342 - The mortar between the stones

I didn’t see his face when I killed him, except the flashes when he glanced back over his shoulder as I was running after him. He was facing away from me when I beheaded him, and his face was dead after that. He looks now as I remember him in the Mahid section of the Marble Palace, when he was extracting all I knew: stern and thoughtful at once, his blond and silver brows over wide-set eyes creasing in diligence more than anger.

He sits in the heavy, unthinking I-expect-to-be-served way of an Aitzas, which makes me feel a bit like a servant chopping vegetables, but I see no reason why I should stop, so I don’t. “What brings you here?” I say, though he could just as justifiably say that to me.

“Assignment from my commander,” he says.

“If I could have, I’d have captured you,” I say, though it echoes back in my own ears lame and pointless. What am I trying to do, make him feel better? I go on anyway. “But you know how it was… I was close to the bone in every way back then. I had no margin for error.”

“I know how it was, Shefen-kas. Very different from now. Put down your knife, let me show you what I am ordered to.” I do, as if he were my commander. He has the gift of it.

We walk outside, into a brilliance more bright than I had thought was possible. I clench my eyes shut, and see red through the lids as if I were looking into the sun; it is like a whole sky full of suns, but it is blinding me because I am not worthy to see it. But I am filled with the same feeling I had dueling Kallijas, the sense of life being greater and more beautiful and more perfect than I ever imagined it could be. I stand with my eyes clenched and dripping, and my heart unfolding.

“The Fields of Honour,” Triadas says. I’ve heard that before, from Kallijas; thinking about it I remember it is the part of Celestialis where good solas go to after they die.

“You have orders to show me Celestialis,” I say. “Do you have orders to show me Hayel as well?”

“No,” he says. “You have already seen Hayel.” I cannot argue with that. “Hayel is created in men’s nightmares; Celestialis in Gods’ dreams. Thus it is the harder to keep alive.”

“Who is your commander?” He does not answer, but cups his hands upward at his temples and vanishes into the light.

My inner mind knows I am on Arkan soil, I thought as I lay awake in the pre-reveille half-light, and that is why it is showing me these Arkan things in my dreams. I knew I had seen more of Celestialis and the Fields of Honour, but had forgotten. Celestialis and Hayel are equally hard to remember.

The idea that I let stay with me, though, was that, once I got to the City Itself and took the Marble Palace, I’d have to put together an administration. The best people to have would be both Arkan themselves, and loyal to me. Who would that be, but my old Diverse Foreign Philosophy students, or at least those of them who were willing to come over? We’d talked plenty about how Arkan government could be improved. I decided to wait until we took the next great city, which was Setzetra, though; the Pages had presented Osijitz as yet another strategic retreat, and people seemed to be believing it.

We marched up the Ereala, which in Arko is known as the Tennik, and people began joining us by the thousands, just for board and a promise of spoils (though those who’d signed on from the start I kept at the same rate of pay, their reward for joining us when our odds had been worse). The tale began to spread that every sellsword, vagabond and beggar with a grudge against Arko came seeking to tag along. If they could demonstrate any ability to fight, or work in some other way that was useful, and swore the oath of relinquishment, we wouldn’t turn them away. I had to hire a clerk, with full authority to hire more clerks, to keep track of them.

In its wars with Arko, Moghiur had managed to stay independent, at the cost of heavy tribute payments; now the king, Truszan Steln Betkov, quit paying them and sent a contingent of two thousand under his son, of the same name. Younger Truszan was not particularly steady-minded or enlightened; he was here in part to live down a javelin-wound he’d got in the back on a slaving raid up the Brezhan. I broadened the no-stealing rule to include people. He could, however, snatch up a kerchief on the grass with his teeth while riding at a full gallop.

We got street urchins willing to squire. We got northerners with faces painted green and scarf-snakes around every neck, southerners of every shade from snow-white with pink eyes to black so dark they shone blue, black-haired, chip-eyed people who claimed to have come from the eastern edge of the world, red-haired people who claimed to have come across the great ocean to the west.

Those who showed unusual ability, or led large contingents, we’d have sworn under truth-drug; that was the case with Ucust of Tiritsa, whose signature had appeared on the letter with Little Hugs, by Krero’s insistence. The letter had indeed been forged.

It was also the case with Megan Whitlock, who was a full-blood Zak from F’talezon, which is so far north on the Brezhan that the sun barely sets in summer or rises in winter. Her habit was to carry so many weapons on her person that I could barely count them with weapon-sense, including her fingernails, which by some Zak process she’d had turned to steel. She could make people see things—herself as a monster, for instance, or a mystical glow on a weapon—and even claimed to have killed a man once with powers of mind. The possibilities were so huge, I saw, that it would take a while even to understand.

Her wife, whose name I know only to render as Shkaira, was a horse commander from across the western ocean, who put on as good a show of riding as Truszan or any Moghiur man, and archery, both mounted and on foot, no less spectacular. She was riding no horse, though, but a Ri, a creature of the eastern steppe, half-horse and half-wolverine. Its favourite food was fresh human flesh, but it would obey her, and eat whomever she told it to.

Horses that could graze without a twitch next to a mamoka would bolt in terror from the Ri. I tried it by challenging Shkaira to spar mounted, and poor Akaznakir was so spooked I jumped off him before he could throw me, and he dashed off the field and kept going through the tents, eventually returning to be fed. Even mamokal were a little nervous of the creature, rolling their eyes and twitching their tails, though not too much to be trained to march near it, which we did.

Shkaira was also an excellent horse commander, and even a strategist. I grilled her at length about Fehinna, the empire across the ocean that spans a continent—or so it is claimed—and had a colony named Nubuah, on the coast south of the Great Gates that let the Miyatara into the ocean. They came selling weapons unheard of, things that twinged my weapon-sense horribly, such as glass globes full of gases that scorched the lungs, fatally, or turned a person instantly into a writhing mound of fungus; I’d turned that down. Then as soon as we were invading, they were selling them to the Arkans; it was not hard to see that they wanted to weaken every nation on this side of the ocean, in preparation for a greater invasion of their own. Not that my knowing this mattered; they were thinking in terms of decades or even centuries. I’d be long gone before they moved.

All my peoples had different ways, including ones to turn each other’s stomachs or strike each other as blasphemous. (I had some who flung themselves on their faces before me like Arkans to an Imperator, and some who looked at me almost as a God; I readied my disavowals for any Assembly inquiry.) The more different nationalities there were, the harder was my task of being the mortar between the stones of the edifice of my army.

Many contingents brought gifts; often they were timepieces, the word having gone around that I was a time and punctuality maven who collected them, the news making itself true. Not so pleasant was the gift a tribe made to me of six hundred and fifty blond heads from an Arkan border-town they’d passed through, neatly stacked in a pyramid in front of my tent in the morning. Their chiefs stood beside it, bashfully smiling, eager for my delighted approbation. It was very obvious that the border town had been several days back, and I had disobeyed Kaninjer’s no-wine rule fairly heavily the night before.

But I smiled and said what they wished to hear, while Kaninjer, who came out of my tent before I could warn him, threw up violently right there and fled in tears; then I got it all cleared away for decent burial before Sinimas, who was about to arrive for our daily chat, could arrive, possibly find a face he knew, and make hay of it in the Pages. The competent general does what he must do.

To lie bare-chested by the fire in the tender night air of summer, listening to Truszan strum his long-necked string-box and croon his lewd lyrics, and see which people’s eyes lingered on mine or ran down my body examining, was sweet. To learn from Kaninjer what illness I had caught, was sour.

Niku and Vaneesh had handed me my schedule of when I was to make love to Vaneesh and not to Niku or anyone else, down to the day by the turning of the moon, the most exact plan I had right now. This affliction, of course, cancelled all that, until Kaninjer managed to cure me.

It would be just as wrong to hold this back from everyone else I’d lain with recently, of course, but I didn’t know all their names or units. The only thing I could do was call the army to Assembly, announce a few procedural things as if they were the real reason for it, then say, “One announcement before I get to the main meat: my Haian tells me that I have contracted an illness such that all who have had sex with me within the past moon should themselves visit one of our Haians.” There was a silence, of amazement that I’d admit it, then some laughter, and then someone yelled, “Thank you for your honesty, Beloved!” and then they were acclaiming me. Mostly I wanted to crawl under the reviewing stand.

The tale that I made love to everyone in my army started somewhere between Osijitz and Setzetra, though how anyone could imagine that was possible when they were growing on sixty thousand, I have no idea. I’ll lay it to rest as best I can, though, by explaining how I think it came about.

I was in the bushes with three Yeolis; we all got tired, I’d given more heights of ecstasy than I’d received, and they felt badly for it. “If I were a king, I’d have gold to give to my people,” I said. “But I’m only a semanakraseye, and so have only myself to give. Take that one extra, pass it on to the next person you’re in the bushes with, say it comes with love from Chevenga, and tell them to pass it on, same.”

That sufficed. I should have shut my mouth there. But no, instead I was fool enough to add, “That way I can say, in a sense, that I’ve made love to my entire army.” Rumour seizes on such words. At least the clap can be cured.