“They’ve been happy with the music I’ve brought,” Naä said. “And I’ve been happy with their conversation. I haven’t looked for more. And what sort of fool are you”—she looked at him as sharply as she spoke — “that you think the things you speak of could possibly balance the death, the misery, the evil you inflicted here within the hour of your coming?”
He looked back at her directly. The lion beside him, for the instant, seemed a creature who’d closed its eyes to keep from hearing. A muscle moved in the lieutenant’s unshaven jaw. Then he said: “Do you know anything about Myetra, singer? If you visited us, you might be surprised at how pleasantly our farmers and their daughters can dance in a spring evening to the great log drums their wives make in the mountains; or how colorful and cunning the representation of sea creatures and sea plants on the tiles decorating the facades of the waterfront warehouses. It’s a pleasant place, but there are too many people in it. There is not enough food — and above all not enough land for our people. It’s very simple, singer, what we’ve chosen to do. It’s a plan as clean and as imperative as…as a blood drop rolling down a new-plastered wall. You see us now taking lives, breaking apart cultures and traditions, here at Çiron, next at Hi-Vator, after that at Requior, then Del Gaizo, and eventually at Mallili — finally even at Calvicon. But soon what you will see, in a band from water to water, is the growth of a rich, intelligent, and wonderfully hardworking and resourceful people, taking land, making food, imparting their ways and wonders on these myriad backward folk who have no notion of their own histories for more than five or six generations into the past — the length of time a burial scroll will last before it simply rots away. It’s a fine plan, singer. And it inspires the officers above me as well as the simple soldiers below me.”
“And does this plan give you the right to do anything, anything at all — at any level of cruelty and destruction to anyone in your way?”
The lieutenant mused. “There are some among us who think that it does.” At every third sentence, the roughness to his voice made her wonder if he weren’t drunk.
“And you? What do you think?”
“There are some, both above me and below me, who probably say that I think too much.”
In the stench of the uncured hide, within hearing of the burry tones that, really, sounded more animal than human, Naä wondered how anything that anyone might call thinking at all could go on here.
But he moved his forearm, with the black glove on his hand, along the edge of the desk by the yellow-burning lamp. “Tell me, singer, what would you do if we were in each other’s place? What would you do if you wore a stiff black cloak and, despite your love of your home, a sense of injustice — if not of justice itself. But yes, the truth is: I’m troubled at justice’s absence, and that trouble stays as close to me as this lion’s face is to my own. Would you try to leave, feign sickness, resign your post to another? Or would you stay, mitigating the crimes those around you commit — changing a death sentence to a prison term, making an execution a flogging, reducing a flogging of twenty lashes to ten? Tell me, singer?”
Naä frowned. Then stopped frowning and thought: this is perhaps the moment to do it. But the words came from somewhere: “I would get very little sleep.” And because these words came too, she said: “If you love your own home, can’t you love the idea of home that other people have? That’s what a sense of justice is, isn’t it? And the plan you talk of, it’s not a just one at all. I’ve looked your men in the face. I’ve heard your superiors talking. Your men have forgotten all plans and are only faithful to following orders. And all your superiors are after is the power and privilege the plan has most accidentally ceded them! So without justice behind it or real commitment to support it, what is your plan after that?” The words came, she found herself thinking, like the words to a new song. “Why not turn openly against it? Why not fight it and them until they strip skin and muscle from you, till no muscle moves, till there is no blood left in you to move them — ”
“Now — ” And she was thinking, Will actions come as fast and as easily as those words? when he said, “I should probably smash you across the face with my fist for daring even to suggest resistance to Myetra.” He raised his hand, and the gloved fingers curled slowly in. “And show you why, through sheer force, that is such an absurd notion. But I don’t think I shall…this time.” He looked at her seriously.
Again she felt her whole body begin to tingle. “You mitigate,” she said. “You turn twenty lashes to ten. And when you are told to rape, break, and violate, you turn it into talk — ”
He raised a bronze eyebrow. “Who told you that?”
“Your guard,” she said quickly, “when he was bringing me back from town. Those were Prince Nactor’s…orders, yes?”
“Uk?” The lieutenant looked honestly puzzled. Then he barked a syllable of laughter. “You’re a liar — or a fool! That sort of loose tongue is not Uk’s style. Believe me, I know my men. No, we had a guard here once who might have said that. But he’s…not with us now. And what I said to Nactor, I left with Nactor, young lady. Right now I hate Prince Nactor as he hates me. No…I think perhaps I will walk you back to the village. We will go together: this way you will have no problems with obstreperous or loose-tongued guards.” He rose.
And amidst the tingling, she thought, Somewhere on the burnt field, somewhere in an alley of the town, yes, when the two of us are alone together, that’s where I’ll do it. Certainly that would be better —
He stood and reached down for her shoulder. But suppose he binds me again? she thought as she rose in his grip. Wasn’t it better to do it now and have done? (His black-gloved fingers on her shoulder were strong.) Or was hers simply the endlessly rationalized delay of someone blatantly terrified of killing?
“I think,” she said softly, “you are a good and thoughtful man.”
What she thought was: you are an evil pig a-wallow in a rotten sty….
He didn’t pick up the rope as, holding her arm, he walked her by the brazier, the chair, the desk, across the matting toward the tent flap.
Still supporting her, with his other black glove he took the canvas and pulled it back.
Standing just outside, the prince ran his gauntleted hand down one side of his beard, then the other, and said: “Kire, you are a fool! ‘Hate Prince Nactor’? Guards!” Naä pulled back as Kire released her arm. A dozen shadowy soldiers waited in ordered formation behind the bearded prince “Arrest Lieutenant Kire — for incompetence, insubordination, and treason! And also the woman — ”
The hesitation that had plagued her moments ago vanished before the immediate. Naä dodged behind the lieutenant, lunged for the table, thrust her hand under the brazier, and hurled fire — in a sheet that astonished her, even as it hung a moment in the air and flickered and threw up coiling smoke tendrils, a curtain of blue and yellow effulgence, of falling, flaming oil, dropping to the matting, arching toward the striped wall opposite. That same moment she hurled herself to the floor and rolled against the tent’s back canvas. Guards shouted. Were any of them dodging around the back? But yes, and she was under, up in the dark and the cool night, running. Mercifully no tree or water barrel stood before her, or she would have smashed into it and knocked herself unconscious.