15 - Digression – Who Minis is

He’s written his story himself, so I’ll keep my version short. At ten, he was notorious throughout the city as the fat and over-jewelled brat who could get away with anything because his father let him run entirely loose and no one dared even upbraid him. If he walked into your house and took something he liked, you said nothing; if you were one of a pair of chair-bearers he hired, you might be run back and forth on the same street all afternoon, or made to run races, or directed through the fountains—and he’d never heard of tipping. If he asked you and your brother to beat each other unconscious with his textbooks, you did it, or face the wrath of the two black shadows he always had with him, his Mahid; if he pissed on you from a window, you counted yourself as showered with blessings. He particularly loved to haunt the Press; every now and then he’d yell, just because he felt like it, “Stop the press!” and they’d have to bring the whole immense machine to a clanging halt, no matter whether the Pages should be out that day.

I knew none of this when I was brought chained into Arko; I was just told that for all I had said to the boy who’d thrown me a gold ring that I wasn’t afraid of him, I’d better keep the ring-name he’d given me, even if I and everyone else thought Karas Raikas, which means “Lightning Loner,” was silly, because he was the Imperator’s son.

The Arkan language has five levels, just as the society does, and thus five different ways of speaking, depending on the relative rank of the speakers. The Yeoli language has only one. Thus I was only ever taught that people should treat each other one way. When he came banging against the bolt on the door of the room I’d been assigned in the Mezem, baffled that it had the temerity to be locked against him, I said he need not do that, but only ask politely if he might come in, and I’d let him. If you’d asked anyone in Arko, from the potentates to the street-waifs, they’d have predicted that he’d have his shadows kick the door down and rough me up (or try). Instead, he asked me politely, and I let him in.

Children are perceptive. I think that as well as admiring my fighting style, he somehow knew beforehand that from me, since I was free of any knowledge of his reputation, he’d get what he got from no one else: sympathy. His father had little more to say to him but run along; he’d been taken from his mother at birth and given to wet-nurses, so he didn’t know who she was, just one of his father’s Mahid concubines; his tutors bored him, too dry. He lived like an only child in the Marble Palace, though he knew he had half-siblings among the Mahid. Friends, he could have only in his day-dreams; he told me early on that he and I must pretend to quarrel, because for all his father had little to say to him, any hint of affection on his part for someone else tended to turn into some sort of bitter fate for that someone else; a few people had vanished before he’d figured this out.

He also told me, in a completely matter-of-fact way, of the executions by torture that his father made him witness, wanting his son to be but an extension of himself, with the same tastes. I’ll spare my reader. It was that which made me open my arms to him, in our very first conversation. I cradled him and held my gorge down at the same time.

When I did start hearing the stories of his antics in the city, I was astonished that it could be the same boy; but with a little thought I understood. A child who is denied the two things children need most, love and guidance, will become angry at the world, and take it out on whomever he’s permitted to. So he started coming down to the Mezem instead, as often as it was safe, to get love and guidance from me. Soon it was all over the city how he’d suddenly reformed, for reasons no one knew, with one exception: inexplicably, he went on bedeviling just one person, the ring-fighter Karas Raikas.

Even that had to end, though, the danger too great. He told me in tears, and I didn’t doubt the truth of it for an instant, that he’d have made the ultimate sacrifice of parting with me, by setting me free, if he could have. “Then let me ask something else,” I said, “that you can do: one thing only.”

“Anything,” he said, sobs wracking him despite his resolve to be brave. I took his face between my hands, kissed his forehead and said, “Behave yourself.”

Laughter broke through his tears then. “Forever,” he said. “You are not asking it, but I will promise you this: if my father does conquer Yeola-e, when I am Imperator I will set it free. I swear, Second Fire come if I am forsworn.”

It is easy for a child, who has no idea what the world will be to him when he is a man, to swear such an oath. In my mind I knew it would never happen; he would remember it only as a child’s promise made in an emotional moment to someone now dead anyway. (A prince cannot legally become Imperator until third threshold, or twenty-one, and he was ten years younger than me.) It would be the least of considerations in the scheme of things for one who rules an empire. But, perhaps in the emotional wound-weakness I was living with every day by that time, my heart heard, and froze me, and then it was me who was wracked with tears.

†

What the world will be so often turns out not what we expected. It was not him who’d set free my people, after all, but I who would take his empire from him. What he might feel was the least of my considerations.

I thought I’d likely never hear from him again, unless Irefas captured him and his Mahid—the eclipse court, as Arkans call it, Imperium in internal exile, that his father would want him to set up. But then, just as I’d made the move to be reinstated for my second term as Imperator, I’d got a letter.

Dear Chevenga,

I am just leaving Haiu Menshir. My healer here has been telling me that if I am to get to the heart of what troubles me I must deal with the worst thing I ever did.

I realize that I was forced, and should not condemn myself for it… but I find it very difficult not to.

When I was twelve years old and you were the mind-broken slave of my father… he forced me to use you sexually. I’m sorry to even write this. It makes me sick. It convinced me that I was what my father had wanted all along, another like himself—another twisted pervert to grace the Crystal Throne. In that sense, I am very glad you have freed me of that.

For my part in this—for what I found myself wanting out of that incident—I am truly sorry. I regret having come close enough to you, my friend, to hurt you that badly, even though it was he who was hurting you, through me. My hatred for him knows no bounds at the moment. But I repeat, for my part, I am truly, abjectly sorry. You never gave me anything but good, every moment you could.

I have not written you before because I clung to a child’s idea that if you did not remember this, I could still imagine you my friend. But I am convinced now that this is dishonest. I am sorry to lose that. It hurts. But I must, or live this lie, that you could still be, on most levels, the father of my spirit, after I have done this to you. I cannot imagine it possible for you not to let your despite of my father fall on me, too, now. A harsh judgment, perhaps, but just.

Now you know. And I have told you. Why this no doubt mutually-painful letter is necessary, I do not understand, and I am bewildered because Haians never ask that which causes pain. I am sorry I did not have the courage to tell you to your face.

My sincere best wishes to you in your life, and I hope my father was wrong when he told me that time would deal with you for me. The only thing I can think of what he meant is an illness of some kind. You, of all people that I know, deserve to live long.

Minis Aan

I froze as I read it, with the kind of deep, down-to-the-guts freezing you get when you are reminded of a torture you’ve forgotten. I had to dose myself with calming essence every ten breaths for half a bead just to be able to stand up and walk across my office.

Of course he’d left no way for me to answer or find him, lest I give it to Irefas. So the words that burned across my mind would have to keep burning there, unsaid and unwritten. No, I do not blame you for what he did. No, my despite of him does not fall on you, any more than it ever did—remember what I told you, power and responsibility are one and the same? Listen to your Haian. Understand, understand, you must understand, above all: a twelve-year-old child being made to do such a thing is being outraged himself, no less. Minis, you’ve been left scarred far worse by this than I. Minis, you are bleeding from the soul with it, and I with you. I am still the father of your spirit and this doesn’t change that even slightly. Don’t hate yourself; I don’t! He was out there, somewhere, and must live without hearing these words.

I had no memory of what he described, but then the whole month of my life I was in the oubliette in the dungeon of the Marble Palace, and a few months after, were and still are lost to me. Knowing Kurkas, I doubted none of it. It was his style, to make his son and his most hated enemy rape each other, both at once.




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14 - What I thought would be an innocuous two-tenth audience

Whatever life-altering personal matter an Imperator/semanakraseye might have his mind riveted by, the course of politics does not pause. The Imperial election was not two and a half moons away, and who did I have? Three Arkan lords, none of whom seemed Imperial material, and Kallijas, who feared no warrior but was terrified of an empire’s worth of responsibility, having never been raised even to dream of it, and was working his heart out boning up because at heart he felt no amount of work would suffice. Of course he’d have me, but not for long… well, maybe longer than we’d thought, but even so, he would not have me close.

It was with this in the back of my mind, since it was always there, that I welcomed a young Arkan writer into my office for what I thought would be an innocuous two-tenth audience.

You might actually recall the name he gave—Minakis Akam—since he’d published several articles in the Pages. Their depth of thought had been striking to me. He was a journalist of scholastic bent with a special interest in politics and a knowledge of the workings of the Marble Palace that was surprising in one who, as far as I knew, had never been there.

I had actually met him before, in the library of the university of Terera, of all places, where he was researching Yeoli-Arkan relations in the time just before the War of the Travesty. I hadn’t given much thought as to what age he must be, guessing vaguely his thirties or forties, and so was astonished to find he was not more than seventeen. I told him he had a magnificent future ahead of him, and we mentioned the idea of dinner, but he was called away before I could invite him.

One other thing had struck me about Minakis right from the start; he was familiar, but I couldn’t place him. I was certain I’d seen him before, and it itched like a bug-bite in my mind all through our library conversation. “My father used to take me to the Mezem now and then, so perhaps there,” he said, when I brought it up, and we left it at that.

Now he wanted to talk to me about the topic of his treatise, though there were historians in Yeola-e who were far more expert than I; probably, I guessed, he just wanted my name among the references, and if he was willing to go to the trouble to get himself on the audience list and then wait for six months, he deserved it. It would be a short, intelligent relief from the usual “Please do such-and-such for me, Imperator, please please please!” audiences.

Minakis was slender, bespectacled and bright blond like Skorsas, his hair cut rule-straight at the exact fessas length in a time when most Arkans pushed the hair laws as far as they could, knowing we didn’t particularly care how long they wore it. His eyes were the pure Arkan blue that painters strive for, almost as bright as the apex of a cloudless sky. They reminded me of Kurkas’s, actually, a thought I put out of mind. He moved gracefully, even a little muscularly, for a scholar. There it was again, though, the moment he came in, the familiarity; it was as if a voice were telling me, you know this youth, and not just from Terera. In one gloved hand he held a book wrapped in brown paper; he laid it on the desk to do the prostration.

“Gehit,” I said. “Have a seat.”

“Thenk yeh, Yeh Whose Wit is the Wisdom of the World,” he said softly, in the broad fessas accent I remembered, but much more formal now that I was Imperator again. “This lowly one brought a gift. Beggin’ yar forgiveness for the impropr’ty...” He pulled off his gloves, opened the book and ran his bare palms and fingers over several randomly-picked pages.

“You don’t need to do that,” I said. Trust a student of Arkan politics to know about paper-poisons.

He looked up at me and smiled slightly. There was a certain sweetness in it that I absolutely knew in my bones. A Lakan would say I knew him in a previous life. “H’its still a good idea, Yeh Whose Life is the World's Blessin'. If yeh trust me, then f’r yar watchers.” He tilted his head toward the big one-way mirror that hid the trap-booth with my office-guards, fingers on the switches for the spring-darts in the walls. Sliding his gloves back on, he lay the book carefully on the desk and pushed it across to me.

It was very heavy for its size. Under the wrapping was a solid gold cover with the Aan sunburst on the front. Like the Imperial Book—another copy? But with the gold? Minakis was extremely blessed with resources… but did he think I wouldn’t have had a copy made?

Then, when I touched the gold with my fingers to open the book, it sang.

†

We are a benighted world. Fallen millennia ago into bare subsistence, and the scrabbling ignorance that goes with it, we claw our way finger-width by aching finger-width over the centuries towards civilization, or at least what our knowledge-starved minds imagine civilization is. But here and there, traces of the old great technology remain, like diamonds in a sea of coal dust, carefully guarded, often claimed by royalty, such as the crown of the Tor Enchian kings or the Arkan temple where the Imperator does the Ten Tens—or else in plain sight but as impossible to reach as a dream for the primitives we are, like Shamballa, the star that rises when all others set, north of Bravhniki.

And sometimes it is kept secret, out of fear it will be stolen, perhaps, or somehow diluted by people outside some self-appointed inner circle knowing about it. So it has been with the Imperial Book; I am the first Imperator who has ever written publicly about the nature of it, and I’m sure many if not all of the previous Imperators would curse my name. But to my mind, just as the best ideas arise out of minds full of diverse knowledge coming together and teaching each other, we will regain what we lost fastest if everyone knows about all of it.

So, the book sang, or more exactly, made a warble like a deep-voiced bird, I whipped my hand away, both Minakis and I jumped back in our seats, and the snap, hiss and tiny thump of a spring-dart into his arm came just an eye-blink faster than I could make the “don’t!” sign to the people in the trap-booth. He lay back in his chair with the look of astonishment still on his face, and I could only hope he heard my apology before his azure eyes rolled back into his head and closed.

†

There is an antidote for Arkan stun-drug that can instantly bring a person out of the unconsciousness caused by it. It’s expensive, but Minakis was unconscious through my slowness of mind, so I felt I owed him.

I had him carried into one of the parlours close by. Of course Krero was all questions, and I stonewalled him. I somehow had a sense I should keep quiet what had happened, that there was sacredness and secrecy about it. I felt I should not let go of the book either, so I kept it under my arm. In unconsciousness, for some reason, Minakis was even more familiar.

“I’m sorry,” I said again, as his eyes flickered open. I put his glasses into his hand. “You were as surprised as me. My mistake.”

Stun-drug leaves an awful headache after you wake up, even if you get the antidote; long since, I’d had Kaninjer make up a remedy for it. “A few drops of this under your tongue,” I said, “and it gets much worse for a moment and then goes away fast. Take it and brace yourself.”

He took the drops, weathered the storm and relaxed. “I have a friend waiting outside,” he said. “A Yeoli—his name is Gannara—if he saw me carried out he’ll be worried.”

“He didn’t,” I said; I’d had him carried the back way that no one in the waiting-room could see. “Gannara?”

“Gannara Melachiya,” he said. “One of the tichevengal.” I’d noticed in Terera too, how good his Yeoli pronunciation was.

When we’d taken Arko, we’d found to our horror that Kurkas had searched out in Yeola-e two ten-year-old boys who strongly resembled me, and had them made to resemble me even more, even to the scars. Using them as his toys, he played out his hatred of me. We’d freed one of them when we’d taken the Marble Palace; the other had been sent out of the city with Kurkas’ fourteen-year-old son Minis and his fifty-strong escort of Mahid, the black-clad clan whose stock in trade is ultimate loyalty, from which Imperators traditionally draw their highest-ranking spies, assassins, torturers and concubines.

The two boys had not been the only tichevengal, or Little Chevengas, as they came to be called; there’d been a score in total brought to the city, the other eighteen going to various nobles, friends of Kurkas. Their parents had banded together, successfully requested public funds from Assembly to help in their search, and tracked all down all but four.

The moment I’d got Irefas, the Arkan spy and secret investigation bureaucracy, back into one piece, I’d set them to search for Minis and his Mahid. The quarries were devious, though. After four years, the agent assigned to it, Perisalas Shefenkas (as a freedman he’d spurned his old owners’ surname, and when I’d elevated him to fessas as one of a batch of deserving men, he’d adopted my given name as his surname) had nothing but a few leads that had run cold. The most interesting part was that Minis had split off from the Mahid two years or so back—when he was around sixteen—and seen both his tutor and his betrothed, who had been sent with him, back to their homes in Arko.

But his Little Chevenga had stuck with him, even after writing his shadow-parents, who’d moved themselves and their merchanting business lock, stock and barrel to Arko to search for him. The girl who’d been slated to marry Minis knew the Yeoli boy’s real name from hearing Minis address him by it—Gannara—and, using that, Perisalas had identified him through the parents’ society as Gannara Melachiya of Asinanai. He was already somewhat famous, from the big posters with a movingly-etched portrait that his parents had put up in port cities all over the Miyatara as well as in the empire; his face with the big sad black eyes that looked far too much like mine had been taken up as a symbol of Arkan abuses in general.

Gannara Melachiya is waiting outside my office? As I was trying to grasp this, it came to me that Minakis’s broad fessas accent was gone. He was speaking in the softest Aitzas instead, the kind of Arkan you’d expect from royalty. Like the vast boom of a huge gate slamming, the whole thing came to me: why Minakis knew so much about the Marble Palace, why his eyes were the same blue as Kurkas’s, why he had the Imperial Book—the original—and why I felt so certain I'd known him before. It was good we weren’t in a place with a trap-booth, else I’m sure the look on my face would have got him spring-darted yet again.

“Minis,” I said.

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13 - There would never be warmth for the child

It was a little after my third visit to Surya that everyone on the training-ground found themselves noticing Niku. “Your wife,” Kyirya Sencheli said to me, brushing dust off the back of his kilt, “is fast today.” The Niah unarmed fighting style, no surprise, has drawn all manner of wisdom from the motions of flying, especially to do with balance and leverage and strikes from high one-foot stances; there is a tricky move to down an opponent called ‘pulling over the cliff’ which relies on speed. Niku could rarely do it to Kyirya and almost never to me, but today she’d done it handily to him every time she’d tried.

She had a certain glow on her, too; between that and the greater speed I should have known, except that my heart was at least half shielding itself from knowing. “What do you mean, what’s up?” she said on the next change of partners, when I asked her. “Aba.”

I took a deep breath. Everyone else took how close we were standing to each other as meaning we were partnered, so we were. Her hands were like lightning; just as I was goading myself faster to match, she pulled me over the cliff. “You’re definitely with child,” I said, from the dust.

If only there were only joy in it, I thought. Not this icy pin-knife of pain and fear at its core. I couldn’t imagine she wasn’t feeling it worse than I, but she was not showing it. Once I was back on my feet she kissed me, and Tyirian, who was calling, barked “Chevenga and Niku, you can do that in bed!” much to everyone else’s mirth. But afterwards when they didn’t have their minds full of move and countermove, and so put two and two together, they came with hugs and words of blessing, mostly “Strength.” They remembered what it had been for us last time.

†

In the first and darker days of Yeola-e, everyone did the stream-test in the way that is now called the severe way. Every newborn was blue when he was pulled out of the ice-water, and about one in four never gained back his pinkness, his tiny life snuffed by the cold. Among those families who still do it, no one does it straight out of the womb any more, but leaves it until the baby is two days old, and many do barely a dip in and out, a formality.

But the semanakraseyesin is in that way, like many others, old-fashioned. I and my father and my grandmother and every Shae-Arano-e ancestor before me was left in for the full run of the stream-testing monk’s sand-timer. Niku had agreed to it even before we married, and honoured it even with Vriah, our first, though neither I nor the monks were anywhere near Ibresi, where she was born, and Niku was not even entirely certain I was alive.

Then, fairly soon after the sack—so, during my first term as Imperator—we conceived again. I had not known there were twins in her family; she told me after the midwife felt two children within when she was about seven months along. “If they’re both boys, omores, we needn’t argue over which of our fathers to name our first son after,” she said, with that smile with a kind of shining in it that only pregnant women get.

I tried not to flinch even inwardly, as two ancient Yeoli traditions at once twinged in my bones. She caught me anyway, by the look that flashed across my face, I suppose, and the smile was gone. “Chevenga, what’s wrong with that?”

“Perhaps I’m too superstitious,” I said, “but I won’t think of names again until they both come alive out of the stream.” She just went, “Hrmph.”

I was too ashamed to tell her the other tradition. When the stream-test was stricter, it was all but unheard of for both of a pair of twins to survive it. A Haian would tell you that this is because, having to share a womb, they tend to be born smaller, and there will often be one weak and one strong, so the weak one tends to die. But long ago, when we were a rougher and more ignorant people, it became custom to think of twins as abominations; since so many of them died in the stream, the thinking went, they all ought to. If you read Yeoli history-books, or even tales, from more than five hundred years ago, you find out that if two identical twins lived to grow up, they would rarely stay in their hometown, and would move to places far apart.

Nowadays, twins work and fight and even marry together, holding their heads perfectly high. But, because of the severity of the stream-test my family does, if you look back through the records, you will not find a semanakraseye, either of my family or the other lines that served before, who had a living twin brother or sister. Among some Yeolis, the feeling still holds. I knew Esora-e, who already didn’t like Niku, would ask me if the test had been done properly, if they both lived, and not much favour them.

I didn’t tell Niku this, but I told Kaninjer. Every now and then, I think, he regrets having hired on with someone as barbaric as me, and judging by his look, this was one. But he agreed to give her medicines and put her on a diet that would make the babies grow bigger and stronger.

Since the womb can feel twins are a double burden, it will often bring them forth before it would a singleton, so they’re born with less flesh with which to withstand the teeth of the stream. I’d asked Kaninjer if he could do anything to hold it off, and he said not much; mothers give birth when they give birth, and it would be just as dangerous, or more, if they grew too big within her anyway. Meanwhile I’d sent to Vae Arahi for the stream-testing senaheral, well in advance, to find a stream that was cold enough somewhere in the mountains near the City.

As the time grew closer, I tried to pass off my nervousness as caused by Imperial work, but Niku caught me when I glanced at her enormous belly, and my mother’s andirons flashed into my mind, from when she’d cremated the baby the stream had killed when I was four. “Don’t fear for them, pehali,” she said. “What if they are like Vriah, and can feel every twinge of your emotion?” I fought it off, but that night at the death-hour, when the heart is most laid open to blackness, I felt it so much again I thought I should not sleep beside her, and went to one of the guest-rooms.

The birth itself went without trouble, and they were indeed both boys. If one was weaker than the other, it was not obvious. As she put one to each breast, I fled the room, sick with fear and my mind full of the andirons, calling over my shoulder, “I’m sorry, love, please understand.” When I’d mastered it enough, with the help of Kaninjer’s medicines, I came back. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked me. “I’ve never seen you like this.” I just said something about always being nervous before. I prayed she hadn’t named them in her mind.

When we went up to the place on the second day, the fear for some reason left me, perhaps because I had a task. I had offered to do it if she couldn’t bring herself, but she said, “Anyone else but me doing it would not be honest.” The monks took their places with their feet astride the stream on either side of us and began the song that is the start of the ritual, and she must have made the wall well, for she laid them into the water smoothly enough, one at a time as I held the other, and the upstream monk turned the sandtimer.

I remember the glade with its cypresses straight like spears, under a hot Arkan blue sky, and the tiny ice-cold person in my arms screaming from the depths of his soul. I’d worn my marya with no shirt underneath, which is best, because you can hold them skin to skin. I curled around him, sending love and warmth into him with everything in me, while the second fought his fight. You could see more of me in their eyes, and her in their lips, I’d noticed this morning; their skin was honey brown like hers but more delicately pale, and they had a thin thatch of tiny black curls on the apexes of their heads. Tennunga, I whispered in my mind.

But when the timer ran out and Niku snatched up the second baby, dripping, she did it with a gasp, and her face went pale under her brown skin and flat like the dead. He was not crying and wouldn’t suckle, bad signs. She dashed away into the woods with him, even past the guards, while the monks went on chanting as if she were still there, and I stood not knowing whether to follow her as a husband and a father should, or let her go as if we were having a quarrel. It occurred to me that it might be best for the one I held not to feel what his brother was feeling, so I stayed. By the time she came back, he’d warmed up and his cries were more demanding than death-filled. He wanted her, of course, so we traded again. There would never be warmth for the child I carried back down the rocky path; all I could do was try not to take chill myself from his stiffening body. Now I understood why I’d been so afraid, and why I’d kept seeing the andirons, the last cradle for one whom my mother had foreknown would die.

When we burned him, Niku’s arm curled tenderly as always around Vriah, but her face was as smooth and dry as a wood carving, in the flickering light. It was so unlike her it made me afraid to speak to her; but we must name the one who lived. “It’s by a custom of my people, not yours, that we only have one,” I said. “Let’s name him Rojhai.” Vriah paid no mind at all to what crackled in the fire, utterly fascinated with her little brother in Niku’s sling.

“I won’t name him after my father to relieve my grief,” she said, flatly. “If we named him Rojhai, I would think of this every time we called him. To honour your father would not hurt either of us.”

“I… no. It would be the same the other way, Niku. Let’s name him something else… we can think on it, though we shouldn’t take too long.” A child can’t begin to learn who he is until he’s named, the saying goes. She murmured yes and we were silent again. I felt tears wanting to come, but they wouldn’t while she was dry-eyed. When I held her that night, she was like stone in my arms.

Early the next morning an idea came to me. “We thought we would have two, and so all the love that we, and everyone, would have given two, the one is getting,” I said, over breakfast. She wasn’t eating as much as a mother nursing both a newborn and a toddler should eat, either. The one way she had not been stone was how fiercely she held the newborn precious. “Why don’t we do the same with the names, call him Rojhai Tennunga?”

She agreed. His name is a study in bilingual diction, Rojhai Tennunga aht Niku nar sept Taekun Shae-Arano-e. Everyone calls him Roshten.

Next day, Niku still did not mourn. “Love,” I said, “when Kurkas tortured me, it was silence that was torture, not expression. It was when I was healing that I screamed and wept. You need to let it out.”

“Shrieking and wailing and tearing my hair does nothing,” she said. “It will only make my burden heavier, same for others around me; why would I do that?”

“Are you blaming yourself?”

“I’d be inhuman if I didn’t.”

“But you’re not to blame.”

“I am trying to tell myself that. And that children die… they both could have been stillborn. We know this. It’s not as if I went into it unknowing.”

“If you’re not blaming me, why aren’t you?”

“Omores, it’s not you, it’s your people. I might as well blame the mountains for being themselves, as well blame them as ask for an answer from a voice in the sky, as you say. I’ll say this much: sometimes your ways are shit.”

I’m not helping things, I thought, by not mourning myself. That night I and all my friends in the Elite who’d lost children to the stream got drunk, and I cried on their shoulders.

Sex can break the frozen heart open, of course; and while a woman who’s given birth doesn’t want it for a while, some tender and whole-souled kissing and caressing might move her. I tried the next night, starting with a feather-touch of my tongue on her shoulder, something she usually loved. She went along, but it was as if there were no nerves beneath her skin and no blood in her veins. “I know what you’re doing,” she finally said. “You expected a fiery response from me, and want it one way or another… sometimes they go out, Chevenga. Sometimes you get embers and ashes. You get that when there’s nothing left to burn.”

The heart-slash of grief for the child slowly gave way to the slow bleed of worry for my wife. She began on a memory-tree as the A-niah do, in one of the Marble Palace courtyards, and was out with it even in pouring rain; she also went flying a lot, handing off the children to Baska. My mother sent her a long letter, as did Shaina, Etana and Artira, none of whom she’d met. But she stayed a ghost in human flesh. I’d wake in the dead of night and find her sitting in the dark, as if she were me. After a half-moon, I went to Kaninjer.

He gave her something, and she took it, and then he gave her the same thing higher, and she refused to take another. Alchaen was still in Arko then; his reputation for healing torture was made on having healed mine, and of course there are plenty of people who have suffered it in and around the City. “You recall when your own feeling was locked up, why it was?” he said to me. I thought back, and remembered the sense of being the boy at the city-gates, holding back a horde beyond number outside, with just my lone shoulder. “It’s the same with her. She’s afraid it will be huge beyond imagining and unending, if she allows even a crack.” She would not go to him, saying only, “I’m not crazy.” He told me I’d just have to wait.

I kept wishing I could tell her that if there’s anything life has taught me, it’s to get over one agony as fast as possible so as to be ready for the next. About two moons after Roshten’s birth, Vriah got a throwing-up fever, and nothing Kaninjer could do seemed to keep her from getting sicker. There we’d been expecting to have three children, and now it looked as if they’d be cut down to one. Her weakening only seemed to stop when Kaninjer, not knowing what else to do, stopped giving her the medicine he was most often giving her.

It crashed together in my mind. If you spend enough time with Haians, you pick up a little of their knowledge, especially if you find it fascinating, as I do. Their medicines never have only one use. The one he’d been giving Vriah, because it best matched the sickness she had, was the same one he often gave me, because it best matched my constitution, and neither I nor Krero had ever asked him how he kept his medicine-box secure. He tested the bottle, somehow, and it was indeed slow-poisoned. An assassin who could read a Haian’s notes? “He’d only have to know his medicines,” said Kaninjer. “You’re not that hard to peg.” We never caught him.

Niku didn’t say a word, but just walked stiffly into a parlour off the main chamber, closing the door. Soon came the sounds of things caroming and smashing off the walls. Skorsas flinched at each crash, saying, “Those are priceless antiques.” Her voice took a little longer to find, but in time the cries came too. To me they were like rain in a desert. “But we’ve solved it, the child is going to be fine,” Kaninjer said to me helplessly. “Don’t worry,” I told him. “This is as much or more about the one the stream killed.”

When she came out, her eyes fixed on me like aimed arrowheads, and she grabbed me by the collar and banged me up against a pillar. “I don’t care if I’m a stranger to everyone but one there,” she hissed, her two fists hard under my chin. “You are going to arrange for me and the children you and I both love to live wherever the fik in Yeola-e you come from, and get us out of this stinking cesspit.”

“Good idea, love,” I said. “I surrender and beg mercy.” She had everyone ready to take off in the same time as it took me to write letters to my sister and my mother, and they were gone before cliff-sunset. She and the children never again set foot in Arko until my second term.

†

So, Niku conceiving again could not be pure joy for us, and there was little to say except to make the calculation. The child would be born next winter, a half-month or so past the solstice, when I was twenty-nine.




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12 - The greatest warrior redux

“Tell me,” he said, looking at my aura. He never squinted or strained or looked as if it took much effort when he did, incidentally, nor did his eyes take on any strange gaze; he’d look at it as you or I would scan the sky for weather. I only knew when he was doing it by where he looked. “Tell me about when you knew you didn’t want to be a warrior.”

I stared at him. “Knew I didn’t want to be a warrior? If that happened… I’ve forgotten it completely.”

“Mmm,” he said, scanning my aura again. “Changed my mind: on the table.” At least he let me stay dressed, and even laid a light quilt over me. This time when he had me breathe deeply, he commanded me to relax completely and close my eyes too, and I remembered what he’d said in the first session: don’t close your eyes, that puts you in the past.

“You’ve completely forgotten a number of things in your life, other than the first two or three years, which is natural,” he said. “The most significant one, other than your stream-test, is when you were tortured in Arko… something we needn’t delve into for our purposes at the moment. Maybe someday you’ll want to heal it entirely.” I’d given up on that, figuring it wasn’t worth it for such a short time left in my life; I’d have to rethink that now. “Knowing you didn’t want to be a warrior, though, you definitely want to get back.”

“I really didn’t, at some point? You sound so certain… you see it in my aura?” I thought back through my past, right to childhood, and could find nothing of the kind. I knew better than to deny it entirely, though.

He laid his hands on either side of my head. “Close your eyes again, Chevenga. All-Spirit… giving an order with that name… well, I’m just going to have to get used to it.” He actually didn’t seem even in the slightest bit fazed. “Breathe deep, breathe in total laxness… let every muscle, every sinew, every cell go loose.” His fingers touched my temples then, and suddenly I was falling into myself. I’d been in trance before, in particular with Alchaen, but it had always taken some time. Surya somehow had in his fingers the power of bringing it instantly.

“Your family all mourned your blood-father… your first war-training class after that,” he said, very gently, his voice filling my mind as I were on truth-drug. “Go to that time.”

Of course it came back as if it had never been gone. I even remembered that I had retained the memory of it recently enough that I’d recounted it in the memoir I’d written in my private time. Not a year ago, and it was gone… I tried to swallow the horror of the fragmentedness of my own mind.

†

It was after the three days of full mourning for my father were over, the first day I went back to training. Esora-e and Urakaila, one of the other teachers, sword-sparred to inspire us as they often did. Always before it had given me joy; now I found myself thinking, ‘What are they doing?’ Then when it came time to wrestle, it was, ‘What am I doing?’ I was with Mana first and he kept beating me, miming breaking my neck or crushing my throat with the usual glee; but each time I got him into a position where he was at my mercy, he would somehow squirm loose, my hands losing their strength when it came time to finish him. Against Sachara and Krero and Nyera it was exactly the same. I felt Esora-e’s eyes on me.

This was something to deal with, I saw, and to decide on. What worried me most was that I might be a coward at heart, my father’s death having brought it out in me. Simple to remedy: I would climb Haranin to the edge of the highest cliff I knew the way to, search my heart, and, if I did see I was indeed a coward, throw myself off. Yeola-e never needs a coward for a semanakraseye.

Before I could slip away, though, Esora-e stopped me at the gate of the School of the Sword, led me into the antechamber where the Sword of Saint Mother hangs, and sat me down with him before it. A year before, when I’d entered the School for the first time, and wrapped my hand round the grip of the Sword as is traditional for new students, I’d also lifted it, which had created a big stir. I remembered the sound of the chains from which it hung, like a brook’s trickling. Yet now this beautiful thing had a stain on it. What was bothering me came to me in a flash: what I was learning to do in this place was what had been done to my father.

I thought of my bright promise, the polished wristlets I would get on my graduation, the triumphs I would lead through the town as I had seen my father do, flowers and streams of wine raining on me, and Chirel, forged in the perfect curve which, extended, would form the circle of rya-kya, nothing/everything—all these things I’d looked forward to making my life about. All lies, this beauty—all a mask worn by death. My body suddenly didn’t seem my own, going hot and cold by turns. It, and my soul, were being shaped into those of a killer; the joy of training itself was a betrayal. Even my name, which means “lion’s heart,” was a thing of war, and it was my only name. I wanted to scream for mama, or flee into some dark warm cave where no one would ever see me again, like the one I’d crept out of not so long ago. Or leap off the cliff.

Esora-e put two very gentle hands on my shoulders. “Chevenga, tell me what’s in your heart.”

“I never want to be a warrior.” With my eyes buried in my hands, I could not see his expression, but I heard a long deep breath, a readying one like before a fight.

“Well… it took courage even to say that.” He was worried about the same thing, that I was in truth a coward. “Look at me, my child, and tell me why.”

I looked him in the eyes. “I never want to kill anyone.”

His moustache twitched. I thought of how he liked to show off his scars, and tell what happened to the warriors who’d given them to him; how he talked of “full-splitting the child-rapers” and seeing their blood fountain, laughing, while my mothers both pursed their lips. I thought of my blood-father; I’d picked a flower on the mountain, and he’d said, “You’ve killed it. Up here where summer is so short and so it takes so long for them to grow back… well, there are many more. But never forget what you are doing. That’s the hardest thing, in war: never forgetting what you are doing.” He understands best, I thought, as always. Understood; now he is picked.

“Anyone?” said my shadow-father. “Even if he is trying to kill you?” He spoke the name of my father’s murderer, which I never write so that it will be forgotten. “What he did was twice wrong: murder, and for mindless hate. We kill for the same reason Saint Mother gave us the Sword: life, and only in fair fights within our borders. Play that out in your mind, lad; you have before.”

I did as he asked, imagining, as a child will, the enemy as a monster. I parried the blows in my mind as always, but when the time came to strike him dead, my hand in my imagination went weak as it had in real life in the class. “I couldn’t win,” I said. “I should not be there.”

“Play it properly. He will kill you, if you don’t kill him. You know that.”

This time I made the enemy truly dangerous, awakening my own fear, and it went as it always had before; any feeling for him was gone from my heart. But afterwards as he lay dead, he turned from a monster back into a man, and I saw him on a pyre like my father’s, heard his wife and his small children weeping, and felt remorse to my bones. But the next enemy was coming, and the next… I would never tire, for that would be choosing death, but keep going, kill, regret, kill, regret, all my life. With any luck I’d die before it drove me mad. Never imagine children cannot see their future.

In this tangle there had to be a thread of pure rightness somewhere. I thought furiously, my hands curled into fists, until I found it, shining with truth’s magnificence. “There shouldn’t be any wars!”

I thought his face would light up with inspiration, as my heart had. Instead he laughed bitterly, and pulled a lock of my hair. “Nothing truer! Yet those pesky foreigners keep attacking us. You’d think they’d never heard the wisdom of the great sage Chevenga.”

I’d thought it was brilliant; certainly not deserving of mockery. As always, anger made me stubborn. “When I’m semanakraseye, I’ll end it. There won’t be any more wars. That’s what Saint Mother really wanted.”

His dark brows went up under his fore-curls, which had no grey in them then. “You will? By not being a warrior? You’ll go visit King Astyardk in Laka and charm him into stopping his thugs from raiding our farmfasts? When King Enjaliansi of Tor Ench lays claim to our port towns because they were inside the old empire a thousand years ago, you’ll say, ‘You can’t have them, but I don’t like killing people, so let’s not have a war, all right?’ You’ll sweet-talk the herd-raiders: ‘I’m not a warrior, so will you dear fellows kindly stop absconding with our sheep’?”

“I’ll make them listen,” I said, stabbing three fingers of my sword-hand into the stone floor as I’d seen Servants do on their desks when making a strong point. “Like when two of us quarrel and Mama makes us do chiravesa, imagine being the other, I’ll say ‘You be me and I’ll be you.’”

“So that you will gain understanding of why they abscond with our sheep, and they, why we’d like to keep them?” He laughed again. “Don’t look at me like that, Fourth Chevenga. It’s not you I’m making fun of, it’s your age. You’ve spoken and I’ve listened; now I’ll speak and you listen.” He took my face between his weapon-callused hands, his eyes turning the grey of storms.

“You think there is always a parent standing over people who are arguing. But with you and some greedy tyrant, there will be none. This is foreigners we speak of, ‘those who will not listen to your words of justice and sense.’ She was right; they came. And they still come.

“While you were showing off your naivete you were also insulting your ancestors. You think you were the first ever to think of making peace? But it cannot be done without a sheathed sword at one’s side, to show the other he’s best off being reasonable. Otherwise what he will demand, ultimately, is all our land and all of us as slaves. All-Spirit, why am I saying this? You know your history, at least the shape of it… you’re just saying you don’t want to kill. You’d leave it to others.

“Well, all right, no one has to do everything; we serve each other best by giving each other our greatest gifts. True?” Knowing what this was leading up to, I didn’t answer. “Of course. And what are you better at, than fighting?” He was right; I was good at my book studies, but a semanakraseye is not an advocate or an academic. I was competent enough at playing the harp and flute and making things with my hands; I had no other uncommon gifts to offer. Then something came to me: “Making friends.” I had succeeded in befriending anyone I’d wanted to, as long as I could remember.

He waved it off. “You can’t make friends with foreigners. Oh, they might fake it; then when you are fooled, thinking what great friends they are, they’ll stab you, and Yeola-e, in the back. Of the other skills, from which come callings, you are best at fighting—deny it?”

I signed charcoal but said, “I have a calling: I’m going to be semanakraseye.”

“Ah, well, yes,” he said, “I was coming to that. Tell me, will you send out others to do what you yourself would not?” It fell to us to command; thus we became warriors. My blood-father’s words; I felt weak and sick.

Plenty of semanakraseyel, in fact, have not been warriors, including my aunt, who served as regent after my blood-father was killed. The old age of kraiyal-semanakraseyel ended with Notyere’s starting the War of the Travesty to make himself king, after which it was made illegal for a semanakraseye to fight for a century and a half. It will likely never again be compulsory. But my grandmother and blood-father had both done it, and I had always intended to.

“Imagine, the Enchians invade, and you send out an army to die on Yeoli furrows while you sit safe in Assembly Palace. The numbers are even, but we lose and ten thousand die. Those who are left bind up their wounds and wonder what went wrong, how it could have been different. ‘I know one thing,’ one will say. ‘Fourth Chevenga would have been a great warrior had he not quit his training, because he didn’t want to kill anyone. With another First General First as good as Tennunga, think how the battle would have gone.’ Another will say, ‘My father got killed by an Enchian too, and I didn’t quit my training.’ All down the line they’ll curse you, and why not? You’ll have denied them your greatest gift.

“Think of those who rightfully envy you! ‘I wish I had the strength and quickness he was born with; I’d have a better chance of living, and Yeola-e a better chance of winning. And he’s the semanakraseye…! If he doesn’t give his best, why should anyone?’ ”

I threw my hand up between his to grab my forelock, tears burning in my eyes and sickness in my guts.

“You were bred to be a warrior, Chevenga. Your blood-parents—too gentle, he was, and she is, they wouldn’t tell you that. He and his blood-mother before him married warriors so that their children would be better warriors. Why do you think the Shae-Arano-el still do the stream-test, and the old way? You will win the tournaments and gain the promotions and be loved by all who fight under you, not by chance. All their choices led up to you. And you would throw it away—what do you think your blood-father would think if he knew?”

I didn’t answer. I was thinking only of the cliff, and how free I would feel with the wind rushing through my hair, faster and faster, knowing the answer to all dilemmas was an instant away.

“Chevenga, we are all bound to duty. Should you turn from yours, you’ll be proven a coward, for all you are fearless of death; a coward is, after all, one ruled by fear of what he must do. In the end, my son and Tennunga’s, I don’t think you are. Grief will turn anyone’s head for a time. But in the end, it lies with you to prove it. Whatever hinders you, you’ll have to conquer, or fail entirely. Think about it.” He got up and walked away, leaving me alone with the Sword.

As I climbed Haranin, his words rang in my ears, but the words of the dead spoke truer to my heart. Unwaveringly, my father had said, “As always, you choose.”

I had sometimes thought they were harsh words; now I knew they were the ultimate tenderness. Everyone loved me; only he had understood me. Now I knew fully how alone I was, with him gone.

The wind sang through the crags, growing cool; clouds covered the sun and the many-hued striations in the rock turned dull. Past the tall pines and then the stunted ones I picked my way up. On the edge I sat, dangling my legs, the shining scythe that was Terera Lake, and the anthill that was the town below, paled by distance.

I felt my limbs whose strength showed when I wrestled, my hands that were faster than anyone else’s at hot hands and five stones; tightening my arms I took my weight onto them, while a hawk flying far above the green forest below hung tiny as a dust-speck between my feet. I flexed my muscles, which I had always, wrongly, thought were mine. Esora-e was right; he’d only adhered to what I’d already been taught. But my blood-father was right too. Even in the time of our greatest helpless, our path always has a fork.

As always, I would choose; go on with my training, or leap. My life was bound to the semanakraseyesin, and the semanakraseyesin, at least for me, to the sword; but I was not necessarily bound to life—less so, now, than most. I shifted forward a little, so my hips were just on the edge. Had the right wind blown then, my story would have been this short. None did, but for a moment I leaned, and thought I was gone.

There was a rushing like a waterfall through my ears. The ground was suddenly tenuous under me, as if the nothingness beyond its edge somehow made all solids near it dubious. The wind filled with song, the notes of the harmonic singer, one the dark and steady tone like a stone flute’s, the other soaring high and bitter and wild like the wind itself. Bound to one core like those of a jewel, facets of my life flashed in my mind: my turquoise, blue and purple cloak, the height of the mountain racing all through my legs after a fast climb, the oyster of the chicken in honey sauce, Assembly Hall with its sacred solemnity, the thousand fascinations of the marketplace, the wildness of the grown-ups dancing at the love-feast, the swelling of pride as I found I could do something I had not been able to do before. From the green land close to me, all the things and people I knew called me to return to them; from the land blued by distance, all those I did not know yet called me to wait for them, their voice the breath of All-spirit, their collective name Yeola-e. The song ran through my head: “Do we defend it grimly, like a miser his gold? No; stiffness is the way of death. We choose; always, we choose. Do we subsist and grasp? No; for goods are not happiness. We celebrate life, and live a celebration.” Life itself sang to me, roared and turned silvery in my heart, and my tears were like those we weep hearing music too beautiful to bear.

When the wind’s voice faded to a whisper again, I lay flat on the rock and wept. For my blood-father, the first tears I shed that were for his loss, not my own. For myself, fated to lose life too soon. For all people who ever died, whom I imagined in their terrible number, more multifarious than any currently-living crowd could be, doing and using things that were incomprehensible to us now, a thousand peoples who had died as one with their devices and arts and knowledge beyond imagining in the Fire, never properly mourned because not enough were left to mourn them. I wept for the cow slaughtered, the starflower picked. I wept for all that must die: all that lived.

In the story of the Fire as my grandmother had told it to me, power had been in the hands of kings so that people could do little, but everyone had known it was coming. I asked her, “What did they do?”

“No one knows it all, but you can imagine. Some excised any thought of it from their heads and lived as if there were no threat. Some lived like warriors, fast and reckless and with no thought for tomorrow, since there’d be no tomorrow. Some went insane, turning frozen or berserk; some withered inwardly and died in spirit, then in body. Some prepared for it, building strongholds deep in the land, and ended up yearning for it to come just to end their fear. Some debated and protested bravely in the attempt to stop it. Some prayed, and trusted in gods to prevent it. Some resigned themselves to it, and some hoped beyond hope it would not happen.”

“But they all died,” I said. “So, in the end, what they did didn’t matter.”

“No,” she said. “But while they lived, it did.”

I made the first of my personal laws then. I had, I guessed, about half the time I might have otherwise expected, so in that time I should do two times as many things as others, and love people two times as hard, to make up for it. I think of it in the childish wording to this day.

I got up from the edge of the cliff and went back down to the School. The Sword hung black between walls of plain white, unadorned, ungraven. We do not surround our sigil of war with scenes of glorious battles or splendid triumphs, of the nobility of war nor even the drama. The Sword hangs plain, neither celebrated or despised, neither reproaching nor praising, neither dark nor light, but equal parts of each, entwined with and contained by the other. The pain is there, and the joy; the loss and the win. “Never forget what you are doing,” my blood-father had said. He’d never said either, “Do it” or “Don’t do it.” I had not known the dark half; then when I’d learned it, I had forgotten the light. Now I saw both.

I curled my fingers around the grip of the Sword. ‘Esora-e wants me to fight because it’s what he wants,’ I thought, ‘not because he sees this. He doesn’t. Well, I see it, so I’ll fight for it, nothing else, and if he doesn’t like it, too bad, but I bet he won’t notice.’ Once again the Sword rose in my hand.

†

Next day, we had kraiya-long wooden sticks, and I was swinging mine absently, waiting for Esora-e to call us into line, when the whim struck me to aim it at Nyera’s head, the closest target at hand, for a joke. To my horror, she did not duck, but stood dead-still like one blind. I was not quick enough at that age to check its flight, and so for an instant had to helplessly watch what my hands did, the knobbed end streaking in, a hand-width, two finger-widths, one finger-width, away from her blond ringlets—then hitting with a thwack that hummed through my fingers.

She stumbled one step, then turned around, her face first pop-eyed with surprise, then black with rage. To her credit, she dropped her stick and came after me with her hands. Being angry while I was bewildered, she was on top of me in no time and grinding my face in the dirt when Esora-e lifted her off me.

He got an earful of truth without asking. “He hit me with his stick!” “I didn’t mean to hit her, she didn’t duck!” “I was looking the other way!” “So you should have ducked anyway!” “How could I!? You snuck up on me!” “I wasn’t sneaking, you knew I was there, you’re just trying to get me into trouble!” “I am not! Sir, he’s lying! I wasn’t looking and he knows it!” “You still should have ducked!” And so on.

To my surprise, since in my mind I was entirely innocent, Esora-e was looking darkest at me. By this time all the children in the ground had gathered around, standing on tiptoe to see over each other’s heads. “Fourth Chevenga,” he said finally, “I’d like you to demonstrate what you think Nyera should have done.” He picked up my stick, and handed it to her. “Turn around.” I did. It was a pleasure to turn my back on her.

It was pleasure she planned to have, too. No one relishes revenge so much as a child granted permission to take it. She brought the stick around whistling, and I ducked just as he’d asked.

Silence fell. “Again,” he said. This time Nyera aimed from the other side. I did the same. The other children stared as if they were seeing magic. Why is this such a big thing to them? “Again.” This time she did a down-stroke and I side-stepped. “No fair!!” she screamed.

He had Nyera give me the stick then, much to her disappointment, and tied his spare sweat-rag around my eyes, making sure not a single crack of light could get through. As always, in training, he was wearing his sword; now I felt him draw it, and kneel down in front of me to match my height. Slowly at first, he ran me through the Eight Blocks. I’d only ever practiced them with my hands before, but of course I’d seen them done with swords, so it was easy enough to extrapolate. I heard him spit, before he checked my blindfold, then tied another rag over it. The second time he went faster. By this time the children were all yelling with delight, cheering me on, and I was enjoying myself. “Try harder, shadow-father,” I teased him. Instead he banged his sword into its scabbard, ordered Urakaila to watch us, and leapt up from his knees straight into a dead run, his footfalls thumping towards the door of the School.

“How are you doing that?” Mana said to me. His full name, by the way, was Mana-lai Chereda, and until his death at twenty-one he was my best friend.

I yanked off the rags. “What do you mean? It’s… it’s… it’s the feel without touch. Like when you watch a fight with your eyes shut.” He just stared at me. “You’re all staring at me with your mouths flapping,” I said. “Why?” It took them some time to get it through my skull that none of the rest of them could do this, not even Urakaila; if they could not see or touch a weapon, they didn’t know where it was. That filled me with horror, and then awe for their courage; how could they even consider becoming warriors, so handicapped? Then my shadow-father came back with Azaila, who was the war-teacher of all the war-teachers, and a good half of the other war-teachers.

He got me to do it again, and when he pulled the blindfold off, the younger teachers, grown-ups all, sweaty with the exertion he’d drawn them away from, were staring at me no less astonished then the children had.

From then on I was Azaila’s, and only Azaila’s, student, at least formally. Always I marveled, at how his old crack-skinned arms could so easily guide my clumsy smooth ones, till they became less so.

That same day, after training was done, Esora-e took me back into the room where the Sword hung.

“You thought everyone had weapon-sense like yours, didn’t you?” he said. I signed chalk. I had been thinking; this explained the strange apparent blindnesses afflicting other people that I had always noticed. His eyes were bright as if he’d just been fighting, his cheeks flushed. “Azaila does; that’s why it must be him who teaches you. So do some of the other teachers. But they’ve trained fifty years for it. You were born with it. Do you know what that means?”

I found myself afraid to know, my heart drifting back to the edge of the cliff. I signed charcoal. He took my face between his hands again.

“If you always work as hard as you can in training, always do your best—which you always have so far—you, Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e, could be the greatest warrior in the world.”

I stood silent. I didn’t know what to say. His face split into a wide grin, and he touseled my hair. “Aren’t you glad you chose to stay with it?”

†

I felt Surya’s fingers on my temples, and his table under my back, and tears in my eyes. I couldn’t remember forgetting, of course, but I was fairly sure I’d never wept over it before. He said nothing, only changed his hold on my head into a cradling, to let my emotion run its course, and my mind take its time coming back to the present.

“I was Azaila’s student,” I whispered finally. “But Esora-e gave me extra, as my shadow-father. His heart was set on it; from then on, it was his sacred task. Surya… I didn’t think I could forget something that major.”

“You concealed your unwillingness to kill from yourself very thoroughly afterwards. Forgetting was part of it. It’s natural. You essentially had to, once you’d decided.”

But I had remembered now. I lay silent for a while, feeling laid open and naked as a new bone-deep wound, my head in his hands. I had to lie here in stillness and silence and his caring, I saw, to get to the point of being able to bear it.

“Now I know,” I said, when I could, “I remember feeling echoes of it, across my whole life. When I was telling them in the Mezem that I wouldn’t fight… it was familiar, and I didn’t know why. No meant death; but when I said no, I felt so free.” Tears came again. He changed his grip again, leaving one hand on the back of my head taking its weight, and laying the other across my brow. His touch was almost more gentle than I’d known was possible.

After another wordless time, my emotion washing itself out, he had me take three very deep breaths, and said, “Tell me now, how you feel about going asa kraiya.”

That freedom flashed through me again, blinding, as long as I could bear, which was a bare moment. Then emotion seized me. I had asked Surya earlier why his walls were lined with sponges; to dampen sound, he told me, so that his clients could fully voice their feeling without the entire neighbourhood bearing witness. It washed itself out all over me, right down to my toes, leaving me so spent I slept for half a bead right on his table. When it came time to sling back on all my weapons to leave, my hands did it unthinkingly as always, but neither the weapons nor the hands seemed my own.

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11 - in which I am outed

An eight-day after Surya and I sent our letters to my mother and shadow-father, I got a pigeon-message, saying they were both coming, by wing. That was the same day as my third session with Surya. As I closed the door behind myself, he said, “You’ll be sad to hear this, but it couldn’t be helped. I know who you are.”

I didn’t understand, no doubt because I didn’t want to. What does he mean, he’s always known exactly who I am, I can hide nothing from him, what in…? I guess confusion showed on my face.

“Semanakraseye.”

I froze, feeling my cheeks go red and sudden tears behind my eyes. Well, why not? What feeling of mine had I ever hidden from him? And yet the tears stayed behind my eyes, locked there by my knowing he knew my name. I took a long casual breath and said, “Call me Chevenga. You know me well enough.”

“You can never take off the armour of your name, except here with me, can you? Have you ever had that before, in your life?” I signed charcoal, unable to speak. “Once you’ve got all the weapons off, just sit down and let it out.” Chevenga or not, I hadn’t lost the habit of obeying him. Blinded with tears, I had to grope for the hooks to hang my swords. Once I’d sat down, he put his arms around me, and I wept on his shoulder.

“You’ve lost nothing, I’ll make sure of that,” he said. “You know how it is, how first impressions stick, and define a person no matter what else we learn. To me, you are still the man who came in through my door, whose aura I saw full of death, and who wanted so dearly to live. Do you think your aura has changed? I knew the size of your burden before; now I understand its nature, and that will be help, not hindrance. I think it was best that I didn’t know before I got you to relinquish your will to me, though; I don’t know that I’d have had the nerve. That makes me think I was blinding myself to it, actually; I knew in the deeper me that it was best I didn’t know, so the deeper me kept me from it. I’ve had things like that happen before. Don’t worry. Everything is going as it should.”

“In a sense my will has always been relinquished to you,” I said, as he handed me one of his goodly stock of kerchiefs. “Semana kra.” We shared a little laugh. “How did you find out?”

“I received a visit from the Captain of the Darya Semanakraseyeni, Krero Saranyera.”

I cringed inside, imagining. He spared me further imagining, if not further cringing, by telling me the full story. Later that same day I got Krero’s version of it, too.

†

Surya had guessed that I was high enough in the ranks that he’d probably know my name if he heard it. He’d thought no further than that. A day after the second session, as he was working with his healing-room door slightly open (he'd leave it that way if the client wasn't yelling, so as to hear taps), a very authoritative knock came on his door. At first he ignored it, thinking that the visitor, having read on his sign that he was a healer, would realize he was working. They usually did. Krero knocked again.

“I must work as uninterrupted with this patient as I will with you, if you’d be so good as to come in and wait!” Surya called pleasantly on the third knock, in Enchian.

“I’m here on business of national import!” Krero barked unpleasantly, in Yeoli.

“My patient is Arkan, thus in effect Yeoli, thus, semana kra, so business of national import can wait, kere,” Surya answered in Yeoli. “You are welcome; please, come in!”

With four of his escort, Krero did, and sat fuming for half a bead.

The poor patient scurried out through the gauntlet of full-geared Yeolis, Surya offered them all ezethra, and Krero introduced himself and began grilling him. “Where are you from? Who are your parents? Where did you get your healer training? Are you war-trained? Why did you move to Arko? Did you ever live in Arko before?” And so on.

Having nothing to hide, Surya answered it all willingly and thoroughly. When Krero ran out of questions, he asked, “May I know why I have been asked these things, especially in person by someone as highly placed as you?”

Krero stared at him. “You don't know, when you have who you have as a patient?”

The healer, Krero would tell me later, looked baffled. “Who I have as a patient? What do you mean?”

Long delays never improved Krero’s mood. “Surya,” he snapped, “I’ve tried to be patient. All through waiting, I tried, and I am still trying now, and I don’t know how long I will be able to succeed. You pose as professional enough to have some knowledge of your patients; would that be enough to know their names?” (“Are you sure you should be trusting this fellow?” Krero asked me as he told me the story. “I know sometimes healers’ heads are in the clouds, but this is ridiculous.”)

“Well, come to think of it,” said Surya, “there is one whose name I don’t know. It didn’t matter to me for the healing, and I guess it doesn’t matter to him either because he hasn’t told me, so it’s never come up. I’ve always had the impression he has some sort of high position, actually; maybe he’s why you’re here? Medium height, black hair, a nasty cut-scar down his right cheek and a square of brand-lines on his left, wears two very fancy Arkan-looking gold bracelets chained to rings on both hands, which he won’t take off even when I make him strip...”

One or two of the escort snickered, but Krero was in no mood. “How could you not know his name? How could you not know his face?”

“I drew him in and onto the table before he had a chance to introduce himself, and then we were too deep in the session… I’ve never thought about whether he looked familiar.” Now he did, searching back through his memory, just as it was occurring to Krero that I might have purposely gone incognito and forgot to tell him. Like every warrior who’d fought for me, Surya had seen me speak, albeit from a distance.

“Blessed All-spirit,” Krero told me in his account. “Nothing in my life has ever prepared me for a healer even knowing words like that. Of course he’d been in the army, that’d be how.” Surya apparently blushed right down to his hands, as well. I’ll rue as long as I live, however long that is, that I didn’t get to see it. The escort all burst out laughing.

“He’s Chevenga,” Surya spluttered. “That explains …a lot.” But he said no more, mindful of confidentiality; and telling Krero he now understood entirely why he’d been questioned, and for the sake of the nation, two nations, he was appreciative of his diligence, he sent them on their way.

†

“So I must pay you back this,” he said, handing me the seven silver chains I’d paid him last time. “We may be in Arko, but I am Yeoli and have not left our ways behind. I do not charge the semanakraseye.” He was polite enough not to ask how I’d had them. I took them, and stifled my happiness that I’d also slipped him the five gold in the hope he would not see it in my aura. He said nothing and we went on.

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10 – Telling three

I stayed in the office late that night to finish the letters—the one to Esora-e probably the most awkward, tentative thing I’ve ever written in my life, the one to my mother much easier—and sent them off with the early-morning semanakraseyeni wing-courier. Personal business, yes, but, when I thought about it, did the Yeoli and Arkan taxpayer not own me anyway?

Then I took Kallijas and Niku into one of the very private rooms in the Imperial chambers.

It was harder getting the words out than it had been telling either of them of my foreknowledge in the first place. I found myself swallowing tears, and my hands trembling; alarmed, they each wrapped an arm around my shoulders. “You know I went to a healer?” I said. I hadn’t told them, but Krero had. “It was... what he did to me... he’s incredible... I have to... aigh.” I did what I knew Surya would advise if he were here: took a deep breath.

“Is it about when you were tortured?” Niku said gently. I signed charcoal.

“The sack?” Kallijas whispered. I signed charcoal again.

“The impeachment?” I signed charcoal. They glanced at each other, stumped, having hit on all the points in my life when my mental health had been clearly questionable. “You’re sure it’s nothing to do with the torture?” Niku said. “Omores, I’ve never seen you so tongue-tied except when you were trying to talk about that.”

“It isn’t, I swear,” I said. “Kyash, I feel like an idiot. I’m sorry. I had no idea this would be so hard. When I do manage to spit it out, you’ll be astounded.” They held me closer, wishing me comfort, strength, telling me not to reproach myself, to take my time, that they understood it was something difficult.

“My foreknowledge,” I finally said. “I’m seeing him about that.” Their eyes fixed on me, growing graver, and my tongue locked again. “He has... he thinks he can... kyash, kevyala, loves, I’m sorry, if I could just tell you I would—! He thinks he has a way to...aigh.”

“Help you take it better?” Kall said, in a whisper. “Though I can’t see how you could.”

My hand stabbed out charcoal. I sprang up out of their arms, needing to move, to walk off the trembling, the nausea. “It’s not so simple as foreknowledge,” I said. “He made me see that. It’s something I am carrying in me. Obligation...” They glanced at each other, their confusion deepening tenfold. I was sweating now. “Something I am carrying... something I can... put down.”

They both froze, as if they’d been stabbed. I remember the stillness in his sky-blue and her earth-brown eyes, like yesterday.

“Omores, you mean...” I watched Niku, ever daring, fight to say the words. “This healer thinks he can save you?”

I thrust both my hands out chalk, and buried my face in them.

There was a moment of silence like death; then Niku grabbed me by the hair on both sides of my face, Kall my shoulders. “Chevenga, this healer—do what he says, don’t buck him like you do Kaninjer, Sheng, we are with you, pehali, ask if there is anything we can do to help, we will do it, no matter what it is, but you have to do what he says...”

“I am,” I said. “I’ve relinquished my will to him, same as in war. I’m acting on one of his orders now; he told me to tell you two.”

The questions came thick and fast. I explained as best I could—now I’d got the main news out, it became easier—how Surya worked, how often I would see him, what he had done both visits. To the question of how long it would take, I had to say I did not know; nor did I know whether he was willing to come to Vae Arahi once I went back there, though if his theory was true that he had been called to Arko to save my life, then presumably he would.

Speaking became a struggle again, when they asked me how it was possible, which really was the more incriminating question of why, if it were possible now, I had always thought it impossible. Though on reflection there seemed no sensible reason to be more ashamed of having an urge to death due to things I had been taught than foreknowledge, I felt more ashamed of it somehow, as if it were somehow more my own doing. Or as if I had lied to them, though I had believed it with all my heart.

I could not explain well; I resorted to telling them I’d get Surya to, or they could go to him for the full explanation, which I learned later they did.

Then when we were about to go back to the bedchamber, where Skorsas would be, it came to me that it was hardly fair to tell two of my loves why I’d been so rattled for the last three days, and not the third. Now that my death was not certain, I realized, his forbiddance need no longer apply.

If I happened to have a dream that foresaw my death, would you want me to tell you? It had been four years ago now, shortly enough after the Sack that I'd still had my arms in casts, after I'd told Kall; I thought I should tell Skorsas too, but also felt fairly strongly that he might well not want to know. How better to find out than just ask? I said it very casually, pretending it was hypothetical. “No!” he answered. “No no no no no—I wouldn’t want to know that.” So I’d honoured it.

Now, I took him off to the same eavesdrop-proof room. In a way it was easier than with Niku and Kall, since they’d already known and made their peace with the first part; in a way it was harder, for exactly the same reason.

“My little professional—I mean my great noble God,” he whispered. When he was really thrown, he could forget he’d been elevated. “It was real. You asked because it was real.” That casually-worded question had stuck in his mind, it seemed. “You never cease to amaze me, Jewel of the World. Muunas…” He looked at me as he was seeing me for the first time again, as people often do when I tell them. “That makes so much about you make sense.” Then when I told him the second part, that I’d learned now it was not foreknowledge, but obligation, he said, “That makes everything else about you make sense.” A bit of a chill went up my spine. Was I so transparent?

“So now—you’re fighting it. Ha!” he said, triumphantly. “No fear, any time you fight anyone or anything. I’m in the gate behind you, Living Greatest, as always, with perfect confidence.”

On retrospect, we’d both done right, I to ask hypothetically, he to answer honestly. He went straight from blissful ignorance to hope and confidence that I would overcome it, never living in the darkness of the certain thing hanging over his head, as Niku and Kallijas had. Skorsas has a gift, for somehow escaping the worst, and coming out with a smile on his perfect face, his clothes unwrinkled and his panache untouched. I wish I had it.

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