Chapter 64
He makes a cup of tea.
He uses my cups but his tea, acquired from a new shop in Poulinio that I have not yet visited, whose owner prides herself on her exemplary palate and taste.
I sit and watch him pour the water, steep the leaves.
He is unfamiliar with the process. He has had people to do this for him for so long – too long.
He is perhaps one of the few people who is as old as I, but for the first time since I have known him, his age is beginning to show.
His hands shake as he pours the water; he gives a little huff as he settles down into his chair – my chair – by the heater.
I sip the tea he offers, and do not say thank you.
He does not drink his at all.
It is possible that he is poisoning me, I realise, but what would be the point?
Poison, stab, strangle, drown. There are not enough ways to dispose of my body in a timely enough manner, in a permanent enough manner, that I will not return. All he’d be doing is making me mad.
The realisation is almost exciting, and I sip a little more, trying out the taste of a thing that should be familiar yet feels so strange after so long from this place.
After a while, he sips his tea too, an acknowledgement perhaps of a test quietly passed, eyes never leaving me, hands pressed around the cup as if his fingers are cold.
“Enhancements getting a little loose round the edges?” I ask at last, tilting my chin towards him in the Mdo way.
“I was always told that ageing, when it happened, would be unpleasant. I just assumed I had more time.”
I clicked my tongue, and then, realising he wouldn’t understand, nodded. “I hear it happens rapidly, once the protocols stop.”
“In its way. Frailty comes quickly. Loss of bone density, muscle mass, telomere shortening and so on. But I have always been diligent in leading a healthy and active life, regardless of the work of my surgeons. I am in excellent physical condition. In other words… I could live many years as an old, crumbling man, waiting to die.”
“You’ve had access to plenty of airlocks. Missed opportunity, if you ask me.”
“I did contemplate it, but how utterly ignoble. It is not the way of the Shine to give up. It is not what our people do.”
I clicked my tongue again, sank a little deeper into my chair, while the night settled outside and the wind rattled the windows.
Theodosius mused, his eyes half turned to some distant place: “My own people sold me out. Very difficult to promote the right sort. You need people who are aggressive enough, fiery enough that they will betray you. It shows they have initiative. But you also need people weak enough, loyal enough that they will follow you to the edge of the world. Off the edge of the world. I have always been very good at choosing the right sort – strong Shine, but not too strong. But war, of course – or rather, I should say, defeat – brings out extreme qualities in even the most dour of natures. The most loyal will die for you even when their death is inane, foolish. The most ambitious will turn like that.” A snap of his fingers, less sharp, less ringing perhaps than he desired; he glanced a moment at his own digits as if betrayed.
“I saw both in the last days of the Shine.”
“Clearly you made it work.”
“I think that depends on your metrics. I survived. I escaped and I hid and I survived. That is of course a remarkable achievement – I am a remarkable person, you see. But it is only a thing the historians, my biographers will be amazed at. The reality of living it – of being on the run – is really rather tiring and prosaic.”
“You have not come to a glamorous place.”
“No. But the irony of it – the delicious irony of it. When I realised which system I’d landed in, the last of my resources running dry. Well. I had to really. All that intelligence I’d gathered on you, and you out there hunting me… delicious, I thought. Utterly delectable.”
He said “delicious” almost like an Adjumiri, a thing to be cherished that is so much more than taste.
“So here you are.”
“Here I am.”
“And what now? You are aware that you cannot kill me. Not in any meaningful, lasting way.”
“I know,” he mused. “Though I thought of numerous ways I could try. Keep you alive for days, weeks maybe, bleeding you dry, making my feelings known. But that trick of yours – the way you sometimes cease to be when attention is elsewhere, that fascinating phasing in and phasing out. Not quite here, not quite anywhere. If I had a team of people then I feel very confident we could torture you to death perpetually, but I do not. As you see. I do not. And to be honest, after all this time… I’m not sure I would derive as much satisfaction from it as I might hope. ”
I clicked again, didn’t bother to explain, rolled my shoulders back.
The cottage smelled of damp and dust – everything would need cleaning, resealing, putting right.
Months of work, maybe years, have to choose what to prioritise first, get the place comfortable enough to sleep in, water, power, heat; get the pantry dry and sealed, arrange food from the town, then work outwards perhaps, starting with the vegetable garden and moving towards the orchard one season at a time.
Once I had stable power, I could look at signing up to a few courses again, or maybe I could even offer to teach something, not that I felt especially qualified in anything significant, but who knows, after all this time…
Theodosius shifted in his chair, which creaked beneath him.
He was getting used, I felt, to having people ignore him, but it was not yet an experience he was comfortable with.
I tried to think if I had anything I could possibly say to him.
I did not.
Tried to think if there was anything I could ask.
Only one question leaped to mind, and it wasn’t even a question, just a statement of a distant memory I would be mildly satisfied to have confirmed. “A while ago – years ago now, before Cha-mdo – you interfaced with a Tryphon.”
His eyes, shifted in colour and unnaturally bright, watched me across the room. “I did.”
“Why?”
“To see what it was like, of course.”
“And how did you find it?”
“Unpleasant, naturally. Not an experience I would recommend.”
“The madness, the risk of death…”
“My exposure was short. I simply… wished to know.”
And just like that, my curiosity was gone.
I recognised its absence with a start, surprised to discover it so quickly faded.
There was nothing more I wanted from this man.
Nothing I wanted to say or do.
He was…
… boring.
A boring ex-tyrant. Petty in his ambitions. Tedious in his self-righteousness. Predictable even in his excessive flourishes of egotistical drama. A big man in a tiny room on an island in the sea.
I sighed, rose to my feet, suddenly aching, suddenly very human after all.
“I’ll call the authorities,” I said. “They’ll send someone to pick you up.”
“Don’t.”
“It’s the right thing to do.”
“I will shoot you and run away if you try,” he explained, sounding almost a little embarrassed. “I will not tolerate a show trial, you see. I will not have my throat cut by the Yeh’haim while I sleep.”
“I think it would be hard to argue that you deserve anything less.”
He shrugged.
It was such a strange gesture. A thing of the Shine, of the old world. Something my parents might have done, before the bombs fell. I watched his shoulders move, and there it was, a little whiff of fascination, my old, familiar friend, gone in an instant. But not anger.
“Are you going to kill me?” he asked.
“Is that what you want?”
“I expected as much.”
“But is it what you want? I think it is. I think it is the easy way out. And I suppose you reasoned that with me, death is fairly unavoidable. Come to the isle, leave your boat, wait. The sun will set, and in the dark… who knows what I’ll do?
No choice, really. No chance to change your mind, once I get myself in a certain kind of mood.
I’ll find you no matter what. I’ll be curious to taste your blood, no? ”
“I didn’t dwell too much on the details.”
“Of course you didn’t. Of course.”
I finished my tea. Drained it down. Stood up, walked to the counter, set my cup on the side.
Listened to the wind. Rain had come, was thickening to a familiar tappity-tap on the roof.
The cottage’s battery would need servicing too, repriming after all this time.
Messy job, if you didn’t do it right, but worth sorting before winter.
“How old are you?” I blurted, the question rising to my tongue despite myself.
“A hundred and something. Eighty? Eighty-two? Yourself?”
“Something like that. I saw you at Glastya Row, when you bombed the city. Everyone said you were destined for great things.”
“Well, they were right, weren’t they? I’m sorry, is this part of your process? Do you need to talk, or should we just jump to the part where I try and kill you and you finally kill me? How does this work?”
“It helps if you imagine I am a monster.”
“Aren’t you? Isn’t that what you are?”
“My name is Mawukana na-Vdnaze, and I am a very poor copy of myself,” I replied. “I’m going to bed, assuming the rodents didn’t get in and eat my mattress.”
“You’re… what?” He rose, indignation and a sloshing of cooling tea over the side of his mug. “You can’t do that!”
“I think you’ll find I can. Kill me while I sleep if you want.
It won’t make a difference, unless you watch my corpse.
Even then, eventually, you’ll have to sleep, and the moment your concentration lapses, I’ll be back.
There’s a lot to do on the island. A lot of tidying.
I don’t really care where you sleep. You can leave the light on, if it helps. ”
“Why would you do this? Why wouldn’t you—”
“It has been suggested,” I cut in, “that I have about me certain god-like qualities. The only god-like quality I can perceive is that I persist. I could persist for a very long time. And I am, it turns out, capable of understanding certain decisions. Cruel, cold decisions. Decisions about those who live and those who die. Those who are saved and those who are left behind. I left the person I loved on Adjumir, you see, when you sent your soldiers in to kill ter. I understand why the Slow let you invade Nitashi, why qe let the people of Cha-mdo burn. Qe balanced the equation, and it is the cruellest thing in the world, and it is also, in its way, born of love. A god-like kind of love. God-like. I think that is how people talked about you, no? Anyway, leaving aside for a moment what it is to love, and lose, and make those choices as to who will live and who will die, the other thing I feel I have learned is that there’s no harm in occasionally taking your time to think about things. ”
I sighed, shook my head, clicked one last time.
“So you see,” I concluded, “I’m going to bed.
And tomorrow I’m going to sort out the pantry and make an inventory of supplies, and work out what to do with you.
Perhaps I’ll kill you. But honestly, right now, the idea bores me.
Perhaps I’ll turn you over to the authorities.
I’ll probably do that. There’s a cliff you can throw yourself off if you really feel like it.
We’ll work it out in the morning. Take a little time to think. ”
“Is there anything,” he asked, words flopping like dropped bricks onto the floor at his feet, “I can do to induce you to change your mind?”
“Careful with that word – ‘induce’ – especially if you say it in Xiha. You should learn Adjumiri. They have five different ways of asking for help, and at least three ways of saying ‘mercy’. Mercy for one whose suffering should cease. Mercy for a foe; mercy that is a gift given without ever needing to be asked for.”
Another way too, a fourth definition on the tip of my tongue.
Trying to remember the sounds of it, shape it into some kind of meaning that would translate into Mdo-sa.
Mercy for yourself, when you have lived too long in shame.
Something of that nature, at least.
“Goodnight, Theodosius Rhode,” I said, and went to bed, leaving the last Executor of the Shine alone.