34 - Love always helps

Who among the four had whispered something to someone who had whispered it to someone else? Not Kaninjer, I could be certain of that; not Krero… not Idiesas or Tyirian either. But then how could I be ultimately certain of any of them? It was not as if I’d sworn them to silence. Or was it just a servant overhearing? The infirmary wasn’t well-secured against that, I suddenly remembered.

As well as scheduling the meeting with the writers the next morning, I sent a pigeon-message to Artira in Vae Arahi saying I would come home to make an announcement to Assembly three days hence. Damn the wound and the rules; I’d relay, leaving as soon as I was finished with the writers tomorrow; it was my only chance of beating the couriered copies of the Pages special edition there, so that my people would hear it from me directly first. I would have to beg Minis’s forgiveness; if he wanted me to be at the announcement of his candidacy, it would have to wait until I got back.

I was done for the day, though I refused to admit it at first. The people in the trap-booth thought that after I took a few moments alone, my colour would come back. When it didn’t—the next person I met with asked me more than once if I was sure my wound was healed enough for me to work—they sent for Kaninjer. After taking one look at me from the booth, he told Binchera to give all the rest my regrets, had a chair brought into my office and would not even let me get onto it unassisted. I was protesting, albeit weakly, when he had my bearers stop beside a wall-mirror and pointed to it. I looked like a corpse with living eyes, my cheeks the colour of ash.

Once in the Imperial chamber with only family and healers around me—my mother had sent for Surya—emotion so seized me that I couldn’t even form more words than “It’s out!” to tell them what was wrong. Surya did one of his tricks on me, putting his fingers on several points on my neck and cutting the emotion apart from the rest of my mind as if with a knife, just long enough to let me explain. When he let go, it came roaring right back. They just held me, taking turns.

Kaninjer would have let it go, except that I was so recently wounded; when none of his drops would work, he insisted I take the full-strength sedative juice. Since there was nothing to do about what was afflicting me other than suffer from it, I didn’t protest that hard. Though all it does to me usually is dull my mind so thoroughly all emotion is leached out, not put me to sleep, this time it might as well have been whatever he uses to put me out for surgery, or a club on the head. I was astonished to wake up at dusk, and as always came the panic of lost time. “You slept both because you are wounded and because you have been overworking for a long time,” Surya said. “So it was good that you did. Now you need to talk.”

I talked. When I tried, on his order, to make sense of what I felt—it seemed a formless black maelstrom—he told me that, in the healing of all wounds over time, there is a logic and a course to it, which everyone roughly follows, even in their different ways. “It starts with refusal to believe, goes on to anger, then a kind of haggling, ‘Perhaps if I am this or do that, it won’t really have happened.’ Second last comes sorrow; then finally—when you least expect it—comes peace. Fear underlies all the phases but peace; they are each a different step in dealing with fear, which is the suffering emotion that underlies all the other suffering emotions. Shame deepens with each phase, worst at sorrow, but vanishes at peace. When one defeats fear and shame by accepting what has happened, that’s peace. It’s not always the same, and you can jump back and forth, but it’s the underlying shape. What’s in your heart?”

“Definitely not peace,” I said. “It feels like the other four all at once, actually, with fear and shame both like landslides crushing me.” It was strange to speak with him as if we were in session, with three of my parents and my three loves all close around, though he must have given them a sign after that, because they were all suddenly gone.

“We’ll get you through,” he said. “I know you feel like you have no strength in the face of this. All that means is that you’ve forgotten that you have immense strength. Tell you what—I have a chiravesa for you. Take a few deep breaths, close your eyes for a little. I want you to truly enter this one, be this person completely, with no trace of you as you are.” This felt worrisome, but I did as he said, settling down the feelings with the breaths.

“You are—you. But it is twenty years from now. You are forty-eight.” Of course my mind leapt right out of it. He gentled me back in like a skittish colt. “You look back on this all, twenty years gone. Your secret came out, everyone felt what they felt, it was talked and written about, it was dealt with. You and everyone who cares about you went through all the phases, arriving finally at peace. It became something about Chevenga that just was. You solved it, you went asa kraiya, the death-in-you faded; you learned the way of asa kraiya and you have known it ever since. And the years passed, since nothing stops them, and life went on.

“Over twenty years, you did all manner of things, busying yourself dawn to dusk again with the affairs of the world, because I can’t imagine you won’t. There was war somewhere, since there always is, and you dealt with it in the asa kraiya way. There was plague, famine, earthquake, storm. You worked towards making the world as you see it can be, and you had some success, as I think is inevitable, so that there are alliances and treaties where there were not before; there is trade and prosperity where there was not before; there have been more inventions, like the single wing and the press, that have changed how the world is, and people cannot imagine how life was without them. Your children grew up, and gave you all sorts of surprises, as children do, whether it was getting into scrapes, or showing some gift or passion you would never have suspected. Tawaen is in his thirties, either semanakraseye, or waiting to be if you still are; he and a few of the others have children of their own, making you a grandfather several times over. There have been deaths in the family too. Among everyone you know, many of the previous generation are gone; you mourned each, still miss those who were closest, but you go on. All the trees around the Hearthstone Independent are twenty years bigger. Your limbs are stiffer, your hands slower, your scars are faded but your wrinkles are more and sharper, and your hair falls down past your shoulders in salt and pepper ringlets, though there is less on the top of your head.

“Just as things happened between eight and twenty-eight that you would never have imagined, let alone believed,” said Surya, “equally inconceivable things have happened between twenty-eight and forty-eight. They are piled up, layer on layer, in your memory, each with the size of its portion determined by how much it touched you. You look back at all of it at once and you think, ‘That’s amazing; I should write a book,’ if you haven’t already.”

“I have,” I said. “This would be the second.” I was weeping; more than anything it was for imagining the tiny warm weight of Tawaen’s firstborn in my arms.

“For all who know your name, the news of the death-in-you is a distant memory, a chapter in history. It happened, it was done. If they ever bring it back to mind, perhaps they shake their heads, thinking, ‘Everything he’s done since then would never have been—the crazy idiot, thank All-Spirit he saw sense.’ ” I laughed through the tears. “And then they forget it again, their minds returning to the present.

“So: forty-eight-year-old Fourth Chevenga—what is it to you?”

I took a deep breath, imagining. “Something I went through, a long time ago,” I whispered. “I know I was formed by it. And I would not be who I am otherwise. But—” I couldn’t believe I was saying these next words even as I said them, always a sign you’re doing a good chiravesa. “It doesn’t matter. It hasn’t… for a long time.”

He put his hands on my head. “Remember this,” he said. “Etch it in your memory. Then, when the emotion seizes you the worst, bring it to mind. If you have to, do it over—and do it well. Karani, Niku, Kallijas, Skorsas—if he needs reminding to do this, remind him.” He tapped my head, back a little from my brow. “Really see that fleeing hairline.” I made the a-e kras’ sign.

†

“Dad?” I’d dozed again; now it was Tawaen, standing over my bed. He was ten and a half now, and had been on more state visits than most his age, ever since I’d sworn to him I would not go away without him.

Next to his head of black-bronze curls, popped up one of white-gold; Vriah, who was seven now, was here too. Both their pairs of eyes fixed me, filled with the kind of burningly-intense hope you only see in children’s. “So,” my son said. “You’re not going to die after all…?”

Had someone told them explicitly, or had he just heard between the lines? Though it didn’t matter; there was no more secret. I’d been dozing; now the knowledge fell on me again, like an avalanche of blackness, everyone knows. All-Spirit, if I could erase one day from my life, it would be the day I told them.

I couldn’t speak. They waited, that gaze feeling as if it would peel my skin off, for what seemed like a bead. “I… well, I’m going to die sometime; everyone does,” I finally said. “But… I told you I was certain it would be soon. Now—I don’t know. Which… makes me the same as everyone else.”

I hoped they’d rejoice at that; I should have known better. Vriah’s look became thoughtful. Tawaen glanced at her; he had learned, as I had, to discern whether someone was telling the truth by her response. I saw him think, half-truth. “You mean, now you might not… but there’s still a good chance… you will.”

I bit back my urge to tell him to ask Surya. “Did you know, love, I’m seeing a healer?” I felt sick, looking into his eyes, as they seemed to scream, “Why don’t you just choose not to!?” Yes, why don’t I? My eyes were clenched shut and full of tears before I knew it.

His small arm slid around my chest, tightening, then hers too. “Shh-shh, Aba, it’s all right,” she said in her piping voice, just the same as I would, comforting her. Swallowing the tears for all I was worth, I put my arms around both of them. “Dad,” Tawaen said gently, “how can we help?”

“Love always helps,” I said. “As you’re already giving me. Beyond that… maybe this isn’t what you want to hear, and for that I’m sorry, but it’s up to me.”

He thought for a bit, then said, “Dad, is not dying… something you’ve set your mind to?”

“Yes,” I said, thinking of my oath and my relinquishment to Surya. That I could say honestly, same as with my parents.

Concern melted off his face, into a smile. “Then I won’t worry. Everyone says that whatever Fourth Chevenga sets his mind to, he does, no matter how hard it is.”

“True,” said Vriah, lighting up as well. “You’ll live till you’re old and crotcheddy.” Where had she picked that up—hearing someone talk about Niku’s mother?

“Good enough, Dad.” Tawaen kissed me on the brow. “I’ll let you off the oath this time. You don’t have to take me to Yeola-e.”




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