#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.