#6 - Calming the Vicious Beast

Weeks, I think. Silence. No human contact but the occasional dumb show when they want me to thrust my hands through the bars so they can shackle me and clean my cage. I don’t fight them. Not yet. I’m still studying. I will find a weakness.  I will get out.

Silence is become oppressive. I sing to myself.  I recite every passage out of the Holy Book of God… that I remember.  My memory is being blurred by this blasphemy I read.  I even went so far as to memorize Goddess passages to bellow at the silent, unanswering walls.

Nothing. The lamp is lit in the morning, I assume.  I study it, every day. Then it is put out in the evening.  Their schedule.  The woman, and three men.  No boys. They’ve all fought. I can see it.  A dirty blond, two brunette and a mahogany red-head.  The woman is one of the brunettes. They are now refusing eye contact as I get louder.  They’re good.  Not mute, not deaf, I think.  They’re good.  They hate me for not being him.

I bow under silence. I held up the Holy Book they gave me and signed ‘please’ for more.  They don’t know that I would get on my knees to my captors for more books at this point.  If I stare at the walls during the day I can make them swim in my sight as if I tried a bit harder I’d make them go transparent.  I’m going mad.  They bring no more books for me.  Who may I grovel to, for books?

It must be fall by now.  The air is getting colder and there is no sign of a stove down here.  I couldn’t burn anything down.  It is clammy. I think they have a brazier outside the corridor here. A puff of dry warmth sometimes blows through the barred window.

I sing every hymn I know.  Every drinking song my soldiers taught me. Every child’s nursery song, dredged up from my memory before I forgot innocent things.  My throat goes raw and I am reduced to a hoarse whisper but I cannot fill the silence.  The silence encased in stone. I spent my life driving people away from me, not realizing I was clinging to them like a howling toddler unable to bear being alone.

No wonder I craved the war trail.  I am… I was… adored by my soldiers because I couldn’t bear losing them and they knew it; being with them, around their campfires. Not having to say anything, just be there and listen.  They seemed so alien to me with their talk of sweethearts and mothers and fathers who loved them, who they loved. But I could be with them, gladly, and didn’t have to defend myself from them or their dreams.

I sit and stare at the page before me.  Please. God. 

God cannot help me.  I can help me.

**

Ahrimaz tore a scrap of paper out of his book and scribbled a single line on it, folded it shut and wrote ‘Limyé Ianmen’ on it, laid it on his tray.  When the guard came to get the dishes, Ahrimaz, carefully standing in the middle of his cell, waved to get his attention.  He pointed at the note and put his hands together, palm to palm. Please.

The guard stared at him suspiciously, tucked the note into his belt, took the tray and secured the pass through.

Scorching hell, please let him deliver it. Please don’t let him just toss it in the nearest flame.

**

He had no pocket watch, left in another world for another him to wear and consult and slide into his watch pocket.

The outer door clicked and Ahrimaz was on his feet, like a sight hound confronted with a distant hare, tense and quivering.

The guard let the Imaryan in, set a folding chair under the shelf with the light.  He set a stack of books on the floor next to the healer and locked him in. 

Feeling as though his voice had rusted shut, Ahrimaz coughed, cleared his throat and forced the pleasantry out.  “Thank you for coming.”

“You are welcome.  It was a very politely worded request.”

“You made it clear last time that rudeness wouldn’t be tolerated.” It felt so good to speak and be answered. 

“I will come and listen to you, speak with you, Ahrimaz.  If we can have good conversation then I will stay, of course.  If you slip and revile me, I will allow two such mishaps.  If you accept me as your healer you may say what you wish and I will not leave you to rot alone in this place, whatever you call me.”  He didn't mention the books, nor look at them.

 

Aha! Of course he wants me in this thrall… he wants to catch me as his patient. Vile manipulator.

“For the moment I think we are at the good conversation stage, Ser Ianmen.”

“If I may call you Ahrimaz then you may call me Limyé.”

“Limyé. Certainly.”  I know how to hide what I truly feel from those in power.  I could hide under my father’s eye for long enough to kill him.  Though when I was a little boy I always had my heart out and open for him to stamp on. “Please, tell me, what is the weather?”

#5 - How They Caught Me

I don’t want to write about how they caught me.  It was her.  And the damned animals.  The dogs snarling at me, the cats fleeing me.  I only lasted a day.

I thought I was smarter than that.  I pled illness and they finally let me alone in the room half the size of my bedroom.   

The chapel door was still where it was in my room.  But nothing else was the same.  The windows had horrid ripple glass in tiny leaded windows. The city outside was a tiny town compared to the Innéthel I knew.  I could recognize the Hunter’s Cathedral though it had far too much blue and green on it… Demon’s Drowning colours.  But this so called palace of theirs didn’t even have walls to keep the stinking masses away. The gardens came right up to the palace walls and were open to the streets. Madness.

The clothing in the cupboards, bright and gaudy, every waistcoat a riot of colour and metal thread embroidery.  I had several such waistcoats but not in those colour combinations.  The worn scabbard of the sword hung on the hook by the door. Nothing like the Flamen. The books in the headboard of the peasant’s bed I’d woken up in finally told me what I had to know.

I was no longer in my own world.

I was in a Coalition… a group of countries that actually made up my Empire at home.  A world where the Demon was worshiped alongside the Tiger Master as his equal, as his wife. Such a twisted world. I found their image of my brand and realized what a fortuitous escape I’d had.

My brand shows the Flamen, the flaming sword of Empire within the box of oak leaves.  Their brand shows the sorcerer’s hand.  I wore a night shirt with long sleeves that covered up my brand and the self-inflicted bite calluses on my arms, thank the God.  I couldn’t make myself open the chapel door realizing I’d see their hideous female deity and her creatures and plants all as if they were sacred, painted on the walls with my God.

My much maligned, and I thought fictional, God.

A child’s history book, pulled from a shelf of nothing but books for children – did he read to his children in his own place, that other me?  Hold them as if they were anything but sickening little grubs that would one day replace him?

These people printed books specifically for children. Hundreds of them.  But.  It was one of those that told me what happened.

Two hundred years ago, what I know as the Mob Rebellion, or the Peasant Rebellion, take your pick, here was the Brother and Sister War, or the War of the Vote.  My esteemed ancestor, Ahrimiar the first, apparently never had a child.  The leader of the country was his sister.  A voted in Hand of the People.  Her child was the one, in my world, who became Emperor after Ahrimiar, as his son.

Was that man the boy’s uncle rather than his father?  Did he kill his sister and make the Empire?

Here, he never succeeded. She and her mob beat him and he is reviled in their histories as an evil man who would have stolen the vote.

I broke into a cold sweat.  How had I come here?  I woke up here! I had to hide from them, until I could get away, find allies, found my Empire here in this peasant world.

But it was the blasted war-cat and a pack of dogs that made Yolend suspicious.  I never knew she had truth-teller in her family.  That means she probably does in my world and I am in a fire of agony just thinking that she kept that secret from me, all those years.  The stinking duplicitous bitch deserves another beating just because she can see my secrets and never told me, never gave me access to that talent.

Ahrimaz put the pen down, pushed the heels of his hands over his eyes. They burned as though he could weep, though he hadn’t done so in years. His head felt heavy and the burning lump in his chest, that always lived there, blazed up hotter and his throat constricted.  He took his hands down from his eyes, sank his teeth into the pad of raw and ragged callus on his right forearm, then bit into the one on his left arm as well before forcing his palms flat upon the table and compelled himself to breathe calm onto himself. Control.  When his hands no longer shook he took up the pen once more.

In this world, she and Pelahir came back in, with a tray of food, lay down with me as though we were married… in this world we are married. I had double rings on my hands, same as them. They fed me with their fingers and I forced myself to be soft and feed them, relax in their arms as if they were helping me.  But I didn’t see the look she gave him and the next thing I knew I was trapped between them, them lying on my arms, he clamped the cloth over my face and everything went dark before I could kill them both.

#4 - The Silence

I remember. I remember when my mother was allowed to love me. That was when I could bear to be touched. I hadn’t yet been tortured into unbearable, dangerous sensitivity. The whip Father used on me was wide so it would not mark me. It turned my back into a reddened, swollen fire of ‘don’t touch me’. It was to toughen me up. I was too soft. I loved. Until I broke and hardened into the image Father wanted. When I could torture my own brothers, when I could torture Kinourae, without leaving marks, except on their souls. When I could remember… her… without tears.

Kinourae loved me even after.  Even after that hideous day.  He loved me.  He still loves me, but he is my body servant.  His family fell into debt and they sold themselves into servitude at the House of Gold, generations ago.  Three generations? Four? He is by nature loving and caring.  Why should I laud him for expressing his nature despite all that my father and I could do to him?  He’s…like a healer that way.  Like Imaryans.  I could have killed him, but I couldn’t make him hate me.

I miss him.

Ahrimaz snapped awake, naked on the bed, rolled onto the stone and began pounding his fists against the floor.  “No, no, no!  Scorching God, KILL ME!  Just KILL ME!  Don’t torture me like this! Hell and flaming damnation!  Don’t do this to me!  KILL ME, it would be a mercy!”  He shouted until his throat was raw and his voice a whisper, his hands raw and bloody. He pulled his clothing off and lay naked on the floor in the smears of his own blood.  “I can’t.  I am too weak.  I am not strong any longer.  I’m broken.  Just kill me.”

There was no servant to come fetch his clothing.  The guard was just opening the door.  Ahrimaz rolled onto his back, watching.  Any contact was suddenly precious.  The woman… a woman as a guard, though she looked tough as his old combat instructor, with seamed and grim face. Moving quietly despite the armour she pointed at him, then at the water in the basin, then at the pass-through.  Clear enough.  He made a kissing noise and thrust a rude finger in the air at her, the blood on his hands already drying and crackling.

She turned without acknowledgement and left again.  Also clear.  It was a meal time.  He could smell the food, outside. A Cylak curry.  His stomach rumbled.  He had to clean up after himself or they wouldn’t feed him.  Fuck them.

He threw his arm over his face and tried to go back to sleep.

**

They didn’t stint him water. Every time they came in they pointed at the mess he’d made, then at him and then at the pass through. He stared at them until they left him alone.  It was a nightmare of his father, starving him into submission that had him finally sighing, getting up and using the blasted chamber pot.  Did they not have plumbing in this benighted world?

He wiped the nightmare sweat off himself with the old towel, bundled everything into the shirt and set it all dirty water, flask, bowl, laundry, in the pass through. Put the lid on the stinking chamber pot and put it in its own pass through… you’d think with so many holes in a cage he’d be able to wiggle some way out of it.  But every door between him and out, had a lock and a guard. And every guard had the stinking Imaryan knock out drug on a cloth ready to clamp over his nose and mouth should he get that far.

He could kill a dozen but someone would clamp it over his face while he was busy breaking someone else’s neck.  Why were they so careful of his life and his health?  They’d interrogated him, making it clear they knew he wasn’t their beloved.  But they’d explained nothing, really.

The guard actually looked surprised when she came in.  Took out the mess, Came back, took out the chamber pot and then, to his startlement, brought breakfast.  He would have punished any prisoner he kept with another day’s fast.  They were all soft.  Not an Empire at all.

He folded the journal closed where it had sat open since he’d stopped writing, set the tray down and folded open his napkin.  There was a pitcher of malak and cream, steaming hot and invigorating.  A gigantic egg like he’d never seen before, even as Emperor, fried, with green onions and peasant rye toast to dip into the orangey soft yolk.  He found he loved it. The glass of berry juice tasted like sunlight and he closed his eyes as he forced himself to eat slowly, rather than wolfing down the food.

#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.