Songs of Experience

8/18/357

Had the loveliest birthday picnic with Marisa the other day. I brought along plenty of candles and took her out to that valley to the east for a midnight dinner and to watch the sun rise. Such moments of peace and comfort are about the only thing that keeps me sane.

As it is, knowing I’d have to be my usual cheerful, playful self for it allowed me to banish some of the guilt that’s been haunting me about the scene in the Queen’s Inn. Not all, but enough that I’ve been sleeping again.

I still hope that Her Holiness will see fit to give me a proper penance for the matter, though. I know that I had that problem with both Romana and Caria; when I would confess matters that troubled me, they seemed reluctant to assign penances of sufficient weight. Perhaps it was because I’d already done penance for the mattrs I confessed, but I think that if guilt still troubles a man, it’s a sign his penance was insufficient and he is required to suffer further for proper expiation.

Speaking of expiation, I have been thinking constantly of my Almshouse. The Tenebrae wasn’t entirely wrong; I have been unable to do what I wanted to do with it. It does a fraction of the good it could properly do, were I able to actually invest more time in it directly.

Perhaps it’s time I search again for an overseer, but every time I’ve tried it’s ended in complete failure. I am at my wit’s end on the matter. Why can I not find a commoner who is sincerely concerned with the state of the Southside and not a thief, heretic or mage? To be fair, I can hardly find a member of the gentry or a noble either who fits those criteria. People are content to ignore that massive pit of human suffering that devours all those unlucky enough to fall into its teeth.

Maybe it’s the sheer scope of the problem. I could put my entire fortune into the Southside and it wouldn’t solve it; the Crown could probably pour its entire coffers into the Southside and it wouldn’t solve it. The problem is in minds and hears conditioned to desperation over histories of cruel years. You can fill people’s bellies, put roofs over their heads and clothes on their back, but that isn’t going to change their pasts. Once you’ve learned morality is a luxury, why should you ever go back to it?

It goes back to penance, too. I don’t think it’s only a fault in me, this feeling that sin clings like tar long after penance has been done. I think that people find it difficult to forget, to forgive the things that they’ve done. If you are damned already, why try to be a good person? The hope that you could, perhaps, be forgiven one day is far more painful than the knowledge that you are not. Better to accept a life without morality, because admitting morality means facing the brutality of what you’ve done.

Or so I gather it goes. Me… the brutality stares me in the face every day. I go to the graveyard and walk among the stones, thinking of those whose death I had a hand in. Maebel Maldrek, Ramil Barrows, Sigrid Latago, Julea Sanguine, Setina Rethvin, Benedictus ab Piuso, Leto Bharani, the scar where Remi leBou lay, Cedany ab Clarke… to some extent I am implicated in every last one of those deaths, and countless more buried without name or marker.

And then there is the grave I dug for the men and women I killed myself. Ended with my own hands, buried with my own hands.

No. It’s not for me, pretending I didn’t do anything wrong. But I can understand the temptation. This work becomes far more palatable if you eschew morality, or reduce it down to black and white. The victims and the villains; the sheep and the wolves.

I fight the urge to reduce it all to that every time I think about it. The dead deserve better.

I keep going over the situation again and again, in my head. The damnedest part of it is… I don’t see what I could have done differently.

Couldn’t let the Tenebrae think that he could threaten me with the lives of innocent people. It’s the ransom example, but so much more raw and immediate. If I will give in to those kind of tactics, then he’s won – completely and irrevocably, he’s won. He could ask anything of me and have it granted.

And he doesn’t intend to only ask things I can agree with. He wants my Almshouse. The whole bloody point of my Almshouse is to provide a springboard for those who want to escape Southside without being caught up in the cycle of crime that exacerbates their poverty. You start seeing the Brotherhood as the only ones who care, the only way out, when in reality they just use you as foot soldiers and get you caught in deeper. If I gave him my Almshouse… it would mean quashing that dream. I know there are people who have already benefited from it to save up enough to get away, move Northside, find a job with our placement services.

I can’t give that up.

He wasn’t going to kill her. I knew that as soon as I stepped one step closer, just as he threatened, and he didn’t. And I suspected it as soon as I came in. I’ve known a lot of villains in my time, and one eventually begins to recognize which sort you’re dealing with. This Tenebrae is the sort who believes himself to be a hero. The mage murders, the distribution of the silver to Southside… many of them pretend to be a savior for the poor, but this one actually believes it. So she was safe. Saviors don’t murder innocents.

Those are the facts that I – and I alone, in that bar – had to work with. Knowing them, I had to convince him that I didn’t care, so completely and thoroughly that he wouldn’t try again. I had to minimize the importance of her life to a trifle, while getting close enough to disarm him safely at the right moment.

I had to.

Or is that what I tell myself?

I tried to apologize to her. She accepted the words, but the sentiments slid off her like water on stone. I don’t think she understands that I did what I had to do, or if she does, she doesn’t care; it’s not sufficient and I should have done anything else. I’m not forgiven. But it’s utterly misunderstanding the point of an apology to say that I -should- be, that I ought to be. Being sorry gives you no right to demand forgiveness; especially when you’re sorry, but you’d do the same thing all over again. So why should I expect that she’d forgive me? I earned the ill regard fair and square.

This is the price you pay, Ari. Don’t let yourself forget that. This is the price you pay for being the one who’s willing to do anything for the greater good. You pay in rumors, and you pay in hatred. You pay in eyes that smoulder with resentment and bows that you coerce with the threat of the whip. You pay in being the cold bastard who does arithmetic with lives.

I threw away honor long ago as the self-satisfied luxury of men who quail at doing what needs to be done. So I shouldn’t falter at the cost.

…at least I can comfort myself by saying I’m not Uvarov. He wouldn’t even have been bluffing, and she’d be dead. The Tenebrae probably would have escaped all the same, and he would have called it a ‘victory’ because he blooded the man, whatever the cost. I shudder to think of what he said he’d do, in a pitying way as if it were a shame I was not hard enough to do it myself.

I may be willing to do what’s required for the greater good, but that doesn’t mean I’ve lost all perspective about what the greater good is. It’s not sacrificing the people I do all these things to protect.