19 - Esora-e's approval

I know from hearing about it afterwards, what Surya said to Esora-e, when they had their first talk session and Esora-e promised him what he’d promised me. After swearing him to it as he’d sworn me, Surya said, “You may have to do something even harder than giving your life. You may have to admit you erred.” No mystery to me, how he knew Esora-e so well, so soon. That was all I heard about that session. Next it was all three of us.

“It’s had time to sink in,” Esora-e said, first thing. “My poor lad... what a thing to carry, starting as a child! I know why you didn’t tell me. Why? I couldn’t have lifted it from you; no one could.”

“Mm-hmm,” said Surya. “As Chevenga saw certainty in that vision, so do you. Why?”

We both stared at him, then at each other. Everything that I had learned in my times with Surya before this went clean out of my head.

“A boy seeing the fresh corpse of his father has an image of his own corpse at a similar age,” said Surya. “Are there not many ways to interpret that? He might take it as certainty, as you did, Chevenga. He might also take it as warning: ‘Don’t follow the same road father did, in some way.’ Some might also say, he’s merely overwrought with grief, and it’s freed the darkness in his imagination. Or that he wishes he were dead rather than his father, as the bereaved often do; here your shadow-father has said he’d give his life to save yours. There are many possible ways to take it.”

I said, “It felt like certainty, to me.”

“Certainty... or necessity?”

That froze my tongue, and Esora-e’s too. I saw Surya look at both our auras.

“You don’t word it much,” he said to me. “Try now. What did you learn, from your father’s death?”

“What death was,” I said. “What it means.”

“And yet you’d already been threatened with it.” Again we both stared at him. “The stream-test, remember? Your first death-battle to prove yourself worthy of life.”

It’s an old debate in Yeola-e, since the first families stopped doing it, centuries ago, and so Esora-e could rattle off the pro side. “Healer, it keeps us strong as a people; we’d have been killed off a thousand years ago if the first Yeolis hadn’t done it. And if every family but one quits, the one that continues should be the demarch’s, else how will we win our wars?”

“That may be,” said Surya. “But it is still what it is, a lesson for the child that some born are undeserving of life.”

“Some born are undeserving of life, lest in adulthood their weakness condemns the rest of us.”

Surya pointed his thumb at me. “This one?”

Esora-e gave an anger-snort, and turned to me. “Don’t tell me that, all of two days old, you took that to heart. You did prove yourself deserving.”

I shrugged. “I was a newborn. How would I remember?”

I meant the question as rhetorical. I had not yet quite learned never to underestimate Surya. “With my help,” he said briskly. “I’ve had a patient who could remember it without, actually. Would you like to? Esora-e, do you want him to? Hmm... I see you are both turning fairly green.”

“Well, of course it’s a horror for the child, to be in icy water and scream for his mother and not be picked up,” said Esora-e. “We all know that. It’s a sacrifice we make, for each other. The demarch, for all the people.”

I didn’t know what to say, my heart a stirred ant-hill. “Look, we’re just trying to save this one’s skin,” my shadow-father said. “What’s the stream-test got to do with that? Did it leave such a mark on him?”

“It’s more complex than that,” said Surya.

Esora-e gave a laughing snort this time. “Always is, with Fourth Chevenga.”

“Surya, did Esora-e do something to help lay that mark on me, and if so, what?” That wiped the grin off his face. But Surya, bless him, was too kind to play along with that. “I was asking you, Chevenga, and I don’t think you finished answering, what you learned from your father’s death.”

Surya knew the answer, of course; he was having me say it for Esora-e’s ears. “What death meant... what being a warrior meant.” Suddenly I found my eyes full of tears. “Shadow-father… I didn’t want to do to anyone what had been done to my father.”

“I’ll admit it, healer,” said Esora-e. “It was I who talked him back into it. He was anaraseye, I was his war-teacher, he was born and bred for it, he had a gift that should never be squandered... it was my duty, to Yeola-e.”

“So you sacrificed the child’s choice, for the nation.”

“Well...! I... semana kra, Surya, the people wills. I married in knowing what that meant! Tennunga taught me; and Tennunga would have taught him, had he lived to.”

“Shadow-father, Tennunga taught me, ‘always, you choose.’ That’s what he told me. Always.” Esora-e stared, uncomprehending. “Maybe he never let you know that, maybe that was a secret that semanakraseyel pass on only to semanakraseyel. You think you talked me into it; but I never told you, I chose.”

“And ‘always, you choose,’ is the truth,” said Surya. “The truth of life.”

Esora-e looked completely baffled.

“But you haven’t told the nature of your choice, Chevenga,” Surya said. “What were your options, exactly? Be a warrior, or...?”

“Leap off the cliff.” My shadow-father gasped.

“Nothing else was open to you?” said Surya.

“No. I knew that.”

“If you had begged off we’d have let you!” said Esora-e.

“But I would have been proven a coward. That’s why I was heading to the cliff after the first war-class after he died, shadow-father. If I was a coward I was going to throw myself off.”

“Because only the strong deserve to live,” said Surya. “You’d learned that at two days old.”

I found myself dizzy. He put his hands on my chest and back again, as if stanching a wound. “Breathe,” he said.

Esora-e said, “Kahara help us. I didn’t think you had killing yourself in your mind until you were fifteen.”

“Be a warrior or leap off the cliff,” said Surya. “And yet being a warrior was against your conscience.”

“Against his—!” Esora-e cut himself off, by an act of sheer will.

“Well... it was, but it wasn’t... I knew what was required of me, being who I was...”

“That was what was required of you,” said Surya. “I’m talking about what you required of yourself, in your heart of hearts.”

“He did not want to kill,” said Esora-e. “He wanted to make friends with everyone.” I was stunned speechless again. Who could have imagined he’d remember that?

“Still does,” said Surya. “We don’t choose what is against our conscience, without also choosing a price to pay for it, whether our minds know or not. Our hearts do.” His hands pressed me between them, harder. I knew I needed it; I was suddenly spinning. “Breathe, Chevenga. It’s all right; all is well. What price did you know, from two days old? What punishment fit the crime, of killing?”

The room turned end over end over end; I ceased to feel the chair and floor under me, only Surya’s hands joining me to the world. I only heard vaguely, him saying to Esora-e, “You see why he has to squander all the training you gave him all those years, and his precious gift that has no equal, and go asa kraiya. You see how you are right, thinking if you require of him what you always have, you’re killing him.”

†

Afterwards, Esora-e asked to speak with me alone, and we went to a private room.

“I never understood,” he said, his eyes teary again.

“That makes two of us, shadow-father.”

“Listen…” He took my hands, and set his teeth as if readying himself to put a friend who was wounded beyond healing out of his pain. His fingers ran over the calluses on my sword-hand. “No one could possibly have done more, and greater, with his war-training than you. People don’t speak of it, Chevenga, because they’re staggered… and of course they’re afraid it will go to your head. Kyash—they are so ignorant. Nobody understands you.”

“Except Surya,” I said.

“Yes, you are blessed—you have one. A person has to see your aura to understand you. Anyway, what I meant to say is… no one could been asked for more than you have, and no one else could have given even more than was asked, as you did. You did more in eight years than most do in three lifetimes. Some… some would say that’s enough, for one.”

I began to see what he was saying, and the half-not-there feeling of shock hit me again. It was becoming familiar.

“Lay down the sword now, and no one could ever say you didn’t do enough,” he said quietly. “No one would have any right to reproach you for that.”

“You’re saying you approve of me going asa kraiya.” I wanted to hear a yes to exactly those words.

A tear spilled down his cheek. “Yes, I’m saying I approve of you going asa kraiya. Kyash… when I was teaching you… you know how it is. I was thinking, ‘He’ll have to repel Lakan raids, keep the Enchians scared enough to leave us alone, negotiate this and that with the power of his army and his own brilliance behind him.’ The usual. It’s natural, I suppose, to think things will go on as they have. What did happen, and what you ended up doing, I would never have dreamed. Who could have?”

“If someone had told me I’d spend my adult life conquering and then ruling Arko, I’d never have believed it myself.”

“Your adult life…! Your adult life is barely begun.” He was still thinking as he’d always thought, and so was I.

When we were done—he headed back to Yeola-e that same day, though with a promise to speak more once I was home for good if it was needful—I went to Surya. I felt as if a mountain had been lifted from my shoulders, and my feet were a handspan off the ground.

“This has much been easier than I thought it would be,” I said. “All I need is Azaila here and I can do the ceremony. I can’t begin to know how to thank you, Surya.”

“Mm-hmm.” He touched two points on my chest, just as he had in the first session, to make it impossible to say anything but what I truly believed. I felt a clenching. “Say ‘I deserve to live.’ ”

“I… I… I de…” I was in a sweat before I gave up. “Shit.”

“Sorry,” he said. “You’re doing very well, and that can encourage when hope is strong. But something you’ve had for so much of your life doesn’t go away quite so fast. Don’t worry. Everything is going as it should.”




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