332 - A rare man

Mirko laughed. “Look, the Invincible’s blushing,” he said. “Oh—you know, I am reminded of a pressing matter I must deal with, elsewhere.” He got up deftly, as did Fuun, saying, “I am reminded of a similarly pressing matter.” They both darted out the tent-door.

It’s a rare man who’d give a flat no to such a request, I would think. Especially with a woman such as Vaneesh. The thought brought the memory of my night with her right back, like embers under the ashes of all that had passed afterwards, the pleasure so much more intense after such intense pain. No wonder I’d gone red. With the Benai’s distillate blowing a warm breeze through my heart, and her face soft in the muted tent-light, I wondered, until I stifled it, whether she might like to begin that child right now.

It’s a rare man, and I am not him. But a thousand other necessary considerations crowded into my mind. I spoke the one that struck me first. “But you would want a full-blooded Roskati demarch, wouldn’t you? This one would be half Yeoli.”

“Yes, but then he’ll be three quarters Roskati the next generation, seven-eighths the one after that, and so on. In the long term it won’t matter.”

“What about the raising? Are you asking me to cast my seed and go, forgetting I have a child?” I thought of Tawaen. “I couldn’t do that… but you must want the child’s raising to be all Roskati.”

“Tell the truth, we have not thought out all the details… we’ll have to discuss it more. It will be moot if Fuun wins… I think.”

“It will be moot if my wife-to-be is not agreeable, also,” I said. The flings of duty at campfires were one thing; the whole idea of this was a child, and that likely meant more than one attempt, not to mention that Vaneesh and I would then share blood-parenthood, however far apart we were. I couldn’t know what Niku would say. “But if it is not moot, I’d like to be in on that discussion.”

“Of course, Chevenga,” she said, gripping my hand in both of hers again. “From the sound of it, though, you don’t seem to disagree in principle.”

“Vaneesh, when someone is offered so huge an honour, how can his heart not be inclined to accept? If anything, I should decline for not being worthy. But you and Mirko would disagree, else you’d never have suggested it in the first place. My heart’s in something of a knot, to tell the truth, and if it weren’t for the Saekrberk I think I’d feel it more keenly. We should speak again when we’re all sober.” (Did Roskat have their own version of 17-3?)

She stroked the back of my hand. “I don’t think you think you are unworthy, Chevenga. Why would you be worthy of the Yeoli demarchic bloodline, and not the Roskati? You just weren’t in on the planning of the former, that’s all, so you didn’t have a chance to feel guilty of conceit; it’s only here you do. But you are still worthy, and you know it, at heart.”

“Talk of bloodlines makes me think of monarchy,” I said. “And so makes me itch. The point is not the bloodline, actually. It’s the raising, from birth, into the family trade. An argument I’m going to have to make very eloquently to get them to let me marry Niku.”

“Yes, I suppose. You’re declining in principle, then?”

I heaved a deep sigh, and she laughed a rippling laugh that reminded me of Komona’s. “No,” I said. “I’m agreeing in principle.”

My wife-to-be, if she still was after this, looked at me as if I’d grown goat-horns. “Will you say that again, omores? I’m not sure I heard it right. You’ve been asked by who to make a what with her to start up the which line of Roskat… when?” I explained it again, making sure there could be no doubting the meaning of the words.

From standing, she flung herself backwards, flopping limply across our bed with a soft thump as if every muscle had gone slack. She lay silent with her eyes closed for a moment, in which I thought it best not to say anything. “I never know what it’s going to be next with you,” she said finally.

“Well, I wasn’t expecting this either! How could I know they’d thought of such a thing?”

“You weren’t expecting what happened with Kallijas Itrean, either.”

Kall and I were still writing, but not so often or long. For one thing, our bond had never been one of words, and they seemed a flat and empty substitute; for another, all of what I could send as good news was to him bad news. You want a love to whom you’re writing to share in your triumphs, but I could hardly ask that of him. Whenever I thought about him, I missed him desperately.

“Yes. But in this case I am asking you first. I agreed only in principle.”

“You agreed in what?” Anger darkened her forehead, her brows becoming two sharp blades. “That’s not asking me first.”

Her Yeoli was excellent, but she didn’t have every Yeoli political word. As far as I knew Niah, also, there was no concept of agreeing in principle. I had forgotten. “In principle,” I said. “Meaning, I am not opposed to it in… well, in principle, meaning, in the main, on its own merits, of itself, but before I agree entirely I have to address some considerations…” Her forehead didn’t lighten. She came from a merchant clan, best I use that kind of talk. “I said yes on certain conditions. Your agreement to the deal being one of them.”

“Ah.” It lightened a little. “But that child… becomes our family, then. How do they want him, or her, raised?”

I froze inside. All-Spirit… how many times did Vaneesh say “he”? I hadn’t even thought of it.

A hundred years ago, as I understand, Roskat was as egalitarian as Yeola-e, with women in as much power as men. But then they’d been conquered by Arko, and suffered what we had only begun to suffer as the Empire forced its ways on them: the expelling of women out of all but the most menial work, the confinements to houses, the forbiddance against women reading, the forced purifications. Seventy years, I could imagine, was enough time for the idea of female inferiority to stick. I’d noticed that most of Mirko’s warriors, and all of his officers, were men. And yet, there was Vaneesh; I couldn’t know.

“Kyash,” I said. “I didn’t find out… whether that first heir to their demarchy had to be a boy or not. If Vaneesh and I threw only girls… You must think I’m an idiot.” She forbore from saying anything, but her eyes didn’t disagree. “I will find that out. They themselves haven’t worked out all the details either… we’ll be discussing it.”

“Good. I’ll look forward to being there.”

I could hardly disinvite her. “You are agreeing in principle, then?”

She heaved out a long sigh. “Omores…” She pulled herself up to sitting beside me, and leaned her head heavily on my shoulder. I put my arm around her. “It’s been so… much. Sometimes I yearn only for peace… don’t you?”

“Of course, I yearn for peace,” I said. “I’m a warrior.”

She creased her eyes and pursed her lips, in the Niah and Arkan ways, both at once. “You know what I mean.”

I tightened my arm around the lithe warmth that was her body, caressed her hair with my cheek and then my lips, and let my own head lean into hers, closing my eyes. “You want our love to be more… mirror-surfaced, you mean.” A Niah-ism translated into Yeoli; calm as the sea after several windless days, it means.

“I should know,” she said. “That is not possible, with you.” Just as I was thinking, at least you’re only stuck with it for six and a half more years at the worst—I did not expect her to go celibate once I was gone, and sometimes wondered who I might arrange beforehand to be near her afterwards—she whispered in a zephyr of breath in my ear, “Meh ish manwia.” Always and forever. “As long as we have.”

We marched to Roskati City. Seeing the place in the road where my Arkan escort had backstabbed my Yeoli escort brought it back like yesterday; I had to kneel there in silence, and in tears part of the time, for a while as the army went quietly past. A thousand times over I heard the whisper, “This is where he lost a little brother and a little sister.” Niku and Krero and Sachara on his crutches stayed with me.

“Now we can do it, we will raise a stone there,” Mirko said to me, that night. I wrote the inscription, which was just an account of what had happened, the date, the list of the names and the same thing I’d written on the marker for the ten thousand Lakans: “May reason bring peace to the living as death has brought peace to the dead.”

The Roskati guided us, of course. The further we got into the empire, the harder it would be to find local guides, I realized. No more local hotheads leading us up cliffs. I’m the first Yeoli commander, I thought, going deep into land where I and my warriors will be hated, not hailed, and our dead, if we leave them, spat on and thrown to dogs and birds, not cared for. That is the fate of the invader.

In the city, people poured out of doors to greet us, with kisses and tears. There was a greater depth to their joy than in Yeoli towns, the sorrows preceding their liberation layered on so much thicker. We camped to stay for a time, other that splitting off divisions to mop up Arkans elsewhere in Roskat.

There are two Arkan roads in Mogh-uir, one going through Roskat, one passing north; I wanted to see which one the Arkan reinforcements from there would take. I had reinforcements coming, if the Yeoli vote went chalk, but they had to get here across all kinds of country, while we sat on a road smooth as paper and wide as a village square, built for moving armies. They’d never catch us if we marched before they got here.

The army camped by the city, and they put me and mine up in the ancient royal castle that had been turned into an Arkan governor’s mansion in the typical style, and would now be turned back into the seat of state. One thing I will always thank Arkan governors for; they build baths. When we’d washed off the dust of the road and I’d hot-soaked the tension out of myself, Niku and I went to meet Mirko and Vaneesh to detail their demarchic plan in one of the place’s old walnut-wood-lined offices.

“…the child I will raise,” I was pretty sure I overheard Mirko say in Roskati; it’s close enough to Yeoli that a Yeoli can catch some. He will raise? So many questions. My tension came back; Niku’s nails pressing into my arm so hard they hurt when she saw Vaneesh didn’t help.

Only I knew everyone, and so had to do all the introductions. I kept finding myself tripping over my tongue and saying things that seemed stupid, such as “This is Niku, my fiancée, if Assembly approves,” which would weaken her position, in her mind. Vaneesh was transcendentally warm as always; Niku was distantly civil; Mirko stroked his beard and watched all. I felt myself smiling like an idiot. I felt as if I’d never had panache in my entire life.