Couriers are swift, and have their own lanes on roads so that they might travel unimpeded. Even so, a message to the capital and back... we might be here several days. Several days in this unforgiving atmosphere under this too-bright sun and on this heavy soil; several days in this oppressive melancholy, with the lord drooping like one of his own flowers, parched, and all the rest of my companions distrait. Truly, Qenain’s maien had taken us all.
The thought would have made me angry a few days previously. On this evening, all I could do was look at the barren sitting room and feel acutely my loneliness, and the emptiness of the coming hours.
So I did the only thing I could, that I knew how to do.
You wonder, perhaps, that I could paint. In truth, it hurt. It hurt my wrists and the fine little bones in my fingertips, and the joints where they bent, holding the brush. It hurt my eyes, which blurred with wetness that I refused to notice, but which I knew the secret name of anyway. It hurt my heart, which did not want to speak through the ink.
But the hand, the eye, and the heart are yoked in an artist. When one is invoked, the others follow, unless something is desperately, fatally wrong. Since it was inevitable, I surrendered; I took up a brush, and with that committed to the examination of a distressed spirit. By the end of it, I had salted the paper with my tears, and the brush had worked the dilution into the art.
So many words I could have chosen. Grief. Regret. Oppression. Taint, again, now that I understood it better.
But I painted shul.
Change. Personal change. The kind of change that a paisathi creates, the breaking, shattering, world-upending sort, that can mean everything to a single person and yet not make any sense to anyone else. A small thing. An ending and beginning thing, inside the self. Shul. Shul. The sound of breaking pots. And I would like to say that I made a great thing of it, that I drew some beautiful masterwork. And indeed I planned it so... but what I ended up doing was... writing the word. My own handwriting, without ornament, without color. Black on cream parchment, spattered with water that fell in beads from my eyes as I bent close.
Shul. I put my head down on the table when I was done, and knew nothing more but the smell of the ink and the salt... and my own confusion at feeling so undone. So completely undone.
The next awareness I had was of Kor’s hand on my shoulder, and very swiftly after that, the ache of my body; I was kneeling on the ground before the low table where I’d been at work, a pose I had not felt while in my artist's fugue but that I now felt in every groaning joint. I lifted my head; he had sat on the divan behind me and was staring past me at the page.
“So,” he said. “You understand.”
“No,” I said. “No, I do not. And Kor… it frightens me.”
“It does me as well,” he said, and drew me into his arms. I tucked my head against his chest and felt his hand on my hair, and there we abided for some time.
When I spoke, it was for the regrettable sort of words which often break such silences. “If I don’t rise now, I don’t think I’ll be able to move for cramping.”
“Up, up,” he said. “I’ll put in a bath for you.”
“Let me come with you,” I said. “I don’t want to be alone.”
In the bath I watched him at work; the confidence of his movements remained unimpeded by the world-weight, but he was more deliberate than usual. He felt it too, I thought, if not as dearly as I did. The sight of his grace soothed my spirit all the same, just as it was pleasing when he helped me undress; it felt good to be taken care of. I went into the bath and there I reposed, eyes closed, until the steam loosened some of the muscles in my legs and arms and chest.
It was the latter release that freed me enough to speak. “Tell me. Why you knew they would not be animals.”
“It is in the books, if you look for it,” Kor said, sitting cross-legged at the edge of the bath.
“You cannot be serious,” I said, startled. But he was, so I said, “Where?”
“In the histories describing our first experiences with aunera,” Kor said. At my expression, he said, “I had cause to look, for one of my Corrections was interrupted by one. Afterwards, I did the research.” He smiles, lopsided. “You will find that is often my answer to many things.”
“I cannot fault a man for seeking the wisdom of books,” I said, thinking of my own long association with the librarian of the capital. Then, looking up at him again. “But what aren’t you saying, Kor?”
He sighed and smiled, and it was a very tired smile. “The lord’s male lover… he was the aunerai I saw that day. I suppose it makes sense, for the number of aunera who would be allowed ingress are few and one associated so closely with a nanaukedi lord would be a likely candidate. But it was… a surprise.”
“Did he recognize you, do you think?” I said, astonished.
“I don’t know,” Kor said. “How could I? Does he know enough of us to know that I am unusually colored?” He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter, Farren. What does matter is if you read the books you will learn we did not give the aunera their designations in order to diminish them to the status of animals. We did it to make clear that they stand outside the hierarchy of Kherishdar, that the hierarchy cannot apply to them.”
“But—" And then I stopped.
“You understand,” Kor said, no doubt watching my thoughts course over my face. “We cannot assign them a caste in order to speak politely of them in our language, because that would make them a place within our society. We cannot even remand them to the unspoken caste, because even a slave, historically, was an Ai-Naidari with a value within the system: a negative value, perhaps, but you would know as well as I do that the negative space creates a shape."
"Yes," I murmured, lost in the image, and the... well, the alienness of the discussion.
"The only way to exclude them, then," Kor finished, "is to speak of them as un-people.”
“But why would we make that choice?” I said, ears flattening. “Why not just create an alien caste, to which only aliens can belong, and then make rules to govern how they are treated within Kherishdar?”
“That is a very good question,” Kor said, quiet. “To which I have only one answer.” I looked up at him and he replied, “ ‘We’ did not make that choice, Farren. Thirukedi did.”
I paused, taken aback. Then said, “What?”
“It’s very clear in the histories,” Kor said. “After we first met the aunera. Thirukedi told us how we were to speak of them. The decision was handed down directly from Him.”
I recognized the look on his face. He was waiting for me to pry more out of him. I was unfortunately too intent on having the answers to take him to task for it. “But?”
“But there are no copies remaining of the proclamation,” Kor said, watching me. “The histories speak of the notice, but do not record the exact wording. They mention it, that is all.”
I let the steam rising off the water distract me while I considered the implications I could understand... and the ones I could only imagine. At last, I said, “It is perilous to guess at the mind of Civilization.”
“Yes?” he said, and I did not detect the usual hint of humor that accompanied such questions.
“But it almost seems as if… He knows something about the aunera we don’t,” I said slowly. “And that, perhaps…in either case…He did not want an irrevocable decision.”
“It is perilous to guess at the mind of Civilization,” Kor said. “But the servants become like the master. We are His own… perhaps we might dare to guess, now and then, at His thoughts.”
