3 - The commitment

37 Bright Street is in the middle section of the fessas quarter. I went cloaked and hooded and with invisible back-up, though at the entrance to the street I signed them to let me go on alone. It was a rowhouse with the usual glass windows and front porch, though roofed with cedar shakes new enough to still be brown, instead of the more common tile; rebuilt after the sack, I guessed. Probably he lived upstairs. His sign was as modest as his card, hand-sized and ungilded, giving his name and profession in Arkan, Yeoli and Enchian.

I did not notice the square flagstones of his walk, though I have a vivid memory of them from later; as I followed them I was trying to settle in my mind what exactly I should say. As it was, I didn’t get a chance even to knock; the door was flung open, and a stocky man in his mid-thirties or so, with red-brown hair tight-curling enough that it was a soft cloud around his head, seized my wrist.

“Come in, come in, you are Megidan’s patient, come in right away!” He laid one hand on my chest and one on my back at the same level, firmly as if to stop bleeding from a wound. A shock went through me, painless, indescribable, making me gasp just as I was about to ask him if he was Surya Chaelaecha. It was as if his touch did not stop at my skin, but reached inside me; as if he had gently seized my innards, if that were possible. “Through here. I am Surya Chaelaecha.” Without even letting me hang my weapons by the door, he pulled me into his healing room, which smelled faintly of incense, and had walls and ceiling lined entirely and unevenly, with what I realized were sea-sponges. “Take off everything and lie on the table.”

“What? Just like that? What are you doing?” He seemed not to want to take his hands off me even to let me strip.

“You... you have two months. Two more months with what you’re carrying, and you’ll be dead, unless you stop carrying it. You have no time, hurry, lie down.”

Stunned, I obeyed. At least a Yeoli healer is not troubled if you happen to have a shortsword and two daggers under your cloak in addition to your longsword. I took off my wristlets but not the Imperial Seals, wondering if he’d ask me to, but he didn’t seem to notice them. His table was actually as low to the ground as a bed, lightly cotton-padded and covered with blue and purple pattern-dyed flannel sheets so it felt solid and soft under me at once. Once I was naked and on it he laid his hands on the centre of my body, on my chest and on my abdomen, with that penetrating touch, and I prickled and tingled all over.

“Breathe. Don’t hold it. Deep, long, slow.” No shock or horror at seeing all my scars, like most people; he seemed not to be looking at me at all, but around and into and through me. The ceiling, with which I would become familiar in time, was white-plastered with rosettes in the classic Arkan style; a cotton cloth painted with a many-coloured Brahvniki-style mandala was hung by its four corners beneath the sun-slit that every Arkan house has in its sacred room, softening and warming the brilliant light.

“Shininao,” he said. “Death-spirit. You’ve lived with him all your life, except the first day of it… the sword in you has been growing since… seven. Your father was stabbed to death, one blow, there.” He slid a finger under my back and pressed it into the precise spot, drawing another gasp out of me. “Don’t stop breathing, keep it flowing strong, like in training. What I am going to tell you is going to shock you to the core, so you need your air. You saw yourself the same as him. Same age, the age you are now. The death you’ve always expected and always kept secret, is closing in on you.”

My breath froze in me. “How...”

“Breathe. How do I know this? It is all in your aura, the life-energy, the immaterial bodies that surround and permeate the physical one. I can see it; that’s my gift. Your aura is full of death. Full of life, very strong—but cut through everywhere with death. We must figure out how to give you more time than two moons, that’s the immediate thing. So many fights, so many wounds... you’ve been tortured. No, don’t close your eyes, that puts you in the past, stay here in the present. It’s all right.”

“I...” I clawed for calm. “I can’t hide anything from you, can I?”

“No, but if you need healing, why would you want to? Don’t worry, I swore the same secrecy oath as a Haian, nothing goes beyond these walls. Second Fire come if I am forsworn.” He gently opened my legs, touched the spot between my testicles and my anus, and at the same time touched the very apex of my head. It was as if a line joined his two fingers, running up through the very centre of my body. “Imagine that course made of light. Keep that in your mind, your will. You have a very strong will. The part of it that’s turned against you is set to kill you, and it is so strong it will succeed. That’s why Megidan sent you. Your family stream-tests, harshly, the old-fashioned way. There is the first lesson, in I-don’t-deserve-to-live, I must earn the right.”

“First lesson in what?”

“They laid you in an ice-cold stream as a baby, because if you were not strong enough, you should not live. Here is the thing you have to understand: you think it is plain clairvoyance, this death you go towards, but it’s not. It is obligation. It does not await you; you are drawing it to you, and you have ever since you were a child, because you felt you ought to, because you felt that was right. And within two moons you will succeed, unless you change course.”

I could not speak, my mind stunned to blankness, like the eyes’ blindness after a close lightning-flash.

“Most people with such a thing have just one or two reasons for it; with you there are so many, it is in everything about you. It will be very difficult for you; you’ve thought this way for twenty-some years, most of your growing up, all your adulthood, you’ve worked so hard all that time to accustom yourself to it, you’ve built the nature of your life around it, and that is not easy to change. You’ve got quite the opinion of yourself, as well, you feel you know everything, control everything—I’m not saying it’s not justified—but still, it’s one more obstacle.

“You have so little time... I will have to do some drastic things, and if they are too much for you, or not enough, we will both know we did all we could, and you will return to All-Spirit and another life. You’ve locked yourself so much into this you can’t even imagine living past thirty, your heart doesn’t even ache for it any more. You do want to, don’t you?”

I managed to gasp out, “If it were possible, I’d want to... of course I would. Who wouldn’t?” I had not held the thought in my mind for fifteen years at least. In the back of my head a voice whispered, this is all madness.

“It is possible. Didn’t Megidan say it was to save your life? In the part of your mind you know, you don’t believe me; deeper inside you know I am telling the truth. Tell me, what would you do to live past thirty?”

“If it were possible? I... what would I... mamaiyana, I would do anything.”

“Anything?”

“I… I would not commit a crime.”

“No crime-committing is necessary. Otherwise, anything?”

“Y…yes.”

“Good. Because what you are going to have to do is so hard. It’s going to take everything you’ve got. You’ll have doubts later; I think I should make you swear. Swear you’ll do anything I ask.”

“Anything you ask?”

“Anything I ask would fall within the definition of anything, would it not?”

Why the wariness in me, as if I were worried about being rooked? Would I not do anything? I asked myself, more deeply and seriously, ignoring the voice whispering “madness,” and thought of my grandchildren.

I took my crystal and my father’s wisdom tooth in my sword-hand, laid my shield-hand over the semanakraseyeni signet, and said “To live past thirty I would do anything you ask, Surya Chaelaecha – Second Fire come if I am forsworn.”

“Excellent.” He slapped his hands together, and rubbed them long, as if in relishing preparation.

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2 - It was meant to be

I threw some water over myself, towelled off, and met the healer at the roof-gate. I did know her, through having been needful of her services some years back on the island of healers. “Megidan! What are you doing here—I thought you’d never leave Haiu Menshir again in your life. Especially to come here.” She was a full empath; for nine months she'd been kept prisoner in the Marble Palace dungeon, in punishment for healing me. How could she stand to return to Arko, or be on the mainland at all, with all the black and twisted things that are in our hearts?

“Fourth Chevenga!” She seized my hands, partly to demand my full attention, partly as if grabbing the gate-post of the long-traveled-for destination, to prove to herself that she really had got there. “You must listen to me, you must trust me. I have come here because I had a dream, a vision, about you. It said I must journey here, and refer you to another healer, whose name would come clear to me once I was here. It did, and here is his card. You must see him.”

Surya Chaelaecha, healer, I read. And his address; that was all. A Haian healer referring me to a Yeoli one?

“But, Megidan, I’m not sick. Why must I see him? What would I tell him?”

“I am sorry, Chevenga... the vision didn’t show me so much. He is a very powerful healer, perhaps you need tell him nothing.”

“Just, ‘Here I am, and I don’t know why, except that Megidan sent me’?”

I meant this half-jokingly, but she said, “That would do fine; he knows, he is expecting you.”

I stood thinking. This could hardly be an assassination attempt or some other skulduggery, not with Megidan involved. She certainly had no doubt of what she’d been enjoined to do, or of its importance, or its validity, else she wouldn’t be here, much less with so much anxiety that I might not agree to it pinching her kindly Haian face. Of course, if I said I’d see him while secretly deciding not to, she’d know.

“What of you?” I said. “Do you plan to tell me this and then turn straight around and sail back home?” She stared at me so taken aback, so obviously not having thought at all about what came next, that I couldn’t help but add, “I hope you’ll partake of our hospitality instead, at least for long enough to have made the journey worthwhile.”

“If you visit Surya, it will have been worthwhile even if I leave this moment.”

I read the card again, as if it had any answers. Surya Chaelaecha. Healer. 37 Bright Street, Fessas Quarter. By Appointment. No clue even as to what sort of healer he was. “So important that I go to this person. Why?”

She clasped my shoulders, pulled me close and whispered in my ear. “It is... please trust me, Fourth Chevenga, semanakraseye of Yeola-e, Imperator of Arko, trust me for the sake of yourself, of all who love you, of all the good you might yet do in the world. To save your life. No less.”

She was one who didn’t know—or at least, whom I hadn’t told. I could not know what precisely she knew, by feeling my feelings. The one I was having now, for instance, that came along with this thought: Save my life? That’s a hopeless prospect.

“He said whenever is good for you; he will clear time for you. You need only give the word. If you tell me now, I will convey it to him.”

“I... I don’t have my calendar here.” I found myself leading her down and into the Imperial office section, through the servants’ corridors; it wouldn’t do to have anyone see me unwashed and all but naked here. My secretary Binchera was still in, working late; he gave me an odd look, and let me know when I asked that I was booked solid, as always. Evenings, meals, festival days, everything; I was already down to one in four days training instead of every day, for which my fitness was suffering. The soonest free bead was a month and a half away.

Megidan pressed her face into her hands. “It is more urgent than that.”

The three of us all stared at each other, at a loss. I could see plain on Binchera’s face, curiosity as to what this was about, and a certain resignation that he would never be told.

“Spirit of Life rules in these things,” Megidan finally said, touching her pendant, the one in the form of a poppy that all Haians wear. “If it is meant to be, some time will open for you in the next few days, and let you see him then.” That settled that.

I told no one, not even Niku, Kallijas or Skorsas, with whom I share my bed and my life; I just said Megidan was here visiting, and got Skorsas to see her properly hosted for the night; she had decided to turn around and travel home the next day after all, no surprise. And I put it out of mind. I thought that might be hard, with such an odd and striking thing, but somehow forgot completely.

If it is meant to be. Kahara kra is how we Yeolis say it: All-Spirit wills. We all say it every day, of course, but to trust to it so completely as Megidan had, journeying all the way from Haiu Menshir with such urgency, seemed foreign, at least to me. I have too much of a controlling cast of mind, perhaps; I tend to try to arrange things the way they should be, much more than let them go there of their own accord. For which I have been roundly criticized. Chevenga kra. Now the idea of Kahara kra stuck in my mind, poking a thought through every now and then during the next two days, even as I forgot why.

The third day after, I was scheduled for a three-bead afternoon meeting with a delegation from Korsardiana on constitutional matters. They sent a pigeon begging to postpone, as their head delegate had suddenly taken ill. I would have filled it with some other Imperial business, except that Binchera asked me, “Didn’t that visiting Haian want you to see someone if some time came open?” Kahara kra. It was meant to be.

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1 - In which it begins

asa kraiya

[beyond the sword]

Being the separate memoirs of Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e that recount the transformation of his life in the year of Yeola 1556, and associated documents both complete and excerpted, compiled by the Workfast Literary of Yeola-e; Aletheya Athal, editor, Y. 1558

[A.D. 4982]

†

I wrote “This paragraph, it seems, is farewell.”

It wasn’t farewell, after all. My farewell would not come as I’d thought it would. Perhaps.

†

You think of me, I know, as having everything. My life is spun out of other men’s dreams.

At the start of that which changed it all, I was Imperator of Arko as well as semanakraseye of Yeola-e. I had command over more wealth than most could imagine; my name was known the world over, loved by allies, dreaded by enemies. I even had the simpler things: my health and strength, a good marriage, lovers outside it with no strife from within it, five perfect children, a more beautiful house in Vae Arahi than I could ever have imagined living in, and the love of as many friends as anyone could want. I could look back on my life and know I had prevailed in the face of the worst agonies and the greatest dangers; I could say honestly that I had done everything I had done well. What I was now doing – arranging to grant that empire back its independence, but with the vote now well enshrined in its laws and the citizens experienced in using it, the greatest defense against renewed tyranny – I could not help but take pride in. Who would not envy me for any part of it, let alone all?

But in my twenty-eighth year, when I would have thirty at the most, I would not have any of it much longer.

†

It began, ironically enough, when I was training. On the sprawling roof of the Marble Palace (since an Imperator’s feet must not touch earth), under a hazy spring Arko-the-City sky, wearing loin-cloth and wristlets and Chirel on my shoulder, I practiced fighting along with fifty-odd other members of the Yeoli and Arkan elites.

It was just shy of Yeoli year-turn—in two days it would be 1556—and I was six moons or so into my second term as Imperator. By my old reckoning I had two years left to live, but it could be less. Avritha of F’talezon’s prophecy, Finish thy work before summer, was always in the back of my mind now. I had an Arkan Assembly now, but that slowed other things down; I couldn’t just write the new constitution, but had to consult with them, which made it take ten times as long. I had a date for the election for Imperator: verekina 86, or Anae 36 by the Arkan calendar, the last day before the year-end festival of Jitzmitthra, which would be six days since it was a leap year. But for candidates I had three Arkan lords who all seemed to have no interest in it other than for personal ambition, and Kallijas, who was not truly willing and did not feel qualified. And a thousand thousand other things needed settling or solving. Avritha’s words drove me out of bed every dawn when I felt like lazing, kept my eyes open past midnight when the writing before me began blurring and splitting into two in the lamplight, made me bolt my food if it was not a meal-meeting. I was not taking an easy run to last the distance, but sprinting, as always.

“Imperator-semanakraseye.”

Once I was home, I’d be just semanakraseye, just the people-wills-one of Yeola-e, which I was born and trained for and grew into, which I have in my heart. No more faces with smiles of false admiration, currying favour; no more people flinging themselves face-first on the floor before me as this servant had done. It wasn’t even the prostration that bothered me the most; it was that an Arkan wouldn’t get up again until I said gehit, so that I was an accessory to his shame. The wages of conquest.

How long would I have, at home? Not long—but better than nothing.

“There is a Haian healer who begs that you deign to speak with her,” the servant told me. “I pray You Whose Whim is the Will of the World will forgive me for conveying her importunacy, but she wished it to be... immediately, as it is urgent, so she says. She says you know her, and she has come all the way from Haiu Menshir to say something to you. A matter of life and death, she says.”

All sweaty and sand-dusted from practicing killing—a fine sight for a visiting Haian—I took a splash from the water-flask and wondered whose life and death. It didn’t seem like Haian diplomatic business; they tended more to follow the protocols. I didn’t know many Haians aside from those who’d healed me from one thing or another. More than anything else, it sounded like someone somewhere needed saving on an informal basis, and if this Haian thought it was in my power, it probably was.

I said, “Show her here.”

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[Author’s note to new readers : to navigate quickly from one page to the next, use the “Newer Post” link at the bottom left of each page. “Older Post” jumps you back to the previous.]

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