439 - Can a person be healed of who he is?

“Don’t tell me you can’t manage without me,” I said to Emao-e. “The war is over, now. Invincible is no longer indispensable. I almost got killed fifteen or twenty times taking the Marble Palace; what would you have done if I had? That’s what you’ll have to do now.”

“Not if you kyashin come to your senses!” she snapped. “If the black dogs had killed you, that wouldn’t have been your choice. Whatever happens because you abandon us is on your head!”

“What I already have on my head is so much worse—Emao-e, why don’t you see it? If I’d assigned a general to take Arko and she allowed this, I’d have her executed! I was putting people to death for stealing Arkan property; how many counts would this be? Mistreating prisoners, which as soon as we took Finpollendias and the Marble Palace every city Arkan was, in effect—how many counts? Should I be absolved, just because I’m me? How fair is that? I did all that to show Arkans I would be a humane Imperator, better than Kurkas; I’ve…” Tears caught me, faster than I could swallow. “…so thoroughly… fikked that up…” Only the Arkan word was strong enough.

“That was to win the war,” Hurai said. “Now you’re Imperator, you can do whatever you want, to change their kyashin ways for the benefit of themselves, us and the world. Having fewer of them to change will actually help… we’ve done lots to change the architecture already.” A few let out brittle laughs; out of the corner of my eye I caught my mother snapping out a charcoal sign at him, as if to say that is not what he needs to hear.

Tajenden leaned over me with a flannel cloth to wipe away my tears, which he did with such tenderness I cried more. “I release you,” I said to him. “I have no need of a healer, now, thank you. The seven of you should go home—oh kyash! There is something I must do before I die, Chinisa, take a letter… aiigghh kaina marugh miniren, I have no cursed secretary, Emao-e, can I borrow yours? I think…” I tried moving my sword-hand fingers. It hurt, but I felt forefinger against thumb. “I think I can sign.”

“Chevenga, it’s the death-hour. My secretary’s up on the plain, fast asleep if he has a lick of sense. We’re doing all that tomorrow. Tajenden, he can’t release you, he’s incapacitated, I speak for him, you stay right here.”

“Incapacitated in mind, I am not!”, I said.

“You kyashin well are,” several people snapped back at once. Tajenden said gently, “It is Haian practice to consider someone who is suicidal mentally incompetent.”

“Mentally incompetent means I can’t sign a letter, then,” I said, fixing his eyes with mine. “Such as one to set Haiu Menshir free.” He froze, speechless.

“It’s not that I want to die…” I began to say. But that was not true. I saw no course my conscience could accept but death, and my wishes agreed, as they tend to.

“You feel you cannot live with yourself,” my blood-mother said, and stroked my forelock back from my brow. “Inhumanly hard on yourself, right from when you were tiny…” My hair needs a trim, I thought absently, before remembering that I need not bother now. If I had to die of thirst, I would do it.

“Vaenakrachaseye,” Perha said to Emao-e. “I found a room with a bed in it over there.”

“Good. Tajenden, what needs to be done to move him? His arms need slinging?” The healer got me to sit up to do that, hurting all my bruises. I suddenly yearned so hard for a hot bath and Kaninjer’s hands kneading my muscles that tears came fresh. I’d never feel that again, except maybe the hot bath from the waist down. I felt I could walk, but I was groggy enough from painkiller that I needed Kunarda’s arm around me.

“No one in here but me, and family,” the healer ordered, once I was in the smaller bed. “More than anything, now, he needs sleep.” I doubted I would, especially when I would not take sleeping-drink—it was liquid—but I somehow did until mid-morning the next day. My arms hurt less, but the thirst was worse. Hunger goes away on the second day of not eating, I know from doing abstinences; thirst does not. It stays grindingly there, becoming an obsession.

All my things had been moved into the Marble Palace and I had a secretary: Binchera Shae-Krisa, who’d been Emao-e’s; she’d reassigned him to me. I’d have preferred to send a pigeon to Haiuroru, but no one had found the coops yet. “Take a letter—oh wait—we have to find the golden pen, he always writes in gold ink.” After much casting about, it was found in a sumptuous office. I could sign, though the strokes weren’t particular straight or steady; then came sealing, which, with five imprints to make, is a little ceremony in and of itself, but which Binchera had to do.

“You’re writing to Haiu Menshir?” said Emao-e. “Last night there was a prisoner in the dungeon who said he’s the brother of the Arkan governing there, and offered to go there as your envoy. His allegiance is good, by truth-drug.” It was Dafidas Pasen, better known in Arko as General Mud. He’d turned himself in. He was willing to go in a double wing.

“Right, now that’s done,” Emao-e said, “there’s the matter of hauling bodies—”

“You don’t already have the surrendered solas doing that?”

“Right. We will. Then getting the markets going again—”

“Where’s the shadow-government? You should be moving them in, first thing.”

“Well, half of them disappeared; what did you expect when… never mind.” The memory came, with a stab that made me flinch my eyes closed, of what I’d said when they’d truth-drugged me. I will fail. I had spoken the truth. More stabs came as I remembered them agreeing to swear silence, in the hopes that that truth would change. “Look, lad, we have a dungeonful of officials, anyone in this palace or the other government buildings or anyone who turned himself or who got captured and looked somehow official. I’m telling them swear under truth-drug or die, and they’ve got till sundown to think about it, but then they’re going to need sorting out, and who can do that but you?”

“Reinstate them to the positions they held, and have the shadow-government fill in the gaps, where they themselves advise you. Amanas Mirenas as chief advisor to the Imperator—”

“You.”

“For now, but I’m incapacitated so I’m doing nothing, and I’m never going to get better.”

She smacked her hand against her scabbard. “Kyash on you, Fourth Chevenga! You think we’re going to let you do this to yourself? You think we aren’t going to jam water down your kevyalin throat?”

“What, until my hands heal, and I’m up and around? I’ll put a blade through my heart then.” Several people gasped and flinched at once. “What are you going to do—make me a prisoner?”

“The stubbornest kyashin kid on the Earthsphere,” Esora-e said between his teeth.

“You wonder why there isn’t even a message from your love, other than she loves you, and sends you her wishes for fast healing,” said Denaina. “It’s because we haven’t told her. We’ve just said your arms are broken… should we repeat to her what you are saying?”

I’ll arrange to see her one last time, I thought. “You’ll have to tell her the truth sometime,” I said. “You’re right that it shouldn’t be until she’s stronger, though. Send her my love and wishes for healing, too.”

“Your love and wishes for healing!” Esora-e spat. “When you’re going to do the worst thing you could to her!”

“Well, at least you don’t have to worry about me marrying a dirt-brown savage, shadow-father,” I said. He leapt up and stood over me for a moment, his teeth bared and his hands clenching and his body twitching all over with rage, before whirling around and half-running out.

After the inundation, the flow of wounded being brought to us slowed, whether because the sackers weren’t killing so many or because those who hadn’t been carried to safety and were too weak to get up were swept away by the water, I will never know. What it meant was that, just as faint lines of daylight were beginning to show through gaps in the roof—a roof that was like a massive set of steps slanting down, Mamin, I have never seen such a building—I was able to stop, and bathe, and have a bite to eat. At least it has the most magnificent baths, all marble and shining.

Then I bedded down with the patients. No worries that moaning and weeping would keep me awake. I was too tired even to cry myself, and gone almost as my head touched the pillow.

I didn’t sleep long, though. They woke me up. There was more work to do, more surgery, then rounds. I learned a lot of Arkan in a little time, a lot of “It’s all right” and “you’ll be fine,” and “you’ll heal.” How grateful and respectful they are varies wildly and… this is really strange, Mamin, so I hope you’ll believe it… it’s inversely proportional to the length of their hair. A man with a bristle-cut will be almost grovellingly appreciative; a man with hair past his shoulders, even if part of it was hacked off, will take my work as his due, and look down his nose at me even as he looks up from a bed. Some Arkan thing I don’t understand. I’ll have to ask Ch… well. No.

When I was taking a rest and a bite in the kitchen, around mid-morning, Iska—he was the person running things, managing to get us more opian and bandages and sutures from who knows where, and now had sent some number of the ubiquitous wildly-dressed youths out to seek food for the patients—came to me. His hair was medium length, a little above the shoulders, so he was sort of half-obsequious, half-commanding.

“So is it true,” he said in very polite, Arkan-clipped Enchian, “that you’re Shefen-kas’s personal physician?”

“It is only true that I was,” I said. “I am no more.”

“Ah,” he said. “And you left his service… in protest of the sack.”

If he knew that, why had he asked as if I still was? I tried not to be irritated. He is a very good person. I remembered, Arkans do things like that in conversation. I remember a few of them from Kallijas and his friend who I couldn’t save, Minakis. It’s one of their many weirdnesses.

“Yes,” I said.

He stood thinking for a bit, as if uncomfortable. “Not friends then,” he said finally, “if you and he ever were?”

“We were,” I said. “But he and I are… very different. This… illustrated it too much to deny any more.”

“But you were his healer until yesterday… so you know how he is… or how he was up until yesterday.”

Why was this person asking these things? He seemed too nice to be a spy. What Arkan authority was left for him to be spying for anyway? Or maybe I think of spies as Yeoli women. Why did he care, how Chevenga was, in the midst of all this carnage and agony he had caused? I just said, “Yes.”

“How is he? I ask because I knew him, when he was here.”

That explained it. Some. The carnage was still all around us. “He is fine,” I said. “Up until yesterday. After that, I do not know.”

“So he was healed of the grium sefalian? Surgically? Did they… did you do that?”

“No, not me, I am not a”—neurosurgeon, I don’t know how to say in Enchian—“surgeon of the brain, I don’t have that skill. Kaninden of Ensera did that for him. He had seven healers, other than me, including my uncle. They were all brought here and imprisoned and tortured as punishment for it.” He stared at me frozen. “Well—not just Kurkas has been punished for that, now. They are all right, they were freed just before the battle of Fispur. He is… well, I can’t tell you more, because of my confidentiality oath.”

He did the up-and-down nodding of the head that Arkans do to mean assent. “I understand. I am glad he was healed.”

As much as he was… can a person be healed of who he is?

“There’s someone else who wants to meet you,” he said. “Bear with me.” He was gone, and shortly came back with one of the many youths who aided him, who looked about eighteen. It was the one who I had noticed was most richly dressed, and had the longest hair, falling well down his back, though he tied it back with a cord to work. Even in this, he wore thick gold bracelets, and a necklace of golden scales that flashed and shimmered in the candlelight, and a silk satin shirt the colour of venous blood. Iska introduced him to me, and I caught the first name easily, because I knew it: Skorsas. Chevenga has mentioned it many times. Always fondly, and gratefully. Iska spoke to him in Arkan and I caught my name.

He looked intently at me, with cold blue eyes in a flawless face. He did not smile. “Quit him,” he said, in very thickly-accented Enchian.

“Yes, I did.”

“Skorsas was Shefen-kas’s boy here in the Mezem,” Iska said to me. “He is very, very loyal.”

I stared back and forth from one to the other. “The… the Me… zem? The blood-sport place… that is what this building is?”

“Enchian bad,” said Skorsas. “I… I want… show things you, Haian. Come.”