44 - The path inconceivable

Dear Papa, p.s. to yesterday’s:

They stopped them in time. Hurai told me today. If I believed in a God I would thank it.

Oh, and I didn’t mention the screaming fight they got into with Niku, did I, when they tried to talk her into talking Chevenga out of it? That was a few days back.

I could have told Hurai he’d have as much luck with her as a perfume-seller in a city built out of shit by skunks.

Because Chevenga doesn’t need this crap on top of everything else, all his family here made a pact that he’ll never know.

As much love as my sword-hand thumb can contain,
Esora-e.

†

Like another stream of life outside my usual life, I also fit in my visits to Surya, once Kaninjer cleared me to.

It was the tenth or eleventh one, when I told him that Kusiya’s words kept running through my mind, and had been doing so for a day or two. What have we done to Chevenga to make him feel this? Not haunting me; no emotion seemed to be attached to them; but they would intrude on my thoughts, or in a mental silence between considerations they’d be there.

“When he said it, I spoke right out of turn,” I said to Surya. “I yelled out, ‘No! Nothing!’ Because… it’s unthinkable. I’m semanakraseye; what’s required of me is what’s required of me. I assume you can see the words in my aura; can you see why they’re there, too?”

I ask these questions only out of politeness, I guess. With barely an auric glance, he said, “Yes. You want to think about whether they are true.”

“Of course they’re not true! Yeola-e hasn’t done anything to me to make me feel anything, there’s nothing in the customs surrounding the anaraseye to turn a child against himself, the death-in-me has nothing to do with the semanakraseyesin!”

He didn’t say “Mm-hmm” but he got the “Mm-hmm” look on his face. “On the table.” I was suddenly very afraid, enough that it put me into a sweat, even though he didn’t strip me. When he laid the quilt over me, took my head onto his hands and said, “Close your eyes,” I knew why the fear. He was going to take me into the past.

His thumbs brushed my temples, feathery, and I was a child again, with my mother and my shadow-parents in a crowd on the edge of Terera Lake, with the wind whipping the flags, a chop on the sparkling water and my father standing naked by the shore, alone. I was mostly there; the table under me, the quilt, Surya’s hands, Arko in 1556, were all distant as a dream.

“My father’s Kiss of the Lake,” I whispered, as if he needed me to tell him; both the words and my ability to articulate them so well were distant, too.

The monk, all in red, arms raised. “People of Yeola-e, call him out!” What does that mean? The people raise their hands, curl them into fists. All of their faces are suddenly angry, dark, teeth bared, like animals—close, far, all the same, furious. Why? What did I do? Their voices split the air, shatter my ears, shake the earth like thunder with sheer naked power.

“Eteron Tennunga!”

My father’s name. They were all looking at him. I am weak all over, sick, as if the sound washing over me took my strength. Why? Why did they speak to him like this? What did he do? What do they want? He stands frozen, with his hair like flame. They aren’t done; fists and hands half-clenched like claws, like the hooking finger-bones of skeletons, rise again, and again the massed voices thunder.

“Eteron… Tennunga!”

No no no, I want to scream, leave him alone, he hasn’t done anything bad, what do you want, why are you doing this to him? Breath is torn out of me, I can’t draw more, I’m gasping. He still stands, somehow not struck down by it, like a pillar. How can he bear it? He is as alone as if no one in the world loves him and everyone hates him; how can he not fall, how can he not die? The hands rise again. I want to clench my eyes shut but I am afraid if I lose sight of him he will vanish, forever. The hands rise, like the talons of Shininao.

“ETERON! TENNUNGA!”

It shatters me, beyond words, beyond thought, beyond knowing. Each syllable seems to last forever, killing me, crazing my bones, ripping through my limbs like blades. But I keep my eyes open.

His body goes to water, not in weakness but like a warrior’s, with perfect smoothness. He kneels, the motion so poised and graceful I am lost in awe and admiration, that takes my breath away. With his whole being, he has surrendered to them.

The whole world, even the wind from the lake and the breath in my lungs, stands utterly still and silent. He alone moves, turning to the Lake and the things, sacred things they must be, that the people in red, the senaheral, have. He walks into the water, the sparkling waves slapping his shins, his knees, his thighs. Chest-deep, he kneels so it laps over his shoulders, clasps the spear with his shield-arm and takes the unlit torch in his sword-hand, putting the wrist in a thing so it’s over a big dish. A monk lights the torch, the flame growing and sending up a stream of black smoke. Behind him stands a monk in red. She lifts her arms up straight and high.

My father bows his white-gold head under the water, and though I did not think it was possible, everything goes even more still.

Time stands still, goes on, stretches so I look at the sky, the buildings, the faces of the people. They’re all locked on him, as if his breath is theirs, not angry now but hungry and afraid and amazed all at once. Someone gasps. “Aigh, semanakraseye,” someone else whispers.

Then he is moving, twitching; the spear and the torch both tremble and jerk, the flame and smoke dancing to the motion. It’s as if he is fighting something invisible. The monk puts her hands down into the water on either side of his head; he ducks it lower, pressing his face into them. He goes still and the muscles on his arms and shoulders suddenly come up sharper, ridged everywhere like carven rock.

No one moves, as if they are all locked in stillness with him; no one breathes. The hardness softens; he sinks; the torch falls out of his fingers. A huge gout of flame roars upwards out of the dish, and the roar of the people goes up with it, in triumph and joy now.

But then they lift his body up out of the water, and I see he is limp, his head lolling, blank-faced, his limbs hanging strengthless.

All I can do is scream and scream and scream. It’s only lately that I’ve learned that’s not the answer to everything. My mother swings me up into her arms, holds me hard, in a effortlessly-practiced way. “It’s all right, Chevenga, it’s all right, tiny precious, Daddy’s all right, he’ll wake up, it’s all right—

Incongruity yanked me up out of the trance. “That’s not how it went!” I said. I was panting. “I’m remembering it wrong. I didn’t cry then; my mother didn’t pick me up. The way the sky is, the clouds, the light, that’s all wrong too; I don’t understand; it didn’t go that way.”

“That’s exactly how it went,” Surya said firmly. “Stay with it. Go on.” The scene had not left me, but was right there waiting, waiting still, for me to go back into, at which point it would pick up where it had left off. –it’s all right, babe, Daddy’ll be fine.” The crowd yells semanakraseye! Semanakraseye! Tennunga, semanakraseye! but now it’s as if they’re trying to call him to them.

I turn my head out of my mother’s neck to see. They carry my father to the pier, and people knot around him. The shouts increase; I hear a tinge of worry in them. His hand is lying on the stone where I can see it; suddenly it twitches and clenches and is gone, and I hear a gasping cough I know as his and then frantic breathing. It calms; then they help him up, and then he’s grinning, flushed bright red all over, waving and blowing kisses to the crowd.

I am so spent I cannot move. I bury my head in my mother’s neck again and let myself go totally loose, like he did in the water.

“No! I was angry then, I wanted to be away from everyone, I ran away up to the Hearthstone… Surya… I don’t understand; what’s happening here?” I forced my eyes open; my heart was pounding and I felt wrung out like a rag.

“Deep breaths, and a little time to calm yourself,” he said. I obeyed, closing my eyes, and he said, “No, be in the present,” so I opened them again, and stared up at the mandala-cloth.

“The Kiss of the Lake as you’ve always remembered it… what’s the other difference, between it, and what you just remembered? In… the tone, the feel of it…?”

I strained to think. I knew what he meant; there was a difference; I struggled to put my finger on it, to get it even clear enough to begin to find words. “It was… there was… usually… it’s like there was something deeper, as if it were two… surfaces… levels… like storeys of a building… I’m sorry, I’m sure that makes no sense… aigh, Kahara!” It all crashed into clarity in my mind.

“That wasn’t the one when I was six… it was when I was two. The first time he did it.”

I had to close my eyes, to shut out the world, to be inside myself. This time Surya didn’t stop me, but took my head onto his one hand and laid the other across my brow. Out of the depths of me and the freshness of the memory, which were one now, the feeling came up too hard to stifle. “Allow it, fully,” he said gently.

I screamed just as I had in my mother’s arms. By then Surya’s healing room in the Marble Palace had been fully sponge-lined, fortunately.

“They,” I said finally, when I was capable again of words, “ask… a lot… of us.” The people, of the demarchs, I meant.

“They do,” he said.

“Semana kra.” I wasn’t sure why I said it; whether I was agreeing with him, or acceding, or just saying it because it sounded correct or was something habitual to cling to, I couldn’t tell. “Semana kra.” He just listened, holding my head. In time he said, “More words, now.”

“The second time… I was angry. I guess I was old enough… I was thinking, if they hate us so, if they demand that we die—why should we work for them? Why should we lift a finger? I was in such a rage I hid in a closet and didn’t come out when they called me so they had to turn the place inside out. But my father stopped my shadow-father from combing me… he was very, very gentle with me, explaining. He set me straight.”

“How?”

“He explained to me how it originated; he told me the whole story of the War of the Travesty, and how First Denaina was the first to do it, when the people asked her if there could be a way to die without dying. And how it is not law at all, nowhere on the books, but our choice, our gift to the people of Yeola-e to prove we are true.”

“Mm-hmm.” I’d had my eyes closed; now they popped open without my willing it, and I stared at him. He’d mm-hmm’ed that?

“Tell me, Chevenga—” Aigh, curse it. There was the twinge, like a knife twisting, of unworthiness to bear my name again. “You had choice; so what were the two options? I guess I am asking, what would have happened had you decided not to do the Kiss of the Lake? If you had said, ‘You have no reason to distrust my loyalty; semana kra, I’ll give my life for you if I must, and my word is good as you all know, so that’s enough’?”

I was so stunned I lay speechless for a time. This was outside the bounds of my thought. “But… I would never do that,” I said when I could.

“Imagine you did. Imagine next time you’re up for Renewal—you’re twenty-eight, it must be this year.”

“I’m going to do it when I go home for good. I was planning to make a trip just for it, but there’s so much to do here, I’m hoping they’ll forgive me…”

“Right. So imagine you decide ‘there’s no need for me to do it, so I’m not going to.’ What would happen?”

“I… agh…” I took several deep breaths, one not being enough. This was truly the path unconceived for me; the path inconceivable. I lay struggling to make myself imagine it, while he patiently waited. Finally I said, “The people… would not trust me.”

“Why not? When have you ever lied to or betrayed them, or shown the slightest sign that you are not to be trusted implicitly?”

I stared at him. These thoughts felt criminal, renegade, evil. “Seriously, Chevenga”—the surge of unworthiness came so hard this time I clenched my eyes shut—“if I look at all you’ve done for Yeola-e, and at what cost, I can’t even begin to imagine how anyone in their right mind could distrust you even slightly.”

“Well, I… I… ” I was panting again; I slowed and deepened it by will. “But… they still wouldn’t trust me… because it’s tradition… it’s something they expect…”

“Something they expect, got it. But what would happen? What would they do?”

“Surya!” I sat up hard, throwing off the quilt, though not his hands as they were gone. On retrospect, I think he knew I was going to do this. “Look, is part of my healing ruining me for the semanakraseyesin? Because in that case I really ought to die instead.”

“Not at all,” he said. “Healing doesn’t ruin anyone for anything. What it necessitates is understanding; you need to fully understand your own situation.”

“I thought I did.”

“Of course. We all do. You also thought you had foreknowledge.” I took a deep breath, hissing this time. “Lie back, Che—”

I flinched, as if I’d been stabbed. I couldn’t help it.

“Go into that,” he said, quickly. “Your name; that feeling. Chevenga.” Suddenly I was shivering all over, my elbow-bones banging against the wooden edge of the table. “Go into it. What is in it? Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e, what’s in that feeling?”

I couldn’t find words. Only tears, coming from so deep a depth in me that I couldn’t begin to understand. He held my head again; somehow that brought them out stronger. If I was washed clean, it was by an earthquake-wave. “Not to worry, you’ll come to the point where you can word it, in time. Letting it out this way will do for now.” When I was done, I felt as limp and loose and empty as my father had looked when they’d lifted him out.

What have we done to Chevenga to make him feel this? There were Kusiya’s cursed words, that I’d hoped Surya would cure me of, again. Each time when Surya was done with me, I needed time, though I tried to make it as short as I could these days, to shift from his world to the real one, though I wasn’t sure the truth wasn’t the other way around; it was like standing for a bit in the anteroom of a temple to adjust from the mundane to the spiritual. This time it took longer than usual. I kept thinking, ‘What have I done?’

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