Sorrowing Vengeance

by David C. Smith

  Sporadic applause, the majority of it from others in the Congress of Nobility, met this sentiment. Elad, head on hand, studied Rhin and saw through him. The king and the speaker were joined by self-interest and status, history and heritage; that much had been admitted in their conversation at the Kirgo Amax. And yet, because his position allowed him to be—demanded that he be—many things at once, Elad was reminded that, in moral or ethical issues (those that separate men from beasts), the greater one’s feelings of guilt, the more fastidiously one proclaims one’s innocence; and the higher one sits in a hierarchy, the more pervasive are the effects of that guilt, the more stridently self-serving the protests.

  Elad moved his eyes from Lord Rhin to Prince Galvus and Count Adred, who were seated near the end of the Public Administration table. Galvus was fidgeting; Count Adred was listening with the look of a man long repulsed by such obvious hypocrisies.

  With Galvus and Adred in the room—with their attitude palpable in the chamber—Elad seemed to see this shoddy prevarication by the aristocrats in a new way. And when the king opened the floor to debates on the issue of the sirots, he witnessed firsthand the war between the ideals in people’s hearts and the baseness.

  Galvus’s attitude was that of a man unquestionably in the right; at times, his verbal attacks on Lord Rhin seemed almost light-hearted, so self-assured was he. “You’re trying to defend an obsolete system!” he pointed out. “You’re trying to buoy up a ship that’s drowning in a storm by punching more holes in it! I’m glad you’re a High Councilor and not a sailor, Lord Rhin!”

  Rhin, completely on the defensive and upset at having his values even questioned, lost his temper whenever Galvus spoke. “We have devised a system that will adequately—”

  “That,” Galvus proudly interrupted him, “is precisely the mentality that has brought our country to the brink of ruin! I don’t believe in ‘adequacy,’ Lord Rhin—I believe in competency! And I don’t believe in ‘systems’—I believe in people! And competent people seem to be very much lacking in our hereditary class of—”

  “This is outrageous! Are you a traitor. Prince Galvus? I won’t retract that word! I use it for what it means! Are you prepared to—”

  “Are you prepared, Lord Rhin, to trade places with one man in the field for a year? For one month? No! For one day? I have! Because if you aren’t—if you can’t do that, and do the job that fieldman does—then you have no right to take from that man anything you aren’t willing to give in return!”

  “Our heritage has set down a system wherein each man does his part in a social order—”

  “And I am not speaking of the past, Lord Rhin—although I’m sure you’d be happier living when men were not only land­owners, but slaveholders, as well! I am—”

  “This is absolutely—!”

  “I am speaking of the future! I am speaking of dignity! Even of your potential for dignity! For you have none now as a slaveholder, Lord Rhin!”

  Following a very necessary recess, matters did not improve when Galvus took the opportuni­ty to invite certain members of “Lord Rhin’s esteemed human stable of cattle” into the proceedings.

  Rhin was freshly outraged when Bors and the other farmers from the Diruvian Valley were escorted into the hall; but Elad quickly reminded the nobleman that it was the privilege of any councilor or aristocrat sitting in the hall to introduce any visitor or evidence he wished, so long as that might shed insight into matters being debated.

  When Galvus began soliciting testimony from Bors and the others relevant to the working conditions of the farmers in Sulos, their grievances, their ideas for reform, and their opinions on the general inadequacy of the proposed sirots, Lords Rhin and Falen protested loudly. “These men are revolutionaries! Does our king now invite seditionists to take part in our government?” And, in a cruel moment: “Have they been checked for weapons? Are we certain that they don’t mean to injure or assassinate any of us in this hall?”

  Galvus answered this alarmist mentality with proud conviction. “If there is a revolution, then it’s occurring because the ideas these men represent have been ignored for so long that their only recourse has been to create a revolution! A revolution in the streets, my lords, must be met—must be greeted!—with a corresponding revolution in ideas and values and our very identities as Athadians! Otherwise, this, this so-called revolution will become exactly what all of us fear, and what none of us wants: an earthquake of violence and bloodshed, an ocean of inhumanity and destruction! People turn to action, Lord Rhin, when their words fail—so listen to these words!”

  Bors, controlling his temper and not at all intimidated by the High Council chamber or the aristocrats for whom it was a second home, made his points as succinctly as he could.

  “It is, sir,” Rhin reminded him midway through the session, “the destiny of some men to direct the destinies of other men!”

  To which Bors replied: “Only, sir, if those ‘other men’ consent to it. I’ll give it to you, but I won’t let you steal it from me anymore.”

  And to Lord Rhin’s angry, “Impossible! Impossible! These men don’t want an economy! They don’t even want a revolution! I could respect a revolution, but these men are anarchists!” Bors replied:

  “Of course it seems impossible to believe in something you don’t understand. But if you were to work the way I do, Lord Rhin, and live the way I do, then what I’m saying wouldn’t seem impossible at all. It would seem absolutely necessary.”

  Late in the afternoon, as council began to weary of the passions and the appeals, the rhetoric and the posturing, Galvus made a final announcement—his plea for the redistribution of all goods and wealth—and boldly declared his own challenge:

  “My friends, when a structure has become so wracked and ruined that it cannot fulfill its function any longer, do we continue to patch it up and pretend that it serves as well as it ever did? We do not. We face facts squarely and we tear it down, this useless structure, and we erect a new one, a better structure, a structure improved by what we have learned from the previous one. And that is what’s happening in our empire today. For the structure that now constitutes our unfair economic system is collapsing; it has not grown or changed as our society has grown and changed.

  “And while our economic structure has been collapsing, we have learned new things, and now we know how to build a better structure. Call this the act of revolutionaries if you will; but what is revolutionary to one generation becomes a commonplace to the next. I prefer to think of this ‘revolution’ as a challenge—not an attack—to those of us who, in our hearts, want to build good, new things! Those of us who are truly proud of this nation! Those of us who understand the reality of the situation and are bold and honest enough to face that situation, and not try to hide from it.

  “Aristocratic private control of business has debased us; it has raped the unprotected, it has mismanaged what it claimed to direct, and it has created a situation so critical that if we do not act now to save ourselves from it, then not even those things we value will have value any longer! A cooperative society is not a sentiment; a nation of many kinds of ownership and economic strategies is a necessity! And believing in the best we have in us is not only a necessity—my lords, it is imperative!”

  Galvus then told the collected council of what he himself had done to help secure this vision, of how he had taken the first step in redistributing privately held property for public use: his purchase of large tracts of Diruvian field land, which Bors and the other workers were managing for themselves.

  This admission brought forth a vociferous tide of noise and confusion. Cries of “subsidizing the revolution!” clashed with outbursts of “Galvus, we’re with you! I’ll leave half my estate to the people! It’s time!”

  And Elad, as he witnessed this from his imperial throne, reminded himself again of certain things apparent in the nature of humanity—self-preservation and paths of least resistance, and ideals, and thoughts, beliefs.…

&n
bsp; * * * *

  Late in the evening, when Council had been adjourned for many hours, while the chamber was yet redolent of arguments and loud voices and cries of revolution and calls for new beginnings, Elad sat alone on his dais and watched as the sunlight died outside the tall windows. When Abgarthis entered, Elad was so deeply involved in thought that he did not hear his minister until the old man was very nearly at the steps of the throne dais.

  “Still here, my king? Are you not hungry?”

  Elad showed him a grave expression.

  “Are you worried about Queen Salia?” Abgarthis asked, seating himself in a chair.

  Elad shook his head; his voice was almost a whisper. “Am I,” he asked, “going to bed with poisonous serpents? Or have I been in bed with those serpents all along?”

  “Ah.” Abgarthis tilted his head. “The Council—or the people. Do you ally with one at the expense of the other? Will the aristocracy show its fangs, as the workers have already?” He read Elad’s stare. “You are king of both—of all. The only way to deal with these issues is to deal with them collectively. They are not separate. What kind of nation,” the minister asked him, “do you see in your mind, Elad?”

  The king nodded quietly. “Am I the same man who ordered the massacre of hundreds in Sulos?”

  Abgarthis watched him.

  “Am I the same man who slew the Oracle? Who was nearly slain himself by one of the very revolutionaries I admitted into this chamber today? Am I the same man who agreed with Lord Rhin, in fact, that we must control this nation—and agreed with Galvus, in my heart, that every citizen of this country already controls it?” He rose to his feet, stepped wearily down from the dais and paused to stare at the high windows where the light was fading. “It is difficult for me to do what other men do spontaneously. I seem to watch myself constantly, as though some part of me were a silent observer of the rest of me—where I go, whatever I do or think—as though I were my own audience. I play all these many scenes, Abgarthis, as though this were a comedy or a play; I am the puppet inside the stage, but I also control the puppet.” Elad shook his head. “It is too much for me. I deal with issues, one at a time, as though each were singular—but a strange thread connects them all. How can I condemn my own brother, and not myself? How can I ignore the working people to favor this aristocracy and the business interests? How can I harm the many and not say that the few, after all, are also harmed by that? What do these nobles think they have gained? What do they fear they will lose? Money? Authority? Prestige? Is it wise to be hated but to cling to one’s gold? Is it wise to act like a god while one despises the gods? Can one claim that a goal, a good and honest goal, should be achieved by any means available? Or do foul means used to gain that goal dirty its achievement?”

  He stared now at Abgarthis with pain-deep eyes.

  “I sat here today and saw men act as brutally, and yet as nobly, as they possibly can act—without weapons in their hands. I rejoiced one moment, I despaired the next. And…I had no control over it, Abgarthis. Not really. Do you understand that? I began to sense that…I do not control this empire, or the lives within it, or the direction in which it moves. I wondered—and I wonder now—that it could easily fall apart. All of it—the pretense of order, of government, of authority—rests upon such an uncertain foundation. I watched these debates and asked myself again and again and again, What holds all of this together? If tomorrow we decided to end the pretense, we could. And would anyone notice? It’s all held together by only a thread, as if all of us, from noble to dockworker, concealed some great deep secret, and the whispering of the secret would suddenly bring it all to light and…release us. One real doubt—one voice loud enough—‘It’s all a lie, a lie!’—and it’s over.” He shook his head. “And that’s true; I know it is true. And, if that is true—because that is true…then why, Abgarthis, hasn’t it all ended already? Why hasn’t it all fallen apart as it seems so eager to do?”

  Abgarthis, intrigued by this train of thought, made no com­ment. Elad began to pace the vacant council chamber.

  “Do you know what we are, Abgarthis? Humanity, I mean. Do you know what human beings are? We are a fearful animal; we are an anxious animal, a doubtful animal. We are an animal of fear able to construct philosophies to which we cannot aspire. Able to harm ourselves in incredible ways, and unable to stop harming ourselves. It’s as though all the creatures of a field or a forest somehow communicated their innermost thoughts to each other, but re­mained only what they were—coarse brutes—despite that. Is that all we are? Is that all our great dreams and philosophies and beliefs come to? Useless fantasies? Mere excuses we use to apologize for our own criminal hearts? Because the ideals, once done, can always be undone. We do not have the courage, or the patience—the faith, perhaps?—to place ourselves securely in our own best beliefs. It’s—yes, it is—the structure, the structure Galvus talked about. It’s as if all that is best in us is composed into a structure, a tower—but the foundation is not secure. We live in the tower in comfort, in wisdom—so we think. But one doubt, one whisper…if a storm comes…if one stone is removed…the awful truth returns. We could spend ten thousand years constructing the finest tower in testimony to ourselves, but if one stone loosened—if there is one angry voice, one doubt—it all comes apart and crumbles. Humanity,” Elad decided, “does not have the strength to be good. We appeal to what is best in us, only so that our attention is stolen from what we actually do to ourselves—we revel in our baseness.”

  He walked to a chair and wearily sat, some distance from Abgarthis. The dying light hid him in shadows—shadows he could not command.

  “You’re tired,” Abgarthis told him. “Distraught. Too much emotion in too short a space of time. Revolutions…Salia leaving…the imbur’s temper tantrums.…”

  Elad smiled softly and rubbed his face with his hands. “When I was recuperating, Abgarthis, she was as solicitous to me as a nurse. Salia. But now I must wonder—how much of that care of hers reflected a wife’s concern for her husband? Or a woman’s concern for a man? How much of it was simply a queen ingratiating herself to the king upon whom she depended? She was like a child, a child acting as the parent to its actual parent.”

  Abgarthis swallowed and breathed deeply in the dusky hall.

  “What holds it all together?” Elad asked, looking around, looking. “What holds it all together?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  The last peaceful days came with the beginning of an early summer in Barl, the month of the Deer. And although the peace was not without tension, and while the people did not realize that they lived in days of calm that foreshadowed a storm, the few weeks that marked the Athadian government’s inquiries into economic redistribution, that saw Salia’s royal carrack make its way east across the blue Ursalion, and that witnessed Agors mu-ko-Ghen take power in Erusabad and become the true ko-ghen were, indeed, days of peaceful suspension.

  Some understood. A prophet imprisoned in Omeria knew. The second son of the dead chieftain of the East saw, and sensed, and knew. In Athad, Galvus and Orain and Count Adred and Lord Abgarthis would sit at the end of a day in the palace gardens to discuss the events of the world, and they recognized this period of peaceful suspension, the balance in which they lived. And they wondered whether the balance would hold. For they loved peace, although they understood that peace is always suspenseful. For peace is in the beauty of a day’s dawning when we know that the day will be an inclement one. Peace is the silence of relaxation; it is the aching beauty of two lovers in a world that, for them, seems ordered and stable; peace is a routine of small duties done and accomplishments achieved; it is the companionship of friends and memories; it is a sense of wholeness and harmony and completion. It is anger held in abeyance. It is promises sure to be fulfilled. Peace exists when we anticipate a warm future, when we trust; it exists when the soul is governed by safety and surety.

  And it is ever suspect.

  Abgarthis, in one of his rare evenings free, as
he sat with his friends, discussed this. For too many, he said, peace is regarded as an apathetic condition, and in their fear of apathy, these people mistakenly believe that peace can be achieved by action, when in fact taking action unsettles the suspension and the balance and sharpens the world for further discord.

  “For it is humanity’s deep flaw,” he asserted, “that, even with our splendid imagina­tions, we forget that our grandparents’ lives were as actual and real for them as our lives are for us. In forgetting that, we dismiss the lessons of the past as irrelevant. How can that be true? Yet we prefer to treat our difficulties as though they were occurring for the first time, immediately within our lifetimes. How foolish, not to see that others faced these same choices. What good is the wisdom of the ages if we believe that that wisdom once was pertinent but is no longer? We isolate ourselves, and our sensibilities, our…imagination. The reasons why we harm ourselves never change,” Abgarthis said. “We want the new, and how rarely is the new worthy of its promise.”

  Nature is ever new, Abgarthis said. Yet she is always the same. Her changes refresh us, and when Nature is renewed, we greet her seasons like old friends of whom we are worthy.

  But in times of transition, the old man said, how honest are we regarding this? Some come forward with new ideas, or they see a new horizon. Or they claim to. “What are we to make of these people who claim they are new? Can we trust them? Which are the liars? Which of them tell the truth?”

  The men and women who, like prisms, distribute the light to show us all the colors of life, all the possibilities—these are the truthful. They delight in what Nature gives us. They wish to share with Nature, not steal from her or harm her. They would rather hurt their own parents than damage Nature. They are truthful and honest.