Peaceful Heart

Illuliolq sat cross-legged in the crater smoothed into the middle of his cabin’s floor. As soon as he closed his eyes, he felt the deafening voice of the world smash into his chest. This was normal. He distilled his breathing into a viscous bubble of calm around himself, gradually kneading flat the ripples of distraction until everything had settled into a vitreous flatness, the gleaming meniscus of a lake of molten sugar. Now, he could begin to heal.

A thorn was working its way into the silence of his healing. He tried to smudge out its burn, but it kept burrowing its way into the blankness of his thoughts. He forced himself to congeal back into consciousness and comb the present for disturbances; at once, he made out the muddy shadows of five elite militiamen running in their rhinoceros armour towards the door of his cabin. He marshalled himself: the impact would see him peppered with a buckshot of broken glass and dust, from all the jars of his medicinal secrets that they were about to demolish. This would not be the first raid of this nature, although it had been several years since the last one. He wondered what had been tweaked in the chaotic, organic gear chain of politics within the People’s Assembly that had seen his peculiar branch of medicine become outlawed once again. A rifle shot wrenched the lock of the door from its mountings.

He expected no niceties from the militiamen, and he got none. They slung a rough fabric sack over his head and threw him into the back of their vehicle before bouncing off over the sands. It was several minutes before he judged from the ambient silence that it was safe to ask a question. He could have wriggled free from the very approximately tied bonds around his wrists, but he decided it was easier to talk directly to their minds.

Is there any particular point in asking where you’re taking me this time?, he asked absently. The five men laughed as one and all instantly assumed he was speaking to them, before their sergeant whacked down a couple of shoulders and reasserted the chain of command.

‘You’re going up in the world today, magic man: High Seer M’aleh-t’u-Hzitl wants to see you.’

Illuliolq smirked invisibly under his fabric hood. The same M’aleh-t’u-Hzitl who is supposed to have been dead for at least six months? I’m not in the business of giving séances.

The sergeant punched the sack in the area where he judged the shaman’s mouth would be. ‘You’ll pay the High Seer respect. He’s still very much alive, and is giving you the chance to remain so as well, unless you’d prefer to continue your treasonous jokes about the Assembly’s supreme authority.’

The rest of the journey to the regional capital took a day and a half. Illuliolq fortified himself by conjuring a weightless trance in which he felt neither hunger, thirst nor tiredness; the soldiers sought solace in their coarse sausage, dense bread, yeasty cheese and beer that turned their route through the desert into a varicose zig-zag. They glared at the healer and the jealousy they exuded was toxic and salty.

***

The regional capital of Lla-Ndazeien crowned upwards through the crust of the sand like the hatching of an immense, mummified chick. It was wrapped in a perpetual sandstorm and its walls were slowly being ground down to powder by the grains of the desert whipped up by the storm. Once any visitor’s ears had tuned out the roar of the wind, it was curiously silent. Illuliolq lay on his back in the cruiser, grateful for the cloth over his face that protected him from the sand, and sketched out the route they were taking in his mind. He expected the vehicle to tilt backwards and for the engines to whine as they took the great helical path to the High Seer’s ancestral seat in the Canopy Chamber. He recalled the last time he had seen M’aleh-t’u-Hzitl on the national broadcast network, bellowing triumphantly about how the country’s victory was inevitable. He had smashed his ham-hock fists into the table as he spoke, his rhino’s chest heaving and puffing as he shouted.

He had to squash the urge to rip off the mask when they tilted downwards and dipped into the shadows of the mercantile district, its air a broth of burning spices and the roasted entrails of cattle. The militiamen had no need to lure him to join them by subterfuge when their main argument was the muzzle of a pistol; still, he could not understand their current route.

The vehicle grunted to a halt in front of an ornate but dusty double door recessed into the wall of the street. Two militiamen got out and identified themselves while the other three yanked Illuliolq to his feet and frog-marched him through the doors alongside them. As soon as the doors had closed, someone pulled off his hood and he could finally see his surroundings. They were in an expansive courtyard dotted with corkscrewed columns and fountains; the temperature was noticeably cooler, and virtually the only sound was the murmur of running water. In a city like Lla-Ndazeien, such an oasis could belong only to the almost royally wealthy. Illuliolq, mindful of the beauty to be wrung from each moment, breathed in the calm of the fountains as he was dragged up the great staircase to the snub-nosed cap of the ziggurat. The view on all four sides took in every last corner of the city. The platform was shaded by a vast, billowing tent, and at the far end was a raised platform bearing an enormous bed. Illuliolq felt the stab of a militiaman’s pistol in his kidney and stumbled forwards.

 They grew close enough after a few seconds’ walk that the occupant of the bed coalesced into view through the heatwave. Illuliolq squinted and scrunched his eyes tightly closed in disbelief. In the massive bed, propped up by two dozen pillows, sat High Seer M’aleh-t’u-Hzitl, greasy with sweat, a bleached bullfrog gasping for breath amidst the electrons of his retinue. He gestured desperately until one of his attendants handed him a metal speech trumpet.

‘The ghosts will not let me sleep.’ There was a heavy silence. His voice was lifeless and strained, an underwater memory from the past. ‘I have achieved so much towards bringing this country under one banner, one belief, but there were always those who resisted. I hear them now, Healer. Every time I close my eyes, they scream. I have tried all these meditation techniques, but -’ and he coughed greasily, ‘- there is too much life in my mind for it to be stilled. You need to heal me. You need to lead me to that place where the dead bear no more hatred for me. I want to be able to embrace the universe and say, “I’m free!”. Free from…well, you know.’ He waved his free hand dismissively.

Illuliolq unwittingly shrugged off the arms of the guards holding his elbows. He could almost feel the magma of his anger against this budget despot bubble to the surface and sear off his skin.

‘Why would I heal you?’, he spat.

The High Seer seemed to take an exceptionally deep breath before raising the speech trumpet to his mouth again. ‘Because, if you do not, I will have you skinned.’

‘Then you will have me skinned. You have learned nothing; you have thought on nothing. You have not earned peace.’

The bilious High Seer gestured to his attendants, who immediately scooped up Illuliolq and marched him down into the bowels of the complex, with only the edges of his toes touching the ground. They flung him into a minuscule cell with one barred window looking out into the desert silence and left. The Healer sat on the floor of his cell and strained all the events of his life through the sieve of his mind. If the final balance turned out to be positive, his efforts would have been worthwhile. He stood up to await the final verdict sink in, and stretched out his hand through the window into the night. The feeling of the moonlight pooling into his outstretched hand was cold and morbid. Once enough moonlight had collected in the palm of his hand, he withdrew back to his cell and painted the route on the ceiling between the village of his life and the town of his parents’ birth.

Meanwhile, several dozen storeys higher, High Seer M’aleh-t’u-Hzitl wrestled for breath in silence. He did not dare close his eyes again, for fear of being drowned under the wave of screaming mothers and confused children and bitter, disgusted grandparents who wept for their family’s cauterised future. They had sung songs, but he could no longer hear them. All he heard was the deafening drumroll of metal. He gestured for one of his attendants to approach.

***

The doors of Illuliolq’s cell burst open without fanfare a couple of minutes before midnight. The same militiamen who had arrested him stomped in and wrenched him up from his perfunctory cot. The sergeant grunted, ‘Change of plan, Your Majesty’ before dragging him off down the corridor and up several floors, before stopping within an inch of the actual doorstep of some luxury quarters. ‘It would appear that His Eminence attaches great importance to the fact that his honoured guest is well-rested. Bon appétit!’

With that, the sergeant kicked Illuliolq squarely in the small of the back and propelled him into what looked like ambassadorial quarters. The door was hydraulically mounted and equipped with a noise protection system, but the guards made an extra effort to close it as noisily as they could regardless. Illuliolq rose to his feet and took his bearings. Ten minutes ago, he had been in a cell smaller than the outbuilding in which he stored his garden tools. Now, he was in a suite several times larger than his actual home. It had multiple couches. His initial curiosity was flattened by the power of the aroma emanating from the main dining table in the residence. A full spread had been laid out: roasted meats, pickled vegetables, steamed grains and a plentiful bouquet of spices and seasonings. Several jugs at discrete intervals along the table were filled with a glittering red concoction that exuded luxury. Illuliolq closed his eyes, pierced into the most vulnerable pockets of his soul and decided that he had enough strength of will to enjoy such delicacies and not be swayed by the person who provided them. An hour later, he was sprawled over the broadest of the couches, replete and snoring.

***

Someone fired several shots into the door. Once Illuliolq had leapt off the couch in shock and struggled to his feet, ready to fight, the door opened to reveal a skeleton cohort of the High Seer’s elite guard. It was early enough that the winds had not yet begun to whip up the sand around the complex. The cohort’s lieutenant, a weather-dried man in tightly wound black robes, smiled wryly and made a knocking motion with his hand to indicate that no-one had been shooting. ‘His Eminence will see you now.’

Two minutes of grudging marching later, the group found itself on the same platform on which the events of the previous night had taken place. High Seer M’aleh-t’u-Hzitl was still throned in grandeur in his sick-bed, wrapped in a white silk gown and taking sporadic slugs from an elaborate tankard propped up against his pillows. His eyes bulged when he saw Illuliolq arrive.

‘I hope your accommodation was to your liking, Healer.’ The first few words of his breathless sentence melted into silence, and then he remembered to pick up the speech trumpet.

‘I’m not sure what you’re trying to achieve here, High Seer. Do you think you can play at “good cop, bad cop” all by yourself?’

This question triggered a semi-automatic burst of bronchitic laughter that almost saw the High Seer faint. As his jag of laughter gradually deflated, however, Illuliolq saw the spectres of distress and grief dent the High Seer’s face. He stood mute and prepared, attuned to whatever the official’s reactions might be. His first reward was a minute-long bout of coughing. When the illness loosened its grip on M’aleh-t’u-Hzitl, his voice suddenly became louder.

‘Nine years of education, Healer. Nine years of hearing that your type are witches, pagans, primitives and so on. Good for the bonfire with your superstitions and your conjuring, nothing but fodder for the rifles of the Society. But I know that my end is very near now; my body is abandoning me, and my mind – that one part of me I always thought was undying – is breaking apart. It is leaving me behind, and it does not care. I thought a lot about what you said to me last night, and then I understood: I cannot receive peace if there is not already peace in my heart. Will you cleanse me? It would raise you up to the greatest leader your people have ever known.’

Illuliolq swallowed a bitter smile. ‘If you have understood this much, High Seer, you must surely have understood how this will end. I can take hold of you, put my hands on you, and make sure that you cross from this world to the next with a weightless heart. But your sins will become mine, and I have no vessel into which to pour them.’

There was a long, heavy silence, rhythmed solely by the breaths of the desert wind.

The High Seer cleared his throat. ‘If there were a way of granting you…some kind of office, in gratitude for all you have done and may be about to do. I look back on the triumphant decades of my life and want nothing more than to scrub every trace of them from my skin. The sounds death makes are strange, you know? It is meant to be reassuring, but I feel as though every inch of the ground is crumbling under my feet. Anyway…do as you will. You are a free man and your people are free, whatever you decide. I am just…yes, I am happy, happy that you as a man of faith are with me as the eyelids of life close.’

Illuliolq strode forward unhindered towards the immense, pallid and shaking form of the Scythe of the Law, who had condemned tens of thousands to bleed out in front of their children in the interests of establishing order. He placed his hand on the dying man’s chest, felt the jolt of the tidal wave of anger and hatred pour into him, and murmured the words of the prayer that would see the High Seer cross over with a peaceful heart and the Healer shrivel and collapse onto the sand in a harmless vessel of petrified fury.