#3 - The Day Ahrimaz Woke Up

They give me books. Blasphemous books that show the Demon as God’s Wife.  Equal. Also a God.  It makes me sick and I would destroy that trash but I cannot tear out the hideous pages of praise to her without damaging the holy words of God.  I open them to read the Tiger Master’s words of war with clenched teeth that I lay hands on blasphemy.  But I have nothing else to read unless I unbend enough to ask for other books.  This world has more books than it has fleas, more presses and more printers than an Imaryan has remedies.

There is no Empire in this world. THERE IS NO EMPIRE. NO OLD MONSTER. NO CAPTIVE NATIONS. They are all working together with the Republic of Inné.

At home… my world.  I cannot forget that.  This is not my world, even if the man I replaced was identical in almost every way.  I have more scars than he… and the brand on my chest.  The Hand of the People, beloved, Ahrimaz Kenaçyen.  My name. But I was feared by most. My soldiers were in awe of me and fawned like the lesser dogs they were.  They were still better by far than any other warriors of the puling, slavish countries around Inné.

How did he get such love?  How is he so beloved that he saves even my life?  I hate him. I hate him with a passion for having love that I deserved. He got love.  Beloved even by my greatest enemy.  Loved by the warriors, loved by the stinking masses, loved by the Imaryans.  Loved by the war cats and war hounds and even the stinking mousers in this plaster and timber termite-eaten pile of a palace that was MY House of Gold.  Even the scorching horses loved him, I’m sure, though I never got near his stinking war horse. 

I was feared.  Not loved. Feared. The old monster taught me how to be feared.  Even Kinourae learned to fear me, though he was the most stubborn when it came to loving me.  Father broke that love.  Anyway.

I am here, with paper, with pen, with ink.  I should write what happened.

I Ahrimaz Kenaçyen went to bed, alone, in my own bed. Alone.  I, the Master of the Known World, the most feared warrior of his generation, had a full bath to cool off in the summer heat and once Kinourae dried me off I slid into gold silk sheets and spread my arms out in the lovely, solitary coolness.  In my bed I had only my nightmares to disturb me, without the stinking press of a wife or a concubine male or female, no one to sweat on me, no one to snore or fart, no one to suddenly touch me in the middle of the night and wake me, ready to kill.  Not even the dogs or cats would sleep with me because I kept being jerked awake strangling some hairy beast that had touched me wrong.

In solitude I am safe.  So in a strange way these soft, overly sensitive dung-eaters have given me what I always said I wanted. Solitude.  Silence. Safety.

No chattering sycophantic court stinking of perfume, with the bad breath that rich food and wine and beer gives one.  No pissant Sen-Grand with his five little villages shoving yet another powdered daughter under my nose in the hopes I’ll want to plow her, give her little silver blond Kenaçyen bastards and shower her family with gifts.  

They don’t realize that my wife… my elegant princess captured from the Yhom right off the battlefield holds my attention for women.  And as for boys… well yes.  They are like kerchiefs to spend my seed in and throw out next day to become pages or starve in the street, it’s all the same to me.  They have as much influence on me as the fat blue flies I catch and smash. Less actually because the flies annoy me. I hate flies.

And the Cylak… Pel, in my dungeon at home.  I am wandering in my writing.

I went to sleep gloriously cool and alone, letting my eyes wander over the splendid gold ceiling depicting my victories… and after a nightmare that had me paralyzed, again nothing new for me,  I woke up. Here. My nose in what I thought was my wife’s hair, my arm around a concubine, though he was heavily muscled for a boy, a massive, purring weight on my feet.

I was buried in bodies and couldn’t breathe, fought my way out of the sheets and clutch of hands and the startled screech of a war cat that had me flailing for my swords or the Flamen but nothing was where it was supposed to be and I ended up standing in the middle of the room, hands clenching, empty, staring at the bed.

It wasn’t my bed. It wasn’t my bedroom. It was cotton sheets and my wife, Yolend, sitting up, pregnant and huge and naked, hand reaching out to me in a way she no longer dared, because I’d taught her better.  And… my breath howled up in my throat and I lunged for the Cylak.  He was the one most likely to kill me.  He was the deadliest enemy I had, but he sat there, also naked, bare except for sheets, looking concerned.  I fell over a war cat that got between my knees and I was on my knees at the foot of that hellish bed.

“Ahri,” he said, softly.  “It’s all right.  It’s just a nightmare.  I’m not the Cylak who hurt you.  It’s Pelahir."

“It’s all right,” Yolend said.

And that’s when I knew I must be going mad because even as I tried to work some spit into my mouth and call my guards… how dare they be so slow? My guards burst in and the one wearing something like Captain’s insignia, was my dead brother Ahriminash.

My brother who was dead because I killed him with his own court sword when he tried to kill me.  My brother who was the only warrior I feared because he could perhaps be as good as I and I would one day have a ‘training accident’ and then he would be prepared to step into my place.  I felt him bleed out over my hand, saw the life go out of his eyes.

I laid him on his pyre with my own hands, lit the pile with the Flamen, the burning sword that is our family’s most precious treasure, because I was supposedly so grief stricken that he’d had the very ‘accident’ I was going to have.  

I was in hell, but they’d given me an out till I could figure out what happened. “A… nightmare.  A scorching nightmare…”

My guard captain dead brother put up his sword, clapped me on the shoulder in a way that had me flinching.  “S’all right, brother mine.”  He turned to the Cylak and said, “We knew if it was serious the three of you would have taken care of it.  Stand down, lads and lasses.” Women in my guard? 

Really?

They left me there, on my knees, staring after these chatting soldiers whose discipline was so lax they may as well have been unarmed and wearing bed-robes.  Left me alone, on my knees before my wife and a free man who I, in my own place, was going to break.  Here… he loved me?  “I… I’m not feeling myself.”

I wrapped my hands, that so wanted to rip his head off, beat her into submission, around my middle.  Where they working together?  How had they even met?  I had one in seclusion in the women’s quarters… yes, still hugely pregnant… and the other in the dungeon, recovering from having one of his fingers removed.  Here… that hand… was still whole.

“I’m… dizzy…”

“I’ll fetch Limyé,” she said.

“No need, First Lady,” the hateful Imaryan voice said behind me and I tensed and shivered.  I was going mad.  There were no Imarya left.  I’d killed them all and banned their foul healing, put proper physicians in their place.  “I am here.  Let me see you, Ahri.”

Shock on shock on shock.  So familiar with me.  And Pelahir and Yolend… in the same bed, holding hands! Both naked, and a damned, vile Imaryan laying comforting hands on me. I shook all over with the need to be still until I could make them all go away, including the damned cat which hadn’t quit snarling at me.

I was naked, but one of my hands was up over my brand of office, the mark of the Royal House, lucky for me because they didn’t just instantly see that I wasn’t their beloved Ahrimaz.  I was shaking and speechless and couldn’t speak.

“It’s all right, Ahri,” she says.  “You don’t have Coalition sessions till next week, you can skip training.  If you feel sick you can take a day to recover.  Come back to bed.”

“No…” I managed to make my tongue work a little. They obviously don’t see me as a threat… I needed to fool them into thinking I’m who they thing I am.

**

Ahrimaz flung his pen across the page, spattering ink everywhere, slammed his hands down on the table, making the journal, the pages, the ink pot and sand pot dance. His chair hit the floor and he ran the three steps to the back wall, slamming both his hands flat against the stones of the wall, back to the bars as if he could burst his way out with energy alone.

Back and forth, back and forth like a tiger raging in his cage.  He flung off his coat and did push ups, press ups, caught the bars at the front of his cage over his head and pulled himself up vertically a hundred times, five hundred times.  Then back to slapping the walls.

He dropped to the floor and did press ups until sweat poured off the tip of his nose, he found himself with his hands clawed into the feather quilt, threatening to tear it apart, but stopped himself.  It was so damp and cold in this basement and he didn’t know if they’d give him another if he ruined this one. He flung it hard against the wall.

He ended up sitting in the middle of the room, finally worked out enough so he could be calm, exercised hard enough that his head was reeling, even in the confined space.  He’d managed to bend the bars slightly, pulling on them and one of the guards was examining them, then staring at him through them.

“Not trying to get out.  Need to work… need to move!”  He shook his hands out.  Who cared if the guard heard him or not?  His words echoed off the stone as if no one had.

He rose, put his sweaty clothing in the box they’d built for that… the outside door would not open until the inner door was closed and latched.  That door was a sheet of iron so he couldn’t break the latch off and leave it in its slot to reach through… there was a towel... then he shied sideways, startled when the guard came back with a bottle and a bowl and another towel and… oh scorching heavens… soap!  He was startled into a smile and there was a flicker of response from the guard, but only a flicker of a return smile then nothing else.