23 – The first clear look and the flash

Though Esora-e had flown back home, my mother stayed. “You need me,” she said. I didn’t argue.

My next two times with Surya were talk healing, relatively easy, in which he undertook to make me know myself better. He made me chase down the emotion I seemed to see least in myself, though it was there: shame. There is the shame of having chosen wrong, and then the much worse and deeper shame of believing oneself innately wrong, which involves no choice and therefore can be cured by no action. I hadn’t thought I had that at all—I’d been called cocky from childhood—but he found it and showed it to me. He pointed out to me even mannerisms I did that were signs of it; for instance, running my hand through my hair, he said, was only a lesser way of clenching my forelock. “But I do that all the time!” I said. He just signed a knowing chalk.

One of his orders was to write up a list of all the times I’d either been shamed, or taught shame, or felt shame. It was much harder than I thought it would be. I would be in the office, meeting with someone or doing paperwork, and an incident would come to mind that I knew I should add, but by the time I was free to add it, I would find I had forgotten it. Soon I learned to scribble them as they came on scraps of paper, then copy them onto the list later. I hope my reader does not expect me to include it here. What it had to do with my living longer, I wasn’t sure, but he assured me it did, and I was sworn to trust him.

“So what did you see in this, Chevenga?” he said, when he read the list.

I felt a twinge in the heart of something acid, so fast the thought that caused it was instantly gone and forgotten. “See in this?” I said. “Surya, it was all I could do just to write it.”

“Wait.” He was gazing hard at my aura. “What was that thought you had, the feeling, just before you answered... when I said your name?”

I stared at him. “I don’t know.” Fear flowered tingling all over my limbs.

“Bring it back. Chevenga, Chevenga, Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e—there. You feel that?” I did, as I had the first time—cut off from my own name, as if I somehow should not be called by it. “That thought, that feeling… what is in it?”

I couldn’t answer. He put his hand on my shoulder again, settling my dizziness a little. “You do not think of yourself as carrying a lot of shame, do you? More a proud person, even over-proud at times?”

“That’s what I was always told,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, meaningfully. “Always told. Mustn’t let you get a swelled head, they’d say, yes? Especially when you were going to be semanakraseye? Got a lot of that, didn’t you?”

“Well, I was a firebrand,” I said. “Some of the things I did astonish me now. I don’t know how anyone put up with me.”

“Of course you did them,” he said. “You felt you had to prove yourself every moment to be worthy of even a short life. Chevenga... breathe.” He waited, until I’d drawn myself back into myself. “So—for a moment you felt undeserving of your name. Have you ever felt that before?”

It was all I could do, but I thought back, and weakly signed chalk. I’d felt it at seven when I’d found my spirit gone in war-training, at fifteen after Esora-e had beaten me for not coming to training after Komona had left me, after collapsing from exhaustion at Chinisinal. “Interesting,” he said. “Does your family have the same custom as others who stream-test—of not naming children until they’ve survived?”

When the spinning of my head slowed down enough to let me know up from down, I was lying on the table, his one hand on the spot at the apex of my head, the other touching the joined spot between my legs. The river of white light I found easily enough, well-trained as I was. “You are not even entitled to a name if you are not strong. Breathe. I had wondered why it wasn’t entirely central to you, despite how famous it is. Tell me: why did your parents give you the name?”

“There was precedent,” I whispered, that being the best I could do. “Three other Chevengal. My parents felt Yeola-e would need a warrior-demarch, and Chevenga is the most war-like name used in the line.”

“How exactly did they decide?”

“They voted... three to one.”

“All right, I have your next order. Speak to the one who voted against—unless it was your blood-father; was it?”

“I don’t know who it was. They have always kept that secret.”

“Truly.” He peered at something in my aura, squinting. “I doubt the dissenting vote was your blood-father, and I’m sure it wasn’t your shadow-father. That narrows it down to two, and my bet would be your blood-mother. So—go to her, and ask her, and if it was her, ask her if she had another name in mind, and what it was.”

“They swore to keep secret who voted against,” I said, managing to put a little voice into it, though weak. “She would never break that.”

“Tell her it’s healer’s orders, and ask her to ask permission of the other two. If Esora-e knows it’s me asking it, I think he’ll agree. At any rate, this is an order.”

I closed my eyes and whispered, “A-e kras’.”

He gazed carefully at my aura, and then said, “It’s an order, but it doesn’t have a time attached. Do it when you are inclined.” I signed chalk, relief flooding through me.

Like any old warrior, I have scars that still ache; some of them bother me all the time so that I’ve learned to erase the pain from my mind by will, and others only when it’s going to rain, so that I make use of them. During the other session, he looked at the scars—the auric ones, since they show up there, too, or the scars on my skin, I’m not sure which—and said, “You fought in the Lakan war for, what, two years? And in the Arkan war for two years?”

“The Lakan war was more like one and a half, in truth,” I said. “I wasn’t there from the start.”

“And two years in the Mezem… all those wounds in that short a time, but none killed or incapacitated you. Of all the warriors you know about your age, are there any who have been hurt as many times as you who are still alive and able-bodied?”

“No,” I said. “None even close.”

“Did you ever wonder why?”

“I’ve always thought it was from being who I am. The enemy always comes after me first.”

“But they’ve never killed or crippled you… what if I asked my question again, of all the warriors you know who’ve led armies who are your age…?”

“There aren’t a lot of those.”

“Compare with the ones who are older, then?”

“I… well… yes, it’s still unusual.”

“You don’t know why.” It wasn’t a question. “Any theories?”

“I couldn’t begin to have one, Surya.” The sense of fear flowering all over my limbs was getting horribly familiar. He knew why of course, and he was about to tell me.

“A warrior as good as you doesn’t leave so many openings for himself to get hurt,” he said, his eyes scanning my aura, “unless some part of him wants to. You took each one to remind yourself there would be the last one.” I was thinking of Iska, after I got wounded in each of my first three Mezem fights, saying I should quit doing it as it was bad for my health.

I clenched my eyes shut, as if that would keep me from seeing, and swallowed the urge to throw up. “Interesting,” Surya said, reminding me of the boy who pulls apart the mouse to see what it’s made of. “Being so certain you’re going to die before thirty that you’ve planned your whole life accordingly is a shrugging matter; but the idea of something in yourself predisposing you to it horrifies you to nausea. Everything comes down to what we’re used to.”

“But it’s fikken madness,” I said. “To have all this death in me, my own hand turned against myself with everyone else’s sword in it… it’s madness, I should be back in the House of Integrity, if it’s true.”

“Well, you’re seeing a healer. That’s all you need do; in every other way you are more than competent, as you know. But answer me this: in your life, you’ve formed the intent to kill yourself how many times? Didn’t I say from the start your aura was full of it?” He touched my temple, the same temple on which Esora-e struck me. “Welcome, Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e, to the first clear look in the mirror in your life.”

I staggered to the privy, barely making it, and threw up so hard I thought my guts would go with it. At the same time my eyes vomited tears.

As I leaned over the basin wondering whether I was done, his hand touched my shoulder. “But here’s the thing you need to understand,” he said. “This horror you feel… is the life in you. The capacity you have to reject the death in you is precisely the capacity you have to embrace the life. Don’t worry. Everything is going as it should.”

The only other thing I remember of that session was just as I was leaving. He abjured me, with two hands on my shoulders: “Be very careful, take no risks. Something’s coming; best you make it as slight as possible.”

†

I am good at conceiving solutions to problems, but I do best when I have time to think. Minis and Compartment Verbal 14 Segment 8 utterly occupied my mind, in the momentary pauses between audiences, the dash from chamber to office, the hurried stops in the garderobe and the bath, the fleeting moments of fast-ebbing consciousness when my head hit the pillow. It was hard to keep the thread of logic.

We could reveal him and then fake his death, and he could become Minakas Akam permanently; past Imperators have wanted to do that frequently enough that there are resting-places in the crypt built so that an apparent corpse can be slid into one end, sealed in, and then slid out the other into one of the secret passages with which the Marble Palace is riddled. But the law required that Minis be executed publicly, in such a way as to provide firm proof of his death, which in Arko generally means beheading, and I wasn’t quite sure how to fake that. Besides, I didn’t like the falseness of the whole thing, and it precluded him ever revealing himself if I were to keep my name for honesty.

Every other idea I had was an argument to make to Assembly. He’s too discredited, as Kurkas’s son, ever to be a threat, so his birth and ancestry are proof against him being a threat; he can be confined to the Marble Palace and watched for the rest of his life; he can submit to regular truth-druggings to prove he has no ambitions; his writings show clearly his view of the Imperatorship and did before he was in any danger, and so on.

None of them satisfied; none were the path unconceived. I needed a flash to show it to me, and I began to be afraid that my mind was too exhausted and sleep-starved to be capable of receiving it, and I would have to go with one of these half-solutions.

He and Gannara were staying at the Marble Palace now. Minis was working hard on the Notyere and Tatthanas paper; he was hurrying, I suspected, for the same reason I had since seven. Same day as my sixth session with Surya, he sent me a note.

Shevenka… you ask me what do I wish to do? I… as many times… sat down with pen and paper to pull the sense out of that which is insensible. And what I get… I do not understand. What is this…? It is not logic. This is not sense. I give this to you as out of the hands of the Gods because I do not understand.

--
What do you wish? You ask me.
And I wonder. What do I wish?

There is nothing is everything there is a space
And a time.
Full of nothing.

I do not know of what I think or feel, or know.
The world is full of the worm of error
And I am seized with the wild wind of possibility.
Pulled between the heavy worth of earth and

Oh thou wild
Oh thou unlimited inhibited and swept by
Wind and world and…

Unknown
And unknowable.
--

Shevenka… this is what came. It is nonsense. I do not understand.

†

That night I woke up at the death-hour. It rarely happened then, so hard a schedule I kept—I allowed no times of leisure bracketing my prescribed six aer of sleep other than throwing on or off my clothes and in-and-out baths—so I wondered why I was awake.

The Imperial chamber, much too vast to allow the one lamp we kept burning at night to cast light as far the walls or ceiling, was opaquely dark, its golden statues and chandeliers all dim ghosts of themselves. Other than the faint rustle of a distant curtain in a night breeze, the dead-asleep breathing of my loves and the minute sound of the lamp-flame flickering now and then, it was silent. Somewhere far away there was a bang and a series of piercing death-squeaks, as one of the white Marble Palace mousers did his work.

I must get up, I knew after lying for a while and getting none of the nonsensical thoughts that are the precursors of sleep. I extricated myself delicately; Skorsas was much more likely to tighten his arms around me in his sleep, when I tried to sneak out of them, since I’d told him. I pulled on a silk robe but left my feet bare, wanting to feel stone under them—as close as I could get them, legally, to the earth—and padded out into the corridors.

The human images that fill the Marble Palace are half-human in the half-darkness of wall-lamp light, massive forms looming stonily in niches, painted eye-whites shining with sinister faintness, heroically-formed limbs in battle-scenes turned into a tangle of monsters’ appendages. In the dimness, the grave, proud portraits of past notables kept seeming to move or change expression in the corner of my eye. I swallowed childish fears, reminding myself who and how old I was.

There is nothing is everything there is a space
And a time.
Full of nothing.

Ask logic of Minis’s words, and yes, as he’d said, they were nonsense; I could see how they offended his academician’s mind. They were dream-words, meant to be understood without thought, as poets often use, writing from halfway into the other world. They were to be understood by the hidden mind that Surya was always talking about, where the death-in-me lived and from where it would rule my life until he did whatever he’d have to do to me to drive it out; they had come from Minis’s hidden mind. It speaks in symbols and riddles.

The world is full of the worm of error
And I am seized with the wild wind of possibility.

What were the Gods having you say to me, Minis? The wild wind of possibility that seizes you—does it ever sing to you, as mine does to me? I came to where the corridor opened out into a room one level down with a high ceiling and a statue of Muunas standing triumphant. Faint as a ripple of zephyr in the air, I sensed motion below. I crept silently to the marble rail, hearing fast breaths, and the brushing of bare feet on polished stone.

It was him, Minis, his light hair, shirt and leggings ghostly-grey in the darkness. He had never mentioned practicing the Ten Tens, but of course he’d been taught, like any heir to Imperium, starting at first threshold, seven. He’s doing it for the same reason I’m pacing the corridors, I thought: insomnia. He moved with the smoothness of unending practice, seeming to take comfort in it, as we can in any familiar-to-the-bones exercise. This is that dream. That’s who the man was. The tingles I always get when I see foreknowledge fulfilled so clearly went down my arms and legs.

I should greet him, but I didn’t want to interrupt him; as well it was the Ten Tens, the act of an Imperator, and he might feel he’d been caught betraying ambition. I shouldn’t stay unbeknownst to him either, like a spy; I knew how it would end, and in Arko the decent thing to do with another’s tears is to not see them. He thought he was alone here, and so he should be. I crept back away, just as silently. He went on, an almost-man practicing a ritual he would never perform as the start of a reign he would never have, by my doing.

Pulled between the heavy worth of earth and

Oh thou wild
Oh thou unlimited inhibited and swept by
Wind and world and…

I knew where I should sit to think; I’d done it a few times before with an Imperial problem in the dead of night. The Crystal Throne gleamed icily in the blue-grey light of a half-waned moon, shining through the ceiling glass above the yawning room. I took off the robe so I was naked but for the seals, and sat, feeling the perfect chill of stone clear as water against my skin.

Unknown
And unknowable

A space and time full of nothing…

It is from nothing that the flash comes. It all banged together in my mind. It was so obvious I couldn’t believe I had not thought of it, and yet it would shock the world; it would take every speck of my powers of persuasion to convince everyone I’d have to. But it solved them all—14.8, Minis’s life, and the candidate problem—in one stroke.




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