Deliberations: A Foreigner Short Story Read Free Page A

Shejidan, since their last man had become offensive and untrustworthy.
    He saw before him an opportunity resting primarily on the promises of allies who thought they could control him— old lords and ministers who might suspect he meant to wield the power they would pretend to give him— but confident he was too young to get the better of them.
    He meant to show them differently: to wield power firmly, and wield it with exactly what his grandmother had— an understanding of the real numbers of the world, unobfuscated by the self-important ‘counters and the kabiuteri— numbers about trade, and industry, numbers about the clans, and finance, numbers about clan lords who had always known they would someday have to decide in his favor or his grandmother’s—
    But over time, youth won. Youth ultimately won.
    What he had not made entirely evident to the world was his attention to his grandmother’s lessons. He was, in every minute detail, his grandmother’s student, and he did not forget. Believe the ‘counters prophecies and plan things by their numbers? He was no more superstitious than she was.
    Believe the promises of political allies? She had taught him history she had witnessed.
    Make black be white and day be night in the same speech, dependant on the hearer? She had taught him that art, too.
    “I shall make my claim tomorrow,” he said at last, “nadiin-ji. Tell my grandmother’s aishid so.”
    #
    “He says, aiji-ma,” Cenedi reported, “that he will announce for the aijinate tomorrow.”
    Interesting, Ilisidi thought. As early as tomorrow.
    And she smiled.
    Cenedi stood waiting, hands folded behind him, black-clad, all impassivity. Cenedi would do whatever she ordered. Cenedi would bend the Guild itself, if he had to. He waited, in formal stance, not looking at her. She said, still in her formal dress at this hour, sitting in the upright square lines of a chair that predated the War of the Landing— “We are not surprised.”
    He waited, still. And she said, “Taiben will support him.”
    “So will the north,” Cenedi said. “And the Marid, and the lesser lords of the coast.”
    It was a strange alliance that backed her grandson, an alliance of lords who would not occupy the same room in peace. It was the old issue, the tribal peoples, displaced from the island of Mospheira when the aishidi’tat had had to find somewhere to settle the humans. It was a two-hundred-year legacy of trouble, having moved two culturally distinct populations onto the mainland, settling them in areas where they could make a living from the sea and preserve their ancient ways. It had sounded wise. The aishidi’tat had found a solution to humans having dropped from the heavens— and it had only cost backward tribesmen a relocation to very rich fishing grounds. Tribal peoples could practice whatever they pleased in their new home. They were not part of the aishidi’tat. They would be represented by lords who were.
    She had insisted that the settlement had been a bad idea, and that the arrangement should be altered. She insisted on assimilation— a vain insistence, since it had never happened; but her insistence had stirred up the tribal peoples, the Edi and the Gan, who had no vote in the aijinate— and their vexation, carried to the extreme, had managed to vex the coastal lords, who had never wanted the tribal peoples settled next to them. And the fact that the Edi people had taken to wrecking shipping had simultaneously vexed not just the west coast, but the central south, the Marid, who had always wanted to slaughter the coastal lords and take the whole territory. Now Marid ships, too, were being wrecked by people deliberately tampering with warning buoys.
    Alienating all three of those districts at once was a rare accomplishment. Unifying them on a single point was unprecedented. It was a question whether she had done it— or her grandson had— but unified, yes, they were, and entirely upset with her.
    And the