my brows pull in puzzlement. “No Arkans I hate are at my mercy. Top of the list—in a way he is all of the list—is Kurkas, and he’s vastly beyond being at my mercy.”

“I’m not asking you to stop fighting...”

“I wouldn’t have thought you would.”

“…but if you have Arkans in your hands in the future… for my sake...” His resolve seemed to be weakening. I felt the urge to tighten my hand on his in encouragement, and to make my eyes go chill, both at once. I did neither.

“Have I ever treated Arkans I had at my mercy cruelly, off the battlefield? Well… except for Abatzas…?”

“No. But even for him, I should ask,” he said.

“By Arkan standards, actually, it wasn’t terribly cruel,” I said. “I didn’t break out all his teeth first, or choke him so he felt as if he were dying, or have a sharp pole rammed up his shithole as I was doing it. I didn’t even have him flogged.”

He took another deep quivering breath and looked away, girding himself, perhaps calling on Aras. By the harmony between us, I couldn’t tell.

“You intend to sack Arko,” he said finally. “Come back with an army, and pull it apart to the last stone, you said.”

My thoughts tripped over themselves with the black flash of the bat’s wing again. “I said? Where? When?” Mana’s arm-ring burned on my arm; I didn’t know why.

“In Life is Everything. I was never intending to read it, but when General Triadas learned you were back in Yeola-e, he found me a copy and commanded me to.”

“I… said that…?” I had never read it from end to end, that I recalled. The vaguest memory stirred in my mind, of grabbing up Norii Maziel’s noteboard, jamming it into his hands and saying, “Go ahead, quote me, and Arko be damned!” His eyes fixing mine, he nodded his head, Arkan style.

“Another time I forgot that I am not king of Yeola-e,” I said. “It was a long time ago, and I was a long way away from semana kra. Kall… shit, you probably don’t even know this. We have a law whereby we don’t go on wars of conquest. Recompense, yes, but that is not conquest.”

“Recompense for seizing your capital? What would be fair?”

“Recompense is not revenge, either. We’ve taken it back. Besides—isn’t this counting the eggs before the chicken herself is barely hatched? I’m not even in the plains of Yeola-e yet.”

“Your people might ask you to conquer us. They might rescind that law. And you could do it.”

“That would not be like them.”

“I wonder.” The sickening inkling came to me, that he was seeing them more clearly than I was. How much had all they’d suffered at Arko’s hands changed them?

“If, then,” he said. “If you ever are in such a position... if you ever hold Arko in your hands... would you consider mercy?”

For a moment, I could not move; then I was itching and tingling all over, and had to, so sprang to my feet and started pacing. “Kallijas,” I said. “You do well speaking on your own behalf. On Arko’s, not so well. They never chose you to, for one thing, else we wouldn’t be having this whole problem, would we?

“I went to Arko on a peace mission, trusting Kurkas’s oath of safe conduct. A hundred ways he betrayed me, and hurt my people through me, before he even set out to destroy them directly. A thousand times, Yeolis must have begged and pleaded, invoking the humanity they imagined that Arkans shared with them. The answer was always sword or arrow, rape or fire. I could tell you atrocities all day, and never repeat one, just from the people who’ve come to me to tell me them so far, that you did to us. I don’t know if you know what I’m talking about; maybe solas aren’t told. Or look the other way. As a people, you have a particular fondness for rape, of every imaginable variety, for making examples of people, for leaving them crippled or disfigured, for torturing people through the love of their own kin by commiting atrocities on their kin, for doing the most vicious things to children. For every one who comes to me, I know there are a hundred more who won’t or can’t. Or maybe a thousand; I can’t even know.

“We are Arko, you would say, we are the conquerors, we don’t listen to mere pleas, we have no use or need for kindness and mercy because we need never ask anything; we only take, and thus we deal with the whole world, because we are the strong. That was always the answer.

“Now things are turned around, Arko’s suddenly losing, and what do I hear? Oh, pity us, we beg you, be kind! For the sake of our common humanity! Poor us, we never expected to lose, and didn’t ever think to worry that we might someday end up paying for what we did!” I understood what that tingling was now: rage. “Do you speak for your people, Kallijas? Will you say, we never meant to be so cruel, it was all a big mistake? Just because we sacked almost every Yeoli city we went through, surely we don’t deserve to have our one city sacked? Just because we killed off a good quarter of Yeola-e’s people—or whatever the number is—doesn’t mean the other three-quarters shouldn’t be understanding of our troubles?”

“My Imperator…” He’d had to say it a few times before I heard him, and let him cut in. He had his teeth set to say it, so much it went against the grain. “My Imperator… is not a good man. Will you sink to his level?”

“No. I couldn’t if I sacked Arko ten times over. He didn’t even have anything to avenge, which might be understandable. It was only greed for himself, not greed for his people, even, but pure greed for himself alone.”

“Then should you punish all of us for his crimes? Did we who are subject to him choose them?” Semana kra, Arkan-style, I thought. My mind, enamoured of irony as it is, turned to the Mezem crowd, when they showed the red.

“How many Arkans do you think oppose what you’ve done here?” I said. “A majority? I doubt it. Maybe one in ten?”

His head was bowed now, so I could only see the two sheets of his hair, that he’d unbound for sex with me, shining gold in the candlelight, and trembling. When he looked up, his eyes were full of tears again. “Never mind, for Arko’s sake, then,” he said. “For my sake!”

“Because I love you? You would use it so?” A choked moan came out of him, as if he were having an arrow excised. “Kallijas, in Yeola-e, the way we run things, each person is entitled to one vote. Living under Yeoli law, so are you. One. What my people will, even if that’s sacking Arko, I will do. We’re talking the fate of thousands of thousands, here. The forces of history move; solitary people get ground between them.”

“No!” he said, looking up hard. “There you are evading, Fourth Shefen-kas. Your people will do what you will. You know it. You are a force of history. I am talking to one.”

I could not speak. It seemed as if my mind was water for a moment; when I came out of it I felt slightly sick, and didn’t want even to remember it, so I have forgotten well. “You think I never got ground between?” I said.

“But you can choose now! Sheng, I’d give my life, my pain, anything, to repay—”

“It’s not for you to repay!” I said. “You didn’t order all these things.

“As solas, it is.”

“You can’t stand in for Kurkas, much as he’d like you to, because you’re not Kurkas!”

“I would offer if I thought it would help. My life, my freedom, whatever you want of me, in Arko’s place, for Arko’s punishment…”

“But I’ve already got all I want of you!” I saw the tactlessness of this only after it had left my mouth. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m letting anger make me callous. But you mean your pain. You ask me to hurt someone I love?”

“Your people want my pain and my death both.”

“Well that’ll make me feel much better. And bring lots of benefit to them.”

“It would not begin to heal them?”

“Not if they found out you’d offered in the hope of blunting their anger against Kurkas and saving the city from sacking.”

“Sheng, you are a better man than any who has ever held my life in his hands...”

“I’m sure I am. So what?”

“So I call to that. Appalling deeds don’t pay for appalling deeds. You say revenge is no answer to your people’s pain.”

I got down beside him, and took his face between my hands. “Kall… you said you’d give anything to save Arko. That must include your love for me, and my love for you, too.” He let out another choked moan, tears raining. “You’d sell me up the river to save Arko, if you could, because that is your duty, except that it’s gotten difficult because you’ve fallen in love with me. You are seeing now that your duty was indeed to kill me when I lay at your feet, just as Abatzas ordered you, and so you should have, however much it hurt you.” His fingers clenched his hair, like claws. “Or you wish the poison had worked. I know, Kall, believe me. You are doing what the semanakraseye of Arko would do, if there were such a person. You are making all the arguments I would in your place, for the sake of your people, who you love. Why do you think I said you’d make a better Imperator than Kurkas?”

He laid himself flat and tried to put his head on my feet, but I grabbed his shoulders. “Get the fik up! You don’t represent Arko to me! You can’t represent Arko to me! You can’t represent Arko to anyone! You’re too fikken good! You want me to punish a good person for what bad people have done and you think I’m actually going to do it, are you fikken crazy? Do you have any idea how that feels? I was tortured until I was out of my mind and you want to heal me by having me torture you?” I was so angry, it felt as if even my bones were quivering with it. He lay limp, weeping unrestrained again with the anguish of utter helplessness. I know how that is, Kall, I almost said. I have been there. I jumped up, banged open the door and yelled, “Sish, Raiga, is mama ready yet?”

“I’m sorry, Shefen-kas,” he said, in the faintest whisper, from the floor. “I’m sorry.”

“I love you but the war stands between us,” I said. “And will till it’s over.”

“I’m sorry if what I ask hurts you.”

“Maybe beyond that. Maybe forever.”

“I love you, too. I hope you might forgive me, one day.” He got up, but was unsteady on his feet, so I made him sit down on the bed.

“I forgive you now. It’s as I said; I’d say exactly the same thing in your place. Throw my love up as negotiation coin? Yes. Just as I got up when I should have conceded. Semana kra. You’re more Yeoli than you know.”

“I have nothing but that,” he said.

“And you know how much it is,” I said.

My mother peeked in the door. “Yes, I’m ready, love,” she said. “I’ve been waiting.” She closed it again.

“I love you,” he said. “I always will. I’m sorry I’m an evil enough man to use that love.”

“I will always love you too,” I said. “Shut the fik up.” His few things needed gathering. I helped him do it, wrote up and signed off his safe-conduct, and sent for a few things he’d need in a Yeoli winter, such as thicker boots, a good woolen cloak and some money, in seething silence.

When we were finished, we stood facing each other. I owed him an explanation, I saw. “I’m not angry at you, Kall,” I said. “It’s the whole situation.”

“I know, Sheng.” There was the harmony between us, again, vast and merciful. My eyes went blurry with tears for knowing how much I’d miss him. I opened my arms. In the anguish of not knowing when we’d be able to again, we hugged so hard we hurt each other. “Go with your All-Spirit. I’m a fool to let fear seize my tongue. You will do your best, always. I trust you.”

“Likewise, Kall. And you with your Aras.” We kissed, for a while. I didn’t let go even when we were done that, though. I did not know I would say what I did, until it welled up in me, making a wound as it came, so my tears flowed afresh, like blood. I was angry for the usual reason, I saw: because he was right. I let go with one arm to take my crystal in my hand. “I won’t sack Arko. Second Fire come if I am forsworn.”

He gasped, his arms clenching tighter for a moment. “Sheng, thank—”

“Don’t thank me. Never. Don’t. Go. I love you, go!” It felt like having my heart torn in half, and his too, I knew, just to loosen our grip, to draw apart stroking our hands down each other’s arms, to feel the last touch, which was the edges of fingers to fingers, and look away from each other’s eyes. He closed the door, and I lay down face-first on the bed that had been his, which smelled like sex, and like him.