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Mercy, High Ones. Not justice, please, not justice. We would all be fools to pray for justice.
We have what we can hold, dear boy, and never let them see you flinch or falter.”
If this was to be anything like training young soldiers, young horses, or young hawks, the key was to take the initiative from the first moment, and keep it thereafter. He could be as hollow as a drum, so long as he was as loud.
Should he list himself as Item One in that bridal inventory? He pictured the entry: Sec’t’y-tutor, One ea. Gift from Grandmama. Aged thirty-five. Badly damaged in shipping. Value…?
The joys of command—well, you know. You taught them to me. One part glory to ten parts shoveling manure.”
“We lords, at our oars, then? We sweating, pissing, swearing, grunting gentlemen? I think not, Palli. On the galleys we were not lords or men. We were men or animals, and which proved which had no relation I ever saw to birth or blood. The greatest soul I ever met there had been a tanner, and I would kiss his feet right now with joy to learn he yet lived. We slaves, we lords, we fools, we men and women, we mortals, we toys of the gods—all the same thing, Palli. They are all the same to me now.”
The gods’ most savage curses come upon us as answers to our own prayers, you know. Prayer is a dangerous business. I think it should be outlawed.
“Any man can be kind when he is comfortable. I’d always thought kindness a trivial virtue, therefore. But when we were hungry, thirsty, sick, frightened, with our deaths shouting at us, in the heart of horror, you were still as unfailingly courteous as a gentleman at his ease before his own hearth.”
“Events may be horrible or inescapable. Men have always a choice—if not whether, then how, they may endure.”
“It was very foolish of you, to attack that vile Roknari galley-man.” “Yes.” “And yet, I think, given the same circumstances, you would do it again.” “Knowing what I know now…it would be harder. But I would hope…I would pray, Royse, that the gods would still lend me such foolishness in my need.” “What is this astonishing foolishness, that shines brighter than all my father’s gold?
His outflung hands traced over the threads of his rug, passed loop by loop through some patient woman’s hands. Or maybe she hadn’t been patient. Maybe she’d been tired, or irritated, or distracted, or hungry, or angry. Maybe she had been dying. But her hands had kept moving, all the same.
Prayer, he suspected as he hoisted himself up and turned for the door, was putting one foot in front of the other. Moving all the same.
When the souls rise up in glory, yours shall not be shunned nor sundered, but shall be the prize of the gods’ gardens. Even your darkness shall be treasured then, and all your pain made holy.”
