Kanmi shrugged and examined his fingernails. “I don’t really have anything to discuss,” he said. This wasn’t entirely true. It was just that he’d already made the decisions he needed to make, and while informing Bastet of them was probably good manners, it wasn’t something he would consider a discussion. But perhaps it would be easier with an outsider present. It might at least keep things civil.
“Oh, come now, that’s not good,” Ankha told him, shaking her head. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed that every time we all manage to sit down to talk, you nod your head and listen, but don’t contribute much. This is as much your time as Bastet’s. You’re paying for my time, as well. And I can’t very well advise one of you, and not both of you.”
Kanmi raised his eyes, and met the priestess’, steadfastly. “This entire set of meetings is a waste of time and coin,” he said, calmly. He didn’t shout. Didn’t snap.
“And what makes you say that? You don’t think counseling is an effective means of fixing what’s gone wrong in a relationship?”
Kanmi shrugged. “Oh, I have no doubt that it can be. But counseling and advice are only effective when the people involved tell you what the problem really is. But every time I sit here and listen, I hear nothing but lies.”
Bastet bristled. “In what fashion have I lied?” she demanded. “Name me an untruth that I’ve spoken!”
Kanmi sighed. “All right. A misrepresentation, then, if not a lie.” He studied his nails again. “Bastet has said, over and over again, that the biggest problem in our marriage is my job. However, other than the first year of our marriage, in which we were both still in school? I’ve held this job, or others, exactly like it. Actually, the first four years, I was on the Mongolian border, in the heart of the disputed territory north of the Caspian Sea, and only came home intermittently on leave once or twice a year. Thus, I’m actually home more now, than I was at the time.” Kanmi raised his head, but didn’t look at Bastet. “The problem isn’t my job. The problem is, Bastet woke up one morning and realized she didn’t like who I was.”
The priestess opened her mouth to respond, and Bastet spluttered, “That’s not true, Kanmi!”
“No? All this came to a head in Judea when you suddenly realized that I’m not a tech, but a bodyguard, sorcerer, investigator, and more.” Kanmi still didn’t look at Bastet. It hurt too much. He focused on the priestess instead, and went on in that self-same, cool, clinical manner, “Working on the issue of my job won’t make the other issue go away. My changing my job won’t change who I am, other than to make me angry at having to give up something I’m damned good at, and where people are relying on me to be there.”
“I need you to be there, too!” Bastet snapped out.
Kanmi looked at the priestess. “You said this was my time to talk. Is it?”
“It is, actually. Bastet, could you hold those questions until later? I promise, you’ll have a chance to respond.” The priestess’ tone was unruffled, but Kanmi could read her eyes. She wasn’t quite sure what to say to him. He’d deviated from the script. He was a little too self-aware for typical counseling techniques to work on him. He’d already asked himself all the questions she could throw at him. And already found the answers, unpalatable though they were.
Kanmi nodded to her, however, in thanks. It did help to have her there to prevent his thoughts from being derailed. “There are only a few ways out of the current situation that I can see. I can change who I am to please her, except that never works. Changing who you are destroys the balance of power, and inevitably destroys your own self-respect, let alone the respect that should exist between both people.” He looked into the mid-distance. “She can change her opinion of me, which she’s manifestly done before. Or, we can separate.” He looked at Bastet directly for the first time. “In any event, it would be helpful if she’d stop wasting everyone’s time and our money by actually discussing the real issue, instead of the imaginary one. The job has nothing to do with it.”
“The job has everything to do with it! You’re not here for us. You’re not here for the boys, and it’s bad for them.”
Kanmi sighed. “Ground we’ve already covered, Bastet. You have forty-hour shifts at the hospital. You come home in the middle of the night, go to sleep, and you might see Himi for five minutes before the pedagogue takes him to school.”
“I will not apologize for my job—”
“Then why should I?” Kanmi’s riposte was fast, and the closest he’d come to raising his voice the entire time.
Bastet’s mouth snapped shut, and she looked at Ankha in mute appeal. The priestess, however, simply raised her eyebrows and straightened her curling wig with a fingertip. “That is a fair question,” she acknowledged. “Do you have an answer for it, Bastet?”
Kanmi watched his wife fume. Clearly, this was not going as she’d expected. The priestess was supposed to be her ally and supporter, present to browbeat Kanmi into going along with her. Ankha, however, was doing her job as an arbiter fairly well. “I save lives in my job,” Bastet finally grumbled.
“You know what? So do I,” Kanmi replied, still in that same calm tone. “Again, ground we’ve gone over before. The biggest difference between you and me, Bastet, is that you’re using the children to try to blackmail me into doing what you want, whereas I have always accepted you for who you are. But I’m not going to go along with you on this, and I don’t give in to blackmail and hostage-taking.” His eyes narrowed.
“That’s a little dramatic,” Ankha warned.
“Perhaps, but it’s only a matter of degree,” Kanmi said, folding his arms over his chest.
The priestess nodded, and turned to Bastet. “Do you have anything you’d like to add? I know you’ve told me, but you may not have told your husband, that you worry for him every time he leaves. That you’d prefer it if he took a safer job.” Ankha raised her eyebrows. “Does it help, Kanmi, to know that some of this is born out of love for you?”
Kanmi shrugged. If it was born out of love, it didn’t feel like it. He’d always liked being married. He hadn’t felt ‘shackled’ by it, as so many men he’d served with had complained about in his younger days. He had little use for men who went out drinking with friends, rather than going home at the end of their day’s work. He’d have a drink when on the road, certainly, but when he was home . . . he was home. No matter that, of late, it felt like thorns had sprouted from every surface in the house, and every thorn was fashioned of Bastet’s anger. He tried to express some of this, and knew he’d failed when Bastet snapped out, “Even when you’re here, you’re not really here.”
“I play with the boys every night that I’m home. I help cook, which is a good deal more than my own father ever did.” Kanmi realized how annoyed he was solely by the fact that he was involuntarily doing his deep-breathing exercises, the ones he used to clear his mind for spell-casting in combat. “I’m not entirely sure how much more here I can be.’
“Yes, and every night, after the boys are in bed, you go to your desk and you write letters or study your tomes, or whatever else.” Bastet folded her own arms now, mimicking Kanmi’s own posture. “Would you like to tell me who Erida is?”
She said it in a tone that suggested she fully expected, and would be vindicated, by a guilty reaction on his part. Kanmi, for his part, simply looked at her steadily for a moment. “I was wondering when you were going to bring that up. You see, my correspondence is largely classified. As such, my desk is locked. And warded. Anyone who opens it, say, with a hairpin? Sets off an alarm. When you opened it last week to go through my papers, I had to have the entire damned place dusted for fingerprints, and when the people at the office determined that the only prints in the place were yours, mine, the boys’, and the pedagogue’s, and the pedagogue had had the day off, and you’d been home that day . . .” Kanmi spread his hands, “I had to talk several Praetorians out of bringing you up on charges of tampering with classified materials, which carries the potential penalty of forced se
rvitude, in Rome.” Slavery still existed in many forms, inside of Rome and out of it. It kept the prison-population down.
The priestess raised a hand to her face, and gently rubbed at the inner corners of her eyes, pinching the bridge of her nose. “And the name Erida?” she prompted, even as Bastet glared at Kanmi, her chin lifted.
“Lady Erida Lelayn is a Chaldean noblewoman and a noted member of the Magi. If Bastet had read much of the letters, she would surely have noticed that we talk about magic almost exclusively.”
“She said she was wounded to the quick, her heart was sore, and that she still ached for the touch of a loving hand in the night,” Bastet snapped out.
Kanmi laughed. He couldn’t help it. Bastet had made her disinterest in carnal relations clear for over eighteen months now. For her to be jealous was amusing, but he knew this wasn’t it. It was wounded pride . . . and a search for leverage. For a way in which he was in the wrong, unequivocally. “Yes. You see, she had to kill her last lover. It’s put her off relationships, but she sometimes finds it useful to talk to someone whom she knows wouldn’t willingly reveal her words to anyone else. Someone who’s trustworthy.” Kanmi stared Bastet down, and she looked away, clearly confused and torn. He looked back at the priestess of Isis now. “So, at the present time, I have a wife whom I cannot trust with classified documents in the house.” His letters to Erida weren’t classified, as such, but everything on the Source Initiative was, and a good deal of what Erida talked about, in regards to her former lover, Abgar, was decidedly . . . sensitive. “She refuses to admit that the real issue is that she simply doesn’t love me anymore, but thinks that reshaping me, like a potter molds clay, will make the difference. It won’t, and I won’t be reshaped. So yes. These sessions are a waste of everyone’s time. But I thank you for yours, priestess.” He looked at Bastet. It hurt, because he could still see the girl she’d been when he’d married her. “Bastet, I’ve put a lot of thought into this over the past months. We got married in Hellas because . . . we were both foreigners there. Both out of place, and lonely, and something about it worked. But I’m not who I was then, and neither are you. I took out a lease on a different apartment this morning.” He paused. “Tomorrow, I’ll hire a new pedagogue for the boys, they’ll come to stay with me, and I’ll remove my name from your apartment’s lease.”
Each word was hard to say, as if he were nailing down the lid of a sarcophagus, and he watched Bastet’s eyes go wide in shock and horror. “No! You can’t take the boys away!”
“I think you’ll find that that is not true,” Kanmi told her, as gently as he could. “This is Rome. Roman law is quite specific. The father has primary custody rights to all offspring in divorces and separations. They do not acknowledge that the mother has any more natural bond with the children than the father does. This is our primary residence, and I will be pursuing divorce proceedings here.”
Bastet was now, clearly, back on her heels. “But they’re my children.”
“And they’re mine, too. But you’re the one trying to use them as leverage.” Kanmi kept his eyes locked on the pathetic potted palm in the corner of the room, and did his best not to set it on fire with his rage. Deep, even breaths. Spreading calm to every part of his body.
“They’ll be better off with me. With you, they’ll just be with a pedagogue all the time, while you’re off jaunting around the world!”
“That will be for the divorce lawyers and the judge to argue, but I believe we have covered, extensively, that their situation will not noticeably change.” Kanmi’s eyes were narrow. “But that being said? A pedagogue can travel. You can’t. If it comes right down to it? I can have them travel with me and ensure their education along the way. They might not get a Roman public school education, but they’ll see the world, and a good pedagogue will ensure that they don’t miss a single lesson.” Kanmi’s eyes glittered. “You see, you’ve given me a lot of time to think about this situation, and come to decisions. And I realized that the conclusions were all inevitable, and that waiting longer to make the decisions was worse than simply taking steps.”
He stood, and bowed his head to the priestess of Isis. “I’m going to head back to the apartment now. Thank you for the use of your office while we discussed these matters. I’ll pack up my books and clothing tonight, and have the boys moved out by noon.”
“No!” Bastet’s voice was a wail, and the pain there almost made his will break. Almost. “Please, Kanmi, husband, no. Don’t take my whole life away at once.”
At the door, Kanmi turned and looked back at her, his face bleak. “And what have you been trying to do to me?” he asked her, bluntly. “You wanted to make me choose. The job, or the boys and you. I’ve chosen. The job and the boys. But not you.”
Roman courts required a couple to be separated for a year before divorce could be filed, in cases that did not involve adultery or infertility. As such, Kanmi spent the next year, as war in the east heated up, traveling, more often than not, with his sons and a new pedagogue in tow. He’d deliberately picked an older woman, in her sixties, to quell any suspicions on anyone’s part that adultery was going on . . . and he hadn’t quite trusted the other pedagogue. She had, after all, allowed Himi to get hurt. And because Bastet had hired her, Kanmi reckoned that the woman’s loyalty would be to his wife, not to the boys.
Bastet pleaded, through the courts, for visitation rights to her sons, and Kanmi acceded. He didn’t see a way out of this situation that didn’t end in divorce, but he wasn’t going to be cruel; he wanted his sons to be able to see their mother, whom they loved, as often as possible. He even agreed to continue to meet with her and the priestess of Isis, but he truly did not see how the differences could be reconciled. Bastet was apologetic in those meetings, pleaded that she could change . . . and Kanmi inevitably, was the one who shook his head. “And in a year, we’ll be back in the same position again,” he told her, simply. “The answer isn’t for one or the other of us to change. We’ve already changed. No one ever changes back. That’s regression, not progression.”
However, when Bastet packed the boys up and tried to flee to Egypt, a month shy of their court date, in September of 1958, all bets for Kanmi were off. He pulled every string the Praetorians had, and Bastet and the boys were caught in Sicily, boarding a ship for Egypt, one that had smuggling connections. “And what did you think was going to happen?” Kanmi asked her, grimly, when the gardia had her in an interrogation room. “Did you think that the smugglers would help you disappear in Egypt under new names? Or did you think that, perhaps, the boys might be sold as slaves? That you might be sold as one, too?”
Bastet gave him a searingly angry glance. “I had to do something. They are my sons.”
Magic crackled in the air around Kanmi, just for a moment, and he stared at his wife, and realized in that moment, that he had no idea who she was anymore. She’d been someone he’d loved, mostly out of reflex, for years. And there had been lingering sentiment. Sympathy. Unwillingness to give her pain, that had kept him from separating from her, for the many months of counseling and arguing and discussing. And now . . . he no longer cared. Oh, he cared for who she had been. He probably always would. He cared that his sons loved her. But for whom she was now? Not a whit.
It was freeing. “I allowed you extensive visitation rights,” Kanmi said, quietly. “I was going to continue to do precisely that in the divorce settlement. Now, however, all such considerations are off the table. Not to mention the fact that kidnapping is a serious crime. I’m also a Praetorian. That gives it a little more weight. I doubt you’ll be sentenced to slavery. You’re a doctor, and the courts give that kind of education a certain amount of consideration. But banishment? Oh, that’s certainly an option.” He stared at her for a long moment, shaking his head. “You’re supposed to be smarter than this. You obviously thought it all out. You had an escape plan. Not a good one, but still, you had it all planned. Sink yourself in Egypt, where there are thousands of Nubians, but you wouldn’t
be back in Nubia itself, and wouldn’t have to deal with your family.”
He shook his head, and the sick feeling at the pit of his stomach came back. Again, not for what was now, but for what once had been. “Bastet . . . I gave you a way out of that life. I ensured you’d never have to go back to Nubia. My mother cared for Himi and Bodi when you were in your apprenticeship years. My family might not have been perfect, but my mother’s help is what let you become a doctor. How did I lose your love?”
Tears fell from her eyes, leaving shining trails along the perfection of her dark skin, but she shook her head, and didn’t answer.
Kanmi walked out of the room, closing the door behind him, and exchanged a blank look with the gardia officer on the other side. Maybe, months ago, I shouldn’t have ripped the bandage off all at once in the office of the priestess of Isis. Maybe I should have been more gradual. Except, we’d been at this for . . . what, eighteen, nineteen months? Did I create this problem, by my own actions? By some lack of action? Except, what could I have done differently? Should I just have rolled over and let her have her way in everything? And yet, what’s to say that, if I let her have custody of the boys to begin with, she wouldn’t have done exactly this, anyway? She clearly believes that there’s something . . . fundamentally wrong with me. And that was the part Kanmi didn’t understand at all.
Once he’d collected himself, Kanmi went, in turn, to collect his sons, who were confused and frightened, and wanted to know why their mother had promised them a trip to see the Pyramids, why they’d been taken away from their pedagogue and their routine, why the gardia had swooped down on them at the docks in Sicily, why they were at the gardia station, and what was going to happen to Mama now. I don’t have any good answers, Kanmi thought, numbly, and just held the boys, tightly. How do I explain betrayal this deep to children so young?
The Valkyrie (The Saga of Edda-Earth Book 1) Page 85