28 - So many ways I am penetrated

[excerpt from:]

Demarchic Guard ~ Questioning Transcript
Idiesas Firnean solas
verekina 30 Y 1556 | Imbas 16 YPA 51
Questioner Krero Saranyera
Interpreter Rinas Shaikeloras fessas
Scribe Amarka Lintao

Kre: Just before it happened, did he say anything unusual?

I: No. He was same as always, happy, joking.

Kre: His face didn’t change, he didn’t seem suddenly to be struck by a thought that bothered him?

I: No, nothing like that. Nothing to give me any warning at all.

Kre: And you did a lunge… anything different about it?

I: No. Just my best, my usual.

Kre: What exactly did he do?

I: He… the timing was same as the usual with him when he counters, you know, he moves a little before you do, or same time at the worst. But instead of… I am sorry, kraseyas, I am sorry…

Kre: It’s hard to say, I know. Take a deep breath. We’ll be through this soon.

I: Instead of doing a wrist or sword-parry he lowered his sword, like this, so he was wide open, and stepped in at the same time, right into it, with the reverse, the shield-side, foot, and… I tried to pull it but I was far too committed and it was too fast… Aras…

Kre: It’s all right, Idis. Deep breath.

I: I will say the same under truth-drug, I swear...

Kre: I know you will, it’s all right. Did he say anything?

I: No.

Kre: What about the look on his face, was there anything when he did it? Sadness or anger or fear or resolve or setting his teeth or anything?

I: No, kraseyas… he wasn’t smiling at that point, he just had that look of concentration that he gets, you know… and it didn’t change. Not even as the sword went in, he didn’t flinch or grit his teeth or anything. His eyes closed for a bit as it went in but that was it.

Kre: And then?

I: We both froze. It was in him up to just this far from the guard, and I… Aras, Aras, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

Kre: Deep breath, hang on, Idis. Hang onto yourself. It’s all right.

I: The fik it is! I’ve just killed my Imperator.

Kre: You haven’t killed him—

I: We’re in here sitting and flapping our lips while he’s dying—

Kre: He’s in Kaninjer’s hands and Kaninjer is a very good healer. Don’t put on the mourning dye before the corpse is a corpse, Idis; you didn’t hit him in the heart or anything that goes into it else he’d have gone right down and bled a lot more.

I: I hit him in the lung.

Kre: A good Haian can save a person from a lung wound. Look, it’s Chevenga, he’s come back from or gotten out of or lived through things that no one ever imagined he could, that he shouldn’t have been able to. If there’s anyone who could survive anything, it’s him.

I: I’m sitting here alive while he’s dying—

Kre: Idiesas, I’m questioning you.

I: I’m sorry, kraseyas, I hear and obey, I will answer.

Kre: The two of you froze and the sword was where it was; did he say anything then?

I: No, he… I will swear to this, kraseyas—

Kre: You don’t have to swear to anything, because I’m going to truth-drug you and confirm it all.

I: I will swear he didn’t know what had happened. He looked at me… and he was surprised, and confused, as if to say “What just happened?” Then he looked down and saw it and looked back up at me and said “Ai kyash.”

Kre: And the look on his face at that point—

I: Horror. He was horrified. It’s as I say, it was as if he didn’t know.

Kre: And then—

I: I put my shoulder under his arm and kept the sword as still in him as I could, and started screaming like a girl at high noon for someone to get his healer. And he started yelling to everyone else, though he didn’t have much voice, he wrapped his arms around my shoulders and was doing the Yeoli “no” sign like this. I remember the words even though I don’t understand them because it was over and over—“Pasamala, palituyai,” excuse my crappy pronunciation, something like that. And “boru,” I know that means “no.”

Kre: And then?

I: What do those words mean?

Kre: Pa sa mala means “It’s not his fault,” and Pa li tyuyai means “Don’t kill him.”

I: Ahh fik…

Kre: It’s all right, Idis. Deep breath, get a hold of yourself. He’ll be all right.

I: Aras! Aras! Don’t let those be his last words, please don’t let those be his last words…

Kre: I doubt they will be, Idis.

I: Aras… I wasn’t even paying attention to everyone else around us. I didn’t care if twenty swords went into me; who could blame them? I still don’t care. I welcome it, kraseyas. I welcome it.

Kre: Tell me what happened next.

I: I had to take more of his weight… he was weakening. He cleared his throat and coughed and blood came up… he didn’t say anything else in a language I understood. And other people took him out my hands, which was right and for the best, and got him down to half-sitting and held him there… one of them was his second mother, the one who trains with us, shadow, you call her… I don’t know if she saw it happen, Aras. Then the healer was there. I lay down and turned my face into the sand.

†

In the black of night and a new moon, the tree-shaded road to Jintila was so dark you could not see where you placed your feet. There was no breeze and the hot Arkan air was stifling close. Somewhere nearby, fireless so as to hide from eyes on wings above, lay the Mahid camp.

“I’m afraid to walk out there,” said Minis. “What if they decide just to kill me?”

I thought I wasn’t going to lead this, I thought. “They won’t just decide to kill you,” I said.

I heard him heave a sigh. “You’re right. He’d want to torture me first.”

“Exactly.”

“So that’s all right then,” he said, reassured; I heard the smile in his voice. I unclipped Chirel and loosened it in the scabbard, and heard him do the same with the Imperial sword. Ahead a shortsword and Mahid kit, with the blowgun and darts, flared into existence in my weapon-sense. Somehow the man was darker than the night. “I’m looking for the fessas couple,” Minis said quietly.

“So you’d be the smooth-skinned boy… may I feel?” Don’t let him touch you! I was ten paces off now, so I did a quiet owl-call of warning. “Fine!” the Mahid said, with a flounce in his voice. “Be that way.” He was in white, and black buckle; what had possessed us to plan this for Jitzmitthra, when we shouldn’t be working?

It struck Minis as odd, too. “You sound almost like a human being,” he said.

“Flattery will get you nowhere,” teased the Mahid. “Spark of the Sun’s Ray, I have the dog-collar and leash right here. Where are your ears and tail?” No matter, what nonsense they spouted in their banter; the Mahid was walking back up the road and Minis with him, toward their camp—the right direction. Kaneka, Kallijas, and the others advanced through the woods in open formation with me.

The Mahid suddenly froze in his steps. “You don’t have any backup, do you?” he said, as if he’d only just thought of it. “Or are running in any elections? Where did you go anyway? Wandered over hill and dale?” He broke into a song about hills and dales then, and Minis joined in, in his piping voice. From their camp came the sounds of drunken singing and laughter, the smell of meat roasting and cedar-smoke. Let Mahid celebrate Jitzmitthra, and they do it in almost excessive style. It was all like a strange dream.

“Race you!” White Mahid and black Minis streaked off, giggling, the steel wheels of their faib-skates screeching; swearing inwardly, I leapt into skating at my best speed to keep up with them, crashing through the brush. “Cheng!” Kaneka yelled frantically; everyone else had just their boots on, so I’d be separated from them. It’s an old commander’s maxim, though, that neither warriors nor their commanders necessarily have to know how they are going to obey orders to obey orders. “Keep up!” I barked.

In the glow of cookfire and torches blue-flamed in the Mahid style, the camp was like a high Piinanian stage, same era as the Mezem. Tent posts were pillars with crowns of fluted gold, tent sides and flaps velvet and embroidered with curlicues of the overblown style of that era. Here and there naked couples were hard at ecstasy, laughing, moaning, pumping, writhing, pouring red wine from gold cups into each other’s mouths or on each other’s skin, garlands of flowers woven into their blond hair.

“Minis!” I hissed. “Your mother, do you see her?” I hoped she wasn’t one of the copulating ones; he’d be embarrassed to mortification.

“Mommmmmmmmmm!!” he bellowed, Arkan-style. “Mommm-meeeeeee!!” I looked all around fast, saw a woman I somehow knew was her scrabbling up a tree, in Mahid black, with Second Amitzas climbing after her. I’ll have your head, you torturing child-raper, just for making my friend tear his hair out by marrying his mother… I drew, or tried to; in weapon-sense I felt the blade of Chirel fall to dust in the scabbard the moment my hand was on the grip, like a perfect statue in a tomb opened for the first time in a thousand years, that collapses into powder the moment the explorer’s breath touches the millennium-old air. Kyash, I thought. I hate it when that happens.

Yet things go as the warrior wills them, if his will is strong enough; I would fight with a blade of will like the blade that Surya said was in me, down my centre, not material steel but real enough to kill me anyway. I’d will myself air, too; in the smoke and the heat breathing was cursed hard, harder than I’d ever known; for some reason I tasted blood, too, and had since we’d left Arko, though I hadn’t shed anyone’s yet. It was all I could do to drag myself up the tree.

Amitzas cackled horribly, like the villain in a play. The ancient play, it turned out, or his version of it: “You think Kurkas Aan is your father… you are wrong. I am your father! Search your heart; you know it is true.” His grinning profile glinted evilly in the flamelight. Minis screamed noooooooo! no no no no no no! and Amitzas flapped down from the tree like a bird, each cackle like one flapping of wings; then he was chopping it like a lumberjack except with his sword. When I thought about it, nothing was going according to the plan.

No matter, I could think on my feet, or at least land on them like a cat; I jumped and floated down as if I had a wing, thinking I don’t have Chirel but I have Hope, I hope, scabbarding the one and drawing the other in midair, while the tree crashed down around me. Above a crow cawed, “Mi Mi Mi Mi Nis!” His mother, altering to the true nature of her almost-namesake; Arkan for crow is “inesa.” The sword Hope came out of its scabbard air, not steel, so I had air in my hand but not my lungs; somehow I couldn’t draw it in, as if my ribs in the front had been pinned with steel to those in the back. Staring up at Second Amitzas, I realized I was lying at his feet. He drew out his favourite little steel knife. “Give yourself, semanakraseye,” he said, and hacked off the smallest toe of my shield-side foot to toss it to the slavering crowd, just as he’d done with the smuggler Mana and I had hired to get us out of Arko. He grabbed and started sawing off the next one, then the fourth finger of my shield-hand, slicing through the perfect place to part the joint like an expert carver taking off a drumstick. I’d be given to the people in pieces, whatever I chose. At least being without breath meant no one would hear me scream in pain and think I was a coward.

Amitzas grew bigger, began hitting me with hammer-blows of his fist as if he wanted to drive me into the earth. “If that’s all you have, every fikken problem does look like this, doesn’t it?” I taunted him; he stared at me thunderstruck and said, “You understand!” as if Mahid weren’t moronically simple. But it is always hardest to understand ourselves. From far away, it seemed, I heard Minis pleading. “Mom, Mom, stop, you don’t need to fly away, you don’t need to, you can fly away anytime. You’re free.”

“The Imperator recaws,” she said flatly. He wasn’t Imperator yet; kyash, I thought, I have to change the law to allow crows to vote and that means going through Assembly. I drew in a breath the only way I could, with the weight as huge as the Earthsphere that was somehow sitting on the right side of my chest: one hair’s-width of motion at a time and one speck of air at a time.

“I’m empty and need you to fill me,” Amitzas said, dropping his spotless Jitzmitthra-white trousers. His manhood was long and thick as a ship’s mast. “You can fly!” Minis cried. His words turned to poetry. “Raikas, tell her! You’re an angel in disguise like the fountain
like Ten Angels
with wings
white wings not black Tell her!

On Jitz anyway, I said with the fraying strands of air and voice I had.

You’re Imperator, tell her!

I wanted to set you free, Arko. So you are!
By the unwritten law, what I say goes.
Now love your son, becaws he’s your son, that’s a fikken order.

Inensa cawed, and I whacked Amitzas’s mast-dick off with a spur of bone he’d foolishly left on my sword-hand, spraying red and white across the whole camp. He fell like a tree, splintering into kindling—no huge surprise his true nature was wood—but I somehow had one of his branches through me already, like a sword. I noticed myself tonguing words frantically by some kind of desperate urgency that had became a habit: don’t kill him it’s not his fault don’t kill him it’s not his fault!

Kill him! Don’t kill him! Kill him! Don’t kill him! The Mahid had grown to a crowd, extending up into the blue sky like mountainsides, screaming in the Mezem’s raucous way of voting. No, no, I cried, vote for Kallijas-Minis! I should be on the golden sand but I was in the Imperial box; he was on the sand, lying at the feet of his mother with her thick sharp yellow beak poised over him like a sword. Don’t kill him you’re his fikken mother for the love of the Gods—why did I have to tell these people these things? What would it take to change the world so that it made sense? And why was it always up to me?

“Chivinga.” Kaninjer’s delicate Haian accent. “Stop fighting, you don’t need to.” Yes I do I always do I can’t stop I have to, um... I don’t know what I have to do but it’s something because it’s always something! I wrenched away from him and that made me flip over backwards, three times end over end in darkness with stars like shards of glass, to land on a Mahid table with a bang that sent rib-shattering pain lancing through me. “I am your conscience,” said the Imperial Pharmacist, First Amitzas, standing over me. “You require correction.”

I give myself. Wait, you didn’t say conscience you said cawnscience… you are Minis’ grandfather? Maternal? Something was going down my throat, my windpipe, like the hand of Shininao in the dream I’d so often had, a hand clenching my hair and arching my neck back the same way, except this thing I felt distantly, not vividly, like his clawed fingers. So many ways I am penetrated. Amitzas laid his hand over my mouth and nose, then finding that made no difference to my life or death, jammed his beak into my chest like the buzzards tearing out the liver of the man who gave humanity fire on the battlefield of the Earthsphere, and tore out my heart. “You are allowed,” he whispered, his hand tender as a lover’s on my forehead, “to weep.” I did.

“The God commands me.” The white crow jammed my heart back in. The right way up, I hoped. Mikas laughed, from the furthest arching reaches of the ceiling of the Great Temple, set up for the Ten Tens. “Risae would never forgive me if I botched such a work! She likes the taste of this blood.” I give myself… “Muunas, do you want to burn this one?” “Burn the dross off him…” I give myself to the flame. Whatever You ask of me… so long as it doesn’t require breathing… You had better say and do nothing less, for the Gods of Arko. They held me in their perfect hands, looked at me with their perfect sapphire eyes within perfect marble features. “Or from within him; the sword.”

Aigh, no, wait!!

“His sword, the sword that is him, he is My sword and I shall take him.”

No, no, I can’t, I can’t go asa kraiya, my people, I can’t, semana kra…

“Oh? You just swore you would do anything. We will pull the sword out of your vertebrae and give it back to its master, Aras. He weeps.” But it was Kallijas’s voice I heard, weeping. No no no no nonononono!! Muunas, the Imperator of the Gods, spun me around by my elbows and pulled me down hard onto his manhood, stabbing up into me like a sword, producing ecstasy as intense as the pain should be.

Nononononono semanakra semanakra! Aras, the God of warriors, reached into my chest, his fingernail piercing my chest just inside the right nipple, sliding like a blade in through skin, muscle, bone. No no no no I can’t let you take it out of me I can’t let it go! Steel was wrapped like a snake of blade, a dark-shining root around the hidden rock of my heart. His divine fingers began unraveling it. Nononononono this will save me! This will save me! No no no no no! Bit by bit it came out; somehow it was as if it were rolling on wheels, like paper through the Great Press. No no no I have to die! Kill me, I have to die I can’t live I must die I must die I must die! Aras drew my manhood into His mouth, even as the manhood of Muunas stretched upwards like a worm surging and His tip, searingly hot as a sword-tip parting flesh, touched my heart. “This is the way We shall pull the steel out of you. Give yourself, even if it cuts you, My son. This is your Steel Kiss of the Lake.” He sucked, and my entrails were drawn down like the water towards the great drains in the Lake, so entwined with the steel they were. Hands forced my ribs apart, inserting some sort of brace into me to hold them splayed. “When a broken bone mis-heals it must be re-broken; you’ve mis-healed around the steel.” I felt Their intent, to tear me cell from cell if They had to, No no no no nooooooooooo
Gods have mercy
You will save me and You must not do that
and I must die I have to I don’t deserve to live
else I could say it
it’s required, I have to die
I have to die
I have to die———

Two hands I knew took my head between them, brow and occiput. It’s Surya, I thought; he’s really here. The feel was too vivid not to be real. “Yes, I am,” he said, with his typical certainty. “I am with you where you are. Take a deep breath and make the white line.” I did. It was as if he were vistas: a peaceful mountain valley full of green trees, a beach of silken sand and a line of bright turquoise sea, an ocean of white tumbling clouds beneath my wing and a blue-black sky-vault above. “Relax.” A-e kras. Hands were under me, holding me up, I realized; his, Kaninjer’s, Skorsas’s, Kallijas’s, Niku’s, my parents’, Minis’s, Krero’s, my family’s, my friends’, all Yeola-e’s, all Arko’s, layer upon layer of them, as thick and solid in their mass as a mountain. I would not fall. “Let yourself go deeper.” Thank you. Tendrils of peace spread outward all over and through me from his hands. When they reached my heart, everything went quiet, like the wind dying at sunset, like the world quickly and blissfully fading when you let your head sink into the pillow and close your eyes after a good hard day’s work. “Everything is going as it should.”