Meta-Conversations: A Younger Kherishdar

            “I’d like to meet the Measure,” I tell Haraa.

            “Because I’m likely to know her?”

           I eye her, head tilted. “Other than Shame, you have made the most study of that part of Ai-Naidari history. Out of anyone I know personally.”

           Haraa waves a hand. “As your people say: ‘Fair.’ I’ll see what I can do.”

           That takes care of that, then. But thinking of the Measure, it occurs to me to ask: “Shame found another Exception, didn’t he? Kor, I mean.”

           “He did, yes.”

           “How strange that must have been,” I murmur. “I guess she was younger than either of you. But then, by the time Kef shows up, she’s older than him. That must be even weirder, given Shame and the Exception have a particular relationship.”

           “A specific one,” Haraa allows, and that odd tone in her voice….

           “You’re not… jealous?” I ask, brows lifting.

           Haraa, who was off in her own world, is startled back to ours by this question, and she laughs. “Mother, no. She was a felt-furred girl, datyani. Some twenty-odd years to his fifty. If the Exception wasn’t so difficult to slot into any expected role, I think he might have felt himself her father. I certainly thought of her as an errant girl. She grew up well, though; I liked her better than her predecessor. Less rude, more whimsical, dreamy, and unpredictable.”

           “Less rude,” I repeat.

           “The Exception can’t help being rude. It’s part of her ishas.”

           “As my people say… fair.” I grin at her, and she grins back. I continue, “She was Kef’s Exception, then.”

           “Until he found the new one.”

           “Because Shame always does,” I say and halt, arrested. “Wait, Kef found a new one? Do they die off so fast? Oh no. They die off that fast, don’t they. The way Shame used to, before Qevellen.”

           “Not all Shames died young,” Haraa demurs.

           “But the most successful, most ardent ones did.” I think of the historical Measure. “They must have died young too. Like Ereseya.”

           “It is a difficult thing, to set oneself in opposition to all society.” This is the kind of sententious utterance that would have been at home in Kor’s mouth—one becomes like one’s family—so it is a relief when Haraa resumes sounding like herself. “But if I were to guess, and it is only a guess, then I would say that like the most successful Shames, the most successful Measures and Exceptions burn themselves out quickly.”

           I don’t love this knowledge, but it’s useful. I trade, then, by saying, “We were talking, the others and I, and we guessed that prior to the first servant of Shame, Correction was a thing enacted by nature, or the gods, or the laws of the universe, and that creating Shame-the-person was an attempt to embody that universal principle.”

           “And guide it to more merciful or productive ends?” Haraa’s ears flick sideways, as if listening to a conversation. She probably is having one with Kor in her head, and I don’t doubt she’ll seek him after I’m gone. “That seems in keeping with Thirukedi’s aims.”

           “Maybe that’s why He was open to the idea when Tsevet advanced it to Him.”

           “You’ll have to ask Him,” Haraa said, laughing. “I’m sure I don’t know.”

           “Historical Kherishdar,” I murmur. “It’s going to be so different.”

           “Do you worry you are unequal to the task, datyani?”

           “Not in the sense you’re suggesting. I know my own power. I just worry about not doing justice to the differences. It’s… colorful and wild and intense and unjust in ways people have come not to expect of Kherishdar.” I think of Haraa dancing in the public places in her costume. “Like the Trysts, but all the time. Passion, and violence. Duels and assassinations. The memory of war. Actual slaves in the slave caste.”

           “Your people have wondered how we evolved from there to here,” Haraa says. “Perhaps this will illuminate some of that mystery.”

           “I doubt that,” I say. “Because I still don’t know. But history’s like that, I think. There aren’t always reasons for why things happen. Not neat, tidy, and linear ones.”

           “Perhaps that is why you’re writing this story now,” Haraa says. “Because you say and think things like this.”

           I eye her. “And if I tell you that you’ve been around Shame too long….”

           “I will say, yes… yes, I have. And it is as delicious as it was when we first made Aishal, and I am as smug about it.”

           I burst out laughing. “Shall I say ‘there is still a fathrikedi in you’ or would that be rude, given that the past is the past, and no Ai-Naidari would say they contain all the changed selves they’ve evolved past?”

           “It would be aunerai of you, at least.”

           “So definitely rude,” I say, amused.

           “In the way that the Exception is. As part of her ishas. Unavoidably.”

           “Ah, but I am no Ai-Naidari to have an ishas….”

           “No, but you are an artist, and an artist never quite fits into her society, does she.” Haraa taps my nose, surprising me out of my surprise. “Attend, datyani. I give you some words. Starting with rus.” Silliness, nonsense, but the reason she’s teaching it to me is because the singular form, rusi can be used for ‘harmless prank’, and her booping me on the nose after teasing me counts. “And as we are discussing maidens, then ‘young’ is yin. Are there any other requests?”

           “Bitter,” I say.

           “The flavor is gun, and the noun form is the irregular agun. The emotion, though, is chaish. Bitterness is chaisheth. Old word, that one.” She smiles crookedly. “Appropriate for a woman summoning the Measure.”

           “And for the Measure herself?”

           “That, you will have to ask her yourself. I am nowhere so brave.” And with another of those mocking-teasing looks, she’s gone, and I settle with pen to write the new words, and to wait.