A Memory Called Empire
Page 40
“She looks like she’s been dragged through the riots,” said one of them. “The blood on her—I think we should keep it. It suits the gravity of what she brought you.”
“Even barbarians can make sacrifices,” said Six Direction. “We could all take note of that.”
As the attendants helped her up from the couch and led her into a room which looked identical to the imperial briefing room Mahit had seen on the newsfeeds when she’d watched the annexation war being announced from Nineteen Adze’s breakfast table, she tried very hard not to feel filthy. Corrupted. Made useful. It didn’t work.
It didn’t work, and it didn’t stop her from telling her secrets again, this time to the recording cameras, as clearly and persuasively as she could.
* * *
The Emperor and Nineteen Adze had a brief, vehement argument about where they would broadcast the announcement from—Nineteen Adze was for everyone remaining hidden underground, but Six Direction waited her out, let her say all sorts of flattering things about his welfare and fragility, and then proclaimed that he was, in fact, the Emperor of all Teixcalaan, and he would make this announcement, fearlessly, from the sun temple at the top of Palace-North, and that she would come with him and stand beside him while he did it. There was no real arguing with him. Mahit could feel the weight of his authority, even diminished and under threat—the long shadow of his eighty years of peace stretching out to shape even this moment.
After the argument was over, there was the usual administrative chaos of orchestrating a complex public appearance on no notice—a rapid twenty minutes of imperial attendants talking briskly to one another, sending messages. The Emperor and Nineteen Adze vanished under heavily armed escort. Mahit caught sight of the child, Eight Antidote, being whisked off into the chaos of that escort, and thought of how many times he might have been moved similarly: relocated at the whim of one political moment or another. He looked at her, as he went— a small, thin boy, observant, straight-backed. Mahit thought of the birds in the garden in Palace-Earth. They don’t even have to touch you, Eight Antidote had said, then. He’d been talking about the birds—she’d thought at the time—but it was true. They didn’t touch him. They moved him without laying hands on him at all.
She herself was taken into another room, smaller, more private—strewn about with infofiche and print-books, half-erased holoprojections still up on screens. A workroom. There was a couch in the middle of it, and Mahit sat down on it. Someone brought her a warm washcloth to wipe the blood and dust off her face; someone else brought her Three Seagrass, who was bemusedly holding a large cup of tea, and the two of them ended up sitting on the couch next to one another, watching the swirl of activity around them. Mahit felt unmoored, entirely cut away from the world. All her tethers gone. Even Yskandr in her mind was a banked, quiet presence.
Half the wall in front of them was taken up by an enormous holoprojection, the only one still active. It had begun broadcasting the imperial seal and flag, with a countdown timer superimposed—forty-eight minutes until the Emperor would speak to his people. At thirty-seven minutes the attendants, save for a guard at the door, all vanished, the great machine of imperial work lifting away and alighting somewhere else. Mahit had played her part. She’d given her secrets up. There was nothing she could do now but wait.
Three Seagrass put her empty teacup down on the floor. Thirty-five minutes. The quiet was velvet-soft. Mahit couldn’t stand it.
“What do you think they’re doing?” she asked, just to hear sounds that weren’t her own breathing or Three Seagrass’s, lighter and more rapid.
Three Seagrass swallowed, pressed two fingers between her eyebrows, as if she was shoving back tears. “Oh, I’d guess they’re finding Eight Loop,” she said, and her voice was not at all steady—Mahit turned, looked at her with real concern. “For the visual impact of imperial authority, all of them standing together—”
“Three Seagrass, are you all right?”
“Oh, fuck,” Three Seagrass said, “no, I’m not, but I was so hoping you wouldn’t notice?”
They were alone. The door guard was guarding the door, looking away, a silent and still presence. They were suspended out of time, out of the inexorable forward flow of events. Mahit reached out—horribly conscious that this gesture wasn’t hers, wasn’t even Yskandr’s, but belonged to the Emperor—and cupped Three Seagrass’s cheek in her hand.
“I notice,” she said.
It was not unexpected when Three Seagrass burst into tears, but it was awful; Mahit felt guilty, like she’d caused it, this little shattering. Like she’d tapped too hard on the shell of an egg and it had splintered, held together only by the internal membranes inside. “Hey,” she said, “hey, it’s—” It wasn’t all right, and she wasn’t about to say so. Instead, acting on instinct and an upswelling of care, a feeling like her vagus nerve had been expertly struck and was vibrating, she reached to pull Three Seagrass into her arms. She came willingly; the slight weight of her rested against Mahit’s shoulder, and her face was pressed into Mahit’s collarbone. Hot tears dampened her shirt.
Gently, Mahit stroked her hair, still unbraided from its habitual queue. The world was spinning on and on and on—the countdown at thirty-two minutes—and she couldn’t fathom the wrenching depths of what this must feel like to Three Seagrass, who had looked like she would cry at the very mention of civil war, back in Twelve Azalea’s apartment.
“I thought I was fine,” Three Seagrass said, muffled, “but I keep thinking of all the blood. Fuck. I miss Petal so much, already. It’s been three hours and I miss him so much and that was such a stupid way to die—”
Oh. Not civil war at all. Something much deeper, much more immediate. Mahit squeezed her arms around her, and Three Seagrass made a miserable, hiccupping sound. “This is—the whole world is changing and I’m crying over my friend,” she said. “Some poet I am.”
“When this is over,” said Mahit, “you’ll write Twelve Azalea a eulogy that people will sing in the streets; he will be a synecdoche for everything Teixcalaan is suffering right now, needlessly. No one will ever forget him, and that will be your doing, and—oh, I’m just so sorry, this is all my fault—” She was going to cry too, and what good would that do anyone, two people crying on a couch underground?
Three Seagrass picked up her head from Mahit’s shoulder, looked up at her, tearstained, red in the face from crying. There was a brief, strained pause. Mahit could swear she could hear the rushing of blood in her own capillaries. They were breathing exactly in time.
When Three Seagrass kissed her, Mahit opened up for her as if she was a lotus floating in one of the City’s gardens at dawn—slow, inexorable, like she had been waiting a long, long time through the night. Three Seagrass’s mouth was hot; her lips wide and soft. One of her hands settled in Mahit’s short hair, held on tight, almost tight enough to hurt. Mahit found her hands had landed upon Three Seagrass’s shoulder blades—they were sharp under her palms—she pulled her closer, halfway into her lap, without breaking the kiss.
This was a terrible idea. This was lovely. It was the nicest thing that had happened to her in hours—in days—Three Seagrass kissed like she’d made a thorough study of the practice, and Mahit was glad of it, glad that she’d done it, glad of the distraction from everything else.
They broke apart. Three Seagrass’s eyes, inches from hers, were very wide and very dark, and red at the corners where she’d wept.
“Petal was always right about me,” she said. Mahit tucked a stray strand of her hair behind her ear and let her talk. “I do like aliens. Barbarians. Anything new, anything different. But I also—if I’d met you at court, Mahit, if you were one of us, I’d have wanted to do that just the same.”
What she was saying was exquisite, a balm and a comfort, and horrible at the same time: If you were one of us, I would want you just the same, and Mahit wanted simultaneously to climb back inside her mouth and shove her out of her lap. She wasn’t Teixcalaanli, she wa
s … she hardly knew anymore, except that she wasn’t Teixcalaanli and wouldn’t be no matter how many lovely asekretim climbed into her arms, tearstained, wanting to be held. Wanting to be held after sacrificing nearly everything she was for Mahit’s sake.
“I’m glad you did,” she managed, because she was, because it had been sweet. “Come here, let me—let me.” Her hands in Three Seagrass’s hair, on the narrow channel of her spine. Holding her.
They didn’t kiss again, just breathed together in time, until the holoprojection screen chimed—fifteen minutes—and changed, beginning to show a series of aerial images of the City, what someone might see from the vast height of the sun temple on top of Palace-North. The eyes of the Emperor, opening up.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
the City rises marching
a thousand starpoints strong
released, we shall speak visions
uneclipsed
I am a spear in the hands of the sun
—City protest song, anonymous (possibly attributed to patrician first-class Three Seagrass)
THE full extent of Teixcalaanli imperial power, even reduced, even under threat from multiple angles, was a crushing onslaught of symbolism. Mahit felt it three ways: first her own longing appreciation, born out of a childhood half in love with Teixcalaan the story, Teixcalaan the empire of poets, all-conquering all-devouring all-singing beast in the garden of her imaginings; second, the echo of Yskandr-doubled, two versions who had come to live here and make themselves into people who could live here, could move in this language and speak and see nothing but Teixcalaan, and still remember Lsel as a distant and beloved home; and last, the quick intake of breath and the full-body tremor of the Teixcalaanli woman Mahit held in her arms as they both watched the theater which was meant to defuse an insurrection.
It began with the Emperor’s-eye view of the City, that shifting panorama—slowly transformed, overlaid with the flowers and spears and sun-petal-gold glow of the imperial seal, the imperial flags—not the battle flag, the peace flag, the one that hung behind the sun-spear throne. There was music. It wasn’t martial—it was old, a folk song, stringed instruments and a low flute like a woman’s voice.
“What is that?” Mahit asked Three Seagrass, and Three Seagrass sat up a little. Her arm was looped around Mahit’s waist.
“It’s—it’s an arrangement of a song from the era of the Emperor Nine Flood, right before we broke solar system—it’s old. Everyone knows it. It’s—fuck, they’re being so good with the propaganda, it makes me feel nostalgic and scared and brave and I know exactly what they’re doing.”
The images on the holoprojection resolved to the inside of a sun temple—far larger and more ornate than any Mahit had seen before, in holograph or infofiche-image: the great central chamber shaped like a belled flask, open at the top and crowned with a lens that scattered bright beams of light around the central platform and its dished bronze bowl of an altar. The entire room was jewel-clear, faceted, glimmering: translucent gold, garnet-red. The music died away, and there was Six Direction, standing just in front of the altar. They’d done brilliant work on him with makeup: he almost looked healthy. Almost, except for the shocking prominence of his cheekbones. Eight Loop was nowhere to be seen, but at his left stood Nineteen Adze, resplendent in bone-white—but it was the same bone-white suit she had been wearing when they left, complete with a smear of Five Agate’s blood on the sleeve. The ezuazuacat bloodied in service. At his right was the ninety-percent clone, Eight Antidote. His small shoulders were very straight; his face had those same high cheekbones as the Emperor, but under healthy pads of childhood flesh.
Emperor, and successor, and advisor: all in the heart of power. As an image, it was reassuring. As a beginning of a message to all Teixcalaan it was frightening: to have gathered them together like this emphasized the seriousness, the necessary conveyance of this particular message. That sun temple was at the very top of Palace-North.
Every other Teixcalaanlitzlim would know that, too.
Six Direction pressed his fingertips together, and bowed over them—greeting every watcher. He did not smile: this was too serious for smiling. The camera hung about his mouth like a caress, waiting for words. When he spoke it was a relief, a tiny burst of relaxed tension, until the words began to make sense: Through our great work and careful husbandry of civilizations, pruning where necessary, encouraging the flowering of society where it is most beautiful, we have together held this empire, with my hands guiding all of yours—but now, in this moment of fragility, when new blooms are trembling on the verge of unfolding into the light of the stars, we are all endangered. Some of you know this danger in your hearts; some of you have felt it in your bodies, in the sound of soldiers’ feet, in the damage inflicted upon our City, the heart of our civilization, by our own limbs—
Mahit felt like her heart had crept so far up her throat that it rested on the back of her tongue; she was all pulse. This was not the speech she had expected. She had expected a moment of reassurance, and then a quick use of her own footage to prove that there was danger, and it came from outside, was alien forces massing on the edge of Teixcalaanli space—not this careful rhetorical construction which approached renewal as a theme, a dangerous theme for an emperor under threat from his military and his bureaucracy both.
“What is he doing?” she breathed.
“Keep watching,” said Three Seagrass. “Keep watching, and wait a minute. I think I know and I don’t want to be right.”
“You don’t want—”
“Hush, Mahit.”
She hushed. The Emperor kept speaking—asked for calm and for reflection. Before the dawn there is a quiet moment where we can see the approach of both distant threat and the promise of warmth, he said. Next to him Nineteen Adze’s expression had changed from even neutrality to something Mahit recognized as dawning horror—resignation—and then a schooling of herself again to stillness. Something was wrong, and Nineteen Adze had noticed it. Something was happening and Mahit didn’t understand it.
Six Direction was talking about Lsel, now—briefly, alighting on it, a mining station at the edge of Teixcalaanli space, a distant eye that speaks to us of danger observed. Her own image, then, superimposed upon the frame of Nineteen Adze, Six Direction, and Eight Antidote: Mahit Dzmare, looking very barbaric, tall and high-foreheaded and narrow-faced with her long, aquiline nose, explaining the coming invasion from an imperial briefing room. She looked exhausted. She looked honest.
The face of the Emperor was behind her face; as her mouth moved, on the holograph, the Emperor’s mouth remained a constant still presence, as if he was commanding her performance by sheer force of will.
The whole image—all of them, the entire sun temple—was replaced by a familiar map: Teixcalaanli space, a grand star-chart. The last time Mahit had seen this it had been deployed to show the vectors of the annexation war which would claim Lsel and everything around it. Now those vectors were dimmed, and as she watched, the map lit up with each of the coordinate points Darj Tarats had given to her: the places where the threat was greatest, where the aliens had been spotted in their ships, festooned with weaponry. Inverse stars on that map: bright for a moment and then spreading a deep, dark, threatening red, like a pool of blood.
Mahit thought of Twelve Azalea, and was still thinking of him when the map vanished. She misunderstood what she was seeing in the sun temple for long seconds, lost in memory and connotation.
The Emperor was holding a naked blade, a knife made out of some dark, shining material, translucent grey at its sharpest edges. He’d shed his robe; it pooled around his ankles. All of h
is bones were visible, even through the light trousers and shirt he wore: every bit of emaciation his illness had wrought upon him rendered up for the eyes of the cameras. Eight Antidote had pressed the side of his hand to his mouth, a child’s gesture of distress—Nineteen Adze was saying something, Mahit only caught the end of it, a wisp of my lord, I—don’t—
Six Direction, speaking: Teixcalaan requires a steady, even hand—a hand star-graced, a tongue prepared, a fist that grasps the sunlight. In the face of what we are about to suffer—I who have served you since I knew what service was—I consecrate this temple and the war which is to come.
“He’s really going to,” said Three Seagrass, her voice too real, too loud, and too immediate on the couch next to Mahit. “No emperor has—not for centuries—”
I name as my immediate successor and the executor of this war of preservation the ezuazuacat Nineteen Adze, said Six Direction, in sinecure for the child of my genetics, Eight Antidote, until the time of his majority.
Mahit had time to think, What have I set into motion, and to feel a great onrushing spasm of grief: hers, Three Seagrass’s, Yskandr’s—
The Emperor took two steps backward, into the center of the raised altar. With my blood I sacrifice for us, he said—broadcast, unstoppable, to every Teixcalaanlitzlim in every province, on every planet in Teixcalaanli space. Released, I am a spear in the hands of the sun.
Her words. Mahit’s and Three Seagrass’s, the poetry they’d used as a lure to get themselves free—the poetry that was being sung in the streets—
Six Direction raised the knife, the sun glinting through it—and brought it down again. Two swift cuts, high on the inner thighs: the femoral arteries gone to fountains of red. So much blood. And somehow, in the middle of that pool, two cuts more: from wrist to elbow, and again on the other side.