333 - As well as a carefully-wrought battle-plan

Who should preside here, I wasn’t sure, and Mirko wasn’t seizing it, so I decided I would if no one else did, once we’d small-talked enough. Niku, who is always more voluble for being nervous, praised Mirko’s fighting at Sonokat, and got Vaneesh talking a little about her Priestesshood. “Chevenga told me a great deal about you,” she said.

“And I’d have told you a great deal about Niku,” I said to Vaneesh, before she could answer, “if, em, well, I’d met her yet.” All-Spirit, how kyashin idiotic did that sound? I saw Mirko stifle a smile in a pretend yawn. Vaneesh touched my hand and said, “It’s all right. I understand what you meant. You love her and would sing her praises to everyone you met.”

“Exactly.” Time to preside, I decided. “Just to review... since as I understand it, we’re all agreed in principle. At least if the Roskati vote goes chalk for you, Mirko…”

“Of course, if it goes chalk for me,” he said. “We have to plan these things out as contingency.”

“Yes, so, a plan, we have,” I said. “For…” I’d never been trained in how to put this exactly. “Producing an heir… to the Roskati demarchy. I agreed in principle with some concerns, for instance, that said heir wouldn’t be full-blood Roskati, and how would that be received by the Roskati people, but Vaneesh reassured me on that. And it’s not my judgment to make anyway...” Why did I mention it, then?

I was sweating, though I hadn’t sweated doing things much harder than this. “My main question is, what involvement do you envision me—em, us, I mean—having in the child’s raising? Mirko, you said you would raise him, does that mean me, or us, not at all?”

He didn’t answer right away, fingering his beard as he searched for words, and Vaneesh said, “Well, you Yeolis are the undisputed experts in matters of demarchy.”

“When the war is over, I am going to be in… one of two places,” I said. “Vae Arahi or Arko. Neither is very near here.” And in six and a half years, I’m gone entirely… I had to provide for that. “I will suggest this: that you have all the Yeoli laws relevant to governance translated into Roskati and ratified by your Assembly, once it is formed… with changes as suited to Roskat, of course.” I would export our ways everywhere if I could, since they are the least evil of all, to my mind, but other peoples are other peoples, and you can’t make them into your own even with cruelty, let alone kindness.

“Then what the child must learn about the position can be crafted from that,” I went on. “I was twelve when I began really studying the law, but I knew the basics before that…” And all manner of philosophy and stories and lore that readied me to understand it… Some things do not translate. Arko had done its best to destroy Roskat’s history, as was its usual practice, so books would be hard to come by, and the living memory of the time before was virtually gone. “Your elders,” I said. “Now they can speak freely, you’ve got to get them talking about what Roskat was before Arko…”

“Yes, excellent idea,” said Mirko. “An Ascendant goes on months-away, does he not?

“Yes, and starting fairly young,” I said. “I didn’t have my first foreign month-away until I was fourteen, but this would be different. The child would have family in Vae Arahi. So, some moons per year; we do that with Fifth Chevenga, actually, who’s with his mother each summer.”

“This child would certainly be wanted and loved,” said Niku, though I didn’t see why; had that been in doubt?

“I have loved all my children, and lost most of them,” Vaneesh said, giving me a slash of heart-pain on her behalf, though her face showed no trace of sadness, in her way of accepting all. I had forgotten that.

“Yes,” I said, getting a bit of the flash. “I see a better chance now of retrieving the one the Arkans took.” I’d ask her all she knew later, and take it with me, and the Roskati contingent, into the Empire. If the Yeoli vote went chalk.

“I’m sorry for your losses,” said Niku. “How many… if I may ask…?”

“One stolen, as you heard, three lost to the arms of the Divine. I have one yet living, who is in training to become a Priest.”

Niku inclined her head towards me with a smile. “He throws beautiful children.”

I felt myself blush. “Just three! Well… so far. Well… that I know of.” All-Spirit, could I sound any more foolish if I tried?

Mirko failed in stifling a flash of a grin. By his eyes, he was calling me ‘lad’ in his thoughts. Tomorrow I’ll invite you to a friendly sparring match, and hand you your sparring head, I thought, the most perfect way, I suppose, to prove him right.

“You don’t think your son will feel hard-done by, with a younger sib being raised to be head of state?” Niku said.

“It’s one reason why we thought of Chevenga as father,” Vaneesh answered. “He can’t claim such lineage.” All-Spirit, it’s all blood, blood, blood… It made me want to hide under the masterly-carven table.

“I’m also wondering,” Niku said. “Does Roskat intend to have both male and female semankraseyel, like the Yeolis?”

“I wonder that too,” I said. “If it’s a boy you want, and Vaneesh and I happen to conceive only girls…” I might be gone before she gets a boy, after having tried for all my remaining life, with all the feeling that would cause Niku... So many things could go amiss with this. “In Yeola-e, women have served very capably as semanakraseyel our entire history. My grandmother... my aunt… my sister while I was away…”

Vaneesh’s natural manner was calm through and through, cut with a deep warmth, same as many spiritual people. But now she looked at Mirko with a hardness I’d never seen in her eyes. “Will you take as heir, whichever I bear?”

He looked somewhat as if he’d sat on a snake but had to hide the fact. I could see considerations flashing through his mind; chief among them, I knew, must be whether the warriors of Roskat would sufficiently respect a female leader. There’d been not only the enshrining of Arkan ways, but some mixing of blood, especially in the youngest generation. I wondered how much pain the half-breeds, not to mention Arkans native to Roskat, would suffer in the inevitable purification that comes with liberation after long occupation. Those Arkans who were kind will be spared, I told myself. It had been so in Yeola-e, for the most part.

“Of course!” he said, finally. “I would be honored to raise any semanakraseye. We all remember your aunt, Chevenga, and the excellence that she brought to the semanakraseyesin.” He gave a slight bow. I heaved a breath, trying to make it slow enough not to be obvious to everyone, of relief. All the hard questions are settled; maybe we can all relax a little. The room lent itself to that, the couches on which we could either sit or half-recline all plush and brocade in an old-fashioned Roskati style, with the odd Arkan overlay such as glass in the courtyard window and the curvaceous gilding on the table corners.

“Of course there is a Niah influence in Chevenga’s family, too,” Niku said firmly. “Whether they let me marry him or not; I’m not going away, so you’ll have to consider that, too.” Mirko blinked, and pulled at his beard. Love, I thought, couldn’t we have brought that up after the secret of the wing came out? Of course I’d already decided in my heart that my Roskati child would learn how to fly, whatever anyone said; probably Niku had done the same.

Before either Mirko or Vaneesh could answer, there was a tap on the door, and fast words in Niah from Baska. Vriah’s were clearer, being slower and simpler: “Want Ama! Now!”

Had Roskat turned Arkan enough to bar a child from a fancy room? We’d find out in a moment. I made the quick glance around that parents learn to do, and said, “There’s nothing too much to chew on or swallow here.” Once on Niku’s arm, Vriah looked all around at everyone with her wide brown eyes, and giggled.

“By the Mother, she’s adorable!” said Vaneesh. “It’s true; you do throw lovely children.”

“Conceived in the halls of death,” I said. “She is our Mezem child.” I felt myself blushing again. “Thank you.”

“Aba ’barrassed!” Vriah said.

“I don’t think I have mentioned, she has a very strong gift of empathy,” I said. “We’ve been teaching her to put it into words.” Niku pursed her lips against her grin; Vaneesh chuckled openly; Mirko looked a touch worried, as people who are in the habit of schooling their emotions do when they find out.

“Big big happy un’neath!” she added.

“She likes to lay it all out, down to the core, sometimes. Yes, Vriah-riah, that is true,” I said in my best stop-with-so-much-truth-now voice.

“I am sure that, however many are in it, Chevenga’s family will be unique,” said Mirko, even as he grinned at Vriah, winning a wide one back. “And perhaps a most valuable school on the Earthsphere, for handing down the principles of victory.” Not what I had in mind when I took my children in my arms, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t some truth in it. I remembered what Azaila had said, though, about their chances of being as good as me in war.

“So,” I said to Vaneesh, as it seemed no one else was raising it, “when were you thinking we would start?”

“Why waste time?” said Mirko. “We don’t know how long it will take.” Roskati have become Arkan enough that it’s considered disreputable for a woman to seem too eager, so he was speaking for her out of civility. “The Roskati contingent will be stronger for having our best Priestess travelling with us.” She signed chalk. This was all planned out, I saw, as well as a carefully-wrought battle-plan.

I looked at Vaneesh. “And we’ll… try… at the time of each moon that your egg drops… until we succeed?” How frank did Roskati tend to be about such things—more like Yeolis or more like Arkans? I’d said it without finding out beforehand. Of course helping them be less like Arkans could be nothing but good.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s best to make love every other day, the Haians say; that lets the man’s seed replenish more between.” She’d made something of a study of it, it seemed. I glanced sideways at Niku, wondering if I’d see a clenched-teeth smile and hear Vriah say, “Ama mad!”

Instead my love said, “It won’t be hard, considering how easy it was for us to conceive this one, when we were truly not wishing to.” She smiled at Vaneesh conspiratorially. “You and I should speak later.” What are you going to tell her… what I like? Though I’d shared ecstasy with both, the idea of them talking together about it was somehow exquisitely excruciating.

“Aba big ’barrass!” Vriah said, with a child’s thrilled grin of accomplishment.

“I think we are as planned as we should be, when it is contingent on a national vote, and it is time for more Saekrberk,” I said, lifting the flask out of my satchel.