This is not at all the first impression she’d hoped to make on Consul Palmar.
Selah doesn’t blame Mima, who told her this morning there was no response to the invitation she sent down to Belamar. It’s a great honor, of course, that the Imperium’s supreme leader of Roma Sargassa would want to pay homage to the late Historian. And she’s seen him before, in passing, but this is different. Now he’s her direct superior. A little warning would have been nice, if only so he didn’t have to witness her downing two glasses of wine in a row right before being introduced. Over his shoulder, Mima looks like she’s about five seconds from downing her own glass in utter despair.
In Selah’s defense, Arran disappeared ages ago and she’s been stuck listening to a pair of ancient scholars drone on for over an hour. Something about insurgents in Lhasa protesting the removal of cult religious texts for safekeeping at the Archives. Theo Arlot had caught her eye from across the room at one point, mimed hanging herself in a display so fragging ostentatious Selah had barely kept herself from losing it right then and there. But even that hadn’t been enough to escape.
“I suppose they have a sentimental point,” Selah tells Palmar, after she finishes coughing long enough to thank him for coming, and decides it’s worth at least trying to claw back some degree of dignity. “But actual, practicing Buddhists are far and few between. Most of the locals observe All-Mater Terra as much as the rest of us, so I do think the preservation of some obscure texts takes precedence over the hurt feelings of a few fringe cultists—and it’ll benefit them in the long run, you know, in the event of another calamity. My father would agree on that.”
“Indeed he would. I respected your father greatly,” Cato Palmar says, positively grandfatherly with his enormous white mustache. “I certainly didn’t agree with some of his more radical ideas, but he was a man of vision and scope.”
“Radical?” She bites down the urge to laugh. It’s not the word she would have used to describe him.
“Oh, yes,” he says. “I remember when he first took office, all sorts of lofty ideas. Greater protections for the guilds. A forty-hour work week. Even argued for the abolition of vernae once, right at the start. Historians have no political sway, of course, but he certainly talked my ear off. Treaties and testimonies arriving at my office every other day, well, you can imagine.”
She can’t imagine, actually. She hadn’t known that. But it makes a certain kind of sense. Mima hadn’t married Dad yet, back when her grandmother passed and he took on the mantle of Historian. Arran couldn’t have been more than a year old. But that still doesn’t add up to what she’s always known about her father. Alexander Kleios was a servant of the Imperium, and instilled in his children from a young age what that means.
We live for the many, not ourselves. We are cogs in the great machine. If nothing else, he made that clear enough the day she lost Tair.
Yet he must have found something in those books and treaties and testimonies that gave him pause. Something that made sense to him beyond the personal, because he’d never been a man to act on the whim of emotion. Or maybe he had just been young, preoccupied by the same haunting thoughts that have kept Selah herself awake on countless nights over the last five years, memories of a girl with deep-set eyes, fireworks on the beach refracting off pale brown skin.
“The whim of a young idealist,” the Consul adds, dismissive.
“Is it, though?” She blurts it out before she can think about it, and immediately turns red.
“Selah, don’t be rude,” Mima snaps, but the Consul raises his hand almost lazily to cut her off.
“Oh, no, Senator Kleios. I’m delighted to get to know the . . . young woman I’ll be working with.” He turns back to her, smile not quite reaching his eyes, and motions for her to continue.
She ignores the warning in Mima’s glance, ignores that Consul Palmar had clearly been about to call her a girl. Because he’s right, after all, they will be working together, pride of place giving the Historian a direct line to the Consul on advice for implementing new discoveries or warnings when his office threatens to ignore the lessons of ages past—and Selah has no intention of curbing her opinions or intelligence for the sake of an old man’s ego. Leave rhetoric to the politicians. This is a chance to show him that she isn’t to be underestimated, twenty-two years old or no.
“I just mean,” she says, “that there’s no harm in taking a fresh look at reality where vernae are concerned. The natural arc of social reform. After all, it’s been over two hundred years since the gladiator games were abolished.”
“Perhaps,” Palmar says, “but we’re not speaking about mindless butchery, are we? The gladiator games slaked a thirst for blood in the citizenry that served precisely no one, and I daresay we’re all the better for their absence. Vernae, however, fulfill their promise to the collective betterment of us all. They have good, comfortable lives, with education and training to become productive citizens and members of the imperial workforce at adulthood. Moreover, the existence of the vernae class severely diminishes that of the working poor.”
These are classic talking points, the tired buzzwords and arguments that Selah’s heard so many times throughout her life, and she knows better, now. She’s known better for five long and painful years.
“But the working poor still exist,” she insists. “Client plebeians still experience social stigma and, laws aside, vernae aren’t all treated well by their familias. Or even able to become citizens when by all rights they should.” That last point comes out sounding more like a bark, and Mima says her name again in that way of hers, because she knows this has ventured into personal territory. Selah takes a breath, willing herself calm again. “I just mean . . . it stands to reason that servae exist. If you commit a crime or fall into debt, that was your choice. Or a clear indication, at least, that you aren’t to be trusted to pull your own weight. But why extend that to their children? Why treat them as criminals?”
“An interesting question,” the Consul says, looking the furthest thing from interested and distinctly less grandfatherly now. “Where would you suggest these children go, then, after we take them from their parents? We could foster them, perhaps? With good familias who might house and feed and educate them as their own until they come of age? Unless I’m very much mistaken, we already do that.”
Her skin burns hot, as she realizes she’s fallen right into the trap he laid for her. But she’s never been one to go down easily.
“That’s fair,” she says, scrambling, though it’s really, really not. The scuffle at the canal comes to her mind then, the chained row of onlookers to Arran’s fight who will now spend the rest of their lives in service for just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. “But maybe we should look to alternate judicial punishment. Maybe service isn’t the answer to every petty crime, and a tier system—”
“Did you know that, for a time, in the Ante Quietam, criminals would be sent to penal colonies or long-term prisons?”
Of course she knows that. She’s the Imperial fragging Historian. She has to resist the urge to roll her eyes.
“And how did that turn out in the end?”
She hesitates. It’s not that she doesn’t know the answer to this, too—she very much does, and that’s what causes her to draw up short. She doesn’t want to play into Palmar’s point. “It was an enormous strain on the annual budget,” she finally admits.
“Precisely. The operation of a single prison required considerable—no, prohibitive—funding.”
“Even though it produced free labor,” she can’t help but snipe.
“Even though it produced free labor,” Palmar agrees. “I hope you trust me when I say that alternate justice is not a novel idea.”
“Then why not stop looking at the symptoms, and look to the root of the problem instead?” Selah finds herself asking the question before she’s really thought it through. They’re here, aren’t they? They’re talking about it already. Maybe the Consul will back her. Maybe he can become the ally she needs against Thane, if only she can make him see that it’s an answer to a long-unsolved systemic question. “Education. If we can give greater opportunities to—”
“This has been debated in the Senate time and time again for eight hundred years. Just ask your mother. Without our judicial system in place, our economy would all but collapse. The balance is delicate. Upending all we have built is not the answer. It simply wouldn’t work.”
“I do hope you’ll pay me a visit at Belamar sometime, young lady,” he continues, a firm end to the conversation in his voice, and something about the prim satisfaction of his thin, pursed lips making Selah’s skin crawl. “I’ll be in residence for at least a few more weeks, I should think. And this has been an all-too-enlightening conversation.”