Post by Seek on Jun 19, 2016 23:11:44 GMT 10
Title: To Build A Home
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1159 words
Summary (and any Warnings): Things change. Things stay the same. Fesgao returns from putting down a slave uprising.
Notes: Not so pleased with this one. I felt it doesn't really give Fesgao much of a personality, but I figured it was worth putting it up if only to see if people got the same read as I did. I'm divided on how naive the raka conspiracy really are: naive people don't survive very long in the world order of Rittevon!Copper Isles. At the same time, a conversation with Ankhiale reminded me that there seem to be two different forces at work (potentially) in the Isles: the raka (or at least, those with the conspiracy) want to be free. But there are also plantation uprisings, and those don't just seem to be against the Rittevons but against the particular institution of Rittevon-endorsed slavery. So what happens when slavery remains under Dove? (Even with the caveat that the Haiming Dynasty also practised slavery.)
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There are rebellions on top of rebellions on top of uprisings, and Fesgao is dog-tired when he returns to the empty house in the renamed Dodeka Square. He isn’t used to the servants or the estate, the slaves or the valet—isn’t, really, used to being anything more than a loyal servant of the Temaida (and later the Balitangs), and a fighter.
But he’s a general now—appointed by Queen Dovasary herself—and the Queen’s sword, and somehow that makes him a noble: he, a son of the jungles with the roar of the ocean off the Lombyn coastline in his blood.
Ardiyanti has left for Lombyn; he recognises this from the suwara flower, neatly folded into his clean bedsheets. Theirs is a marriage no less loving for the long silences. A raka servant goes where he must, and he has never tried to tie Ardiyanti down. She chafes at the cities; in particular, Rajmuat. Trapping is her life: he knows that. He has never tried to take it from her, has never resented her for it.
They do not communicate through letters. Letters are risky and educated raka are dangerous, particularly where paranoid luarin nobles or Topabaw’s spies are concerned. They know the old Kyprish script, though: characters carefully shaped (long ago on stone tablets, now hidden subtly on the corners of new reed paper) but silence is now a matter of habit, shaped by a decade of concealment.
He shucks his boots off, and still represses the feeling of…of oddness, of something not being quite right as he hands Wira his cloak. It’s strange to adjust to the presence of a valet: a silent, competent man, with the features of a Tanair man, taking care of his affairs, managing things so that Fesgao has hot water (an unthinkable luxury, at times) for his bath and his clothes are neatly pressed and his armour cleaned and repaired.
Even stranger, Fesgao muses, than the thought that they’d end up working hand-in-hand with the luarin to place a twice-royal queen of prophecy onto the throne. Even stranger, perhaps, than the thought that they would be aided by crows, or that the god himself would choose a cunning luarin girl for the task of bringing down the Rittevons.
It is a strange world, that they live in. Fesgao wonders how one gets used to it. If one ever really does. The Copper Isles under Queen Dovasary is an experiment, among other things: you cannot brush away decades erased by the luarin, nor long memories of raka rule. But if anyone told him he’d be sharing a bottle of arak with Taybur Sibigat a few years ago, before everything began, Fesgao would’ve thought they were jungle-touched.
The sword, Fesgao carefully unbuckles and lays out on the dresser. Sometimes, you miss things on the march. He notices a trace of crusted blood where hilt ends and blade begins, and sighs—it’ll have to be cleaned, more thoroughly now. The heavy, tapered blade is common to traditional raka weapons, meant for clearing brush and branches just as much as cleaving flesh and bone. The hilt, however, is more unusual: wire-wrapped in a style more popular among the luarin. It was a gift, however: one Fesgao saw no good way of turning down.
“She needs you,” Winnamine had said, pressing the sheathed blade into Fesgao’s hands with an air of finality. He could not find the words. There were no words for this; not for the gift of a sword. Relationships ended that way, he thought. You never gave someone a sword, not unless… “Gods all bless you, Fesgao. You’ve served us loyally, and I can’t deny you this.”
“I never said anything,” he manages at last, feeling as if he’s talking to Aly, as if he’s missed half the conversation. The Duchess simply glances at him, an eyebrow raised ironically.
“You think this is the end of it, Fesgao?” she asks, simply. “Your work has only begun. You’ve won my daughter a throne. Now, the difficult task is to build a kingdom—one far better than the one we lived in. There will be rebellions, uprisings. She needs someone she can trust, even if she won’t say it to your face. She needs you. The Balitangs don’t need another guardsman. But Dove needs a general, someone who has killed for her. Someone who can kill again.”
He leaves that conversation, too, feeling as if he’s underestimated the woman, as if he’s mistaken something about the woman he’s served for years. People had a way of doing that, of surprising you. Sometimes, you just had to go with the flow of the tides.
The Duchess was right, of course. There were rebellions and uprisings, in numbers. Luarin nobles who spoke of restoring the Rittevon line, but who saw a throne wide open for the taking. Sometimes, raka nobles fought with them. That surprised him. He wonders if it surprises Aly or Dove, or even Taybur. For all Fesgao is a strategist, the idea that raka nobles might find more in common with luarin nobles than the restoration of the Haiming line is…deeply puzzling.
There are uprisings as well, and he is no less surprised by them. Fesgao reaches for his kit and begins the slow task of removing caked blood from his sword. Raka blood, he thinks, if only because this last uprising was on a slave plantation on Malubesang. So much changes: so much remains the same. As if a dam has broken, the slaves are rebelling, setting plantations on fire.
“This doesn’t make sense,” he’d said, once, to Taybur, after Dove issued her orders. “We freed them.”
Then, Taybur’d shrugged. “Did you?” he asked, laconic.
On Malubesang, they send back the clothes worn by Dove’s diplomat. Fesgao looks at the bundle of clothing he holds, and shakes his head, slowly. It is a message all raka understand, and one that slips by his second in command. Raharjo is a good man: clever in the way of battles and logistics and command, for a luarin. Things like this, he does not understand. Cannot possibly understand. “They’ve given him to the jungle,” Fesgao says, quietly.
Understanding dawns on Raharjo’s face. He knows this, at least: you do not survive the jungle naked. Nowhere in the Isles is this possible.
“We fight, then?”
“We fight,” Fesgao says, even though he is tired, even though he doesn’t understand. (A part of him does: the prophecy says the one who is promised will create a home for all, and the slaves have seen no home for themselves in Dove’s new country.) The slaves fight, of course. They fight hard, with the fire of men and women who know that there is no going back, with no expectation of anything in the way of mercy. There are no prisoners. Not this time.
The fighting, Fesgao thinks, never ends. He scrubs his sword clean all the same.