by Kali Altsoba
More and more, Jahandar drifts into garbled memory of old lines from his school days, the last time in his twisted and brutal life he felt anything approaching joy. He stores up these images and memories from boyhood, saves and savors them not for pleasure but to use in fresh plots and to justify new murders. He can’t comprehend their original tragic or ironic essence, for Jahandar is not fading and madding Lear. He still wields total, absolute power over billions.
He’s stirring, waking from sclerotic sleep. He feels hollow with his long-since completed destruction of old Dauran culture. Having smashed the old order and Empire and its most ancient traditions and folkways with his terror system and Grim Revolution, what else is left to do inside Daura? It’s time to make history once again. He’ll reverse centuries of Hermit Empire isolation. He’ll burst from closed frontiers with extreme violence and malevolence, in speed and spite, so that Orion is astonished in its fear. He’ll act, when he acts, however he acts, with the suddenness of a flipped stellar magnetic field, sweeping aside any opposition in the Thousand Worlds. Then he’ll rule them as he rules Daura, cruelly and absolutely, wading in tidal oceans of blood and terror and mass murder. It’s how he does everything. It’s what makes him Jahandar.
***
Soso the boy journeyed far from his home in Dambatta at the foot of the Blue Mountains on Sachi to become Jahandar the Dread, “Possessor of All the Worlds.” Came so far the old man hardly remembers the child. Yet a savage boy is father to this brutal man, tethers him to a blood code and ancient grudges, revels with him in cruel heroic falsehoods, binds him to vulgar and ugly truths. The boy is alive inside the old man, tearing at him daily, clawing at his guts with filthy scything nails, gnawing with filed teeth to rip a way out of his dying and wizened shell.
Soso’s early life was almost as violent as Jahandar’s daily thoughts, habits and orders. Or so Jahandar likes to boast to nervous courtiers and frightened cronies, who quake at his bloody tales of twisted boyhood, knowing that Shishi guards stand rigid at every palace door, ready to butcher anyone at a simple nod from the stooped and malodorous and unpredictable old Tyrant.
His favorite lie is how, as a boy of eight, “I defended my mother in the family kitchen by knifing my drunken father in the belly when he beat her, over and over with filthy knotted fists.” No one knows the truth of the knife tale save Soso. Not after Jahandar makes sure decades later that only he remains alive among anyone who knew the story back then. Most old men talking decades later over a flagon of spiced samogon would conceal the lurid tale, ashamed of the ugly scene and vile deed. Not virile, cruel Soso. Not stooped, corrupt, isolated Jahandar.
Then again, perhaps it’s not a lie? Soso’s father was a violent drunkard who beat his wife and son. Soso’s boyhood home was full of wild, unpredictable violence: father on mother and son, uncles against brother-father, and as Soso grew thickened muscle, quick and hard-fisted son drubbing blows onto a drunk-stupid father slumped unconscious against the dirt-cellar door, his mother crying: “No Soso, stop! You’ll kill him, please stop. Spare him for me, for your babu.”
Violence was part of the natural order of Soso’s youth, his first resort whenever he faced adversity or an adversary. Raised without a snowflake’s worth of kindness in his home, he was merciless as he went into the world. At age ten he joined the Dead Souls, a boy’s gang working the cobbled streets of Dambatta, a dull provincial city on the minor and backward world of Sachi where he grew up. Within a month the Dead Souls gang became the center of his life and being. He thrived in its rough-and-tumble embrace, in its daily celebration of male-on-male violence.
He made a good impression in the “knife game” the gang played often. Boys paired up and tossed titanium street shivs in high arcs at each other, throwing underhand while backing farther off with each toss. The thrill was to see how closely one boy would let the other boy’s tumbling blade fall without dodging it. Most boys jumped as wobbly arcing throws became less accurate and more dangerous with greater distance. Soso never flinched.
“My knife’s stuck in your leg! You lose, you lose!”
Soso pulled it out, held it up, and claimed a hobbled victory.
“You don’t win! I win!” said the other boy. “Stickin’ it in is close as you ken get. That’s the rule!” Later, he was found in an alley in pooling blood, his chest lacerated with stab wounds.
“You lose!” Soso had taunted, as he stood over the warm corpse with a bloody shiv in his hand. After that, no one would pair with him in the knife game. Yet all the gang respected him. He became their fearless champion when the game was played against rival gangs during truces.
Within a year he was right-hand boy and street enforcer to the 15-year old vozhd of the Dead Souls, the gang boss who recruited and trusted him. He killed for the cruel boy easily the very first time he was told to do it, stabbing to death a rival youth gang leader with his own game shiv. ‘Who would’ve thought it was so easy? Just slip it in and then again, and again and again.’
Barely two years passed until Soso made his move, knifing his patron and gang vozhd during an argument over a petty matter Jahandar can’t even remember anymore. He recalls only that it was a quick moment, fast and permanent. Soso quickly killed two more boys, to eliminate rivals for boss of the Dead Souls. ‘Should’ve knifed me first. I’m strong. I’m right. I am Soso!’
Volatile and sly, Soso was full of wild ambitions and never-forgotten grudges. Hard to the core, he was tough enough to survive even the Great Plague, an exobiological virulence and social leveler that raced across and marked off his boyhood. It spared neither peasant nor priest, sage nor beauty on a hundred medically backward and unready Dauran worlds. He fought off the disfiguring, pustular infection the way he fought back against everything, with merciless rage.
Some believe it was an alien virus, that it crept out of the Dead Zone to infect the border colonies. Others say it was infiltrated into Dauran space by Grün or Calmari agents. It carried off 17 billion Daurans before built-up resistance isolated the dying to destitute margins of the vast demesne of the emperors, to places even worse than Sachi. By then the mass die-out rocked the Empire end-to-end, opening veins of dissent and despair that later bled into the Grim Revolution.
Endurance of the plague left outer scars on Soso to match his pocked and pitted soul. His deformed face suited an instinctive preference for violence to solve any problem, the bloodier the better. Wearing a daily masque macabre of corrupted ugliness, he learned not to reveal the true monster within. Not until the lethal moment. Then he’d let the vizard fall, his bright yellow eyes peering coldly over plague scars cratering the sharp nose and angular cheeks below, terrifying his prone victim with hideousness and merciless promise just before he struck the fatal blow.
“No Soso, please don’t! I’m sorry, I’ll never do it again. I...”
“In you go, snick snick my clever knife.” He would stand to watch life’s ebbing and the blood pooling round, careful not to step in it with his peasant boy’s bast-and-mockleather shoes.
Soso has another odd and rare defect. An accident while visiting his best uncle’s mountain hunting lodge at age fourteen shattered the bones of his left leg and stunted his height. His damaged leg stayed shorter because he was poor, and because a drunken doctor in Dambatta misgrew a ceramic-femur replacement but slid it into the leg cavity anyway and left it there.
“It doesn’t matter boy,” he said, drunk as a mountain stoat. “It’ll do for the likes of you.”
“You take that back, and fix it proper!”
“Why? Don’t see a slum boy like you getting up to step dancing.”
“I can dance as good as anyone, you stupid drunk.”
“Yeah, sure. You’re gonna step it out with the ladies in the Imperial Ballroom in Astrana. Kid, in your whole life you’ll never get off Sachi. You’ll never even see Nalchik.”
One of his uncles beat the drunken doctor blue and senseless when he heard about the bad femur, and the insult. Jahand
ar remembers. It’s as close as he ever gets to a feeling of gratitude.
The failed repair left him with a noticeable gimp, though usefully it also kept him out of compulsory military service when he turned 16. Typically, he converted the injury to advantage. He overdeveloped his upper body, allowing him to deliver hard beatings with powerful arms and hammer fists to the faces and chests and groins of much taller boys. He took pleasure in brutally bloodying any bigger lad who assumed that shortness and a limp meant vulnerability in a fight.
Vicious initiations of new members ensured that Soso was surrounded by menacing and heartless boys, as well as many more too shocked and terrorized to get away. He let no one leave the Dead Souls. No one can leave him for any reason, especially as they all want to. If they asked to leave the gang he jumped on them and cut their faces with his knife, marking them as his. If they tried to sneak away at night or ran from him anyway, he hunted down and slashed them to death in howling, blood-spattering rage. By age 15 the ogre had killed a score of boys and men.
A decisive moment in his leadership arrived when Soso made the gang torment but not kill a mentally impaired woman. “Beat her, go on. Harder! All of you. All of you!” They left her half-conscious and nearly half-dead in a Sachi backstreet. While they beat and robbed her of the few little things in her cloth purse, he sneeringly tortured and killed her only companion, a small black-and-white cat. She cried out for its suffering even while taking the beating. He marked the gang in its blood, signing his cruelty and their complicity by pressing a red thumb to each cheek.
Then he graduated them all to murder, leading ambushes of oldsters in the back alleys of the slums. Not to rob them but as initiations and loyalty tests. He ordered his little gangsters to stab and leave one old man to die on his own porch. There wasn’t any profit in his death but Soso made them all do it. Murder became the red glue binding them to him, forever. He knew where they buried the bodies, and they knew that he knew and could have them hanged by the Sachi town magistrate and police with a single anonymous tip. But that wasn’t the real secret. No one really cared about the bodies or the police or thought he’d do it. Soso had learned how terror really worked, that it worked best when combined with murder that made everyone complicit.
The random killings finally brought down on Soso belated attention from the Dambatta police. They failed to get him for the murders because no witness would ever stand against him, so they started to arrest him on sight for the smallest offenses, then to beat him up on principle.
The last time, he laughed into their faces. “You punch like my babu,” he shouted at a fat cop who was sweating profusely as he worked hammy fists all over Soso’s arms and upper body.
“You filthy cripple. I’ll teach you respect, plague rat! Hold still, you damn poshlusty!” He stripped Soso naked and locked his feet in floor stirrups, arms held out straight by two other cops. One leered in sadistic pleasure at the hard beating to come. They’d done it before, to a hundred street toughs and wannabe thugs from Dambatta’s slums. None ever reacted like Soso.
“You’re a fat, stinking piece of shit!” he taunted, pissing on the fat man’s shoes. The fat cop hit him again, in the gut. Then kicked him in the groin, grunting with the effort and spraying sweat around the cell. Then hit him again in the face, with a flabby fist but bone-crunching force.
“Babu! babu!” Soso yelled as his nose broke. He didn’t stop taunting until they kicked him unconscious and he lay in his own blood and piss and broken teeth on the unpainted cell floor. They couldn’t understand his defiance and hated his last smile. He knew what they didn’t. Their deaths on the jagged blade of his Blue Mountain knife were certain. Only a matter of time.
His greatest pleasure as gang leader was crushing rivals, or anyone he believed might become a rival. Already, it wasn’t enough just to murder. He had to drive his enemy to despair before plunging into his vitals a serrated knife, slow twisting the defiling blade in ripping gray guts as he looked straight into their redding then waxy eyes. Soso’s squat and bent physique, his awkward limp, terribly scarred face, smoldering moods and quick and easy turns to extreme violence over the smallest insult earned him the street name “Poison Dwarf.” He hated it.
One day he picked up a stubby laser-axe during a street fight, lying where some worker left it beside a woodpile. He swung it hard and chopped off the legs of a rival youth gang leader, then stood over the gushing, dying boy, taunting: “Who’s the dwarf now?”
No one dared call him “Poison Dwarf” to his face again. And few did even when alone. He learned that he controlled their terror, that he could get into and stay inside their minds so that they anticipated his orders and wishes. He had discovered the primal source and nature of power.
Afterward, he carried the hatchet tucked in a wide black belt holding up his rough, tan trousers. Decades later, Shishi terror thugs heading out on killing sprees tucked into thick black belts the laser-hatchets they call “sachis” in his honor. For the Tyrant made the hand-axe of Soso’s boyhood and first cruelties the signature murder weapon of his terror police and his terror state. It’s the central symbol and enforcer of his long, sanguineous despotism.
Dambatta police kept returning him to school from prison, until he reached 16. Once in class he was an oddly different person. Quiet, studious and respectful, attendant and attentive in all his courses. The only trouble he gave the teacher-monks of Dambatta was leading a student strike to protest a dull diet of beans and bread or rice cake served every day. For months on end.
“We want spicy mountain food, not this peasant’s swill! We won’t work your gardens or study until we get them.” The monks caved and changed the menu. Turned out, they were sick of daily beans, too. It was Soso’s first taste of politics and a lesson he never forgot, about how the many will follow the one if only the one shows them that his iron will and strength will prevail.
“Exceptionally bright and eager, even brilliant,” said a report by the teacher-monks to skeptical police more familiar with Soso’s criminal reputation. The head monk even wrote the same things to Chief Superintendent of Old Ritual Education on Sachi, who obtained a visa for the pocked country boy to attend Temple Seminary in the regional capital of Tikbuli.
He was away from Dambatta for a year, the brightest boy from a mountain province ever to arrive in the dull capital of Sachi, itself a gray and provincial world. He mastered all subjects that a higher set of monk-educators challenged him to read, gaining top grades in cultural studies and languages, especially excelling in Imperial and Ancient literature. He loved the old dramas but grew contemptuous of all lighter genres. He tried at first, then decided that he would never view another novel. ‘Trivial self-indulgence, narcissism of the chattering and privileged classes.’
His teachers noted and approved Soso’s rare love of heroic verse and of the ancient poets Shakespeare and Dante. “It’s wonderful. Too few of our boys are drawn to archaic fare.” They failed to see that he returned from time inside Macbeth morose and brooding, not “linen-cheeked but pricked red-faced.” Believing he was unusually insightful into tragedies, they gave him more.
They missed completely that he ascended from the Inferno stripped of every pretense to virtue, convinced by wicked Alighieri that any time spent without power and fame leaves only a fading mark on life and on the worlds, no more than “smoke makes on air or foam on water.” As soon as he finished reading Dante he left Tikbuli Temple without notice or graduating. Back in Dambatta and still just 17 years old, he reclaimed leadership of the Dead Souls with a dozen new and severe beatings and a quick but especially bloody and public assassination of his key rival. He chose his life path, away from the civilizing toward the barbaric. He never looked back.
Revolution
Soso made the Dead Souls more than just another tough boy’s club. He turned it into a highly profitable criminal gang. That brought him into contact with politicians demanding bribes and favors. Local police made a working peace with the new gang l
ord, who they knew was ruthless as an Abrek mountain man. He bought their information and protection and paid them well, so they let him run wild with his street gang until he smashed all rivals and controlled all crime in their city. They still believed his mask of deference and formal renunciation of all grudges for their past beatings of him, as he handed over the weekly pay packet. ‘The fools. The weak, stupid fools.’
He never stopped plotting blood revenge on the fat cop who broke his teeth and nose, or anyone who slighted or beat him. They found the oily man on his own doorstep one morning, gutted like a sturgeon and toothless as a homeless cur, a rusted pliers and neat pile of teeth on the cobbles beside his bloody mouth. His arms and legs were chopped off with a laser of some kind.
They couldn’t stick the murder on Soso. Five witnesses swore that he was in Tikbuli at the time, including an old man from his neighborhood who came to the station to volunteer the information. They can’t get him for murdering two more police after that, the ones who held him for the fat cop to beat. Dambatta’s cops knew who they were dealing with when they found the bodies, badges and chopped-off arms at their sides. They took his gang money and kept silent.
