Chapter 1202: Losses (6)
Basil looked at his father as if he were seeing a stranger emerge from a familiar mask. The orange juice in his cup was cold now, and the sweetness felt cloying against the bitterness of the conversation.
"Empathy, Father?" Basil repeated, the word sounding foreign in the cramped, utilitarian space of the tent.
"Yes. For the most part, I understand the world through a ledger of wants, fears, and desires," Alpheo said. He leaned back, the shadows of the pavilion deepening the lines around his eyes. "Except for a handful of people, your mother, your sister, you, your uncles, the rest of humanity is a sea of grey. For me, they are little more than pebbles I overstep with my boot. I see where they are going, and I know how to move them, but I do not feel their weight."
"But the soldiers..." Basil protested, his mind flashing back to the warm, paternal way Alpheo had clasped Oto’s shoulder. "The way you spoke to them...and they spoke to you."
"I care for the Legions in a paternal way, but it is an affection for the idea of them," Alpheo clarified, his hazel eyes unblinking. "I am thankful to a man who sheds blood for my name, but I feel nothing when evil befalls those outside my circle. It is a necessary deformity, Basil. A skill required of any man who leads an army. You cannot allow your heart to stop every time you order the murder of thousands, many of whom are not soldiers, but merely common souls caught in the gears.I was once one of those soul, you would think mercy would come to my hand easier. But every man has his own way to reply to it."
He looked down at his hands, turning them over as if inspecting the callous and the bone.
"I lack the tool to inspire loyalty through my person alone. Most of the service I receive is an extension of my office, my power, and the weight of my name. Strip those away, and I would be a hollow thing, unable to truly connect with the soul standing in front of me. In that regard," he looked up, his gaze piercing, "you are already my superior. What you did today, calming that man knowing what had to be done on an emotional level? That is a power I have to simulate and fake for the most part. You simply have it."
Basil frowned, struggling to reconcile this cold admission with the Prince who had transformed Yarzat. "What about the good you have done? The grain you distributed during the famines, the seeds you gave the farmers on the frontier, the light taxes? The laws you passed to protect the tenant farmers?’’
"They are my people, Basil. It is a social contract, not a romance," Alpheo said, his voice flat and pragmatic. "They toil so that we may lead. We labor off their efforts, and the bare minimum of our duty is to protect the small lives they have carved out. But make no mistake, every kindness I have offered has paid a dividend to the state."
His fingers ticked against the grain of the table.
"Had I not gifted food to the starving provinces, there would have been a harvest of banditry and riot. I gave seeds to ensure that production continued even when nature turned her back on us. I passed laws because a happy subject is a subject who is easy to rule. The masses are simple to please, but they are just as quick to turn.
It is easier to find men willing to offer their lives in a frenzy of battle than it is to find those who will suffer in silence and patience. I do not do these things because my heart bleeds for them; I do them to secure a standard of living that discourages the rot of social discontent."
He stopped his ticking and looked at his son, the silhouette of his bandaged head becoming silver as it caught the light of a small candle.
"And many times," the prince said softly then, "the joy of the many flows directly from the sorrow of the few."
He saw the flicker in his father’s eyes, the ghost of the field. Basil remembered the sight with a clarity that made his stomach turn: the bloated corpses cooling in the mud, the wind carrying that cloying, malefic rot to the nose. He remembered the rats skittering over stiffened limbs and the crows perching atop faces, stripping the meat from the bone with clinical indifference.
He had stood beside his father as they surveyed that nightmare, when his father had been capable to walk away from bed, of course. Basil had been horrified, but he had pushed it down, whispering to himself that this was the "great evil" required for peace to be sustained.
But when he had turned to look at Alpheo, he saw his father’s eyes take in the horror, absorb it, and then simply move past it as he began to walk.
He realized now that his father wasn’t cold; he was a man building a vault. He was stuffing every sin, every scream, and every drop of spilled blood into a dark corner of his mind, locking the door and throwing away the key. It was a mask of pragmatism, for he had seen the guilt in his expression as he walked away, the same guilt he saw when he beheld the wounded of his ranks.
The words of his Uncle Jarza echoed in the quiet of the tent: ’He cannot see the goodness he has done. He has no eyes for the lives he saved, only for the tribulations he believes he forced us to suffer. He thinks himself a creature of darkness, blind to the light he has shed upon every one of us.’’
He was like a man denying himself the hope of redemption, pushing down his guilt with more evil acts, like a man in a hole convicing himself i that the light he was seeing above was an illusion and to deny himself even that slight hope, he’d rather be digging a deeper hole than look up.
"You lie Father,’’ Basil suddendly spoke "You say you lack empathy, that you only see variables and social contracts. But if that were true, you wouldn’t have been found at the bottom of a bottle when Egil gave his life."
Alpheo opened his mouth to retort, but Basil didn’t give him the chance.
"Men don’t charge into a wall of spears for a tax cut. They don’t scream your name with their dying breath because of a seed subsidy. They follow you because they see a man who probably for the first time in centuries, seems to care , even a bit , about their state.Do you realise how rare that is?You may think my eyes have only seen Yarzat and yet I know how the roads goes away from it.
You think you are a creature of the dark, but Uncle Jarza, Asag, and Edric, they love you. Not the Prince, not the office. They love you.They love you as man."
Basil reached out, placing his small hand over his father’s clenched fist.
"Mother doesn’t look at you as a ’social contract.’ Rosalind doesn’t see a ’variable’ when she runs to the door to meet you to clamor for hugs and kisses. And I..." Basil’s voice cracked, but he held his father’s hazel gaze. "I don’t see a monster, Father. I see a man who is so desperate to protect us that he’s willing to convince himself he has no soul just so he won’t flinch when he has to use his sword.For what monster would have his son love him so?You do not care about strangers?That is all right, who are they to you? You are not a monster for that, your priorities are simply different.You love your family and friends and they love you’’
Basil looked up, searching his father’s eyes for a crack in the stone, some sign that his words had taken root, just as they had in the quiet of the office months ago. But the hazel depths remained flat and impenetrable.
A hollow coldness settled in Basil’s chest as he realized he hadn’t reached him.
For the first time , he understood there were things he could not change.
"In another life," Alpheo began, ’’A life where I had not been born into this crown, and where the gods were kind enough to bless me with you again... I would have nurtured you differently. I would have taught you lessons that had nothing to do with the survival of a state or the sharpness of a blade."
He stood over Basil, his presence suddenly overwhelming, like a shadow stretching across a sunlit room.
"I would not have forced you to learn the anatomy of a slaughter. I would not have required you to become a great man, or a great killer, or a great prince, for I have learned there is no peace to be found in greatness. I would have given you only the small skills, the quiet strengths required to live in a world that is soft and narrow. I would have watched you grow old with a woman you loved, seeing the years pass and pass with the simple, boring peace of a man who has never heard of war."
Alpheo’s gaze moved toward the tent opening, seeing a future that would never exist.
"I would have been there, in my white-haired years, rocking in a chair on a porch somewhere while life slowly deserted me. I would have looked at you as my greatest achievement, with grandsons and granddaughters climbing over my lap, surrounded by the warmth of a family that had no need for iron walls. I would have seen you become the decent man you were meant to be and know that my life had not been a failure."
His hand rose, cold and steady, to rest against Basil’s cheek.The boy’s skin was flush with the heat of life and hope, while Alpheo felt like marble, cold and hard , capable only of bringing death.
"But I have murdered that boy," Alpheo said, his voice breaking with a sudden, jagged edge of guilt. "I have taken that decent man and I have drowned him long ago.
When I looked at your emerald eyes that day and I saw the light in them, and all I could think was how I am the one who will eventually have to teach you how to extinguish it. I have damned you, Basil."
A single tear pooled in Alpheo’s eye, a solitary glint of moisture that he made no move to hide. It didn’t fall; it simply sat there.
"For all that you will inherit from me, the gold, the titles, the power, it is all merely a gilded shroud. What you will truly inherit are my tribulations. My ghosts will become your ghosts. My enemies will become your shadows. I have forced you onto this blood-slicked path because I was too weak to find another road to walk. This long ago had been what I desired most, until I was obsessed. I had even convinced myself that was my road and the best there could be.
Now that I look upon it with the gravity of age and the weight of love, I understand how shortsighted I had been.
For the crown I have placed on your head, and for the soul you will require to sacrifice one day to wear it... my son, I am more sorry than any god could ever forgive."
