#9 - I Cannot Heal

And now I am back to silence.  The guards are not happy with me and have shortened my day, I think.  It brings me back to the horror of when the old monster broke any hope of us being a family.

He hauled us boys down to the dungeons and locked us in.  Then he brought the girls.  And mother. She had just had another miscarriage and was not well.  She’d born us, all seven of us, and had four lost children.

I can’t remember that. I won’t remember that madness. It was madness and horror and every one of us broke that night, howling for our mother though we all knew. Every one of us cried and screamed and he left us there.  Fail him and he’d kill us. Until he brought mother back and made her release us.  She felt different. Wrong.  She was never the same, after, cold as ice.

The court was told that we were ill and in seclusion.  True enough. And he didn’t leave us a light. That was when Arnziel started drinking.  Ahrimiar began buying slave girls. Ahriminash became a fanatic at fighting.  I started hunting, killing things.  But I could ride outside and there was my valley.  The only place I would never kill anything.  I don’t know why, to this day, why I wouldn’t.  Outside where there were no walls, no bars, no blood on the floor, no shit or piss or semen.  There were flies but not masses of them covering… no.  Only the occasional flying bug, outside.

There was a peace that I could get by letting father see me torment some animal.  It was better than have him make me torture people.

The valley was the one place I could find some kind of sanity… it must be here in this world.  I hold that close to my withered and rotten heart.

My hunting party knew what I required and would go racketing around the hunting preserves all around.  They… covered for me, bringing back meat for the court’s table while I would sit at the waterfall.

The waterfall and the tree.  Though this tree was on the royal preserve somehow people would manage to sneak in and there would be ribbons tied onto the branches, cages with open doors though I used to laugh at the song birds sitting inside still.  I would take those home and give them to my sisters and little
 

Allama would actually train them to be free.

I’d be waiting at the tree at the end of the day, step out of its cool shade and meet my ‘hunting party’, get blood all over me and ride my lathered horse home.  Oh, not all the time.  Once or twice I would run from the racket of slaughter but most of the time I was in it up to my elbows.  Wild boar were the best.  They’d be the most likely to kill you and I admit I almost longed for it at the time.  I could see I was lost and would become the beast, the ravening monster.  I was so like the doomed boar.  Destined to either kill everyone around him or bleed his life onto the ground.  I could see it and couldn’t stop it, couldn’t turn aside any more than the pig could, helpless in the face of horror.

How long will the Imaryan make me wait? An orderly in a House of Violently Deranged.  Well.  You can certainly say I am that.

I have no appetite.  The food on the plate looks and smells disgusting.  I drink the malak because I think I would faint from lack of energy if I didn’t.  I put the lid back on the tray and shove it out the slot.

The valley. The waterfall.  The tree.  I have not allowed myself to miss them.  As an adult I put aside childish fancies, like naiads in the water and sylphs in the tree.  I stopped going out there.  But I did not forbid my children to go.  My young Ahrimiar.  He looks nothing like the hardened old bastards the Kenaçyen line are.  His smile is still sweet.

The silence.  I blink. There is nothing in the hallway. I stare at the candle light and try to imagine the night sky. I want out so badly I can taste it.

**

Days of silence.  I managed to eat this morning.  A handful of berries. A piece of toast. I am burning off any fat I might have built up not being able to exercise more than I have been.  Limyé is so conscientious that he even shaved me after he knocked me out.  After I tried to kill him, force them to let me out.

Between my beard growth and them clocking my days and nights by lighting and dousing the lamp, I guess that I have been punished with silence for approximately two weeks.

Then when he comes back he doesn’t speak to me but sets a box down, ties his trailing sleeves back at the small of his back, girds up his robe exposing skinny black legs and bare feet and begins painting on the wall.  “Limyé… Sir. Sir Ianmen?” He doesn’t answer me at first.  I sit down at the bars, out of reach.  “I’m sorry.”

“I accept your apology,” he says, carefully tracing a line onto the rough whitewashed stone.  “You have no more chances.  Should you attack me again I will not come back.”

“I understand.”

The painting takes slow shape under his brushes and his fingers.  He sometimes plunges his hands into the paint and draws with great sweeping smudges of his hands, wrists, even the edges of fingers that resolve, in the flickering light, into leaves, twigs, flowers.

“Why are you doing this?”

“Because I wish to,” he says.

I nod.  Bullshit. He is still trying to get me to become his patient. “Limyé, you do realize that I can never become your patient?”

“Why is that?” He isn’t even looking at me.

“Because I wish to live.”

“Oh? It doesn’t seem like it if you are not eating.”

“That will pass.  My appetite will come back or I will force it.  To put it bluntly, I wish to live and if I become your patient I will grow a conscience.”

“And this will kill you, how?”

“If I grow a conscience… or let it out of its cage… I will be forced to recognize the evil man I’ve been and realize what horrors I have inflicted on the innocent and have to kill myself.”

He’s silent a long time standing, looking at his work, one paint covered finger leaving a green splotch on his lip. “It seems to me that you already know how evil you are. Anything else frightens you and you just cannot bear the idea of being healed.”