Minori let out the breath she’d been holding. It was so hard to do so much of this by phone, or letter. “Numbers are wonderfully comforting things,” she said, softly. “"If we input this amount of energy into a system, and there's this much resistance or friction in the system, then we can expect that amount of force or energy output. There are always losses. That's the nature of the universe. It's in determining which losses are the acceptable ones that is where engineers and sorcerers become artists.”
“And this is precisely why I love talking to you.” Kanmi’s voice warmed.
“The thing is . . . when I’m with you, there don’t seem to be any losses. Oh, there’s friction in the system—”
“I’m rather fond of the friction, myself—”
Minori choked. It wasn’t the words themselves. It was the way he said them. “What I mean,” she said, clinging to her dignity, “is that when I’m with you, there aren’t any losses. There are just . . . gains. And so . . . I really would rather just be with you,” she admitted. “I have no objections to the arrangement. And we’re both quiet people. We share most of our interests.” It was all true, too. It wasn’t just that she felt safe with him, though he’d certainly worked hard to make sure she did. It was the overall feeling of wholeness. Of not having to compromise on dozens of issues, because they were simply so eminently comfortable with one another.
“Yes. I see long evenings in the living room, with both of us reading. I don’t see either of us inviting over friends and irritating the shit out of each other by talking loudly all night about things that the other one finds inconsequential. Loud drinking parties? We’re both pretty high on the list of people who should never, ever get drunk.” A pause, and a vocal inflection that sounded like a shrug. “Besides, you’ve met the people I’m closest to in the world. I work with them.”
“And I like them,” Minori said, quietly. “They’re good people. There are people in the world who are talkers, and there are people who are doers . . . and you’re all doers.”
Kanmi snorted. “Yes. There’s a big difference between the waitress at the corner taverna, who’s ‘only waiting tables until she’s discovered as an actress,’ and people who’ve actually worked to make themselves who they want to be.” He paused. “So, we’re settled then? You’re just moving in with us?”
Minori swallowed. “Yes. I think I am.”
“Good. The boys have been asking when they get to see you again. They’ll probably beat the next rocket to the moon when they hear you’re moving in with us.” Kanmi chuckled. She’d gotten used to the various masks he wore. The inmost man, the person she and his sons got to see, was a surprisingly gentle being, and the towering anger he usually carried with him was primarily composed of raw outrage at the injustices he saw in the world around him.
“Ah, there is one more thing . . . .”
“And that is?”
She braced herself, and stared at the twisting knot-work patterns in wallpaper that her apartment had been furnished with before her arrival. “My, ah, parents. They want to meet you.”
Another pause. “I thought you didn’t really talk with them.”
“I hadn’t, besides letters, for years, until last week. They were . . . understandably upset that I hadn’t spoken with them, and that, well, apparently Roman agents had been there to ask about . . . resisting torture and things like that.” Minori realized she was twisting her finger in the cord of the phone until her skin turned purple. She did not like thinking about the four hours in which she’d been the object of Huallpa’s attentions on the mountain. “One thing led to another, and my mother asked why I was looking into moving to Rome . . . .”
“Aha. Caught you in an admission. I was a deciding factor in the move.” A solid poke, to get her mind off the bad memories.
“Perhaps you were.” Minori, in spite of the fact that he couldn’t see her, lifted her nose in the air.
Kanmi chuckled. “All right. I have . . . at least another month of this damned administrative leave ahead of me. Let’s look at the calendar, see when we’re both scheduled for hearings, and . . . go to Hokkaido, I guess. Can I bring the boys? Another country to color in on their map of the world.”
Minori blinked, rapidly. “You . . . you don’t mind?” Her voice rose a little, nervously.
“No. Figured I might try doing things right this time around. Bastet mostly married me, I think, in retrospect, to make sure she wouldn’t have to go home to her family in Nubia. She’d fallen more in love with Hellas, than with me, and didn’t want to be stuck as her extended clan’s main doctor forever. So I never actually met her parents.” She could picture him shrugging again. “I would love for you to meet my mother, Min, but I won’t subject you to my brothers. Maybe I’ll send her money for a plane ticket at some point.” He paused. “So, I have to ask . . . .”
“What?” She was simply trying to picture Kanmi in her father’s shoin-zukuri house, and failing, completely. She couldn’t imagine him speaking with her severe, distant father, or her father’s wife, or even her mother. Oddly, she could picture Bodi and Himi staring around themselves, wide-eyed, and probably getting in trouble running through the gardens.
“Right. You’re still technically a noblewoman, Minori.” Kanmi’s voice was long-suffering. “You’re going to have to tell me how I’m supposed to ask your family for permission to marry you, and if this is going to result in me having to fight a duel with your father or anything like that. For the record, I am not getting my head cut off for you. He’s going to find that his sword has disintegrated in its sheath before he can fully draw it, and that’s final.”
About five total responses all competed for control of Minori’s mouth at once. The one that won out was “Marry?”
“Look, I figure if I’m inviting you to live with me, that’s sort of part of the equation. And I certainly don’t think it’ll particularly look good to your parents if I don’t ask you. It might look disrespectful, in fact. So, is there anything in particular I need to know? Do I need to bribe him?”
“Bribe?” Minori’s voice was strangled.
“That’s what most dowries seem to be, though technically, that money was usually supposed to be kept for the maintenance of the daughter given in marriage, and her children. Amazing number of noblemen seemed to use that coin for something else, though.” Kanmi’s voice was dry. “Information, Min, please. What do I need to know?”
Minori got her rattled mind back together again. “Were you going to ask me, first?”
“I asked you to live with me. You said yes. Do I have to fly up there and pry this out of you with a crowbar?”
Roman culture didn’t put much of a premium on romance. Most love-stories from the classical period ended in tragedy; a moralist might suggest that an overabundance of passion was a flaw, and that the best way in which to live was to live moderately, in all things. Even in comedies, too much passion made people the butt of jokes. Marriage in the classical period had largely been for purposes of controlling reproduction, and for the economic benefit of the family. People had not married for love; they had married at the directive of their families, for their families’ benefit. Rich and poor alike. Gallic and Gothic culture, on the other hand, both very much did stress the importance of romantic love. Cultural syncretism had led, over the centuries, to a balance between the two competing concepts, but the Roman view of romantic love remained, perhaps a little surprisingly, jaundiced. Foreigners, barbarians, could be slaves to passion, but not a proper Roman man.
Minori explained, simply enough, “Feudal Nippon was much the same as Rome. People married for the good of their families. There were . . . go-betweens. Arranged marriages were common. Men would come to work for their wife’s family, because labor was in demand, and that was what was . . . valued. He could visit her at night, and she would stay with her family until she was pregnant, or until one of her parents died.”
Kanmi cleared his throat. “That’s a very long commute just
to try to get you pregnant, Min. I assume there’s a different way forward nowadays?”
Minori leaned against the wall, chuckling helplessly. “After the shoguns came to power, the system reversed, and women went to work for their husband’s families, instead.”
“So, no bribes?”
“No, but he will probably wish to ask you many questions. You are a foreigner. He doesn’t know you, or your rank, or if you are . . . suitable. If they agree, they’ll arrange for you to give me an obi sash and for me to give you a pair of hakama pants. They may even insist that the ceremony be done before we leave. Propitious dates are difficult to find.” Min swallowed, tracing a finger over the knot-work on her wallpaper, and wishing that she weren’t hundreds of miles away from Kanmi right now. This didn’t feel quite real.
“No rank. Probably not suitable. Marrying you, regardless. Assuming, yes, that you want to.” A hint of anxiety. “You do, right?”
Minori smiled a little. “Well, I don’t know. This is a little sudden, isn’t it?”
“Ahh. I see how it is. You’re only after me for my body.”
“Your mind, Kanmi, your mind.”
“Package deal. You don’t get one without the other.”
So, in Ianuarius of 1961, they’d gone to Hokkaido. It was possibly the worst time of the year to visit, and the entire prefecture was cloaked in snow. Minori was used to this sort of climate, and hadn’t been home in twelve years, so she all but hung out the window of the train to stare at beloved hillsides and buildings, her breath clouding the air. Kanmi, Himi, and Bodi, on the other hand, were accustomed to Rome and Tyre’s mild winters, and even though they’d brought warm cloaks and were wearing double layers of tunics, the boys shivered. Kanmi, apparently wanting to put a good foot forward, actually had not put on jeans, a tunic, and his usual vest covered in pockets filled with technomancy gear. Instead, he wore a white Carthaginian caftan, under his long winter cloak. “If I’m going to look like a barbarian, I might as well look like my kind of barbarian,” he’d told Min, grimly, before they’d boarded the train.
Formal greetings, in the snowy courtyard of her father’s house. Servants had been out to sweep the snow into heaps, at least. Her mother had gray hair now, much to Minori’s shock; she had only ever pictured her mother as the serenely beautiful woman that Aika had been in her thirties. Her father, Tadaoki Ijiun, was every bit as formal and severe as she remembered, and Minori bowed to him, respect and courtesy ingrained and reflexive. When she rose from her bow, however, she was startled to see a softness in his eyes she’d never realized before was there. She’d known he loved her enough to permit her to go to Gaul, but she hadn’t realized that he’d missed her. I am learning that I have been a child in my thoughts for at least a decade longer than I should have been, she realized. I am seeing my parents for who they are now, instead of who I perceived them to be, when I was young. Gods. I was a fool.
And again, to her surprise, Tadaoki offered Kanmi a very Roman wrist-clasp. His Latin was rusty, and Kanmi had picked up only a word or two of Nipponese from Minori, though she suspected that might change when they moved in together, so Minori had to serve as an interpreter, at first.
The weeklong visit went far better than Minori had ever thought it would. She had to give Kanmi and the boys credit. Again, they ate anything put in front of them without comment or hesitation. The boys were a little restless during a formal tea ceremony, but a word from their father quelled them. And when her father took Kanmi off for a private conversation the second day, Aika pulled Minori off to the side, an hour or two later. “You told us he was a sennin,” she said, smiling. The word could mean either kami-touched or sorcerer, in context. A learned user of magic, or a god-born. There was less of a division between sorcerers, summoners, and god-born in Nipponese culture than in Roman. “Your father said that you did not tell us he was also a samurai at heart.”
Minori had long since come to that same conclusion, but still smiled a little. Outwardly, there was little similarity between Kanmi, who was abrasive at best, and the calm, restrained manner that a warrior who practiced bushido would cultivate. Most days, he deliberately flouted manners, though he was clearly on his best behavior here, for her sake. But for her, it was all about the will of the person, the refusal to be defeated.
She did need to poke Kanmi several times before he’d tell her what they’d talked about. “Mostly financial details,” Kanmi finally told her. “I told him that your money would stay your money. Anything that you’ve made from Eleutherian, anything you make at the University . . . that’s yours. I’ll pay for rent and food, and you’ll be on the Praetorian’s medical insurance program which is . . . surprisingly good.” An acid grin. “It has to be, of course.” He shrugged. “He asked about children. I said that that was up to you.” He picked up Minori’s hand, and kissed her gloved fingers, as they walked in the snow-draped gardens that were tucked between the buildings of her father’s estate. Himi and Bodi, bundled up against the cold, bounded through the snow to either side of them, pelting each other with snowballs, and hiding behind exquisitely trimmed trees, possibly to the despair of her father’s gardeners. One errantly thrown missile came in on an attack vector for their father’s head, and exploded into fragments three feet from his face, without Kanmi looking away from Minori, which just made the boys laugh. “I’m open to the idea, if you want one of your own, Min.” Kanmi used his free hand to brush snow off his shoulder, and looked up at the sky. “Though I can definitely understand if, with these two already around, if you would prefer not to.”
She smiled a little, wide-eyed. A year ago, she’d thought that none of this would ever be in the stars for her. “Yes. I want to. But . . . not right away,” she told him, after a moment.
“No. Let you get settled in. Make sure you think you’ve made the right decision, get comfortable at the University of Rome before there are any major changes.” Kanmi looked over his shoulder to make sure they were alone—even sending out a gravitic pulse, to ensure no one was nearby—and leaned in to kiss her.
And so, before they returned to Rome, her parents took them to a local shrine. She was painted white from head to toe . . . a sign of virginity that she emphatically hoped the gods would forgive her for wearing, though her mother whispered in her ear, “Perhaps you should consider this the gods’ way of making you a virgin again. A fresh start?” as she settled the veil atop Minori’s hair that would conceal her ‘horns of jealousy.’
The kimono she wore was one of her mother’s oldest, and was of very high quality, with a train and sleeves so long a shrine maiden had to help her with them. Kanmi had been bundled into a male kimono and black hakama pants, and wore with them, an expression of extreme patience.
The Shinto ceremony was not particularly long, and mostly involved the ritual drinking of nine cups of sake, and making an offering of branches before a sacred tree. ‘That’s it?” Kanmi asked, quietly, as they passed back out of the shrine. Only her father, mother, and the two boys had been present, besides the priest and shrine maidens.
“That’s it. We’re simple.”
“Thank the gods.”
The next month, they saw Latirian, when Trennus and Lassair brought the baby up from Judea to Rome for yet another hearing. Minori held the baby cautiously, and a little awkwardly. She’d never actually held one before, in thirty-one years of life, and she wasn’t convinced, entirely, that it came naturally to every woman. Lassair laughed at her for that. But then again, motherhood sat exquisitely on Lassair. She was summer and spring at once, mother and maiden, and Minori was, again, simply awed by the fact that this creature had chosen human form. Lassair could be anything. And she’d chosen this.
Minori was also aware that she was being questioned a good deal more by various Praetorian agents than the others were, but she wasn’t entirely sure why. A number of the questions seemed more hypothetical than directed at her experiences in Tawantinsuyu. On the whole, she was grateful for that. She was doing her
best not relive the memories, and constantly having to answer questions about the experience wasn’t letting her forget. That being said? Many of the memories didn’t actually bother her. And some, she didn’t want to forget. She didn’t want to forget the exquisite sorrow of Mamaquilla, the sacrifice of Inti. She didn’t want to forget Kanmi’s rage. She . . . could live without remembering the fear and the pain. She’d prefer not to dwell on the memory of killing her foes, but that recollection didn’t disturb her at all. But she would prefer not to remember the torture, and if she could efface it from her mind, she would.
The only fly in the ointment of married life with Kanmi was that yes, his job really did require quite a bit of travel. Sigrun Caetia usually called their lifestyle peripatetic, with a faint smile. That was an understatement. Three out of four weeks a month, the lictors were usually out of Rome. Minori treasured her time with her new husband, and adjusted, slowly, to the fact that she now had two young step-sons. Who, while generally well-behaved, now that she was underfoot all the time, did start to challenge her authority a bit.
In May of 1961, while Kanmi was off in Qin, escorting Livorus on a diplomatic mission, Minori found herself back in Lutetia, at the University’s ley-magic and technomancy conference, presenting her first paper on the Tawantinsuyu Incident, as it was being called. She’d been aware that there would be some media scrutiny, and she’d had to have her paper vetted by the various lictors before she was allowed to submit it, to ensure that no classified materials were leaked in it. This was her first conference here, without Professor Camulorix on hand to support her, and she blinked a little, before preparing to enter the conference room. She missed her old mentor, and being back at the conference brought back the memory of his murder powerfully.
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