335 - Expectations of the _semanakraseye_

Excerpt from The Understudy semanakraseye
By Kinethao Kariya

She has learned to know better than envy her brother; does that mean she once did? I ask Artira how they got along as children.

“It wasn’t all good. Everyone knows that. It was hard for all of us after Tennunga died. All along we had the spats that siblings had. He had dark times; don’t ask me about what, ask him. I did envy him. How could you not? He was so impressive, so well-admired, and he drew love effortlessly, because he was so open and so fearless. People like to be near that.”

What of the expectation that he would be a great warrior?

“Well, the danger in hoping that a child will be a great warrior when he grows up is that it is, in effect, hoping for war. He can’t make his name in history by sparring. So Chevenga himself didn’t keep that ambition in mind. There were others, more cynical, you could say, who maintained that war was inevitable, so no harm in aiming him for that…”

Their shadow-father, Esora-e Mangu, perhaps?

Artira demurs. “There were any number of people. They turned out to be right in the end. But I never envied him for his warriorhood. It’s a hard and painful life. I think that if we all had complete choice, ultimate choice, no one in Yeola-e would do it. This may surprise you, but he agrees with me on that.”

What did she envy him for?

“I’m concerned,” she says evenly, “that with the determined way you are questioning me about that, you are going to write the book as if it was more significant than it was. If I jumped up and down and screamed that something was not fair one day, what of it? I was a child, subject to foolishness. Who of us can say we were not subject to foolishness, as children? We are brother and sister; we love each other. We work for the people of Yeola-e. I’m also concerned, with all the questions you are asking about him, that your book will be about him when you originally told me it is about me.”

Good time to change the subject. Though she is twenty-two, and her… ehh, let’s just say, a certain other semanakraseye whose name we will not mention was married at nineteen, she is as yet unmarried. Have there been no prospects?

“There have been prospects, but none I wished to choose, as of yet.”

In her teen years, did she seek love? There are certainly no stories abounding as there are about… a certain other person, whose drive to marry, by all reports, first struck him at the precocious age of twelve, so that some close to him were surprised it took him until nineteen to marry, and were struck by the literally odd configuration: an already-bound couple, and him.

“I did, and I found it, in the short term. We all have our apprenticeships; we all have our trials and errors in learning how to get along.”

She offers no examples or vignettes. Is it most politic, she finds, to keep discrete about such things?

“It’s not that,” she says. “It’s just that there is nothing out of the ordinary. Kinethao, here is something you must understand about me, and I hope it doesn’t ruin your prospects for writing what you are writing. I am fascinating to those who are close to me, due to their love, but to those who are distant, I am a calm and even and therefore dull person. I am not ashamed of it; if anything, I pride myself on it. I certainly prefer it, in my personal life, because being acting semanakraseye is plenty enough trouble and strain. I expect I will find a marriage, and have children, and happily live out my days in their embrace. Dullness is underrated, has an undeservedly bad reputation, when there is so much to be said for it. Have you never heard the saying that boring people with boring lives live longer?”

I forbear on my next question, ‘What sort of marriage do you seek?’ The likely answer seems too certain: ‘a boring one.’

My first conversation with Artira ended shortly thereafter. When she was called away to Thara-e with Assembly to debate the question of whether Yeola-e should attempt to conquer Arko entirely, and it seemed her absence would be protracted, I went with her, despite the harshness of the late-winter journey.

When I ask her whether there is someone who will dearly miss her, she says yes, but won’t say who, as nothing is definite enough yet. It seems the love is possibly unrequited, but whether she is the disinterested or the desperate one, she will not say.

If the vote goes chalk, what will it mean to her?

“I expect to be working as semanakraseye for some years, perhaps many years, now. All-Spirit and the Die of Chance and all wishes prevent that Chevenga should come to grief in the war, but if he did, I would become full semanakraseye. If he did not but the war went on long, or he became Imperator, I would continue as acting semanakraseye, I would expect.”

What does she feel about this prospect—of being understudy semanakraseye, second to another who holds the position in name, for all that time?

“I like the work in and of itself, and it is even better to be doing it during good times rather than tragic.”

Having made the journey in expectation of having to take over presiding when the debate necessarily involved Chevenga, Artira was proven right. He recused himself from the debate entirely, causing her to be busy every day, and reticent to speak to a curious writer.

Yet, when I approach her for a conversation in a fine restaurant in Thara-e about a half-moon into our sojourn, her aspect seems entirely different. Her eyes are brighter, her step more lively, her smile, usually well-controlled and rarely seen except in civility, much more wide and frequent and free.

She looks like she is in love.

Is she?

“I am. With someone I met here in Thara-e. I cannot tell you her name as I don’t have her consent to do so. She and I are of one mind, that we should go cautiously at first, and make sure that we are not seized by a passing infatuation only. The most wildly passionate relationships can prove to be the least stable. But we are very much in love and, if we stand the test of sharing lodgings for a time, I have a four.”

A four?

“Yes, with her and my two dear male friends in Vae Arahi, to whom I promised myself and my love, once I found her and she agreed, as partners in parenthood.”

Artira Shae-Arano-e’s boring life is about to get less boring.

I went by wing from Thara-e to where the army was now camped on the road to Osijitz that night, managing to sleep a little before dawn. “Seven in ten chalk,” I told Chinisa, when she got up, as well as the Disseminatory people. My tent-sentries began whooping and jumping up and down, and it spread from there, and the whole camp began cheering and singing the victory song, as if we’d already won. I ordered the signaler, call the army to assemble, and told them the full news.

The Osijitz raid had gone off well, but the Arkan army from Moghiur had made a position there nonetheless, Barakas putting the people on barely-alive rations.

The city was a day and a half inside the Empire proper, this land ruled by Imperators for four centuries. Since Roskat was Arko in the Arkan mind, the border had no official marker. There were two stakes on either side of the road, though, each with a half-rotted blond-haired head impaled on it.

I walked between them onto the soil of Arko.