"Will you do it?" the physician asked, intent on my face.
"Of course," I said. "I will go right now, before she retires."
A moment of digression here, aunera. I am not certain of the protocol, and lacking it I am forced to rely on bald words, so forgive me for them if they seem overly familiar. It has come to my attention that you feel I wrong you with my assumptions: please, forgive me. It is not my intention to make you feel so much like aliens... it is only that your ways are inexplicable to me, and you do seem more... agitated. Shame has commented that it is perhaps that our laws begin from different bases: ours addresses social wrongs, and physical violence is a rare matter, springing from that seed; it appears to us that you begin with physical violence, and only vaguely address social insult. Yours would be a strange and uneasy place for us to navigate, never knowing whether we committed any fault, and fearful always that we would learn it too late at your fists when at last we had broken one too many unspoken rules.
It is Shame's opinion that it must be thus, for you, because you are all so varied in custom and inclination. Forgive me again, if I tell you I find such a thing harrowing to contemplate. Like a garden where different plants are rooted, one behind the next without rhyme or reason, and without signs or labels, and each plant needing separate care and growing at a different rate... how you manage such diversity without inefficiency and loss, I cannot fathom.
But perhaps you do not, and that is the price you willingly pay for diversity. For us, the loss of a single person—their productivity, their happiness, their lives—is too great.
I have lost the thread of the story, however. Let us return to it.
With great reluctance, I left Seraeda to watch over Shame until Ajan returned, and took myself through the dimmed light of the halls toward the lady's study. Perhaps I would be fortunate, and she would not be available...
...but she was. And so I was ushered in, to find her still at her desk, reading something—accounts, perhaps? I could not read it upside down. Some sort of journal, though.
"Osulkedi," she said, sounding tired but not surprised. "Do sit, if it pleases you."
Neither sitting nor standing pleased me, as I did not want to be there. "I do not intend to trouble you long," I said, Abased, my head lowered.
"That is well, as I need no more trouble," the lady said. "Speak, then."
"Lady," I said. "Why are you sending the lord and observer away?"
Such a sigh. "What would you have me do, osulkedi? Their presence here is deeply disruptive. Even when the household is not speaking of it, the pall remains. Every footstep in this house holds the echo of the taint. It cannot be escaped. The whispers. The worries. I must remove the evidence from people's sight if I wish to begin to remove it from their minds."
That, aunera, is an aphorism among us: What is out of sight falls out of mind. It is in fact the basis of several contemplative exercises, mostly for the young and untrained: to begin to clear the mind by closing the eyes, or cleaning one's space. Indeed, our word for what you would call clutter, devre, refers specifically to both spiritual and physical clutter: there is no separating them. The one becomes the other.
So I could find no fault in that reasoning, save that... "Lady, without the lord and the observer at hand, there is no guarantee that Shame and I might uncover the source of the taint."
"You would put your curiosity above the well-being of the house and the fallen?" she asked. There was no accusation in her voice, only weariness.
"It is not curiosity, lady, forgive me," I said, struggling to convey the depth of my disagreement with her decision without failing the Abased mode that made voicing it possible. "If we do not find the source of the issue, the chances that it might recur..."
"Are stronger than if you do not, I know," the lady said. "But if I leave them here, osulkedi, the chances of it spreading also grow. You have seen the fathrikedi. And she is only the tip of that spear. The entire household is becoming disordered. Will you have me leave the disease here while you work on its cure?" She flattened her ears. "No, osulkedi. I will not see this entire house sickened. The mind-ill will not be harmed by their quarantine in facilities more capable of caring for them... and their absence will begin the work of healing this house."
"But we cannot do our work, lady, without them!" I said.
"Osulkedi," she said, her voice tensely formal, "you will have to find a way."
That was a clear enough dismissal, and really, what more was there for us to say to one another? We had made our positions known, and in the end, I had to bow to hers. And in truth, her reasons were sound. I could hardly complain, knowing the choice she'd made would probably injure her brother the more deeply: as an Ai-Naidari above the Wall of Birth must, she had put the welfare of those in her care above her own blood family. That is the duty of the Noble and the Regal. That it made my task nearly impossible was of no moment in compare to that duty.
There is a word for a situation in which duties conflict among Ai-Naidar: gaul, we say. And for the feelings that arise in response to that conflict: agathe. Agathe... the tearing grief and guilt and paralysis of knowing that the fulfillment of one duty causes us to fail in another. How deeply we strive to minimize these situations! The Books of Civilization exist in part to save us from that pain. Perhaps you have felt it also... I do not well understand your own concepts of duty and love, though I know you have them. Perhaps you then have felt agathe, that emotion that rises when you can make no right choice: when no matter what you do, someone is failed or wronged or hurt.
I skirted perilously close to agathe, leaving the lady's study. Perhaps then I could be forgiven for not fully seeing the implications of her decision. For if she could send away her own brother to save her household from taint, what would she do to the osulked investigating it?
"And now what?" the physician said upon my return. "How will you save Qenain?"
Seraeda flipped an ear toward me as she poured the tea and handed me a cup. I contemplated it morosely, wondering how the salvation of the house had come to rest entirely on my thin shoulders. "If the lady is right, the removal of the afflicted will begin the process without my intervention," I said.
"The lady is certainly right, at least in part," Seraeda said, sipping from her own cup. Over its brim, she said, "But she has sacrificed the lord to that aim, there is no doubt. He will not be returning to this house again."
Recognizing the truth in her words, all three of us remained silent. What the others pondered, I knew not. For my part, I wondered if I could have given up a family-member to taint in order to prevent the fall of a house. The lady began to assume heroic proportions in my mind.
"Well," the physician said grudgingly, rising. "I should go prepare for the journey tomorrow."
"And I should rest. The black flower is beginning to grow in my sleep," Seraeda said with a sigh.
"I will see you off in the morning," I said to the physician.
"I would like that," he answered. "I have enjoyed making your acquaintance, osulkedi."
We bowed to one another, hands folded in our robes.
Seraeda, watching, curled her tail in amusement and said, "So serious. As if you will never see one another again."
"We may not," the physician said, then eyed her. "Unless you know something we do not, Observer."
"Maybe," she said, with all the smugness that only the opposite sex can bring to bear. "Maybe not."
After they left I leaned against the closed door, feeling bereft... though of what, I could not say. I was relieved when Ajan entered and looked at me, one long gaze from feet to ears.
"You need to paint," he said, beginning to clear the dishes on the table.
"I do?" I said.
"You do," he said. "You're ruffled, and painting calms your mind. It is your meditation, the way practice is mine."
(That too is a truism among us, aunera. We say that your work must also provide your meditation, and if it does not soothe you to undertake some part of it, you are in the wrong work.)
"I have no idea what I would set down," I admitted.
"Then choose the first thing that comes to mind," Ajan said.
And that is how I came to paint agathe.
Yes, aunera, I know. It is a gruesome topic for a piece of art, and I hated that not only did I labor long over it, but that... yes, it calmed me. How can it be, that one might create something distressing, and yet find peace in that creation? I did not thank Ajan for the suggestion that led me to the page, for the revelation was as uncomfortable to me as the topic. I had not wanted to know that I could find satisfaction in the making of painful things.
But paint that painful thing I did, and chose to do so simply: I sheared the word at its center, one half of it higher than the other and the cut as sharp as a razor, painted, in fact along the edge of a metal rule. The word I colored in aching scarlet lake, evoking the translucence of blood, and carefully masked the letters so that I could smear orange into the red before it dried; orange, and the white one sees when blinded by a blow. And all this I darkened toward the cut in the center, so that the hole between the halves was implied: the oubliette of despair and tension into which we are condemned by gaul.
This painting consumed me for almost two hours, during which I kept one ear trained on the bedchamber and the susurrus of Shame's breath. What would he think of this one when he woke, I wondered? Most probably, he would bear it away as he had the first, to protect it from me. I was not comfortable with that revelation either: that in some ways, I too was a man of violence, and capable of a destruction motivated by passion. I merely needed the right impetus.
