397 - Proof of my imperfection

The mind splits, when it takes a blow. While I sat frozen to the core, one part of my mind was drily thinking, There you are, Risae: proof of my imperfection, while another one wanted to say genially to the bailiff, “Aranin? Your accent sounds as if you could be from Terera; are you perchance related to Kusiya Aranin, the Servant of Terera South?”

“Thank you,” I said numbly, and laid the papers on my desk. He was unfolding the ones from the other packet. He laid another charge page, scribed just the same as the first—a copy—beside it.

After a time of awkward silence, he said, “Semanakraseye… you have to sign. You can fill in the part about personally-and-alone or an advocate later, but the signature needs to go on now.”

“Why?” I said numbly. “What happens if I don’t?”

He looked at me, measuring. “Semanakraseye… I guess you’ve never been charged with a crime before.” At least he was having the decency to keep his voice low. I glanced around; people were staring, then pretending not to when I looked. Kyash… I’m showing it. I’ve probably gone pale.

“No,” I said. “I haven’t.” I was starting to feel light-headed, too. I took a deep breath and a draught of water. It was so hot, I’d already been sweating, just sitting here. The A-niah had arranged to fly ice down from the mountains, and my squires would put it in my water, or wrap some in a bandanna that I could wear around my head during command council meetings, something other Yeolis had taken up. It made us able to think.

“Then I should explain: you are not admitting guilt by signing this,” he said. “Much of my job is telling people that… You’re just warranting that you won’t bolt instead of coming to court… not that you would exactly bolt... Do you understand?” I signed chalk. “Both copies, please, semanakraseye; one is ours, one is yours.”

I began signing, wondering if I should use the demarchic seal; this wasn’t official Yeoli or military business. I decided to do so, since it was how I always signed, and I should do nothing irregular. “So what if I did refuse to sign?” I asked, meaning it half-joking, but hearing it come out sounding horribly serious.

“Well… I’d have the authority to order your arrest.” No, I told myself firmly. Do not look him in the eye and say, “Yes, but would you have the nerve?” Done signing, I sealed, my hands shaking, and he began signing. “Ah well, we can’t have that,” I said, with a laugh, that sounded pathetically thin to my own ears. He’s probably never seen someone who seemed so guilty in his life, I thought. Well, I am… thousands of people witnessed it. My life didn’t feel real, but like a strange dream. I tried to wake up, but it didn’t come.

“Good, semanakraseye, thank you,” he said when the ink was dry, and he could fold up the court’s copy. “I will see you later.” I scrawled a note to go with the packet, gave it to Iperaiga and said “Veresinga. Double-time.”

The advocate was there in a bare moment, dressed as formally as ever; how he could bear it was beyond me. I was dripping wearing nothing but wristlets and kilt. I finished with the person I was with, gave the rest of the queue my apologies and took him inside the tent, so the world wouldn’t see my face as we spoke. I learned later he’d been in a meeting with the Arkan shadow-government, but had dropped everything for this. He, by the way, had been witness to my executing Kamina, and my taking Inatalla down; afterwards he had come to me and said, “If that milakraseye approaches you about this—or about anything else, for that matter—let me know.”

As I handed Veresinga a cup of ezethra, I tried to read his face, but it was schooled, as ever. “Personally, I was hoping we’d hear from Inatalla directly, but I can’t say I’m surprised by this,” he said.

“You anticipate better than I, then.” I kept telling myself I’d gone numb, then I’d feel a fresh flash of emotion like a knife-cut in my soul. “So... what in the Garden Orbicular do I do?” I couldn’t even think, couldn’t imagine the next step.

“Well, he’s playing very aggressively. He may have overextended already... we can work with that.”

“Overextended already?” A bit of sense and a trace of law-knowledge snagged in my head. “The anticipated intransigence thing? He’s supposed to try to approach me before he makes any such claim, isn’t he? This sort of law... was not what I studied most.”

In case you are not Yeoli: someone who feels they have been wronged in Yeola-e can choose from three ways: the court of reconciliation, which has as its aim not determining guilt and setting out punishment, but making peace; the court of prosecution, which does determine guilt and set out punishment on behalf of the people; and the court of recompense, which also determines guilt and sets out recompense—usually in the form of money, but it can be anything—that the wrongdoer must pay the afflicted.

In Yeola-e, it is generally held that the court of reconciliation—which you won’t even see in many other nations—is the best way, since so often disputes come out of misunderstanding or lack of understanding, and so can be settled when there is a wise and experienced intermediary helping, and by chiravesa, which is invariably done. Some sort of recompense can be part of the result as well, if both sides agree—both sides agreeing is the key, and the objective.

Thus, if you choose the court of prosecution, you are required to explain why you didn’t choose reconciliation. People will do it because the wrongdoer is a foreigner, or insane; they’ll also do it if it is clear that the wrongdoer is so angry or hateful or closed to chiravesa that no agreement is possible and so reconciliation is pointless. The legal euphemism for this is “anticipated intransigence of the Accused.”

He doesn’t even know me, to think that of me, I thought. Of course I had jumped him like a berserker, ground his face in the dirt and said, in effect, I wished he was dead. But I had done because he had said something so vicious that I felt a red flood of rage through my body every time I even thought about it, even now. Does he think there’d be no chance of reconciliation if he retracted that?

“Yes, he should attempt an informal reconciliation first,” said Veresinga. “I’m assuming he hasn’t contacted you, since I asked you to let me know if that happened.”

“No, he has not. I guess he could claim I put him in fear... but, for all he says he has a Haian record, he wasn’t really hurt.” I itched to jump up and pace, gave in to it, began wearing out the tent-floor. “Any warrior gives and takes worse than that in training, all the time.”

“True. He can’t really claim that. As you say, eating a little dirt is nothing for a warrior. And your case is a lot stronger than this summons would suggest, given your emotional state at the time and the way he baited you.”

“The way he baited me? Were you close enough to hear what he called me? He said it very loudly... he was meaning for everyone anywhere near to hear.” I felt myself embarrassed anew, for Veresinga having heard it. Having seen what I did, too, in fact; I hated imagining what it had looked like, for someone as fatherly, in a proper and peaceable and utterly respectable way, as he was. I knew for a fact that he’d have restrained me, if he had been close enough and strong enough.

“Yes. I attended the execution because it was setting a precedent, so I’m also a witness to the incident. It was said specifically to shame and humiliate you when you were already plainly in great anguish, so your attacking him is a clear-cut case of acting in the heat of passion.”

I had sat down, feeling exhausted; now I jumped up to pace again. “You know what is weirdest, Veresinga? I don’t even know the man. I’ve seen him in inspections and so forth, but that’s it... never said more than a few words. He doesn’t know me. I can’t imagine what he’d have against me. That’s almost what bothers me more than anything else about this. Why in kyash did he say that to me? And now do this?”

“I know it’s hard to understand,” Veresinga said, “and I’m afraid I can’t help you there.” He was an advocate, not a psyche-healer.

“Maybe he’s friends with Sharaina Anina or something... though he doesn’t come from there...”

“We need to answer these charges first and foremost,” he said, gently steering me back to the necessary topic. “Understanding his motivations can happen in the reconciliatory phase, if it happens.”

“Fair enough. Though…” I spoke the thought as I had it. “It occurs to me he might be trying to stay away from that so as to hide his motivations...” Something made me shudder. I suddenly remembered Mana in the Mezem, when I was about to fight Riji, saying it was his evil that bothered me. But… in a Yeoli? “I know, I know, I shouldn’t worry about that yet,” I said. “I know exactly what you want to say, that you are too civil to: calm kyashin down, Invincible.” I stilled myself and took a long deep breath where I stood.

“It’s quite all right. Getting served like this rightfully feels like an attack.”

All-Spirit… again he’s more on my side than I am. Still, I couldn’t imagine he didn’t actually prefer I calmed down, so I could think. I took another long deep breath. “So... for a good defense, what do we do?”

“Well, the first thing we do is call him out for not attempting some form of reconciliation. You’ve already shown me that you’d like to understand why he acted that way, and I suspect he would benefit from being forced into your shoes.”

Oh, yes. It was delicious, imagining Inatalla saying I am walking into the Ring, and one of my own people, my people whose will I serve and live for, is coming at me mindless with drugs, and I know that Kurkas will show the red and I will have to kill him… He’d sweat; I wondered if he’d cry. “Yes, I would absolutely like to get him to do that.” A kinder part of me thought of Elera Shae-Tyeba, in the Lakan war. “I’ve turned around one pretty nasty enemy that way before.”

Elera, by the way, was fighting for me now. In one of the first losing pitched battles on the plains, he’d been wounded in the gut by a javelin. He’d been sick for months with the festering, being sneaked by the shadow-sibs from house to house in central Yeola-e. But eventually he’d healed and rejoined us as setakraseye over mercenaries, been promoted up, and now was fighting as a perfectly competent milakraseye.

“Well, that’s a standard part of the reconciliatory process,” said Veresinga. “As he’s opted for prosecution, our first step would be to prepare an application asking the judge to remand it to the court of reconciliation, since we don’t believe his choice is justified.”

“Even if he says I was Shininao embodied at the time, which maybe I was,” I said, “I can say I cooled off the next day... it’s true. I regretted it... kyash. I should have gone to him. Maybe I’d have headed this whole thing off… I was still too angry to think of it.” Veresinga, my advocate, I thought, you were calm; why didn’t you think of it?

“But we didn’t expect him to skip this far ahead. That’s why he’s overextended, and why it should be quickly remanded.” He thinks, I thought. He added, “Theoretically.”

“Right,” I said. “That’s why you didn’t think of it...” He didn’t look in the slightest bit non-plussed. But then, he never did. “So—let’s prepare that application, then. What do you need from me?”

“Not very much. These forms are fairly standard, and anything I don’t know I can probably get from your secretary or even your squires, since they’re sibs. I’ll draft it and bring it by for your approval and signature, as always.” As always, I thought. This is getting to be far too much of a routine. “What will likely happen is that, before the hearing, the judge will call us all in—Inatalla, the prosecutor, you and me—for an informal talk. Unless the prosecutor has some sort of grudge against you, too, she’ll be advising him strongly to agree to reconciliation; she won’t want to be party to compromising you, and she also knows that if he is intransigent himself, it could bite him back.”

“Oh? What could happen?” I asked, eagerly.

“The judge could summarily throw out the charge, even censure Inatalla or order him to perform some act. Judges don’t want to see you compromised, either. No right-thinking Yeoli does.”

That brought the question painfully back to mind: what’s with Inatalla? Did he envy me, like Elera? Did he agree with certain Servants of Assembly that I was too big for my kilt and should be knocked down? Did I look uncannily like the oppressive uncle who slapped him in childhood?

Veresinga jolted me out of brooding by a pat on my shoulder. “I will draft it and get it back to you immediately. Take heart, Chevenga.” With the papers tucked into his portfolio, he went.