I should have asked for three. But a deal is a deal.
The bottle first, and then we talk.
* * *
Fine. Yes, I am Baldassare, once captain in the army of the Divine Empress—ha! You cannot even hear it without flinching! A coward, like all the rest. People are such fools, even more foolish than they are feckless. Change the word and the thing itself changes! The Empress becomes the Anathema, and those who bent knee to the first heap curses on the second.
Not for me. The Divine Empress She was, and the Divine Empress She remains. Not that I’m one of those street-corner madmen who hold to the old prophecies; “fleeing and ignorant, unseen and unseeing, blinded by knife and time, She will come among us again.” Losers always cling to things like that. But the old days are lost; the age of gold has turned to copper, to pig iron, to shit. We did not deserve Her, and now She is gone, and there is nothing to do but mourn Her death, and our defeat, and the cowardice of those we fought for, and the falseness of our enemies.
And to drink. There’s always time for that.
What could I tell you about Kiri that you don’t already know? He was the immaculate birth of the ocean and the moon, spoke his first words at twelve hours, spent his childhood strangling snakes and wrestling lions! When his balls dropped a great choir of devas descended from the skies and sang his name in sweet unison! He was so handsome that to look upon him was to go sunblind, and so chaste that he never so much as smelled the sweat of a woman—before he met Amata, of course, Amata, so beautiful. Amata, so kind!
Fine, fine, you bought the bottle. We soldiered together. Came up through the Academy, commissioned the same year, sent off to war together. That God you all pray to? I once saw him whipped by our math professor for coming late to class. I once saw him puke a pint of liquor onto his dress jacket. Once saw him cut through a war-fettered with his ratchet, climb onto his back somehow, tore into its control plate. Saved me and half my platoon.
Hateful bastard.
He was a man like any other. Better than most, worse than most. Trust an old soldier: there is no such thing as destiny. An artillery shell has no name on it, and dysentery kills geniuses as well as fools. But he was too ignorant to know that, and in time the world came to be fooled by his certainty. Not I. An honest man does not rise to the position of street sweeper in this world. Destiny is ambition gilded, so bright and so beautiful it might excuse anything in its service, which is to say, in yours. What kindling did your God use, to see that blaze rise higher?
I wonder.
Three years we spent at the front, and I thought I knew suffering. Cold, hunger, the occasional misfortune of digging a splinter of steel out of your body or of watching your friends die screaming, cradling them as the blood ran from their mouths or their stomachs or the stumps where their legs had been, as they gasped their last and shat themselves. But we have already established, have we not, that I am a very great fool? I had not been home a week when I discovered the truth of the matter—it was the students who were the real victims! Yes, the students, the men dressed like women, long-haired and vague-eyed, and the women dressed like men, shorn heads and constant scowls, and all smoking puff in the alleyways.
And what were their complaints, exactly? They were not allowed to drink and cavort in the streets past a certain hour! They were required to maintain their allegiance to the Goddess who protected and sheltered them! What abuse! What oppression! How right they were to rant of tyranny and call for revolution!
That year before the rebellion was the worst of my life. No, it was better than what came after. Still, it was terrible. Nothing to do but sit in garrison while the city rotted, watching the things you fought for, the things your friends died for, get pissed on by callow youths and gutter demagogues. Kiri and I would run into each other in the cabarets and dance halls. There was a crooner he used to go with for a while . . . En . . . Enheduana, something like that. We would drink and talk in great rounding circles, conversations like waves tumbling that never quite managed to go anywhere but left you exhausted just the same. He was like a man who had lost something, or was lost himself, waiting, desperate for a door to open that he could sprint through.
If you have questions about the March, you’d best ask someone else; I can’t remember. I am an old drunk, has that not yet become clear? When I wake in the morning my hands shake so badly I cannot hold a toothbrush. I will say this—whatever happened during the Sanguinary March, whatever officers were there, whoever fired their weapons and whomever they fired them upon—they were right to do so. What is a soldier who does not follow orders?
You came from the kelp tanks, didn’t you? I can smell the brine. Fascinating creatures, the halflings. Who made them? Not your God King. Not my Empress. And who came before her? Is there anyone still alive who can remember, some sad ancient gumming their teeth and recalling things forbidden so long ago as to be forgotten? The city dwindles daily, a broken wagon careening downhill. Let us hope we do not hit a rock, and the craft shatter into a million pieces! Or at least, you can hope that. I pray for it every day.
Anyway, back to the breeds. The men who lived along the shores used to chase them down with dogs, but they have grown so rare that the High Chapel put a stop to it. Foul things, aren’t they? Just enough of the human to make them hateful—the grasping hands, the clever eyes—and then what is not human—the gills and their too-long arms, the webbing between their fingers—makes them seem twice as blasphemous. But that is not why we hate them. Shall I enlighten you?
Envy, pure and simple. Every breed has a purpose. It exists to fill a single, certain need. No doubts, no questions. Only duty, clear and clean as noonlight, or the ring of a bell.
Go away now, you have wasted enough of my time. I don’t care what I told you and I don’t care what you hoped to hear. I care less about the bottle now that it is gone. I care everything for a full one and nothing for one emptied, as is the case with every other man, woman, child, and breed in our sad and miserable city. Anyway, it would not be wise for you to tarry, Amanuensis; the Enclave is as ridden with spies as any other quarter of the city.
Oh, yes, so very subtle. You think covering up your brand is all it would take to disappear without a trace? Who else would be picking at the old wounds of an old soldier? Such a long interview, and the questions so careful, and you without pen or paper! Are you so stupid as to think everyone you meet so stupid?
Manet the Amanuensis, the most exciting thing to happen to the city in a fortnight! They say you’ve gone mad, that you murdered an old man and were killed in a ferry while trying to escape the God King’s justice. You need not fear my tongue, though there are few others of whom you can say the same. See now how quickly the city turns on you? A word from on high and you are mad, a danger. Another word and you may be a bird, or a turtle, or a lost bit of string. Why do you suppose that each new God purges all the books of the last age? There is no such thing as truth, there is only belief, and belief is power. You would do well to remember that.
Or don’t, it’s no matter to me. I have a second bottle to finish.
(19): Sin-Nasir
11:57 AM
Come in, mistress, come in. Sin’s Seaside Bar and Cabaret is open all day during the Jubilee. We’re running a special: one kel and you can drink as long as you’d like from the tap without pausing. Coughing counts as a pause. Also vomiting, obviously.