280 - Penning missives such as this

The building had been a collection of offices; seeing the plaques made me wonder, as always, what had become of the people who’d worked there. My bed was set up in what had been a great-room for meetings, with a stone-stove and a polished oak circular table that had been taken apart and leaned up against the wall. “Where’s Niku?” I said, as they helped me undress and lie down. I saw things of hers here, as usual. “And Emao-e… ask her to report… we should do the after-battle command council.”

“It’s already done, Cheng,” he said. “I know it’s your least favourite word in the language, but you’re incapacitated, until Kaninjer says you’re not. You just have one assignment: lie there and heal. Niku, I can get.”

“My mind isn’t incapacitated!” I said, to his receding, and unanswering, back.

“Kaninjer says you have to eat dinner whether you want to or not, Cheng,” Ilachesa said. It stood to reason; I hadn’t since the bite I’d had pre-battle, last night. I wasn’t hungry.

“Omores?” Her sword-arm was in a sling and her shield-side shoulder had a big half-circle of stitching on it, from a flap of skin and flesh almost sheared off. On one cheek was a scrape from something glancing. Under her good arm was a roll of cloth and the hand of her slung arm held a teapot, a weight I’m sure Kaninjer would have forbidden her to carry if he’d caught her. “I brought something to eat.”

“You’re all right? Love…” We kissed and just clung for a while, with one arm apiece.

“Vriah’s with Ada,” she said, then dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “There’s some red meat and stuff rolled up in Haian flatbread.” She unrolled the cloth on the bed and poured two cups of tea on the night-table with her good hand. “Maybe something Kaninjer’s forbidden you will aid your appetite?” I had Sishana close the door, saying we wanted to be private, in case my healer wandered in.

“I can’t start eating before I ask you to report,” I said, and set my teeth.

She sighed, and leaned her brow on my shoulder for a moment, then straightened. “Eighteen of ours flew home to Tyriah.”

I froze; the look on my face must have been mixed. Less than I expected… All-Spirit… From inside her pareo she drew a minute dagger that I knew was ceremonial both by the designs sewn on the cloth wrappings, and the way she handled it. The blade was brown with dried blood. I remembered what she’d told me about Niah funerary rites; that the heart of the deceased is roasted, and the bereaved share in eating it.

Show nothing… it is sacred to them… the souls of the eighteen are gone, their flesh is only flesh, and it doesn’t matter what happens to it… “When we’re at war, we can’t do full rites but this stands for it, so I thought you would want to share,” she said. “My bakuriah—a bad translation calls it ‘holder of hearts’—has touched their hearts.” She set her lips to the blade tenderly, and handed it to me.

That is all I have to do? I did as she had, trying not to show relief. As if I am pristine of blood myself… I’d lost count of how many times I’d tasted someone else’s. “Should I kiss it another seventeen times?” As the sight of one of them going down ran through my mind again, tears seized me.

“No, pehali. The bakuriah touched all their hearts.” I wondered what that ceremony looked like.

“So... who died...? I saw Suku with a javelin in his shoulder, is he all right?”

“He’s fine, already trying to talk the Haians into letting him exert himelf, but not saying how, precisely. I figure our injured we can send back to start the school. We need to.”

“Because it starts on the ground… right. I hope they said no; he shouldn’t fly with a shoulder-wound… who else died?” I knew all their faces, perhaps a quarter of the names.

She named them all off. Perhaps half way I grabbed my forelock, tears coming hard. “I couldn’t know until we got there,” I said when she was finished the list. “I couldn’t know there were so many fikken Arkans hidden around…”

She tightened her arms around me. “Omores... pehali... stop. We are at war. They’re all flying free now. We’re warriors and someday our wings fail... It’s all right.” Her eyes were red, too.

“You don’t have to comfort me, Niku,” I said. “Your grief is worse than mine… maybe later I will tell myself, this is how war goes, that Niah-lur-ana chose, that ultimately it’s the Arkans who are responsible... but right now I feel for my part in it, because I was commanding on the ground and because none of them would even be here if it weren’t for me... let me cry that out.”

“Chevenga… cry if you want, but you did so much to hold the Arkans off until the bolt broke, you saved who-knows-how many of us. Don’t forget that; none of us will.” I cried more anyway. When it eased, I found myself hungry, and we ate. I should not do too much tonight, I saw; I’d have my hands full tomorrow with going to the advocate—or having someone ask him to come to me, more likely—being with the A-niah, and talking the command council into not thinking of me as incapacitated so that I could help plan how to take the citadel.

Ada brought Vriah, who cried for a time, then stopped when it seemed to run out, and the three of us cuddled in together. I fell asleep soon and slept like the dead all night. In the morning I gave Sish the note with the name and address of the advocate, Veresinga Shae-Rusha, on it, asked her to ask him if he had time to speak with me, and when. Then I called in Emao-e.

“Why can’t you just leave it to us and rest?” she said. “Why can’t you just tell yourself, ‘I’m wounded, leave it to my capable people’? I’m going to defer to Kaninjer on this, Chevenga; is he around?” My healer was sleeping in, it turned out, having worked all through the night of the battle and yesterday. I wasn’t willing to wake him. “Then we’re meeting without you,” she said, with a face like a barred gate. “You’re incapacitated until he says you are not.”

“Kyash on that… there are other Haians.” Of course they started the meeting before Iperaiga could find one, and then Sish was back. “He says yes, and it can be any time. His office… well, the roof’s in black pieces on the floor, and everything’s charred. They were picking through the rubble. I guess he cancelled all his appointments.”

The last thing Veresinga would want was a new client in the midst of all this, especially one who would not pay, but I understood why he was saying yes anyway; he’d be able to say forever more he’d had a semanakraseye as a client. A semanakraseye who is revered, I thought drily. I told Sish to stand by.

The Haian came in, pulled the covers off me and took one look. “Of course you’re incapacitated.”

“To fight, yes, no argument there, but to think? To plan?”

“Incapacitated doesn’t just mean unable, semanakraseye,” she said. They’d found a middle-aged Haian, the kind who has seen everything, has had every kind of patient, and has not a trace of shyness left, so she won’t budge a fingerwidth facing even the likes of me. That choice had been purposeful, no doubt. “It also means needful enough of rest that you shouldn’t be expending any effort or taking on any strain. You want to know more…”

She sat on the bed and felt my wrists, her touch more brusque than Kaninjer’s. “You are thinking the wounds are minor. With any one of them, I’d say fine. You have four of them. Up and around a little today, to start working back up to it, but that’s all, unless your healer says different—but he won’t. You’re letting yourself feel too much pain, asking for nothing like an over-tough fool… here.” At least she just gave me painkiller by mouth instead of sticking me. I wanted to hurt just to spite her. I waited until she was long gone before sending Sish for the advocate.

Veresinga was in his fifties, I guessed, a portly-built man with his silver-bronze hair tied neatly back in the bun that is the legal style, and with neither a hair out of place nor a wrinkle in his tunic, though last I’d heard he’d been picking through ashen rubble. He had keen eyes with a furrow between them, the kind that people get who think hard on how to do whatever they’re doing correctly. He looked familiar; once we’d made our greetings, I asked him, and he said he’d seen me at a dinner when I’d visited Hirina at nineteen.

“It’s not a legal matter per se,” I said to him, feeling the nervousness come up. “It’s a political one…” I opened my lapdesk and handed him the letter. He read it quickly. Of course, in the silence while someone does that, you can’t help but watch their face for the slightest clue as to what they’re thinking. He didn’t let slip even a flicker. “I know this is going to sound... hard to believe, perhaps, but the words are eluding me... so I thought I should seek help.”

“And you were correct to do so,” he said. “This is a formal request and thus is best limited to objective evidence, mitigating circumstances, and denial of impropriety. I’m confident we can have this dismissed.”

“Voted down, you mean…” Of course he’d put it into the terms of the courtroom. “Well, someone in Vae Arahi I trust totally said that everyone there thinks it’s, you know... ridiculous… and sure to go charcoal. But in the meantime, I have to answer and it’s gotten under my skin. I’m already late; I should have had it done several days ago…”

He thought for a bit then looked at me with the trace of a scheming grin. “Semanakraseye, I believe we can write this in such a way to discourage similar efforts in the future.”

“Truly?” Of course if Sharaina came after me once, she could again. “Veresinga... thank you so much for being willing to do this... I appreciate it very much.”

“Semanakraseye, the honour is mine.” He was so at ease with formality it sat on him well, like a long-owned and perfectly-fitting cloak, but I still asked him to call me by name.

He studied the letter a moment again, and asked me, “Do you feel that you have encouraged reverence for yourself among Yeolis and foreigners? If you consider any part false then the question is overbroad and we can firmly deny it. Partial concessions we can address later.”

“Well… when I haven’t been busy fighting, I’ve been thinking about this, and what it is is cursed unspecific,” I said. “What does that mean, encourage reverence for myself? What am I supposed to have done that they’re referring to? I don’t even know. The proposal doesn’t say, and I wasn’t there for the debate, what debate there was. So in a sense I can’t answer... one thing I’ve been thinking of doing is writing back asking exactly what they mean—”

“The fact they don’t say that gives you some liberty to define it as you desire,” he said. As I desire? “Define it so that it’s clearly deniable, and then we will deny it and include how we interpreted their unspecific request.” But, but… that’s like trickery… I remembered he was an advocate, and they did things like that.

“Well... I haven’t ordered everyone to quit calling me semanakraseye and start calling me King Chevenga the Much Revered. I don’t have minions kowtowing to me...”

“Right. We deny the first question. For the second, we can provide sound reasons for encouraging reverence for a solitary warrior, champion, or commander which benefit a fighting force.”

“But the first question is two parts,” I said. “It’s not just encourage, but allow... shouldn’t we make the point that I can’t exactly forbid people to feel something...?”

“Absolutely, but since the question said allow and encourage we can denounce it firmly, which is the most important part, and provide our rationale later. Primarily in the remarks.” He had not only a very formal way of speaking, but very precise, as if he were measuring the dimensions of each word in his mind before allowing it out.

“But I can’t deny something first then justify it later,” I said. “They’re going to pick apart every word like buzzards with eating picks through bodies on a field… And what if by ‘allow’ they didn’t mean allow feelings, but allow expressions of reverence? Maybe they want me to tell the army to shut up when they’re chanting my name or something.”

“They certainly will pick it apart, but they ask here to concede or deny this, singular, so it must encompass all claims. We deny that all parts are true and present our rationale later.” I reminded myself: advocates don’t think like normal people. But then he said what I would understand: “We order the charge after we have prepared the battlefield to better suit our liking, if that analogy is familiar.”

I grinned in spite of myself. Assembly should never be a battlefield. And yet, sometimes it was. It’s that the battle should never be over me. “How should I word the answer to the first question? Just, ‘I deny this’?” I pinned my noteboard between the heel of my hand and my leg under the covers, and poised my Arkan pen to take notes.

“To be perfectly honest, Chevenga, I would be happy to have one of our scribes draft a formally-penned copy for your approval and signature. Presented properly it may show them that you take a firm stance on such requests, and in our opening paragraph we can explain how you asked for our services since you had more pressing military responsibilities. In other words, if they must spend their time penning missives such as this, they’d better find time also for studying how to speak three-up Arkan.”

The snort of laughter, hard enough to hurt the wound in my side, came out before I could stop it. Veresinga and I, I saw, would get along.