32 - The only possible justice here is truth

On the fourth day, cleared by Kaninjer, I went before the writers to do as I’d promised Idiesas, absolved him and apologized to him, told them it was my error. When they asked me how that was possible, I said “I wouldn’t have thought it was, either, but these things can happen. I am just one of these people who gets wounded a lot.” Before they could nerve themselves to probe more deeply, I ended the meeting, pleading healer’s orders.

The more intelligent of them could smell that there was more to this, as I found when I read the stories, and they hoped they’d find out some day, but they left it at that, for now. Being liked is in so many ways a blessing.

The next day, when I was freed from all but the vein-tube, and cleared to work sitting in bed, Surya sat close beside me, and everyone else suddenly had urgent business elsewhere. Obviously Kan had cleared me to face the music, too. I breathed deep, though it was not easy.

“Kaninjer forbade you to talk about what happened,” Surya said gently. “Did you take that as a forbiddance on thinking about it, too?”

“No, but… maybe it’s from wound-weakness, but how it happened is beyond me, and has seemed pointless to think about. I guess I knew I could count on you to make me.”

He smiled. “Not entirely beyond you; you are certain enough that it was not Idiesas’s fault at all, but your own, as you’ve told everyone.”

I shrugged. “That’s just a matter of who can and therefore should do what in a sparring-match. He attacked; the defense was up to me. He didn’t attack in any way that I didn’t know how to counter—he did the same move, and I countered it easily, four or five times in that same bout. That’s where his responsibility ends; the incorrect move was mine. What’s beyond me is how I could have been so incorrect.” Remembering helped none; in my memory, one moment we were facing each other in stance, with him starting the lunge, and the next, I was skewered. I knew I stepped into it, but only because other people had seen it.

Surya picked up my hand and pressed it between his two. I got a sudden urge to say, “Curse it, you know full well, you can see it in my aura, why don’t you spare me the waiting and give me the cursed mercy-stroke, just tell me why this happened.”

“At least you are not maintaining to me that it was an accident; you’d have a harder row to hoe if you were. I guess a head of state has to shit his people sometimes… Anyway, do you remember our conversation when you came to ask me about going on that raid? What I said about being cautious?”

You are expelling this thing from you. But it can see its own death coming, and it will try to cling to you, try to defeat you.

It hurt to take a deep breath. I did anyway. I had thought this meant throw some doubts my way, put me into a mood of uncertainty or hopelessness, draw some criticism to me from someone who was against my relinquishing the sword, or the like, tempting me off-course. Something’s coming; best you make it as slight as possible. How spectacularly I’d failed.

“You think it’s the sword, the death in me... trying to kill me.”

“Is your death not its aim, its culmination?”

I covered my eyes with the hand he wasn’t holding, suddenly sick, my insides feeling as if there was no solidity in them, just liquid. “Breathe,” he said gently.

“Shit… I’d better not spar. Not until... well, I guess I won’t be sparring after I lay down the sword, either... will I? Curse it… no one’s going to want to go against me again in my life.”

“I wouldn’t say that… they just won’t until they’re all certain it’s been understood and dealt with enough not to happen again.”

I felt my fingers clench in my hair, pull on it, even as I knew he’d spot that as a shame-mannerism. I knew what people must be thinking. Suicidal. Sure, they’d think it possible that I’d do such a terrible thing to Idiesas intentionally—did the witnesses not have the evidence of their eyes? The doubt about me was always the same. Madness. It’s not as if they have no reason, I thought. Why don’t I just admit it, resign everything and wear the green ribbon for the miserable scrap of life I have left?

“It tried to kill you, Chevenga. It came close. But it did not succeed. And it is fighting so hard out of desperation, knowing you are winning. I know it doesn’t feel like that, when you are wounded and weak and in pain. But you are. You didn’t go on that raid, you had the sense to come to me to disentangle your motives instead. Else...”

Twenty Mahid with their darts and gas and who-knows-what, all itching to kill me, instead of one sparring-partner who’d want nothing less? I could not doubt what would have happened.

“So—I have to be very careful. You told me that.”

“I should maybe have been more specific. Still—I said do nothing risky, and that was an order.”

“I don’t think of sparring as risky.”

“You’d let someone untrained do it?”

“We’re all trained.”

“Lack of training isn’t the danger here.”

I heaved out a sigh. “Surya… I’m sorry. I guess… I hate being kept on a short leash, and bucking that is a gift, a skill, almost a specialty of mine. Ask Kaninjer, ask Krero, ask Skorsas, ask my parents, ask First Amitzas… ask Assembly Palace… I’m sorry.”

“Chevenga, don’t apologize to me—that’s not the point—or make excuses. Or flog yourself either. Just admit the plain truth.”

It was there. There was no turning away from it. The wound gave a twinge of pain. “You gave me an order and I disobeyed it. I forswore.” I felt like sinking into the earth.

“It caused you to forswear,” he said. “You don’t know how to act without its influence, not yet. That’s why I made it a requirement that you relinquish your will to me. You can’t make your own decisions in these matters, you’re not competent… Idiesas’s sword served to drive that point home, so to speak. You’re not competent. Do you see it now?”

I let my head fall back on the pillow, and my sight was suddenly blurred with tears. “I see it,” I whispered.

“I know it’s hard. You have enormous responsibility, you are worried you’re failing. In matters of state, you’re entirely competent, far beyond competent… as you know, and as you rightfully take pride in. The only place you aren’t is in the matter of your own life and death. Tell me you understand, and accept.”

“I understand, and accept.” He would know by my aura that I was not lying.

“In that sense, this wound, for all it may seem the opposite, truly is part of your healing, like a giant Haian needle as I was saying… did I ever mention, that in healing, things often seem the opposite of what they are? I thought it might take something this severe to get it through to you entirely. I guess I was hoping it wouldn’t, but… well, things happen as they ought to.”

“Was there another message in this, too?” I asked him. “I can’t make the election come sooner.”

“It’s a make-your-intent-whole message. You can’t do this just a little bit. You have to form your intent complete and strong to undergo the asa kraiya ceremony. You thought you had, didn’t you?” I had no answer for that, ran my hand through my hair. “Optimism is good; delusion is not.”

I took a deep breath, again enough to hurt on the right. Though Kaninjer had said I’d lose little or no function, I’d been trying to measure my own breaths, in vain; only exertion would be a true test.

“But Surya…” It was through a sudden chill of fear I had to cut, to ask him this. “If it got so close—why did it not succeed?” From what Kaninjer had told me and what I remembered, the blade had grazed or barely missed several blood vessels close to my heart because I’d stepped in with my shield-side foot, and a little low in the stance. If I had with the other, and thus been turned slightly more to the shield-side, or the blade had gone in a bit lower, I’d have been dead before I hit the ground.

“Think of the Assembly in you again. Not enough Servants were opposed to keep the wound from happening at all, but they could keep it from being mortal.”

“But why would the Assembly in me so play with chance?”

He shook his head. “Sometimes, Chevenga, you live in a world of denying. If I made a dot on my skin with an Arkan pen, you could hit it with the tip of your sword in a full-speed lunge, could you not?”

“Of course.”

“And you got the elite warrior’s training in anatomy, yes?” I signed chalk. “And, as you said, he’d done the same move four or five times before in the same session, yes? So you knew exactly how he does it?” I signed chalk again, and felt sick, seeing it coming.

“The Assembly in you knows how precise your warrior-skill is. Chance didn’t enter into it.”

I washed out my nausea with tears. It took a while. He just kept a grip on my hand. When they were subsiding, he said, “What do you do when you forswear?”

“Renew the oath. Re-relinquish.”

“We can’t do all you need right now… Kaninjer hasn’t cleared you for exertion. But we will when he does.” Fly on the wings of it… I understood. I could at least swear the oath again. I did, putting my name to it this time.

I still have what he said afterward; I knew I wasn’t entirely understanding it and would forget, so I grabbed a notebook I had on the night-table, and recorded it.

“You set yourself for a fight, you think you will be alone with it, you think you have to carry it all on your one pair of shoulders, since responsibility has been your life. You don’t. You aren’t alone. You don’t have to fight or strive or do anything, other than follow my orders and answer my questions—I’ll carry you until the life in you flames up strong enough to sustain itself. You don’t have to struggle to learn or understand; it will just happen. You don’t have to understand what I’m saying now; you do inside anyway. Just relax, relinquish, experience, trust and let it all happen. Everything is going as it should. You don’t have to hang on to or control anything; just let go. Look at you madly scrawling my every word; that’s trying to control too, that’s hanging on, and I tell you, you don’t need to. The whole thing, Chevenga, is a huge letting-go. Once you learn to let go entirely, you’ll be done.”

†

They let me rest for a time, then Krero came in, with Surya, Skorsas, Kallijas, Niku, my mother, my stepfather and my shadow-mother, all with somber faces. They all touched some part of me with their hands. Niku kissed my brow and slipped her arm under my head.

“You’ll be on your feet soon, Chevenga,” said Krero. “Your family, your healers and I had a talk about it.”

“You must understand why we are worried, omores,” said Niku, tenderly touching my stitches, making them itch.

“I understand entirely,” I said. “Cut the preamble and just tell me what you’ve decided for me.”

Lips pursed all around the room. “Legally,” said Krero, “we can decide nothing, as you know full well. But… well, Surya tells me that you swore a certain oath that ensures you’ll follow any rules that come from him.” Curse them, they’d conspired with him against me; of course they would.

Krero listed them off on his fingers. “No sparring, obviously; no one’s going to spar with you until we—Surya, or whoever—gets to the bottom of whatever shit in your mind made that happen, anyway. No two-person practice at all, in fact, even with wooden weapons, and no practice with steel whatsoever. No flying unless piloted by someone else—”

“No wing-relaying,” Niku cut in.

“—no swimming alone, no riding alone. In fact, someone else with you, all the time.”

“In the army, we’d call this a suicide watch,” I said.

“You are not suicidal,” Surya said. “This is not you; it’s the enemy within you, which is very powerful.” Wasn’t that the case, I wondered, with every suicide? I didn’t say it, though.

“Maybe it would be simpler to lock me in a cushioned room.” Kallijas’s hand clenched so hard on mine it hurt. “We’re not doing that, love,” my mother said. Niku kissed my brow again, and said, “I know it’s hard, omores.”

“Jewel of the world, if I have to remind you, I will,” said Skorsas. “You are still Imperator, freer than free. You are not in the Mezem, with Kurkas holding your chain.”

“Think of it as locking the enemy within you in a cushioned room,” said Surya. “Anyway, however you consider it—it’s an order.”

“For how long?”

“Until further notice,” Krero said tightly.

Surya was more honest. “Until I say.” Their faces made it clear, they’d all agreed with that.

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

†

So, now I knew why I’d got the wound. How to explain it, to those who deserved an explanation? Seeing the only possible way was like rock grinding on rock inside my soul. Truth. There was no escaping it.

I called together those I thought should know: first and foremost Idiesas, but also Krero, Kaninjer, and Tyirian. Because I was obliged to tell them, I could not swear them to silence. I would have to trust their discretion. “So, Cheng,” said Krero, when they were all seated around my bed. “You’re going to tell us what really happened.” It was not a question.

“Yes,” I said. “The only possible justice here is truth.”

I told them everything, in the two languages I had to for everyone to understand: the vision, my twenty-one years of living in the certainty, the fact that it was in truth death-obligation, my working with Surya to cure myself of it, and that it was death-obligation had drawn me onto Idiesas’s sword. I managed not to weep, but I certainly did not tell it smoothly.

I had never told so many people at once. The silence when I was done, and waiting to hear what they'd say, seemed to open under me like an abyss. They all sat silent for a bit, of course, transfixed with horror.

To Idiesas, at least, it brought the relief a full explanation can give when an earnest assertion cannot. Despite my absolutions public and private, he had not absolved himself entirely, but now he did. I had not known he’d stopped sparring true steel; he began again the next day.

Tyirian said to me, “So, you understand it; but will that prevent it happening again?” I told him I wouldn’t spar until I got clearance from Surya, which satisfied him.

Kaninjer said, “This explains why you refuse to take care of yourself. Why you never listen to me when I say you’ll never see forty… why you have never finished your healing from the torture as Alchaen recommended you should.” I swore I would listen from now on, and finish the healing when I was asa kraiya. Of course this was not the only thing I had ever hidden from him; without any qualm he said, “I wonder what you are hiding from me now that I will learn later?” I swore second Fire come that this was the very last. Later, when I was more recovered and we were in private, he would put his arms around me with tears in his eyes. No one had pulled me out of the jaws of death as many times as he, so that he had something of a proprietary feeling about my life, right in his heart; to know that the one from which he could not save me had been looming so close gave him pain.

But it was Krero, who had known me the longest, who was the most struck, I remember him staring off into space as I spoke, but in truth staring into the past; by his eyes I could see old questions that had haunted him being answered, one after another, like thunder-claps in his head. “I want never to let you out of my cursed sight,” he hissed. “I thought I knew you.” When everyone else was gone, he stayed. “This doesn’t just explain why you aren’t careful of yourself,” he said. “It explains everything weird about you.”

We ran over some of them. Why I’d kept trying to grow up so fast despite all the trouble it got me into with Esora-e; why I’d wanted to marry when I was twelve; why Nyera and Komona had both left me suddenly and would not say why; why in whatever work I was doing, war or peace, I always seemed to be trying to make the greatest difference in the shortest time. Over and over, I apologized for not telling him, although we agreed that Mana and Sachara had both lived happier lives for not knowing.

Finally he said, “Shit, Cheng,” and seized my face between his hands. “So many times, I thought we’d child-raping lost you, and then you’d come back, it was as if you were invincible.” He’d stayed dry-eyed so far, but now the tears came. “This would have been the certainty. We would have lost you, for sure. Shit, Cheng, shit, Cheng, shit—”

For a frozen moment we stared at each other; then he wrapped his arms around my neck and head and kissed me, long and deeply and forcefully, tears raining.

“You still love me, from when we were kids,” I whispered, when he let go.

“Oh, I didn’t for a while there,” he said. “It retreated in fear, from all the cursed mysteries. How could I love someone I couldn’t begin to understand? Curse it, I came close to hating you. Curse it, curse you, carrying this after you convinced me to stay alive… I should break your cursed fingers.”

We were alone. I didn’t see how I could argue. He gently picked up my shield-hand and wrapped his two hands around the little finger. My heart came to my throat. “No, don’t—I surrender, mercy, I’m seeing a healer, I want to live, Krero, I’m sworn second Fire come, I want to live!”

He laid the hand down just as gently, laughing, and touseled my hair. “We will hold you to it, Fourth Chevenga,” he said.

That night when I thought about what I had done, my head spun again. Since starting with Surya, the number of people who knew was double and a half what it had been. That had to stop.

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