Hatchet, Buried? (Czechoslavonic-Istkalenic Summit)
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Summer had turned sour, the air too thick, too hot, the sun burning. The calm of June had been more than made up for by the sticky hell that August, in but seven days, had proven itself to be; for the peace they had felt, for the peace they had deluded themselves into believing they would feel to the end of summer, they would pay a thousandfold.
It was not weather for a summit, at the very least, thought Elizabeth Íkrat as she leaned against the wall, the only source of cool anywhere around, even in the relative, air-conditioned respite of the old Imperial Palace. You simply could not think in such weather; the dull heat numbed your mind, made it slow down, left you nothing more than a sprawled out husk of a person, staring out, gasping like an idiot. Not even "like an," really - you were, in the moment, in fact, an idiot, gasping, staring, whatever. That was the effect it had on you.
No, not weather for a summit at all - and rude, too, perhaps, to have held it now, to have forced dear Mother Reiserová - why, oh, why, had she ever thought of her as anything else? - to come to this country and expose to themselves to this seeping, insidious malaise. But what was done was done; she had made the invitation, they had accepted, and whatever further price had to be paid for that, she and dearest Istkalen would pay.
She sighed, glancing briefly at her foreign minister, standing there, ramrod straight, unmoving, eyes fixed into the distance, waiting, dutifully.
Patriot, muttered Íkrat. What a damned patriot, there, stalwart in the heat. This was the show Írenet Isteresskemar always put on, for foreign dignitaries and colleagues alike, to play the role of the perfect servant of the holy nation, the dutiful, uncorruptible woman firm as iron, there on high not to usurp, nor to embezzle, nor to moralize, but only and always only to do the work appointed her, as it had to be done - with mechanical efficiency and precision and perfection.
Compensation, Íkrat supposed, for all the gifts constantly showered on her, the diamonds and pearls and caviar and thick stacks of EMUs that flowed out from the offices of her crony ambassadors into hers, to be quickly hoarded in some vault of disgusting excess Isteresskemar believed to be her own little, secret indiscretion but which everyone in Kirelesile knew all too well of.
Not even to sell, thought Íkrat with a little quiet chuckle, but just to keep, stuffed away, for vanity, for pride.
But that was simply the way things in Istkalen had become. Anyone in government with the slightest of connections to any part of the outside world, whether it was to some Kirelesile patron or to, yes, the foreign markets, could now be guaranteed to be corrupt to the bone. Everything had loosened; everything was now acceptable. Even someone like the Colonel Kuldar Loime, the new Minister of the Interior, now dozing off in a wicker chair in the corner but, normally, as violently principled as men in Istkalen could come, upon the slightest bit of exposure to the world outside the veritable monastery that government was would immediately start engaging in the most excessively decadent debauchery one could imagine. She had given him - and Irakemar too, although her morals had always been too modern and loose - an allowance, she remembered, to spend in Europolis, and he had used it all on caviar, ice cream, and other such ridiculous luxuries.
Everything and everyone was corruptible, had little cracks that quickly became big cracks - all, as it was said in the churches, fallen. All slowly rotting away, hidden behind the deteriorating mask of the old.
And the heat, she supposed, their last punishment; or, as in the words of Liris, the state of the country matching the state of its rulers.
And now it was the moral coming here, the moral she had believed immoral when, out of power, she had seen Istkalenic power as moral (black as white, white as black, mind so addled to see everything in inverse), to see and to judge.
Íkrat pushed herself of the wall and walked to join Isteresskemar, looking forward, waiting for Mother Reiserová's verdict to come down on her and all the rest of corruption. The end, she thought, here - only, now, to face and to embrace it.
