30 - The passion of dissolution

I mentioned ‘the hand of Shininao in the dream I so often had,’ but haven’t recounted that dream. If you are Yeoli, no doubt you are thinking, ‘Shininao doesn’t have hands.’ I am telling out of order. But then I have dreamed it more times than I could count, starting when I was a child, so it stands outside of the orderly course of my life anyway.

Before me stands Shininao, not the tiny half-bat, half-bird creature that Yeolis imagine from the stories, but in human form, as tall as me, with wings of a purple that is almost black, their skin letting through light where it is thinnest, between the spars.

I cut him neck to hip with Chirel, a two-hand blow, but it goes through him as if he were a ghost, leaving him unchanged. I am not equally substanceless to him, though; his palm-heel hits my brow like a club of stone, filling my eyes with a blast of stars. When they are gone I am still standing but Chirel is gone, and he grips my wrists in his shield-hand, my sword-wrist between the thumb and forefinger, and my shield-wrist between the forefinger and other three fingers. I try to twist to wrench my arms free, but can’t even begin to move; his fingers are as strong as the slender steel cuffs the Mahid use, the one hand holding effortlessly against all my strength. I struggle for a while until I accept that it is hopeless, while he patiently waits.

He gently forces the tips of his sword-hand fingers between my lips, then between my teeth; I arch my head all the way back trying to escape, but he drives his hand deep into my mouth, pressing against my palate, pinning my tongue. I try to bite, but his skin is armour against my teeth. Like a frog in the throat of a snake, it presses gradually deeper into my throat in slow surges, one for each breath I take, so that it is as if by breathing I am inviting him into me.

His fingers reach my voice, silence my moaning. That weakens me all over with despair; I fall to my knees, his arm inside me coming down with me, and my jaws slacken. Finding less resistance, the penetration of his hand down into my chest speeds. He lets go my wrists, and my arms fall to my sides, strengthless. My breath is stopped; his fingers wrap around my heart and begin squeezing its pounding still. The core of me is no longer me, but him, my body ceasing to be more than a fleshy shell helplessly enwrapping him.

Almost in my bones as much as my groin, I feel the pang of the mortal sex-urge, the passion of dissolution, the body’s one last desperate bid to make new life before it dies. As if he knows, his other hand seizes my manhood in a cool, impersonal grip. I come instantly, helpless not to, pumping mindlessly as an animal. He works me to keep the ejaculation continuous; I understand that he will milk out all the life in me, and when it runs out he will crush my heart to stillness.

There is nothing to do but feel every nuance of my destruction, to dance down that inevitable road, to let my flesh celebrate its final sensations. I am not even angry any more, for all struggle in this life is ended; I also know that he bears me no malice, but is just doing his work. In fact, I sense that he has destroyed my ability to feel anguish as fast as he could, in sympathy for it, and brought me to where I can do nothing more than embrace him, to be merciful to me.

I tell out of order; I had the dream in this form the night before I was scheduled to see Surya the sixth time, same one in which I’d done up the shame list.

I woke screaming and sweat-soaked, Niku’s, Skorsas’ and Kallijas’ arms gripping me and voices reassuring me, as usual. I know people who often know they are dreaming when they are—Niku, for instance—but I never do. My dreams are always as real as life to me, until I wake up. Even then, sometimes I have looked for something in the morning that I lost in a dream the night before, just to be sure.

This was the first time I’d had it since I’d started with Surya. I hadn’t meant to take it to him, but after we talked over the shame list he glanced at my aura and said “Recount for me the dream you had last night.” I took a deep breath and did. “How have you interpreted it?” I hadn’t thought he could ask me to do something harder than just recount it.

“Well,” I said after a while of breathing deeply, “it was straightforward in that it was about my death… and its inevitability… and how I must accept… I always thought so.”

“Ever wonder why, if your death really was inevitable, Shininao kept coming to you in dreams to tell you it was… as if you needed convincing? Chevenga… don’t just breathe, make the white line.”

I did. “I always thought… the dream was telling me it would be easier if I accepted totally…”

“Do you believe everything that every dream tells you is true?”

“No.” I’d had plenty that made no sense in the slightest, once I was fully awake and thought about them, like anyone else.

“You know that some are just the imaginary enactment of your fears.”

“Yes.” Just to banish another illusion: being use-named Invincible doesn’t make you invincible against these.

“More exactly, they are the enactment of the dangers that fear convinces us are likely, or inevitable. We fear, say, the house burning down, so in our fear-dreams, that happens… even though it never has, and—if we are careful with the cook-fire and the candles and so forth, which people who are afraid of fire invariably are—there’s no particular reason that it will. In that sense, the dream is enacting a delusion.”

I began to see what he was getting at. “So… Shininao in my dream is not death truly, but… my belief that I will die, or my conviction I… should?”

“Yes. Being of the mind, which is a living thing, these things have their own life. The death-in-you is trying to tell you that you are helpless, that it will prevail; it’s trying to crush your morale. It had you all but entirely convinced before you came to me. There is truth, a lesson to be learned, in every dream, if you read between the lines. But you have to know how to read between the lines.”

“So… there really is something in me trying to kill me.”

“Yes. Why do you think I told you that you need to cede your decisions of life-and-death to someone competent to take them? Without help, Chevenga, that part of you will indeed kill you, within months. You have to understand that. But you also have to understand, and I know it’s difficult, that it is part of you, so that ultimately, you control it.”

It was again one of those times of seeing two opposite realities super-imposed, shimmering through each other: the casual knowing that I was going to die because it was destined, a shrugging matter… the unimaginable horror of something inside myself destroying me. My mind shied, ran in circles, shrank from it.

Surya patted my shoulder. “Don’t worry. You have help; you’ve done all that is necessary, so far, and you’re working on the rest. You need only follow orders and be careful. Tell me…” He looked at my aura hard, squinting. “Over the years, has that dream changed in any way?”

I found myself suddenly ashamed to admit it. “Yes. It was odd… this time was a throwback to years ago, before I went to Arko… in how much I fought him and how long it lasted. Over time I’ve got more and more… accepting… I learned to just lay aside Chirel instead of striking him, and in time it was not there at all; that was when I was in the Mezem. I started surrendering to him right off when I was fighting in the war; I’d kneel before him and give him my wrists before he could stun me, so he need not. Towards the end of my first term as Imperator, I no longer even gave him my wrists because I would not fight him with my hands; I’d just kneel, put back my head and open my mouth to him. He was killing me more and more quickly and easily… which made it more merciful for me.” I felt the points on my cheeks burning with shame.

“Mm-hmm. I don’t see how to ask this gently, Chevenga… imagine yourself someone else looking at this.” I shrank from that, for good reason, as I knew by how deeply I cringed when I finally did it. “Do you see, in that one part of you, how insane you are?”

I just signed chalk.

“But here’s the thing you need to understand—well, two of them. First—you know how healing works, the direction of it, yes?”

“Well, I’m not a healer. Downwards and outwards, I know that; well, I feel it every time I have a fright, that’s how the tingles go, and Kaninjer pointed it out to me with Tawaen’s measles too, how they started in his mouth and worked their way out to his hands and feet towards the end. And backwards, I’ve heard, so if you’re being healed deeply you’ll get back old things that you had before.”

“Yes. Whether it’s of the body or the mind, illness disappears in the reverse order that it afflicted us. So you see what the form the dream took this time means?” I had to confess charcoal. “You said it was a throwback to much earlier, when you didn’t acquiesce so much. You’re going backwards, see that? Even if it didn’t feel that way when you woke up screaming, it’s a sign of improvement.”

I just sat transfixed with amazement, and he said nothing, giving me time to take it in as he did.

“So that’s one thing you need to understand. The other is about how insane you are, as I said; what it means—it’s all right, Chevenga, breathe. What it means to be that insane is that, while you know in your rational mind you will feel better when it’s cured, you cannot know how much better. How you will feel is inconceivable to you, where you are now; that’s the nature of the mind. You literally cannot even imagine it; you’re not capable. So what you have to look forward to, and you have every reason to be confident you’ll reach it, is something unimaginably good.”

That night, when everyone else was asleep, I tried imagining it anyway. Yeoli though he was, perhaps he underestimated the power of chiravesa.

I never saw my corpse; I never made the calculation of thirty. I grew up innocent like everyone else, imagining fifty or sixty years. I never worried about 21-1 and 21-5-7, just took it for granted I’d be semanakraseye. I had sex with no talk of marriage and no worry, and talked of marriage with no terrible secret to reveal, and had to swear no one to silence. I married Nyera and came to the semanakraseyesin with a conscience so clean I couldn’t even imagine how else it could be…

He was right. It was unimaginable because I couldn’t go on imagining. It didn’t seem inconceivable, but then nothing does that is, any more than you can think of the path unconceived before you think of it. It was unbearable.