456 - Shefenkas's truth

From The Pages of Arko, Aras 32, 55th-to-last Y.P.A.:

Shefenkas’s truth

The policy decreed for the Great Press is not what you think

By Intharas Terren
High Editor

THE GREAT PRESS OF ARKO, BUILT INTO THE CLIFF, strongly-gated, not immediately apparent from the outside, is a much easier place to barricade and hide in than most Arkans were blessed with. It is for this reason the staff of the Pages was able to publish the issue that preceded this one, giving an account of the sack.

But we knew it was simply a matter of time before the soldiers of Fourth Shefen-kas Shaeranoias found us, broke down our defenses and brought us to whatever punishment the conqueror deemed appropriate for what we had written and published.

Each man of my staff, with the help of his respective professional or diligent God, made his peace with this.

So it was with great surprise that, yesterday, we heard a quite civil tap on our gate, and, looking from a hidden vantage-point in the cliff, saw a delegation of Yeoli soldiers mixed with Arkan Sereniteers, led by an unarmed Aitzas, who proved to be a high aide of the Minister of Internal Serenity. When we answered his hail, he informed us that Pages High Editor Intharas Terren was invited to the Marble Palace for dinner with the Imperator. The envoy carried Shefenkas’s own written oath, signed Second Fire come and sealed with the Imperial seals, that I would neither come to harm nor be deprived of my freedom.

Consulting with my wise and loyal staff, I considered my options. It has long been a custom of Arko that if you are invited to dinner at the Marble Palace, you do not decline. Did Shefenkas mean to carry on that tradition, so that I would incur his wrath if I refused? Now we’d been discovered, we were effectively besieged; the kind Arkan citizens who’d been surreptitiously sustaining us with edibles since the sack—for which we will always be grateful—could now be prevented. As well, our publishing—our only purpose—was at an end, absent the permission of the Imperator by conquest.

So I put on the best suit of clothes I had at the office, and went to face my fate, as bravely as I could. I would take all responsibility for all offense we’d given him, I decided, so as to save as many lives as I could, if I could; and I would stop at no abasement of myself and no argument—even throwing away all our lives, if I had to—to influence him to spare the Press. I was escorted to the Marble Palace by the envoy and his guard, who were all perfectly polite and respectful.

The Palace was neither severely damaged nor looted in the sack. Its opulence is no less impressive than before, for perhaps being slightly more spare; the only striking difference is that the pairs of sentries are armed and armoured in the Yeoli style, and it is often dark eyes that peer out under the brims of their helmets and dark curls peeking out from beneath.

Without being strip-searched, truth-drugged or even required to swear any oath, I was ushered into a small parlour, where, at a table set for two, the Yeoli Imperator sat waiting. As far as I’d heard, the prostration requirement hadn’t been waived, so I went down. He gave me the word to rise just as if he’d been an Arkan Imperator, then civilly invited me to sit, addressing me by name.

I never met Shefenkas when he was Karas Raikas, leaving that to worthies such as Roras Jaenenem and Norii Maziel. I am informed, however, that he looks no different than he did then, except for his attire, then the garish and muscle-revealing garb usual to Mezem denizens, now the conservatively-opulent white satin and gold of an Imperator. As described all too pruriently in many a tract during his Mezem career, his Yeoli curls are black, his eyes deep brown and gazing intensely, his clean-shaven features angular and marked in several places with scars. He is of medium size and has the muscular, fatless build of a currently-active warrior. Hard to imagine though it is, given his accomplishments, he is only twenty-four years of age.

The feeling of his presence is hard to describe. It is impossible not to be intimidated; at the same time he is unfailingly polite, and there is an inescapable warmth about him. His Arkan is absolutely fluent and has only the trace of the Yeoli lilt, but, because he learned it from his Mezem boy, it is fessas-accented, and he retains the famous habit of speaking to everyone—including myself—in the equal-to-equal mode, which is disorienting, to say the least, from an Imperator. As you will see, he is very direct in his way of speaking, seeming to know no other way. But beyond that, there is something unearthly about Shefenkas. In his presence, you can distinctly sense that he lives life on a different scale than most of the rest of humanity.

The other thing that struck me was that both his arms were in casts and slings, encasing all but his fingers. The Imperial seals he wore suspended on a chain around his neck. I had thought the victors had not sustained any casualties in the final battle, since victors generally don’t, but the one who seemed most likely of all to escape injury somehow had not. When it came time to eat, I raised my own fork, but Shefenkas had to rely on the ever-loyal Skorsas Trinisas, who now wears the neck-chain and glove borders of the Marble Palace Chamberlain.

When it came time for conversation, I readied myself for what I expected, what is natural to expect, from an Imperator and a conqueror: orders. I prepared myself to etch them onto my memory in every nuance of tone, as well as the words that I would record in my notebook. I had surrendered, and so from now on I would serve him as I had served Kurkas, since he had won that right by conquest. Who kills becomes. It would be his message that I would carry to the citizens of Arko now, so I must find out what it was and how to write it to suit him.

So I expected, at any rate. I am going to take a measure I normally do not, as I generally expect the basic trust of my readers that all quotes I give are accurate. I am going to commit to writing, and publication, a truth-oath. Sworn on my hope of Selestialis, Shefenkas said everything I write here, just as I write it.

He looked me in the eyes in his piercing way and said, “What do you want for Arko?”

I sat speechless. What did I want for Arko? What did I want? Who was I to want anything for Arko? Who had I been to want anything for Arko, even before he’d vanquished the empire of which I am a subject, and sacked the city in which I live? I stared at him, and he asked me again, a little more insistently.

I stammered out an answer that I couldn’t imagine him taking issue with: “Peace and safety, You Whose Whim is the Will of the World.”

“Why then,” he asked me, in the most gentle of voices, “the inaccuracies in the last Pages?”

My astonishment crashed down to mere realistic, albeit bitter, acceptance. He’d been playing me. I would have to retract everything that had made his army look like sacking conquerors, though they had been. I’d have to apologize and correct, giving the version he would lay out for me now. Keeping the vanquished under his thumb meant adding an extra edge to the threat he would make me live with; so be it. I know how to please an Imperator.

“You Whose Word is the Information of the World need only specify what I should correct when I issue a correction,” I said, “and it will be thoroughly and exactingly done.”

“Intharas, I can’t know what is true and what is not, for anything that happened that I didn’t witness,” he said. “What you got right and what you didn’t outside the Marble Palace, I have no idea. I only know that you had me in places I never was, doing things I never did, and for me that casts doubt on all the rest. You also claimed I was never tortured in Arko, which I can easily prove I was.”

I sat frozen again, repeating back in my mind what he had said. Yes, I’d heard rightly; he’d used precisely the words a man would use if he wanted you to give an account of events that was… accurate. It sounded, ominously, as if he wasn’t going to supply me with his preferred version; as if he for some reason wanted me to investigate what my own staff had written, and determine with them what had really happened.

I didn’t know what to say.

“I don’t know what to tell you to correct, except what I can speak to myself,” he said. “From when we landed on the roof, I was never outside the Marble Palace. Well… unless you count one of the inner courtyards, where I was for a short time. I fought through the Palace’s top floors to where Kurkas was. I killed him in the Greater Baths, by drowning him—a death I admit was torture to him. And that was the end of the war for me. I didn’t personally harm a hair on anyone else’s head from then on, Second Fire come if I lie, and I challenge anyone to come forward and say he witnessed me doing so.

“I could show you scars from being tortured. I could show you the initials of Second Amitzas Mahid, which he carved right onto me; but you might say that was faked. But I can describe to you—if my tongue will comply—an oubliette in the cellar of the Marble Palace, the crack on the ceiling, the exact placement of the table, the shackles, the”—he was speechless for a moment—“everything there, and if you look you will find it just so, and not be able to deny I was in the victim’s place, and for a long time.”

My hand numbly took the notes. The indignation in his words was what you would expect from some Aitzas or solas who’d attracted our notice for a story but somehow been misquoted, so that his actions or motives could easily be misconstrued, and was now appealing to my own sense of justice in his request to have it set right. Not an Imperator. Not a conqueror. If there was any hint of threat in it, I couldn’t detect it.

I also couldn’t help but believe every word he said.

“You want peace,” he continued. “You’re not going to get it, by engendering resentment through falsehoods. If you want to embarrass us, you needn’t worry; what we did was bad enough without you adding anything.”

What we did was bad enough?

At the outset he had offered me Saekrberk, having Skorsas place the bottle near my glass so I could pour my own. I took a generous draught now, and it helped me find words.

“I will correct what you’ve specified, You Whose Wit is the Wisdom of the World,” I said. “What else should I know? Every Imperator lays out guidelines for the Press; how soon might I expect Yours… so as to avoid any... misunderstandings?”

Shefenkas gazed at me with his penetrating dark eyes and said: “It’s simple, Intharas. Write the truth.”

“Of course,” I said. “Truth is what we deal in always. And therefore we recognize how absolutely necessary it is that we receive the current Imperator’s detailed guidance on the nature of truth as he sees it—”

He cut me off. “No, I mean truth! Don’t tell me you don’t know what I mean. You’ve been in the Pages since you were an apprentice. You know like the back of your hand what truth you couldn’t write because it was not Kurkas’s or his father’s truth, but which was still searingly true. You probably have filing cabinets full of it.

“I remember when I first read the Pages, when I was in the Mezem. I kept thinking, why do I feel half-blind? Why does it seem like so much is being hidden from me? Does the Imperator never do anything that anyone objects to? Do Arkans never disagree on anything political? Does anyone who works in the Marble Palace, other than Kurkas, have a name? It took me some time to understand: the things that were missing from the Pages weren’t there because they weren’t allowed to be. Do you understand, Intharas? I don’t just want you to write truth and no falsehood, fact and no inaccuracy. I want you to leave out nothing that is of concern to Arko.”

I felt as if the floor had fallen out from under my feet. Saekrberk scalded across my tongue. My mind didn’t know what to do with any of this.

“If you write something I disagree with, I might rebut it. If you write something I don’t like, but it’s true, I’ll bear it. If you write that I’ve been an idiot when I’ve been an idiot, fine—what can my objection be?—it will be just like at home. I’m used to being called up on my mistakes, I wouldn’t feel right if I weren’t! I won’t… punish you. My oath on it. Second Fire come if I am forsworn.”

I am living in a different world, I thought to myself, than any that I have known. Not a tenth-bead ago, I’d been expecting to entreat Shefenkas not to order the Press smashed.

One wants to credit an Imperator in every case, no matter whether what he says is truth or lie, and I had long trained in the technique. But my mind was spinning in circles. Something else about Shefenkas: he misses nothing. “You don’t believe me,” he said. I couldn’t deny it.

“All right, Intharas,” he said. “I will prove it. Right here, right now, you may ask me a question. Any question. On any topic, other than the military secrets of Yeola-e or Arko, and I will not refuse to answer it. I will answer it true, and you may publish it, and no punishment will befall you. My oath on it again; Second Fire come if I am forsworn.”

Did he mean it? My ears told me yes. My eyes too, as his were locked on them, unwavering, unblinking. Every speck of knowledge of the world that I had ever acquired told me no.

But I must ask him—something. My readers, I must apologize to you for the slightly inebriated state I had gotten in, while performing my journalistic duty. And yet perhaps it was for the best in the end. In drink is abandon, and, on retrospect, it was a question I could only ask in a state of abandon, seizing the first thing I’d been curious about when I saw him.

“You Whose Arms Are the Fortress of the World,” I asked him, “how did You break them?”