Sorrowing Vengeance

by David C. Smith

  “You must do more,” his nephew told him. “What you’ve proposed in your announcement, Uncle Elad, is very meager, and its method of advancing reform is so constrained that the people don’t take it seriously. You can’t expect the working people to believe in an alternative strategy that follows the existing system. That system is the one that’s strangling them! Don’t ask for opinions from your bureaucrats. Don’t go to the work bosses and the guild masters—they’re as much in need of reform as your council is! Uncle—you’re trying very carefully to untangle a knot that’s been tightening for generations. Take your sword and cut through the knot! Do this—and I know for a fact that many sympathetic aristocrats will side with you.”

  Elad told him, “I cannot allow the people to overthrow the government on an idealistic impulse, to simply ‘cut through’ a hundred years of legislation—”

  “Legislation that hurts more than it helps—” Galvus interrupted testily “—and—where it helps—helps only those who need it least. The people want authority over their own lives. They’re demanding a redistribution of money and power and authority because they want the profits of rich men put to good use—social use. They want the control of businesses given to the people who work those businesses.”

  Elad shook his head. This was indeed the same radical program that Count Adred had advocated last winter, and it was a dangerous plan. But just as the king began to respond—

  “I’ve already begun a method by which we can accomplish this,” Galvus said.

  Both Elad and Adred showed their surprise.

  “What do you mean?” the king asked him.

  “When I went to the farmers in the Diruvian Valley, as you asked me to do, I went beyond asking them to cooperate with your plans for the sirots. That won’t satisfy them: it’s too little, too late. So I’m personally buying a large stretch of land in the valley and donating it to the workers to till on their own. It will be an honest test. My own feeling is that the land should not have to be bought from the House of Lodul—it should be taken from them. For now, however, as a token gesture to them, and to keep tempers calm, I’m buying the land.”

  Adred was enormously impressed; Galvus had not given him any hint of his intention to do this.

  Elad was less excited. “It’s your money, certainly,” he agreed, “to do with as you wish. I suppose if we look upon it as a sort of investment—”

  “An investment in the people,” Galvus told him. “An investment into the kind of society we’re going to have in Athadia, sooner or later, no matter how many rich people refuse to believe it.” He sighed and wiped his damp hands together. “Your crown, we’ve lived too long with this childish mentality of profit for a few,” he remarked. “It’s time we became the mature society we consider ourselves to be.”

  Elad, a light in his eyes, watched him. Admiration? Indul­gence?

  “The only thing I ask of you now,” Galvus told his uncle, “is your promise that, so far as you can control it, no one on council interfere with this…test. Because it’s this—and quickly—or it’s revolution. And to no good purpose.”

  Elad smiled and genuinely gave out with a laugh. “You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?”

  “We’ll soon see whether I have or not!”

  “I’ll sign legislation protecting this honest test of yours,” the king agreed. He stood, then, and walked to a table where a pot of tea was heating on a small burner. Slowly, Elad filled a cup for himself, then faced Galvus and Adred.

  “I’m not going to sanction class warfare in my country. I’m the king of everyone in this empire, and I won’t jeopardize the business interests already operating—and I appreciate the fact, Galvus, that you did not recommend that I do that.” He shot a stern look at Adred. “Even though some of our people in the business community may be unscrupulous, they’ve accomplished far more good than they have evil.”

  “I disagree,” Galvus replied. “I think those businesses are cannibals, and they would devour each other for the slightest profit, and that’s all they are. But values have changed. I want to show you that business can be operated by people who are better than that. Even most animals are better than that.”

  Elad slipped his tea and regarded Adred. “I’ve just allowed my nephew to harangue me—No. Not a harangue. He’s most eloquent and passionate. And very thorough. But I’ve known you to be quite capable of managing such an exercise yourself, Count. I don’t think you’ve said five words since you walked in here. Surely you have something to contribute to all this?”

  Adred scratched his nose, looked from Elad to Galvus, and glanced at the king again. “Well,” he decided, “all I really have to add is that if Galvus is opening his door for volunteers, I’d like to make myself available.”

  Elad grinned and shook his head. “You two are quite the pair, aren’t you?”

  “Oh,” Adred claimed light-heartedly, “I taught him everything he knows. I just wanted to let Galvus do the talking tonight to see how well he could handle himself.”

  The king laughed out loud and nearly spilled his tea: honest laughter from an honest man.

  * * * *

  Night in the eastern gardens of the palace. A warm night, filled with the fragrance of blossoms and trees, soft with comfortable shadows and the lights of the many-stoned palace high beyond the waving leaves. From where they sat, Adred and Orain heard distant voices from open balconies, the music of flutes and mandolins, faraway laughter, and the occasional echo of a passing guard’s bootsteps.

  He had told her of everything that had happened during his and Galvus’s meeting with Elad, and Orain was thrilled. “I’m so happy,” she said. “I was afraid he’d simply reject Galvus. And Galvus wants to accomplish so much.”

  “He trusts you,” Adred reminded her. “You’re Elad’s family. And that means he’ll listen to you when you tell him things that really must be heard.” Looking at her, he moved closer toward her on the bench and held her hand.

  Orain leaned her head back, smiled, closed her eyes, and relaxed her hand in Adred’s.

  And he found himself letting his thoughts wander, as Orain rested against him—his family, his parents.… Adred won­dered what it must be like to be married. He recalled sitting often in the company of friends and their wives and listening to the easy banter that passed between a husband and a wife—the conversa­tion, the sly grins and the quick changes of mood and insight and understanding. The easy sympathies, the intimacies taken advan­tage of publicly without a misspoken word of anger. But the thing that had impressed him most was the awareness that in secure marriages there was a time and a place for everything, almost a schedule of compliances—an understanding of when to speak of trivial matters and when to discuss important issues, an appreciation of times and places appropriate to wear certain aspects of one’s personality, always with the approval (and sometimes to the amusement) of one’s spouse. A friendship, really—that’s what the best marriages seemed to be—because there was always that undercurrent of something distinct between husband and wife that could not be shared with outsiders, could not be interfered with. That was the security of it; that was the sense of it; that was the aspect that most intrigued Adred: the bond that grew between the two, the balance, the strong bridge that would never fail. It seemed almost a permanent thing, more permanent than life itself: a spiritual, living thing, as strong as hope, as permanent as laughter—

  He felt Orain draw her hand away.

  An intensely human thing.…

  Adred looked at her. She was not crying, but she was wiping her face with her hands and she seemed to be momentarily breathless. He moved in the darkness; Orain sat up.

  “What is it?” Adred asked.

  “Nothing.” She shrugged. “I’m all right.”

  “Tell me, please.”

  She wouldn’t look at him.

  “Please.…”

  She shook her head. “I was thinking of Cyrodian.”

  Adred took in a breath. �
�What— Are you afraid of him? Afraid of his coming back?” He recalled being there, feeling completely helpless, when Cyrodian had nearly murdered her in a fit of anger.

  “Not—no, not frightened. Adred, I’m ashamed, that’s all.”

  “But there’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “But there is. I’m still married to him. He’s my husband.”

  “Do you love him?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Do you want him to come back so you can be everything for him that a wife is for her husband?”

  “Please, Adred, don’t make—”

  “Then he’s not your husband, is he?”

  “I mean legally.”

  “Legally, I’m sure you can have the marriage stricken in a moment. Orain, Elad would nullify it for you right now. Three strokes of the pen.”

  She didn’t say anything to that.

  He asked her, “Is this what you’ve been living with, all this time?”

  “Don’t make it sound so foolish.”

  “It’s not foolish. Look at me.” He took her by her shoulders and turned her around so that her eyes met his. “Is this why you’ve believed so strongly in Galvus? Is this why you turned away all those men in Sulos?”

  She tried to shrug and she shook her head. She showed him an odd smile. “I suppose so.”

  Adred laughed at her, but it was a pleasant laugh. “You’ve got to learn to take better care of yourself! Why would you do this to yourself?”

  “It’s the kind of person I am,” she replied softly. “I can’t help it.”

  “Orain, am I your friend?”

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “A friend always interferes when he sees the need to. That’s part of the agreement. A good friend will save you from yourself, even if you don’t want him to. They take an oath. It’s part of the whole friend…oath-taking part of it.”

  She smiled.

  “That’s more like it. Your perspective is all disorganized. Orain, if you worry this much about trivial things, what happens when a real emergency occurs? You have to learn to maintain your perspective.”

  He went quiet, lifted a hand, and pushed back some of the hair that had fallen into her eyes. “I’m your friend. Don’t forget that.”

  “I won’t. I know you are.”

  Now she was watching him. Her eyes were shining in the darkness, her face glowed, her mouth was trembling. She shivered in a sudden breeze.

  And Adred impulsively drew her to him and kissed her—held her to him and wound his arms about her, and kissed her again. She answered him with a tentative embrace, moved her hands to his head—

  Then, abruptly, she pulled away and slumped. She looked across the garden.

  “This is— I feel so—” She didn’t say it. Nervously, she tugged at folds in her skirt.

  “You feel so ‘what’?”

  “I’m thirty-five years old, Adred.”

  “What does that mean?”

  She turned on the bench so that her back was to him, pulled his arms around her waist, and held her own hands over them. “Just…keep being my friend, Adred. All right?”

  “Always.” He kissed her hair as he held her. “Always, Orain.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  He was sitting on a bench in one of the dusty squares near the center of town—one of the many moderate-sized towns that had grown up in the farming regions of central Omeria. He had been there all morning, attracting small children with their pets, and vagrants, to him; now, in the afternoon heat, the crowd around him dwindled. Some of the unoccupied young men mocked him or asked insulting questions; but because he answered taunts with the same honest concern as he did the attentions of small children, the troublemakers soon drifted away. Mendicants and other outcasts sat in the dust close by him, hoping that the people attracted to him would drop some spare coppers into their laps. Families who had come to barter with merchants passed a few idle moments listening to him, judging his words against the weight of their personal experiences. And still others, intrigued by his presence and heartened by his message, sat with him for hours—young women from farms or from the shops in town, travelers, occasional businessmen who no longer owned any businesses, or workers without work.

  “No one,” Asawas told his audience, “can live life without trusting to the value of something. And that thing you choose to value, it will similarly value you just as you profess to value it. What, then, should a man or woman value? Love? Power? The esteem of others? Judiciousness? Tolerance? Equality? Wealth? Whatever you value, you will strive to strengthen that value in yourself, and then you will see the world reflecting that value. And you prove this, not by your words, but by your actions: what your heart intends, your actions betray. If a man honors corruption because he feels that it achieves the things he wishes to achieve, even in the name of good, then he will become corrupt and deceptive, he will degrade the rest of us with his corruption and treat us with contempt—even when he professes to love us. In this way, the man will invite us likewise to treat him with contempt—and all in the name of achievement. What, then, has he achieved? Only what was in his heart. And this will happen likewise with any other value or ideal or emotion you think you should champion to enhance yourself. Thrift becomes a means to cheat your neighbor; intolerance of some brings you the approval of others. I tell you that all values flow from the same fountain, and you should drink of that fountain moderately and believe equally in all values: do not promote one at the expense of another.”

  “Sir,” someone asked him, “is this why there is so much danger today? Because those who lead us do not have values?”

  “Yes. They are intolerant. They do not keep their values in balance: they believe that what is right for them is right for everyone. They are impatient to gain, and so they lie to themselves about their values. You must remember that when we are not taught to respect the world or others, then we fail to respect ourselves. A person cannot respect what he does not know; and what a person does not know frightens him. The person is frightened because to know anything means to reach for that thing with an open mind and an open heart. Frightened people don’t have open minds and open hearts. Frightened people who don’t understand the world make up their own world: a world of doubt and misunderstanding. And where many are afraid and are in seats of authority, they conspire to command the world with their fears. Like the corrupt man, they degrade all those around them.

  “Don’t you think that the mysteries and actions of nature are difficult and severe? A drought comes, and lives perish. One animal must devour another to survive. Flames destroy a forest, and many creatures lose their burrows and their food. Yet if we watch nature for a long time, we see wisdom in how things are accomplished. We see the larger spirit of nature at work within the many small things.

  “So it is with us. Evil comes from lack of knowing oneself, and to know oneself is to know others. Humanity endures to prevail; we do not prevail to endure. Now, you may say, this is perhaps true of one man or one woman, but what of an unjust society? Each one of us may strive to be as you say, but when evil flourishes above our heads, how can we live so simply and generously? Surely a starving man cannot live a guiltless life if those who manage his life make it necessary for him to steal bread for his family! And I say to you that this is true: I say to you that when you know the truth, you will do away with the liars, and if someone oppresses you, then you must show that person the true way. If that one lies to you with words, show him with action the true way. But if you answer his lies with lying actions, and fail to see what it is you do, then you will yourself become a liar, and evil.”

  He continued to speak of these things, answering questions with insightful illustrations, sometimes posing alternative questions to his listeners so that they might solve some particular problem themselves, and then again speaking frankly of why he had come to them, why the one god had chosen him to do what he did.

  There were questions from thos
e who did not trust the idea of the one true god. “What does On look like?” they asked the prophet.

  “He has no face; he has no form. I speak of him as a man only because I am a man. But On is neither man nor woman entirely; he is both the male and the female and all other things, because On is the All.”

  “What words does he speak, Wise One?”

  “On does not speak in words; but I, his servant, must speak in words.”

  “Then what does his heart sound like to you?”

  “The same as the sound of your heart.”

  “With what eyes does he see? With your eyes?”

  “On is as the wind and the air, as the stars, which are always and everywhere. On sees with all of our memories, for our memories are his memories, and our hopes, his hopes.”

  “Why, Chosen One, is the one god called On?”

  “Am I my name? Are you your name? Is On his name? Call him what you will, On is yet what he is.”

  As the numbers of the crowd shifted and moved, some going away, others pressing forward to look at and listen to this prophet, one man there, a visitor to the town and by the cut of his garments an obviously well-to-do young man, stepped forward and stared at Asawas with an intense gaze. When the prophet’s audience fell silent for a moment, this one spoke to him in a quiet but powerful voice.

  “I have a question for you, speaker.”

  Asawas turned to look upon him and met the light in his eyes, the awareness in his stare. “Yes,” he smiled, recognizing the stranger. “I sensed you, watching me from across the square. What is your question?”

  “Why was the Temple of Bithitu in Erusabad destroyed by the heathens?”

  Asawas’s polite smile did not fade. “Because Bithitu demanded that no temple ever be raised in his name. Because the men there who called themselves priests did not comprehend in their hearts either On or his Prophet. And because it was a thing of the earth, a symbol of the old ways that now must perish.”