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31. ENTEMANNH; The Peacemaker.
Carba = mirror, singular and plural.
Aloyan Entemannh = Entemannh The Peacemaker.
Corrimannh = Former name of Entemannh Garibe, a penal colony.

The White Road is under the snow. No track of a vehicle defines it for us, only the truck in front of me for me. They go at a slow pace. cautious, middle of the road. The road is endless. It turns toward the pines and blue mountains occasionally, then back toward the desert, a scenic view that refreshes, only to be resumed by the monotony of left and right, up and down over the rolling landscape. We traveled faster out in the desert! Or perhaps it was the constancy of left and right, up and down, there that made it seem so. I wonder how far this city is, how long it will take, at this pace.

After many hours the pines become more prevalent on both sides of the road. The desert is left behind. The terrain goes more uphill, through the snow, climbing, leveling out, climbing again. I can see out over the pines on my left, east, nothing but pines, distant mountains. Then nothing but forest on both sides of the road, pines, leafless trees. Staying in the middle of the road becomes easier. The monotony of driving doesn't.

After interminable hours the truck in front comes slowly to a stop atop a hillock, just over it so that I have room to stop on the peak. I stop. Thimiannh tells me to change places with him. I glance to my left. It's getting dark on the horizon, night coming up in the east. To my right, west through the pine trees, I see occasional glimpses of a reddish hue in the overcast, Sunstarset.

Soda is up, says, "Let me sit up front a while." We dance around each other, get where we're going.

In the back Eenunh is re-rigging the bench on the left as a cot, the old x-leg style I'm familiar with on Earth. It fills the space, leaving a narrow aisle on the right by the other bench. She unrolls one of her blankets over it. Tinunh climbs in, boots and coat and all! Enunh covers her with another blanket, points for me to lay down. I see another roll of two blankets on the bin rack. My sleeping bag. I take off my bulky coat, lay it open over the foot of the cot.

I lay down, and groan with the pleasure of laying it all down!

"Oh Lawd!" I say, "Let these old people lay down!" Eenunh laughs, interprets. The others laugh. I'm too tired to laugh.

Long assed drive! I groan again, and again, with each deep breath and exhale.

Thin Man laughs, yells, "Long road for old people!"

I laugh. Eenunh squeezes in beside me, her back to me, adjusts the blanket over us. The truck begins to move. I feel the now familiar slipping of the white tires, feel them grip, slowly accelerate to the snail's pace we've been at all day. Tinunh raises up, looks at her mother, past me, says,

"Mother, tell Gary about the Terror Wars." She kind of... smiles at me, eyes a'flicker, lays on her right side, snuggles her face under the top of the blanket so all I can see is her parted hair. There was something... some... kindness in her face.

"Why?" Eenunh asks her.

"Because he needs to know... the danger... we're going into," Tinunh answers. I see Soda out of the corner of my eye, look back toward us.

Eenunh rolls toward me, throws her knee over my left leg, kisses me. Kisses me again. And again. Her face is cold! I think to say, 'Stop it!' but I don't want to. I don't want her to. She settles, her mouth at my shoulder, her arms around mine. She begins, her voice audible over the hum of the truck engine, which seems to be transmitted through the legs of the cot, its taut canvas at my back. I want to 'hum' with it.

"When the terror," she says, and I hear 'The Terror', "came down from the north, they were... zealots. They had ideas about themselves and their... righteousness. They believed they knew how to live and so how everyone else should live. We had carba before they came. The terrorists from the south weren't as... intrusive into such personal matters. They were bad enough. Always looking for someone, always suspicious. Always checking."

Eenunh has called my small mirror in my shaving kit a 'carba'; mirrors. They had... mirrors. I've never seen one here... there, Entemannh Garibe.

"We had music in those days. We lost a lot of people when The Terror had come up from the south, a lot of workers in every field, and musicians, just to the violence, people running away to save themselves, taken away by the Terrorists. But The Terror from the north were crazed! 'Mirrors were not good for peoples' sense of themselves,' they said. 'People shouldn't see themselves!' They took all the mirrors.

'Music was not good for Emoilihn mental health', they decided. And musicians were rounded up and deported. We don't know where they took them. No one ever heard from them again, or heard of them. In Costaramannh there are musicians and mirrors again! You'll love Emoilihn music... if... they've learned to play it again; if they have instruments. I hope they have instruments.

The single costume for men, for women was imposed by the northern terrorists. No one had knit dresses. No one had blue blazers. Everyone looked the same. Not much has changed.

Visual art... we had painters, innovative painters who used color and light and shadow and shapes to make interesting visual art. There was art in our homes, pictures of families going back many solar cycles. There was art in the places we worked, the shops and stores, public art, sculpture in the streets, murals on walls. The Terror from the south had no interest in doing away with all that. The Terror from the north didn't like art, so it was gone.

The leaders and soldiers from the south could be terrorists too. No one was safe. But art and music and mirrors and clothes were not a concern of theirs. They wanted control, power, which they said was for our own good, but they abused, hurting people, often the whim of a single soldier. They punished those soldiers if they could find them, teaching intolerance for such abuse. But it went on. When you put ten thousand soldiers, men in the field, in a city, many from other places who didn't grow up there, you can't control them all all of the time. They were mostly men, only some women. The women could be as abusive as the men!

We went home after work, did our shopping on a daytime schedule, got off the streets and locked our doors in the evenings. We'd watch the sun go down from our windows, sometimes in the street outside the building, close to the door, so if commannh or soldiers or gangs came we could get in, quickly, go to our apartment, lock the door. The commannh could be abusers too. No one trusted anyone. They promised us security from the terrorists but they could be terrorists too.

Not that locking the door made you safe. People quit locking their doors, just to keep the impatient domestic terrorists from breaking the doors, too violent to wait for you to respond to a knock, if they even knocked. My neighbor said she was right by the door when she heard someone try the lever. Before she could reach and open it they kicked it in. Her house was always cold. They promised to come and fix the door. They never did. We learned to live like that, hiding, just trying to get to work, get home again, find food, not attract attention.

The Terror from the north... they... they were...you could look in their eyes and see this same... dark... look... like they just knew you were... the enemy. Maybe you did art or music or were a southern terrorist sympathizer! Or any other reason that came into their heads to justify whatever they wanted to do next."

Tinunh raises up, looks into my eyes, says, "Children weren't safe. One night three men came to our apartment. One of them told the other two, 'Get that little girl for me!'"

Eenunh says, "Tinunh!" quietly, but... with a suddenness.

Tinunh finishes, "My mother did not let them take me." She lays back down, looking across my chest at her mother.

I stare down at her. I slip my right arm under Tinunh's head. She settles on my shoulder. Her hair tickles my face. She brushes it away, under her own head.

I slip my other arm out from Eenunh's hold, up and over and under her head. She settles there.

They're looking into each other's faces. The image of Eenunh in the pub that first night, springing to her feet when Chesty and his friends had reached the end of her patience, comes to mind. My girl will only take so much.

I snug the blanket under both of them, stare at the roof of the truck, wonder what horrors they... my girls... the Emoilihn as a race... have suffered. 'Man's inhumanity to man'. Emoilihn are capable of the same... madness... subject to the whims of madmen, madwomen, violence, invasion, predation, on a large scale, and... on a small, personal scale, no one safe from the predations of a militarized government... a militarized populace... militarized police. People... turn predatory... desperate... prey on other people in desperate straits. Madmen ascending to Leadership Decision-Making positions. The children of the poor, preying on the children of the poor, a gun at their backs... 'Hurt people, hurt people,' they say. The rules of civilization fall away when common men, boys, girls, children are made desperate... empowered... given a 'badge of authority... given 'justification'... given weapons of enforcement... and... little or no supervision.

Eenunh goes on;

"The Terror Warriors from the north spoke of 'The Common Good', but they simply took care of themselves. The rest of us fended for ourselves. They took plenty of food. We struggled to find enough. Their banquets were the stuff of gossip that rippled through the city. People who worked in their kitchens told of stocks of food far more substantial than anyone else they knew, more than the grocery stores where we shopped. We didn't call it 'shopping for food' in the stores. We called it 'hunting for food'.

Entemannh... was a good man. He... rose up, gathered an army, men, women, children, from among the Citizens, deserters from north and south, people who still had a sense of Emoilihn honor and integrity, intelligence, kindness, family, hearts and souls in them!

We got weapons, made weapons, learned... to set traps... all kinds of traps, ambushes. There was... much... violence. Perpetrators of crimes, if caught and accused and witnesses found to... justify it... predators... abusers... were killed in the streets, in their homes or wherever they were found once 'convicted', often without letting the Government know. They began to patrol in larger groups, but Entemannh marshaled even larger groups to monitor their movements. The Emoilihn began to know who was an honest commannh, who were honest soldiers... and who was not.

The anti-terror revolution brought new rounds of finger-pointing and accusations and denouncements and claims of injustice. But the terrorists began to fear us, the Emoilihn, The People. We weren't easy to abuse any more. We were watching them in the streets, in the homes. They could no longer come and drag someone off in the middle of the day or the middle of the night. The alarm went up and people came out of their houses, armed, and made the terrorists leave people alone. If they demonstrated someone was a criminal, made legitimate charges, with witnesses, evidence, proof, just like we would do, we would let them take people, but a contingent of Emoilihn would go, make sure the prisoner got to the justice system. We checked on them. People stopped just disappearing. Abuse in the jails stopped. People went to trial, had their plea heard. If they could be proven guilty they went to jail or longer to prison. If they had remorse they could be released, let to return to society. If they committed crimes again... there was no forgiveness. It was hard Law, but it was Law. It was justice.

Entemannh, Aloyan... Aloyan Entemannh was elected to Government, representative of the Emoilihn, seated among those representing commercial interests, military interests, religious interests, interests of the Government itself. He told them he only represented the Emoilihn, any single man, woman or child, any family, The Emoilihn People. We had a better apartment, better food. We felt safer. He thought he could keep helping all the Emoilihn from there, inside the Government... and he did... until...

But the terrorists were no longer free to take Emoilihn off and never bring them back. Convicted murderers were held, with intent to hold them the rest of their lives. The terrorists, those... holy men... always men... argued that there was no reason to keep murderers alive since they could never be trusted in free society again.

But, often, people were exonerated, proven innocent as they said they were, by new information, witnesses, evidence. So killing a man or woman based on what we thought we knew did not seem justified. Enough innocent people were found often enough, some after a lifetime in prison, that we could never be sure justice was done by execution; we could not kill people for punishment.

Rabid terrorists were a different story. Those were the ones who were killed wherever they were found. People knew them, knew their names, their faces, their crimes, and found them. There was still a... street justice, a street 'trial' of sorts, but Government executions were common until word got around that The People would no longer tolerate terrorism. Even... especially... state-sponsored terrorism. The trail of justice could come back to the highest levels of Government if the evidence led there.

Entemannh tried to control it, punishing those who submitted to his authority just like any others if injustice was alleged and could be proven. He made the policy widely known. If you were a predator, an abuser, you could expect justice to come down on you, in the Courts or in the streets.

Soon the control enabled people to go to work, to be out in the evening without fear of roving terrorist commannh or terrorist soldiers or terrorist civilians whose conduct could be dangerous.

Entemannh Garibe was a penal colony first, called Corrimannh, a place for imprisonment, the workers, prisoners, men and women, cutting the first corridors, housing, common areas.

The water-truck garage... that's a natural cavern. That's where they started. They dumped the cut stone out along the cliff face, and later compacted it into the patio. If there are corridors or dwellings inside there is a patio outside. They dumped it off the balconies. People who could not live peaceably in the colony were jailed there or sent elsewhere... still are. You remember the three men arrested when you played out on the patio at the pub."

The zapped! Yeah, I remember! "Neh!" I tell her.

Suddenly Chesty's nasty ass comes to mind. I'd like to see his ass shipped off somewhere. Patrick. I wonder how he's doing. He has no idea the [naughty word removed]-storm of Emoilihn reality he's in.

"After Entemannh was killed..." Eenunh stops. I feel her throat tighten against my chest. She doesn't start again for a long time. I just wait. Tinunh is asleep.

"After Entemannh was killed there was turmoil, but the people who thought as Entemannh did, that the Emoilihn should not be threatened by northern terrorists or southern terrorists, or domestic terrorists, that we should be protected by Government, by commannh, by soldiers, that we had to band together in mutual aid and self-defense, that philosophy began to dominate, to enforce that dictum that all Emoilihn have rights of privacy, rights to think as they choose, to make their own decisions about intensely personal matters, to expect freedom and justice and equality. The idea that Emoilihn as a people are family is old, a philosophy as old as the race. But we had become divided, and conquered.

And that became the norm. Terror Wars came up from the south, down from the north and Entemannh's legacy was that the Emoilihn would not tolerate it, would mobilize, men, women, children would go to meet the enemy in the field, in the streets, on the patio, in the corridors, in our living rooms, if they got this far, persuade them it would be costly to keep coming. It worked. We knew peace, a long and lasting peace. Soldiers went home, north and south, and promoted the peace, stifled the terrorists among them.

People spoke of, 'Entemannh! The Peacemaker!'

We could never relax fully. The Terror Wars would come, but they got smaller, small bands of violent men, sometimes soldiers, then, just bandits. But we knew that if they came we all knew what to do and would do it, die fighting rather than let them just run over our bodies and take us, dead and alive.

In the settling of the chaos... it wasn't... immediate. It... took time to... get normal life going again. Then... Entemannh was... assassinated. They targeted the building. I... have no proof but... it wasn't just a random shot of artillery. Northern terrorists? Southern? No one knew. We found the artillery, three guns, but not who they belonged to, who brought them, who fired them. They came off The White Road, but from which direction, north, or south? They set them up, fired one shot each, and people saw them flee, leaving the guns behind. Three shots hit our building. One witness said they saw each shot, each higher than the one before it. It took planning.

Chaos reigned. We were out in the winter streets. That's when I brought Tinunh back to Corramannh, to Entemannh Garibe. It was just a prison, not a village then, still a penal colony. No one called it Entemannh Garibe."

Tinunh's awake, reaches across my chest to her mother, somewhere under the blanket. Eenunh's left arm comes up, holds Tinunh's hand on my chest. I open my eyes to see their faces, lovely at this angle, all eyes closed.

It is warm. Eenunh is quiet. I'm falling asleep, that wonderful surrender to the feeling, letting it take me. I guess I drove about ten hours, with one stop for taking a pee. Eenunh speaks, quietly, says,

"Entemannh... was my husband."

I'm asleep. I've heard the words! I'm stimulated somewhere psychologically! But can't stir physically.
I fall... literally... it seems, to sleep,
see a man's face, a green face, a stern face...
golden irises, hair, cut... short...
green... blood on his cheek...
smeared by the back of his hand...
He... smiles... nods... affirmation... looks away.
I sleep.
I hear Eenunh's voice, again;
"Entemannh... was my husband."