The Embalmer's Apprentice by Lyra

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Chapter 67

Azruhâr's mind is quite occupied, thank you very much.

CW for non-graphic mentions of contagious sickness (bacterial gastroenteritis).

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Chapter 67

Eärendur son of Elendur of Andúnië to Azruhâr son of Narduhâr, the King's Embalmer at Umbar: greetings!
My treasured and faithful (and far too humble!) friend, I hope this letter finds you in the best of health and spirits, just as it has left me in good health. Summer has been kind to us, and business is recovering for my people, and thereby, slowly, for me. It does me good to be free of council duty – Nolo has formally taken over from me on Erukyermë Day - and to be able to look after my own province instead.
And yet, please allow me to congratulate you on your new appointment, and to encourage you to make the best of it, as indeed I read from your letter you fully intend to do. I wholly understand that you are less than happy about the position and the expectations that come with it. Nonetheless, I have to disagree with your assertion that you do not have the mind for it. The fact alone that you were willing to step up, and that you now intend to educate yourself, speak against that assumption. Do you know how many guildmasters – who actively desire to be councillors and pursued the path there for many years – see no need to study the law beyond the most superficial understanding? I assure you that it is not at all uncommon for ignorant men to serve on the council, and you at the very least do not intend to remain ignorant. Believe me when I say that this makes you more suitable than many others. I trust that in time you will grow into the role and perhaps even cherish it. It was not always a chore for me, either, but only became one recently, as you know better than most.
Therefore let me congratulate you and wish you the best of success. As for your fear that it is pointless, very little that we do will leave a lasting mark upon this world, yet in our little way we may nonetheless make a difference for ourselves and the people who live through our times. And you never know whether the experience will not serve you well in other places. If nothing else, it is a worthy enterprise to keep your mind occupied.

I put the letter down with a sigh. Lord Eärendur meant well, of course, but all his kind words couldn't mask the fact that I was well out of my depth and struggling to stay afloat once more. And for what purpose? There were no other places where I could use the experience, because I wasn't going anywhere. The Daytaler's Welfare Society had Amraphel to guide them, as well as the lawyers they could hire – not to mention that any advice I could have given, even if it were useful, would arrive there months to late. Master Târik had written to me with advice for the preservation of the ice, warning me against using chalk because it would react with the thaw water and give off warmth, which was the opposite that I needed. By the time his letter reached me, I had already found this out through trial and error.

Master Târik had also offered advice concerning Dârujan.
As for your illiterate apprentice, perhaps you are in a position to consider a change of his role. It is true that I would unfortunately have had to send you unto your judgement if you had not learned your letters, but as I understand it, you are at a little more liberty with your freedmen. Perhaps you can demote him from apprentice to assistant, in which case he may not have to perform the same duties as the others but can nonetheless continue to work in your service. Or you may find some specialist use for him in which he can remain a full apprentice.

Indeed, Dârujan still hadn't learned to recognise the letters. We had tried to come up with ways to make them 'speak to him', since that was how he described the problem – we had even given them silly little faces and silly little stories - this is Parma, she is with child and is wrapping her arms around her heavy belly; this is sssilmë, a coiled snake – but even so, there was too much confusion about the direction in which the letters had to point. I suppose too many of them looked too similar, even with the stories. In our frustration we had begun to let Dârujan illustrate the reports instead, leaving empty pages next to the writing so he could later draw the things and actions that were described. He was undeniably very good at that. For private purposes, I had asked him to draw the house and my household, so my family could at least have an idea what the people I told them about looked like. I had the impression that he was happy with that assignment, although I felt somewhat embarrassed about it. Occasionally, he also made portraits of the dead, which were very popular with their families. I wondered whether that could be the 'specialist use' that Master Târik had written about. There was no way of demoting him, of course, since technically none of my apprentices were apprentices in the first place until they had lasted three years. But I was determined to get them there – all of them, including Dârujan. Including Yorzim, even.

It must be said that Yorzim had in recent weeks grown rather more civil, and I cannot deny that his medical knowledge had proven very helpful indeed. For not long after the innocent (or, at any rate, not evidently guilty) prisoners had been released following that awkward council session, a wave of sickness had swept through the city. As Captain Thilior had said, they had caught some sort of disease – the shits, as he had prosaically called it – and once they returned to their neighbourhoods, they brought and spread it there. Thus even my satisfaction at having contributed to their release was poisoned and turned to regret. Not that I thought it had been wrong to overturn the law (or rather, return it to a less unjust course). But clearly, it wasn't so easy to set things right; and in a way, I felt to blame for the things that followed. The disease in most cases didn't kill people, merely tormenting them with several days of painful cramps and violent bowel movements before it exhausted itself. But in the heat of summer, it was a horrible thing. There was barely enough water for the sick people to drink as quickly as it left their bodies. The stench of their excretions hung in the air of the city like a poisonous haze, and it was impossible to wash it away. As if that weren't bad enough, while most of the sick eventually recovered, for those already weakened or malnourished it could be lethal.

My household out in the vinyards wasn't spared, either. Dârujan had been released before he had caught the sickness – I was convinced of this, because nobody at my household had fallen ill just after his return – but a few weeks later, one (or even several) of the others had brought it into my house after a visit to their families. For although those quarters of town in which the disease had already struck were quickly locked down and forbidden to enter except for the healers and the guard, the insidious sickness spread too quickly to be contained, breaking out seemingly without warning in previously unaffected quarters. When my servants and apprentices had come home in the evening, they had been seemingly healthy, but a few days later Rophâr had doubled over in pain and taken to the outhouse, and soon there were others equally afflicted. By and by, everybody was taken ill, with the exception of myself - by some stroke of luck I never caught it - and our work and day-to-day life ground to a complete halt. Yorzim knew some herbs and other treatments that could help, if not against the disease itself, then at least against the cruel cramps and the speed at which the bowels emptied themselves, and he worked tirelessly (except for the week when he himself was taken ill, and so weak that he could do nothing but sleep and cower in the outhouse and try to drink enough broth and tea to keep himself alive). I helped him as well as I could. Since I lacked the knowledge of a healer, I followed his commands, or cleaned up, or dug a second latrine, and I feared that he would grow all too used to his new role of master healer and mine of menial assistant. But in fact, he returned willingly into the role of apprentice once at last the illness released our last patients (Jômar and poor Lîdosh, who had suffered the worst and the longest, and whose recovery was generally considered a small miracle). With Yorzim, I doubted that gratitude had anything to do with it. Perhaps it was easier to show respect to a councillor than an embalmer – even if supposedly the Umbari saw nothing wrong with embalming.

In the wake of the disease, we had once again more bodies than we could safely treat at once, and we even had to turn people away. There was no question now of having to pay the bereaved, although initially I still offered money to the first families that came to us, at a time when I didn't yet know how many there were to follow. To my surprise, they refused the money (even though I am certain they could have used it as much as ever). They simply wanted me to preserve their dead – mostly the poor, the sickly, and the elderly among the better-offs – and even offered to pay, in kind or in labour or in money, as they would have paid their own embalmers. This, in turn, I refused; but the bodies, as far as we had the capacity for it, I took into my care. In a manner, it felt like my fault that they had died – though in all honesty, I had no idea how we could have prevented it, except by keeping these people imprisoned, which still would have been wrong.

At any rate, my mind was quite occupied enough. There was my day-to-day work, which aside from working and teaching required planning and assigning workloads and keeping track of things that had to be done at a certain time, of materials that had to be re-ordered, of money that had to be collected or paid – all things that I had never been trained in. There were the council meetings, regular and otherwise, during which I tried to keep my head down but hardly every succeeded. There were the visits to Lord Roitaheru's library after the council session and every other Valanya during which I copied out laws until my wrist cramped and my brain was reeling. I would have gone every Valanya, but Lord Laurilyo said he feared that I would turn into a joyless scholar ("even more than you already are"). His concern I could have ignored, but Master Selcheneb expressed the same worry in other words, so I couldn't entirely disregard that there might be some truth to it. They duly decided that I needed to be entertained and taken along on their excursions so I would not disappear entirely beneath my work and the law codes. The night market had been closed for many weeks and was only just returning to its old splendour, but Lord Laurilyo reasoned that it would be good for the city's businesses if we frequented the food stalls and taverns and bought trinkets or even the occasional useful thing. Or rather, the others bought. I had a little more money now than before, since I didn't have to bribe the Umbari anymore and was moreover receiving the stipend intended to compensate councillors for the loss of their free day, but it felt safer to save that up in case my family at home needed it, or in case Lord Roitaheru decided that I was spending too much money for my household.

We also rode to the secret beach again, and my friends decided that I should learn to properly swim (literally, this time, not just in a manner of speaking). Lord Roitaheru was very much in favour of swimming lessons, so even my bath time in the governor's palace was no longer entirely relaxing. He also insisted that archery was just the thing to strengthen my shoulders when I had hunched them over the books for too long, and he scheduled private archery lessons for me in the afternoons of council days. When I protested that I had barely time to breathe or to study the law, he told me to stay in the city for a second day. "You're just catching up with what you should have learned much younger. It's unfortunate that it's so much at once," he said, as though it was my fault somehow that I'd had to spend my youth learning to do every odd job that I could get, rather than studying the law and following athletic pursuits.

Once the Umbarian musicians and cooks were able to take up their trades again, I was invited to lavish parties, first to celebrate the occasion of Mistress Tôdaphel's birth day, and later Lord Laurilyo's. Back at home, we had never made much of a fuss about birth days – Master Târik and the others had generally hosted a nice dinner, and in recent years we had done the same for Amraphel, who unlike me knew the day she had been born on, but that was about it – with the exception of the actual day of birth of a baby. Here, it was an event as great as the turn of the year, to be observed with much feasting and music and dancing and, in the case of Lord Laurilyo, acrobats and jugglers and certain entertainments that I did not wish to partake in. I wasn't allowed to skip the dancing, however. Instead, my friends insisted on teaching me some of the courtly dances that also were in fashion at the council feasts at Lord Roitaheru's palace. Of course, Lord Herucalmo had some snide remarks for me as soon as I dared to join the dancing there, and I did not try it again.

In short, my time was well spoken for. Indeed, the only time I truly had to myself was when I was lying in bed, too tired to fall asleep. In my heart I understood that all these lessons, exhausting though they were, helped me to fit better into my strange new role in this strange country, in the company of people who thought I had a future and who knew nothing of my past. That past felt so far away now that sometimes I wasn't even certain that it had truly happened, or if it had, that it had been in the same lifetime. If not for the occasional letter from home or needling remark from Lord Herucalmo, who was happy to remind me that I was an exile and an impostor at every opportunity, I might almost have forgotten how much I had left behind. But such thoughts were only making my already overtaxed head spin. I suppose I had to be grateful that at least I did not have to play chess. I had briefly considered asking Sidi to teach me - he was playing against Yorzim or Urdad occasionally, and seemed quite proficient at it - but for the time being, we barely found enough time for my language lessons. For I was still trying to learn the language of Umbar, too.

These language lessons were now more useful than ever, as we were frequently visited by the families of our Umbari dead. They truly had completely different ideas about death. They were convinced that it was necessary to visit the deceased on occasion, whenever something significant had happened in the family (and also, as I learned later, on the anniversary of their death). These significant events could range from "There was a great sickness but we have survived it" to "Our Bushâr is finally getting married", from the birth of babies to the loss of livelihoods and everything in between. The first time such visitors stood at my gate it gave me quite a fright, I admit, as though I had misunderstood my assignment and been expected to bring them back from the dead. Sidi had to explain to me why these people wanted to speak to their deceased. But in time, I found it touching, how the dead continued to be part of their family and were kept up-to-date with how the living were doing. It was nice to understand some part of what they were talking about, and I had the impression that it pleased them when we exchanged some polite words in their own language, badly though I pronounced it and superficial though my knowledge was. I don't know if my apprentices were equally pleased; after all, they now had to fear that I would overhear and understand their private conversations, although in truth I could barely get the gist of what they said. Then again, they were no longer quite so wary and watchful around me, and occasionally, they even made jokes in my presence, in their own language and in mine. It wasn't the unguarded and sometimes naughty kind of joke you would make in the company of friends, but rather harmless quips that you wouldn't mind your parents hearing. Nonetheless, I felt that it was a step forward.
 

Darîm thought otherwise, when he visited again. During the past months, we had barely spoken, except for the greetings exchanged during council sessions; but now the time had come when he felt the need to check on my apprentices again. "I should have visited sooner," he said by way of apology, "but you understand, I am certain, what a busy summer it has been. And with you, I believe I do not have to look out that my people aren't mistreated. I have to be more worried that they are spoiled."
Although I wasn't answerable to him, I felt a pang of guilt. "They are not being spoiled," I said. "They work hard, and are rewarded for it. I'm not giving them anything they do not deserve."

He smiled in that way that always felt a little condescending. "You take a more generous view than many as to what people deserve, Lord Councillor," he said, and I felt another pang of guilt. 'Master Embalmer' had been bad enough, and now that I had grown used to it, I was given a new title that wasn't rightly mine.
"Maybe I am," I said defensively, "but as far as I know, that is my business and not yours."
Darîm – the Darîm, I reminded myself, because it was a title as well – spread his hands, no longer condescending. "Naturally. Naturally. I merely worry that they grow used to it, and will no longer know how to behave when they work for less generous masters. They will be in trouble then."

He had suggested similar things before, and then as now, I found it absurd. "I trust them to be smart enough to understand the difference between myself and other people."
"You are as generous with your trust as you are with your rewards," the Darîm replied smoothly. "But I am concerned about the consequences. Perhaps your servants are smarter than I dare to hope, but others will observe and think, perhaps, that this is how they may behave towards all of your people."
I very much doubted that. I forced myself to smile politely. "I think you can give your people a little more credit," I said, and because that reminded me of the debts everybody was so worried about and the complaints about his closefistedness I had overheard from my household and our visitors, I added, somewhat reproachfully, "in both senses."

He tensed immediately. Then there was an awkward pause during which he studied me with almost painful intensity. I had to fight down the instinct to backpaddle, apologise, explain myself. There was nothing to apologise for, I told myself. I did disagree with the way in which he spoke of his people, and wasn't entirely convinced that his treatment of them was fair, either. His people they might be, and he might speak for them, but clearly, he considered himself apart from and above them. He did not feel that he belonged to them; rather, they belonged to him.

"Lord Councillor," the Darîm said eventually, with a winning smile. "Unfortunately I do not have the privilege of looking out only for a select few people whom I know well. I am responsible for all of my people, and while I certainly desire to help them all, in reality that is not possible. I cannot afford to give credit to everybody – in both senses. In the one sense, I do not have money enough for so many people, and in the other sense, I would be risking my own life. If you misplace your trust and one of my people misuses it, then the blame will fall with them. But if I misplace my trust, then the blame will fall with me. If therefore you feel that I am less generous than you would be, I ask you to remember that I must protect my people as well as myself."

That was reasonable, and I nearly felt bad about having brought the matter up in the first place. But then I thought of Lîdosh.
"There is a difference," I heard myself say, "between being unable to give someone money, or actively preventing someone from getting help."
The smile faltered. "I do not know what you are referring to, my lord."
I felt myself getting angry. Maybe he really didn't know what I meant, I told myself, struggling for patience. "I am referring to the case of one of my apprentices. Or rather, his daughter, who was left alone to a difficult birth because neither the midwife nor the neighbours dared to help her."
A frown. "And how could I have helped with that?"
"As I understood it, they didn't want to help her because they thought they'd be blamed if the child came to harm. Because the child was one of my people. You told them that, didn't you."
"Ah. Of course I did. You know, of course, that the punishment for harming one of your people is very strict for one of my people. It is considered high treason in any case."
"Maybe the child wouldn't have been harmed if there had been help from the beginning."
"The midwife thought otherwise," the Darîm said, the corners of his mouth stretching in a pained grimace. "I spoke to her in advance. When she pronounced her concerns, I felt it was safer to warn her against the risk."
"At the risk of my apprentice's daughter being killed or maimed."
He was looking me straight in the eye now. "I am afraid that before the law – your people's law, my lord – that was the lesser evil."
"And that had nothing to do with the fact that you wanted to punish Yorzim?"
The Darîm tilted his head. "What for, my lord?"
"You were angry because my apprentices had thought you had – you had placed them with me for them to be sacrificed."

"Oh!" His face contorted in disgust. "I had forgotten about that. But you already punished them for that, did you not. What reason did I have to add to it? No, my lord. I was acting to keep my people safe. As I always do."
I wasn't certain that I could believe him, but I had no good reason to suspect him of lying, either, except that Yorzim had made it sound otherwise. Of course, Yorzim was an angry man, and angry people may lash out with or without good reason. But all I had heard from the neighbours - and the midwife, too - supported his view.
"A young woman of your people was nearly killed."
"So I heard," the Darîm said soberly. "The child did not live, either. The mother and the midwife could both have lost their lives over that, you understand, if they had been accused of harming a child of your people. You could decide to put her life above the child's with impunity. They did not have that liberty, and neither do I."
I bit my lip. I would have liked to protest that that wasn't how the law was meant – and I still was convinced of that – but after my experiences with the makers and keepers of the law, I had to concede that someone might well have interpreted it like that.

Perhaps sensing that I was upset, the Darîm now spoke flatteringly once more. "Your concern for my people is very touching, my lord, and I believe we could be good allies. I am grateful for your generosity. I simply have to ask that you are willing to trust my knowledge of my people."
"I'm not unwilling," I said grudgingly, because I couldn't deny that he had lived among them all his life and I had barely been here a year. "But sometimes I get the impression that you are harsher than necessary to them."
"Understandable. No doubt they often feel treated harsher than necessary, too. But it is not always possible to be kind. Not everybody deserves it."
"Not everybody deserves unkindness, either."
"That is very true, but sometimes it is hard to tell who does and who doesn't, isn't it? It can help to be familiar with people. No doubt you know your own people better than I know them, too." A pause. "It was very interesting to learn that there was trouble in the Yôzayân as well, in the year of the drought. I was not aware of that before it came up a few weeks ago. I would indeed have thought it impossible."

I felt my throat go dry. If he hadn't previously been aware of it, that had probably been on purpose – to protect the myth of the invincible Land of Gift, no doubt. I wondered whether I would at some point be blamed for making him aware of it, although as far as I recalled, it had been Lord Herucalmo who had talked about it. After a steadying breath, I pointed out, "We would not have demanded tribute at such a time if we hadn't needed it ourselves."
He studied me for so long that I was once more feeling thoroughly uncomfortable. At long last, he bowed his head. "As I said, Lord Councillor. You know your people better than I do. Please trust me to know mine."
I was in doubt. I clearly did not know my people nearly as well as I should. Indeed, sometimes I felt like I did not know them at all. The only people I felt confident about were people like myself - whether they were of Yôzayân or Umbar.

The more I look at the law, the less I understand it, I wrote to Lord Eärendur when at last I found time to answer his letter. I despair of my ignorance and wish I had never begun these studies. There is so much of it. And many of the things I read seem to go directly against what I know from my own experience. Some things that I would think are a matter of course are in fact completely different, or written in such a complicated way that it is hard to know what the law-makers were thinking. And some laws have been changed forwards and backwards and I do not understand why they were like that in the first place. How am I ever supposed to make sense of it?

That last part was what Amraphel would have called a rhetorical question. I didn't expect an answer. Indeed, I suspected that the answer was that I wasn't supposed to make sense of it, just learn it by rote. Even that was ultimately missing the point that I probably wasn't meant to learn any of it. Who was I to sit in council or in judgement? Ultimately, my confusion was probably the best proof that I was altogether unsuitable – whatever Lord Eärendur thought.