On the day that Adhirbal Ghazanoi Ilorat died, his son Kaddar got into a fight with his mother because he wanted to study philosophy at the University, and she wanted him to study law. Kaddar took the very reasonable position that he could not help but learn a great deal of the practicalities of the law in the course of his duties as a junior member of the Emperor's Council and from the practice orations he composed under the direction of his tutors. Philosophy was a better master than law for a moral man, in any case. Fazia Muhassinet was a women in the best Carthaki tradition. She was upright and modest in her personal habits, deferential to her husband, and loyal to the Empire. No son of hers was going to waste his time indulging in philosophy when he could be perfecting his knowledge of the finest intricacies of Carthaki law so to fit him to a quicker rise through the Imperial offices.
Kaddar stormed off, aware both that his behavior was childish and that it would not have been brooked had his father been home. To push these guilty feelings aside, he sat by the fountain in the garden and thought up elegant arguments that would tear his mother's position to pieces. He imagined himself quoting from Druson and declaiming verses from Orastis; just as he was crowning his oration with Hannorian's Declaration of the Just Man, his father would walk in, unannounced and unexpected. 'Fazia,' Ghazanoi would say. 'What can a tutor in oratory add to this? What use would a study of human laws be to our son when he can speak so well already on divine ones? Let him pursue philosophy, for I can tell that his place lies among our great teachers of wisdom.' His mother, of course, would never contradict his father, and that would be that. It was all a hopeless dream, and Kaddar knew it. Ghazanoi Ilorat had never been known to place philosophizing above pleading a case or fighting for the Empire. If his father indeed walked into one of his arguments with his mother, Kaddar would be on his knees to beg his mother's pardon within minutes, and studying for the law course within the hour.
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When the messenger came, it was to him and not to his mother. Fazia Muhassinet had received him without asking to see the letter he brought or hear his news, and had sent a slave to lead him to her son. This, too, Kaddar only learned later, although he suspected that had guessed the import because she sent Asni, the oldest and most devoted of Ghazanoi's slaves. Kaddar was sitting on a wall in the garden with a scroll of Hannorian's Academe and trying to decide whether he ought to move his weight off the leg he was sitting on or whether such concern for physical discomfort was unbecoming to a philosopher. With the stupidity of a young man who has just been absorbed in his reading, he did not think that the messenger who knelt with bowed head could be bearing news of his father until he saw the imperial seal done twice over on the scroll: once in gold wax and once in black. That sufficed. When he later described the moment to his wife and his children, Kaddar would sometimes say that his mind had gone blank, that he moved like a mechanized automaton rather than a man, and that he had quickly opened the seals in order to confirm what he could not believe was actually true. Sometimes he would say that he could already feel a strong responsibility rising up under his grief, and that this had steadied him and allowed him to remain composed.
Whatever the exact circumstances, Kaddar read the letter's contents quickly. Enobar Sallis, his father's chief legate, said no more than was necessary. The rebellion was quelled, but the General had died of wounds taken in battle. It had been an honor to serve under him, and his loss was felt no less personally by every man in his army than it was felt publicly for that such a great commander would give no further service to the Empire. The Emperor had desired that the General's body be sent to Carthak, where it was to be given a state funeral. He regretted to be the sender of such bad news, and sent his respectful commendations to the General's son and widow. Sallis's neat periods took up less space than the interior seals did: the imperial one that all government documents bore; the official seal of the Southern Army beside it; the legate's personal signet; and finally, General Ghazanoi Ilorat's, the ring still embedded in a thick puddle of wax that had been melted under and around it to hold it in place. It was his ring, now, but he did not put it on. As he explained it later, to do so would have confirmed what he did want to believe was true after all.
For the first time, no one gave him a challenging look when he swept through the doors to the women's quarters. Perhaps it was his air of determination that decided the household, or perhaps they guessed that they had a new master, now. He did not think about any of it, then; he only knew that he had to tell his mother. She would comfort him as mothers do, and tell him that his father was still alive and all was well. Or rather, he would tell her what a soldier's son hopes never to tell his mother: that her husband will not return.
Fazia Muhassinet was at her loom, surrounded by her women all engaged in their own work, but her hands only played with her shuttles and plucked the threads. While spindles clattered to the ground and thread stopped rustling through linen as Kaddar appeared in the doorway, she had no need to stop working. He could tell that she already knew. He conveyed his message briefly, made awkward by the presence of so many silent women and painfully aware that he was nearly parroting Sallis's phrasing. His mother received it silently, and allowed him to take her arm and embrace her. When he touched his cheek to hers, wetness smeared along the side of his face. But it was not until he had escorted her out to the peristyle surrounding the women's garden that he realized there was something wrong with the situation, that she was supposed to be comforting him and not he her. Then he realized that he had not run to his mother for comfort since he was eight years old.
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It was only several days later that Kaddar counted back the days from the messenger's arrival, and he was ashamed that his father had been dying for the empire while he remonstrated with his mother over frivolities. He was sitting by the reflecting pool, having put aside some Epitomes of the great philosophers he had been reading. Hannorian's stoic dignity and Druson's eloquent denunciation of public life seemed inadequate in the face of his father's death: foolish, if not shameful. Adhirbal Ghazanoi had neither lived nor died by delicate syllogisms and clever ethical logics, but by simple virtues: duty, loyalty, justice. It was these latter which must be his concern, now. And they should be his concern. Kaddar knew of no better man than his father had been. If he were to be the head of House Khazoi and hold Ghazanoi's seat on the Grand Council, there was no better way to do it well than with his father's virtues.
He put away his philosophy books and sat down in the library with Belisar's On the Pacification of the Southern Tribes, the foundation text of Carthaki military strategy and provincial government. From this book, his father had taught him to read; Ghazanoi himself had never tired of pointing out the elegant simplicity both of Belisar's phrasing and of his battle plans. As Kaddar unrolled the scroll, he remembered how he had fidgeted and been impatient to play in the garden, and, later, how he had looked longingly to the shelf of poetry and philosophy on the far end of the room. But this time, he averted his eyes and looked instead to the rows of law texts when one brilliant tactical manoeuver after another became too much even for his newly-focused concentration.
That afternoon, he visited his mother. Fazia Muhassinet had confined herself to her room in the traditional mourning of a husband's death. Over bitter cups of tea -- out of respect for Ghazanoi's memory the household would eat only frugally until the funeral, which meant that there were none of Kaddar's favorite pastries to go with -- he told his mother that he would read the law course at University.
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Adhirbal Ghazanoi Ilorat was buried with all the pomp of a state funeral. The Emperor himself gave the oration. Kaddar barely heard his uncle's speech. He was sure it was accurate as far as it could be; no one would ever be able to add those best praises of all: that Ghazanoi had never reconsidered his loyalty to an Emperor he despised; that he had sacrificed personal friendships and personal happiness for the stability of the Empire; that he had suppressed his own feelings and even his own morals in order to do his duty. And so, Kaddar thought with a philosopher's cynicism, his father had been permitted to die honorably in battle rather than honorably by his own hand. But he had to believe there was a difference, because his father had believed. He was taking the law course; he would of course train with the army while studying in the capital. This was his own funeral as much as it was his father's, for he could hope for no better fate.
Musing on these philosophic thoughts, and thence on his yet-unsucessful repudiation of philosophy, Kaddar almost missed his own name in the Emperor's mouth. For the love and obligation he bore to Adhirbal Ghazanoi Iliniat, Ozorne Muhassin Tasikhe adopted Kaddar Ghazanoi Iliniat as his own and his heir, in the promise that the son would follow in the footsteps of the father for the glory of Imperial Carthak.
Note: This is somewhat a companion to Sub Malis Principibus