Short Pause

Chere readers!  I will be preparing to go and going to a small local convention (Eeriecon) as a guest.  I have been plotting out possibilities for next week's posts and should (if I'm not too tired) be able to do some work for Monday.

Does anyone have a feckless young raconteur who is willing to risk chasing Ahrimaz around and ask questions for their story?  How about a name for the publication willing to print the stories as the hapless public wonders what happened to their Hand of the People?

The Inn(é) and Out? Merditorious? Nothing But Gossip?

I'll see you next week... have fun.
 

#27 - You Traitorous Cur

As Yolend and Pelahir neared the door of the cell they heard slow, monotonous  cursing.  “Scorch and damn and burn you, mutt!  Why don’t you bite me?  Drown you! Scorch you! Come back here you traitorous cur!”  Sure trotted out of the door to the hallway and down toward the stairs, but stopped half way down the hall and lay down, whining, staring back at the cell.

Pel looked at Yolend and she grimaced.  When they entered the hall, now filled with Limyé’s paintings, they found Ahrimaz kneeling naked in the middle of his cell, teeth set into his own arm, eyes clenched shut as he shuddered but could not manage to climax, though the two could tell he was in agony, trembling on the edge of it.

Yolend nodded at Pel who whispered, barely audible, “Come. Taste that delicious pain. You are lonely.”

It was enough.  Groaning Ahrimaz fell forward, blood on his arm, blood on his teeth, curled protectively around his genitals as he climaxed.

Yolend eased out and a moment later “Hello, Sure!  Who’s a good dog then?” echoed outside.  Ahrimaz jerked as if he’d been shot, scrambled forward into the bed covered to the eyebrows as Yolend came in, bringing Sure with her.  “Good evening, Ahrimaz!  Are you ill?”  She and Pel sat down on the chairs under the lamp.

“Go away, both of you.”

“Oh?” Pel crossed his arms across his chest.  “You’d have to get out of bed naked to make us leave you realize.”

“Curse you, I shit in your heart, drown you, burn you, I’ll fuck the front row at your funeral, scorch you, flay you, I eat your heart—“

“After you’ve shit in it?” Yolend said, raising her eyebrows.  “I think that would taste bad.”

“Damn you, woman you interrupted a perfectly good tongue lashing of this one-eye’d, split-tongued Cylak!”

“Ahrimaz, were you trying to get the dog to bite you just now?”  Sure hadn’t squeezed through the bars but sat, with her head pressed against Pel’s thigh.  Ahrimaz lowered the edge of the feather quilt.  The two were both wearing light cotton clothing, as if for bed, if he didn’t know that they slept naked.

“What if I did?” He sat up, dropping the bedclothes to his waist.  “She’s just a cur.”

“Why?”  Yolend rose and stood just outside the door.

“None of your business, you cunt-mothering witch!” Ahrimaz’s hands curled into fists as she opened the latch with a click that echoed in his head, the terror roaring through him. He choked silent as she stepped in and pulled the desk chair over next to his bed.

He sat, rigid as a statue as she took his arm and turned it over to look at the crusted and bleeding wound on his forearm.  “It’s only the one arm, now,” he gritted.  “The other one’s healed up.”  He thrust the other arm out violently to show the darkened scar tissue next to the wound.

“Ahrimaz,” Pel had followed Yolend into the cell.  For the first time both of them were inside, with him.  “You don’t need to hurt yourself or anything else to get sexual release.”

Ahrimaz wrenched his  arm out of Yolend’s  too tender grip and flung his back to them both. “Go away, just go away.  Let me rot here, you don’t want to like me, shadow-copy of your lover, smeared with blood and shit and injury.  You don’t want this breathing corpse to get anywhere near you.”

“It’s not your responsibility, really,” she said quietly and laid her hand on the back of his head, while Pel took hold of his calf through the featherbed.  “We will like who we like and…”

“I don’t want your pity!” Ahrimaz shouted at them but his face was buried in a pillow and though he twitched with the force of his shout, he didn’t try and throw off their hands.

“You need to listen to Limyé when he says that the next step in your healing is learning to be gentle with yourself.”  She pulled the bedclothes down and touched an old scar on Ahrimaz’s back.  He bit the pillow and choked as Pel reached under and laid a hand on his bare skin.  They sat for a long moment before Ahrimaz began shaking.

“You don’t want to do this,” he said, finally.  “I want to tear you two to shreds.”

“Then try,” she said.  “We can look after ourselves.  It’s not for you to say.”

Ahrimaz lunged out of bed, striking for her face quick as a viper.  She moved to match his speed, easing her face out of the way and Ahrimaz snapped his fist back just in time for Pel to bundle him in the bedding and the two of them rolled him onto the floor.  By the time he’d untangled himself, roaring with rage, they were already out in the hallway, and Yolend spun the chairs into his way as she dashed out the door after Pel, Sure scrabbling all four sets of claws on the stone to run ahead.

Ahrimaz scrambled after them, screaming, but his long sedentary hours had cut into his phenomenal speed, and they made it to the stairs up to the salle with him half way down the hallway.  On the stairs he somehow found his wind and rhythm, ceased raging and chased them silently. Yolend darted through the salle door first and Ahrimaz was within arm’s reach of Pel’s back when the Cylak ducked under that reaching arm, flung an arm around the Innéan and spun them both into and across the room, straight into the roaring stream.

It devolved into a splashing, ducking, swinging, struggle because kicks were too slow and Yolend would disappear into the foam and suddenly her hands would find his ankles and yank him under.  Pel would haul him up, duck or block a strike and then dump them both under.  Neither tried to strike back, but in the tumble Ahrimaz lost his balance and smacked up against a boulder and breathed in a lung full of water.

A hand grabbed his hair, another his beard under his chin and hauled him up to blessed air where he vomited and then fought to just stand on his own two feet and breathe.  Sure danced on the artificial bank and barked.

When he’d coughed up what felt like half the river he found himself clinging to the two, standing in the circle of their arms.  He stared down into her face and for a fleeting moment considered biting her, found himself kissing her. Bile and river and her sweet, sweet mouth.

He tore his head up, looked around wildly.  “I must not. I must…”

“Come on, Shit-Head,” Pel said kindly.  “Let’s get you dry and talk.”

#26 - Dragons in the Underbrush

I do not trust them.  I do not test the doors to see if they are open.  The guards are still there.  At least one… someone brings me food.  Good food, not slop.  And pots of malik and cream and there are the books.

My life becomes nothing but the bed and piles of books.  And when I am too stiff and too filthy in mind and body I ask Limyé to go with me to the bath.  I do press ups, pull ups, squats but I am a shadow of myself.  I do war routines, empty hand smashing my hands against the walls to toughen them up.

Clean myself.  Then retreat back into the cell to read.  They have broadsheets, every two days.  There are three papers, named Inné Times, All The News, and Did You Know? And they alternate so that there is a paper out every two days or so.  Granted the Did You Know Broadsheet is mostly pap.  Gossip.

They are speculating on my disappearance. They criticize the Kenaçyen line for having so many foreigners from the Coalition close.  They chat about the royal families and extended families.  Did You Know has an Innovator's page where people with science papers publish. It is fascinating to find that they are only speculating on building double shot-pistols and have not set about making them one of the armies hand to hand weapons.

There are no wars to report, apparently.

I have the animals lying across my legs and outside… because there is a weather column and a weather forecast column… and a weather history column I know that it is the heaviest snow in thirty years.

I read.

Limyé comes to paint.  There is a whole jungle of trees now, in the hall outside my cell, crammed full of birds and he’s starting to paint flashes of stripes here… predator eyes there.  It’s not a peaceful, safe jungle he’s painting.

Most of it is fantasy.  Riga and the Imaryan island city are hot temperate but even they do not have dragons.  Their weather is pounding rain for a double handful of minutes every afternoon… then steaming dry under a sun that bites into tender Innéan skin.  I cannot tell if an Imaryan even can tan, they are so dark.  Yolend comes and reads to me.  Shashe has gone back to school, safely away from me.  And Yolend insists on showing me the new larva as if I care about the child before it can speak and be orderly.  He has my eyes.  And her smile.

I think Limyé is painting dragons in the deep dark patches.  My illness.  My evil.  My monstrosity.  All buried under normal green trees and flowers and birds.

The war-cat’s name is Heylia.  “Of the Sun” Appropriate with her solar eyes and patches of rusty bleach against dark.  She kills things.  Then she drags them in to give them to me.  I find the corpses of snakes in my bed every morning.  I praise her as a mighty killer and a ferocious monster and she brings me baby crocodiles.  Limyé says that she used to hunt birds but Ahrimaz my brother didn’t like it and everyone trained their war-cats that what they wanted were rodents and crocodilians out of the river.

I curse Limyé when he comes in the morning but he tells me that my words no longer have force and passion behind them.  Pelahir comes and I snarl at him and he snarls back until he gets me to laugh.  I want to go out… I don’t want to go out.  I am safe here.

Ahrimiar comes and speaks to me.  I might be able to speak back to him soon, more than 'yesser' 'noser'. My mother… Wenhiffar comes and speaks to me.  She even sings with me.  The old folk songs are very similar and she and I sing.  “Star-Flower Morning” and “Bright-Eagle Eyes”  and even nasty old silly songs like ‘Fart Under the Eaves’ and ones I didn’t know… ‘Maiden’s Vindication’ ‘Feather of Truth’… all these songs about girls shown to be honourable and warriors and mothers and free and… Father would have stared at these wild women and they would have taken him down like the rabid dog he was.

No wonder the First Emperor slaughtered his sister.  If he wished men to rule he had to make the women evil.

Evil.

A man’s sex is supposedly all there is.  Women are not to have wants or needs, except as passive receptacles for seed and being the  skin envelope to grow children.  Because women wanting sex terrified the Old Emperor.  Women terrified him.  Where did you grow so small and scared, Old Man that you had to slaughter anyone who spoke back to you, called you on your bull shit, fought back.

How could you be so petty as to force obedience with the closed fist and the bruised cheek?

Old Man… Goddess?  How did you let this first monster take over and start killing your priestesses?  Why did You allow this atrocity that led to my brutalization?  Yes, yes, free will and all that… I read those passages and I snarl because people should be made to obey… and then I realize.  That is the fearful impulse that drove him.

We men are animals.  Predators.  Dragons in the underbrush. Why?  It hurts to be that.  It is the most painful thing, to sit with my mother, and know that she loves me and that in the Empire my father killed her in front of us because I, at the tender age of twelve, nearly got her free of him.

#25 - Books and Discretion

Limyé turned away from the painting, put a hand on the door of the cell.  “You aren’t being forced out, Ahrimaz.  If you feel safe here, you needn’t go out.”

Ahrimiar had waved at the guard beyond the outer hall door and they unlocked it, left it open.  Ahrimaz collapsed onto the floor, staring over Ahrimiar’s white hair.  Pleta, Oriké and Katishenne all had a heavy stack of books in their hands.  Ahrimiar had one in his hand as well, held out to Ahrimaz.  “Here’s the one that has the laws against confinement that I talked about.  I thought you would be interested.  Had you taken us to court with this one, and could prove to an Apparheitos arbiter that you weren’t a danger to anyone who didn’t attack you, would have forced us to let you go.”

“But… why… but… you aren’t fighting me on this? You’re just handing me the laws?  You kept me in ignorance and now you hand me, the starving man, a banquet?”  Ahrimaz clambered to his feet and reach out toward Limyé who still stood at the closed cell door, fingers laced through the bars.

He didn’t flinch as Ahrimaz closed his hand on his fingers.  Ahri squeezed, staring into Limyé’s eyes and then eased back, flung his other arm up and set his teeth in the callus on that side, eyes clenched shut.  “You didn’t hurt me, Ahrimaz.  You pressed hard but stopped at the point of hurting me.”

Ahri was sobbing through his teeth, through his flesh, forced his eyes open and looked at the books now neatly lined up on the shelves of a folding bookshelf that Pleta had brought in. He took a deep breath, looked at Limyé and then over at Ahrimiar.

He left his eyes on the older man, teeth still clenched in the flesh of his forearm, as he reached out again, carefully, and slowly touched the iron latch--raised it with a click that rang through him like an earthquake because it moved.  It wasn’t locked.

From where he’d staggered back, a step or two, nearly falling over one of the dogs, he stared at them all.  Limyé, who hadn’t moved, Ahrimiar who was just sliding the law tome into the shelf from where he sat, long arm stretched out, to Oriké who had just brought another few books in.  “You’re all mad.  Madder than I am.  You’re treating me as if I deserve to be treated well, treated like I’m injured or ill instead of fucked in the wits.  You’re all open and giving and so trusting and and I… can’t… stand… it!”  He flung his hands over his face.

The big old cat hit him softly behind the knees so he went down onto the floor and the three animals clambered onto him, pinning him down.  Not licking, not nosing him, just… keeping him still and warm.

“I’ll see you again,” Ahrimiar said.  “Once you are composed perhaps you and Pel might go to one of the libraries to pick out something that interests you, instead of my guesses, here.” He waved at the shelf.  “And you should probably rest after this upheaval and eat more.  When you’re up to opening that door by yourself, you should come and start training with us.  Or just watching the new classes.  Rutaçyen has given her permission for you to come and go at the salle, at your discretion.”

“Discretion??? DISCRETION?”  But he didn’t have the strength to start screaming.  These people, these animals were all mad.

Limyé turned and began painting a Red Breast onto a branch of his tree, humming.

“You’re not going away too?” Ahrimaz cast a glance to see that the outer hall door was now open. There was no guard sitting on the stool there.  Insanity.  These people were giving insane.

“No.  I would not abandon my patient in crisis,” he said.  “I will just be here for if and when you need.”

“Aaaawwww, awwwhhh, awwwwhhhhnnngh!”  The sound forcing its way out of Ahrimaz’s terror-constricted throat was almost a bray.  Not a laugh, not a scream but a bit of both as he writhed on the floor under the dogs and the cat who kept him from biting himself.  They had his arms pinned down.  “You… you… you’re all mad… fire-fucking insane… drowning crazy!  I’m drowning in all this emotion!  You’ve ripped the lid off it and it’s so deep and so wide I’ll drown in it.  It’s endless, bottomless…”

“You feel it is unending,” Limyé said, then put his tongue out the corner of his lip as he concentrated on a line of paint, glancing over to see if the animals still had him cuddled.  “It’s not.”

Ahri had enough strength, just from having eaten, to weep.  “I’m going… going… going to melt into a puddle of tears if you have your way!”

“No.  You just have a few years of tears to get caught up on.”

#24 - What A Thought

He turned, staring at Limyé.  “I will eat.  But you have to discourage that child from trying to be my healer.”

Limyé set a bowl of soup and a fresh loaf of bread on the desk, poured a cup of malik, strong enough to make Ahrimaz’s head come up to sniff the aroma.  Pats of butter each on its own bit of paper, perfect for a piece of bread.  No knives, not even butter knives, Ahrimaz noted.  Instead the bread was baked to be torn apart. He had no doubt that everything was fresh, even though he could have sneered at it as peasant food.

The Imaryan turned and opened his paint box to begin adding more birds to his tree painting on the wall and Ahrimaz looked at the door of his cell.  He hadn’t seen Shashe or Limyé lock it.  “I will discourage her,” Limyé said.  “But only because I discourage children from seeing their relatives in distress.”

The scrape of the chair legs was harsh and Ahrimaz half fell into it.  He took up the loaf and tore it in half, suddenly aware of Sure sitting attentively on his right side and Teh on his left.  The cat was luxuriously sprawled, taking the whole bed for itself.

One bite of dry bread. One spoon of soup.  Spread the butter.  Another single bite, though your body is screaming that you feed it, feed it NOW!  Pour the cream into the malik, watch the dark brown liquid roil around till it is the exact colour of Yolend’s skin.  Limyé is darker than un-creamed malik.

“Good.  So, who have the mob chosen to usurp me?”

“Not usurp.  Take up the burden of government to give you time to heal.”  The door clicked again, unlocked.

“This is a busy place for an isolation dungeon,” Ahrimaz said, staring down into the clear broth with what looked like salat leaves gently floating with onions and bright bright green cubes of kohlrabi.  "Take up the burden, yes, that is one thing that is the same."  It was Ahrimiar, who immediately waved him to sit as he jolted upright, away from the food.

“Sit, eat something, you’re getting skinny, boy.”  He settled himself cross-legged on the stone floor and waited quietly until Ahrimaz, wary, sank down into the chair again.  His father would never have allowed anyone to sit with his head higher than the crown.  “I heard what you were asking.  It will be Ahriminash, though he argues that he’s a better guard captain than any kind of head of state.”

“That sounds like him.”  In the Empire Ahriminash, though he was second in line for the throne and a constant threat until he overstepped and got killed, had always preferred training on the field to training in the salon.

“Limyé tells me that we might be at a turning point for you,” the older man said quietly.  “We’ve been locking you up and treating you like a wild animal for too long already.”

“What? You’re going to tell people I’m not their beloved Ahrimaz and let me go?”  Ahrimaz laughed.  Then he stopped laughing as he realized Ahrimiar was nodding.

“If you will continue to be Limyé’s patient.  He is offering the family his services in exchange for his research with you so you needn’t worry about payment—“ I hadn’t even thought of that.  What is it costing them to keep me here? “-- and not kill anyone or break any laws, we are not right to keep you isolated.  It was a panicky move on our part.  We were so shocked at what happened and you presented as a horrific danger to all of us.”

“Just… let me go…” Ahrimiar tapped the spoon against the empty bowl, poured himself another out of the tureen.  “I, personally, think you’d be mad to do so.”

“I don’t.  The worst problem you’d have would be being badgered by the writers for the Broadsheets, the novelists who want to make a romance out of your predicament, and so forth.  They can be quite persistent.”

“Writers.” Ahrimaz’s lips quirked.  “And I’m not allowed to injure any of them?”  It was only a half-question, teasing.

“Exactly.”

“You obviously think that I, alone, am not a danger to your Republic, or your Coalition.”

“Not if you continue with Limyé, and Rutaçyen, along with both Pel and Yolend.”

“Where… would I go?”

“Where you wanted.”

Ahrimaz was silent for a long time, spooning soup steadily into his mouth, dusting the crumbs of bread off his hands. “It seems too open, too trusting, just to blurt out this disaster to the country, destabilizing for one thing.”

“It’s not a disaster for the country.  It is not even a disaster for the family.  We will publicly apologize for having confined you and we will compensate you for that.  It won’t be a fortune but you’ll be able to find a place to live in Innéthel---“

“Compensation!  Set me loose with no skills other than warrior or tyrant?  I’d get mobbed in the street and starve before spring!”  Ahrimaz had to laugh again. The fear he was familiar with settled under his breastbone and he looked around at the cell.

“Our people, the Innéans are not inclined to mob, and I’m sure we could find something you could bear to do to support yourself.  Your notoriety alone would sell books.”

“A ‘Tell All’ in my own words, printed in their hundreds or thousands, given the number of presses you people have. What an obscene thought, baring my soul to every pest-ridden peasant from here to the Riga City states and beyond.”

“Far beyond.  Riga ships trade with a country across the sea that they discovered… They call it Tuinos.”

“What a thought.”  The terror of being uncovered, ripped open, laid bare before the world’s eyes rose up to choke him and he clutched the edge of the table as if to keep himself from flying off the face of the earth.  “Could I… may I… would it be you I have to beg to stay here?”