51 - A deaf dancer moving to a song I could not hear

Kaninjer. Kaninjer, no, please. Kaninjer, this is the end of my consciousness, let me keep it. Kaninjer, you can’t, this is the wound you’ve dreaded, the one you can’t save me from, I’m sorry, I can tell, I can feel it. Kaninjer, please trust me, I’m refusing healing, I have to, I’m sorry, Kaninjer, please... I was in and out of consciousness as they laid me on the litter and carried me down the mountain, the jolts sending me off, the drops of medicine my healer gave me bringing me back. I understood what I had been doing when I saw the ceiling of the clinic: rehearsing in my mind what I would say when he set the needle to put me under for operating, how I would say the worst thing he could ever hear from me, that he would have to suffer the worst thing possible for a Haian: stand aside and watch my life drain away when he might, he thought, save me if he acted.

He argued with tears pouring down his cheeks, but ultimately it is the patient’s choice. I let them do some things, that would help me last longer and ease the pain and keep my head clear: break off the arrow-shafts, stanch the bleeding, vein-link me, put me on pure air, assist my breathing with the bellows when I was not talking to allow me greater rest, fill me with painkillers. Just being still, half-sitting and bundled in blankets in the solarium helped; I felt the leave-taking of my soul slow its pace. I kept finding myself desperately wanting to sit up all the way, though, trying to deny my own helplessness, I suppose. The one time I tried it, I fainted.

I called for Binchera, had him make the list of what I had to do yet: give my account, brief Artira on the matters that were in my mind only, direct her to certain papers, speak to the writers. I remember Niku stroking my hair and saying, a sob catching her off-guard, “Even your death has to have a schedule.” Skorsas clung to my feet the whole time, begging me not to die, pulling his white-blond hair. Kallijas I would never see again; I remembered the quick embrace and the casual words we’d given each other as I left, not knowing they would be the last. I would be cold before he knew.

Krero lost it with his head in my arms, saying over and over, “Boru, boru, boru.” Tawaen was all hardness, though I was sure he would crack later, and let me see his tears before I was gone. Vriah was glassy-eyed with making the wall. Kima and the others, I think, couldn’t believe I was going to die, and so would save tears for later. My parents and sibs, I could see, had made a pact to show no emotion while I lived, perhaps because, as usual, I had too much to do in too short a time.

I kept from weeping myself until I recounted to my closest what had happened, with Binchera scribing it so I’d only have to do it once; I could not hold my tears as I gave everyone the most terrible shock. I had to swear second Fire come it had been Yeolis. It was as if every Yeoli in the room had been struck his or her own death, the only sound my own sobbing breaths and the faint hiss of the pure air in the mask.

I was two beads with just Artira and semanakraseyeni business, then another two with the writers. They were tongue-tied at first, so I couldn’t resist saying, “Just think, I had to go through this to find out what can shut up a roomful of writers,” which got a tense laugh in spite of themselves.

Binchera read my account, and then I took questions as best I could, telling them not to hold back. The worst was being asked how I thought this would affect Yeola-e. I had meant to do this dry-eyed, but fell short again at that. How could I begin to know? I put the best face on it I could, saying that while we’d never had to bear such a thing, we are greater than any one person, and so on. When they asked about efforts to capture the assassins, I learned what I had forgotten: I had told Krero at the meditation place who had done it, so he could send people after them right then.

I felt time pass as I’d never felt time pass before. The sun was starting to sink behind Haranin when I finished my farewells to the writers. It had become much harder to speak, to breathe, to move my hands; I was lying completely still with my eyes closed for longer and longer. Shininao’s beak was toying with my ear.

Who, when watching a brilliant sunset, does not stand on his toes to cheat one extra glimpse of the last edge of the sun’s fire? Children do it openly, of course, and adults sneak it; at least I always did. Now it was a terrible thing not to be able to, when I knew I would never see it again.

Then I felt a familiar firm hand on my shoulder. Surya. He seemed out of place here, as if he were a ghost, or else I and all else was ghost, and only he real.

I opened my eyes, and touched his hand. “You did all you could,” I whispered. “Count it as my failing, not yours. And I will return to All-Spirit and another life.”

He reached under my blankets to touch between my testicles and my anus, and touched the apex of my head, again. “Eh, I am not done with you yet,” he said, and I felt the line catch fire, silvery-white, through me. “You are going so gracefully, just as you were taught. No resistance, no futile struggle, all serenity and acceptance. You are going to your death without really feeling it.”

It was hard to fight off my astonishment enough to find words. “I... I’m feeling it plenty, Surya, believe me. I don’t think I want to feel it more.”

Since his hands were busy, he shook his head Arkan-style for no, impatiently. I had a feeling I knew what he meant; that if I really felt it, I could still by some magic survive. I felt a surge through my arms, but did not have the strength to say, Let me be, let me go, damn you, you’ve interfered enough. Last time I was angry was the last time in my life, I thought.

“Chevenga,” he said. He was looking at my aura, and I wondered vaguely what a dying person’s aura looked like. Did it show interesting colours? Did his life flash through it? Did it slowly fade, or fold in on itself like a collapsed tent, or whirl away like a dust-devil in a windstorm?

“Fourth Chevenga, you’re dying by the hand of Sharaina Anina. Doesn’t that bother you?” I must have looked completely confused, for he added, “That it was her?”

“Well, kyash, Surya,” I said, finally. “It’s killing me.”

He did not laugh as I’d hoped. “You are you. Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e, semanakraseye, chakrachaseye, Invincible, Beloved. You know your own brilliance, the magnificent things you have accomplished. Who is Sharaina Anina? An envious and power-riven and pinched-minded woman who has let herself get wound tighter and tighter into her obsession until it drove her to the ultimate treachery. But she’s defeating you.”

I stared up at him, wordless for confusion with a tinge of embarrassment. I had never heard him speak so disrespectfully of another person before, had thought it was against his Haian ethos.

“You are dying, Fourth Chevenga. You are leaving the world and all who love you without you, accepting and serene, because this worm of a person who is hatred and jealousy and small-mindedness, the most despicable traits a person can have, embodied, wanted it so. This woman, who is all the worst aspects of Yeola-e rolled into one”—he touched my cheek—“...is grinding your face in the dust, Chevenga, and you are just gently acceding to it.

“Tonight when you let your heart cease beating, so nobly, so without rancor, the battle over the soul of Yeola-e that has raged all your adult life will be over. And fear will have won out over courage, rigidity over flexibility, hatred over love, envy over appreciation, small-mindedness over large, prejudice over openness, madness over integrity... all that is evil in this nation will have scored a crucial victory over all that is good—a victory that will be recorded and remembered forever.”

I wanted to say, I am hearing, but your words are not really registering to my understanding. They were clear and Yeoli, but somehow split apart, so that I could not hear them joined and thus grasp their meaning.

“Whenever some Yeoli of the future is faced with a choice, should he do the great thing or the small, should he take up the challenge or shrink from it, should he extend the hand of friendship or turn away, he will have in the back of his mind, ‘Chevenga did such things... and look what happened to him in the end. It is the bad in the world that is stronger, for Sharaina beat him though he was so great, how can I think I can oppose it?’”

The words did not register; yet I felt something in me stir in answer to them, like a deaf dancer, moving to a song I could not hear, but only feel.

“You are dying. They will catch Sharaina, and probably give her a legal Yeoli death on the courthouse steps, but she will go to it laughing in triumph, for she will still have won over you. And all over Yeola-e, as people learn you are destroyed, the evil will laugh in triumph over the good, as she laughed over you on the mountain.”

“So I put the question to you, Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e. How can you do this? Just let Shininao take you, without a word of protest, of injustice, of anger, without a single expression of the wrongness of it, when all this hangs in—”

A cry tore up out of me with only that faint vibration as warning, like lava from a volcano, cutting him off. It was in a voice that was deeper and purer than my pain, than my death, that cut through all and extended backward and forward in time, a scream across the millennia.

“No-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o!!”

†

Then I was in darkness and a sweat, sitting up with hands outstretched in a double-charcoal hard as two knives, my head spinning, my own voice echoing in the Imperial bedchamber still, and others gasping. “Raikas! Sheng—are you all right?” No I won’t let her kill me, I won’t let that kill me, I can’t let that kill me—I was still yelling, I realized. I should stop.

Hands groped, found me, gripped me. I seized myself, felt all over my chest, my stomach, found only my unbroken skin with all my old scars. It was a dream. My lungs were heaving, but without pain; I could move. I sprang out of the bed, just to know I could do it, to feel my health, my strength, my vitality. “It was a dream,” I said, more to myself than them, “I’m alive. I’m not dying. I’m all right. It was a dream.”

“I should get Surya, shouldn’t I?” said Skorsas.

“No, don’t wake him up,” I said, by reflex. My voice was hoarse, and my throat hurt, but the taste of blood was only in memory; the pain was from yelling, I realized. “Bad enough that I’ve awakened the two of you; I’m sorry.” Guards came running in with spears leveled, followed by Kaninjer and Surya. Had I awakened the whole Imperial quarter, with one “No”?

Of course they had to examine me, Kaninjer my body, Surya my aura. They talked about me in front of me in the way of healers: “He’s had nightmares as long as I’ve known him,” said Kan, petting my shoulder. “Is there any possibility that what you are doing might give him relief from them?”

“This one was part of his healing,” said Surya. Everyone seemed to accept this easily; he was still educating them all behind my back.

When the guards were back at their posts and everyone else settled down, he touched my arm and said, “Come.” We both knew I didn’t stand a chance of sleeping a wink more tonight, and would be happy not to.

In his healing-room, I could tell him it all freely. It was not a dream that would fade out of memory at all, as they usually do; the minutest details—the feel of the quilts under my arms, the pop of the fire, the twinge of an arrowhead when I shifted—were staying with me. When I was done, he had me lie still and just breathe for a time, holding my head between his hands. Then he said, “Well, in your dream I was right, wasn’t I, that you could yet save yourself?”

“Only you, Surya, could be so invariably right you are right even in a dream.”

“Answer my question.”

“Save myself…? Well, I woke myself up—along with everyone else—which I guess you could say was saving myself subjectively; my dreams always seem utterly real when I am in them. So, yes, I saved myself that way.” In the symbol-code of dreams, Sharaina was the perfect person to represent my people’s fear and envy of me, I saw, being the epitome of it. Call her the Servant of that constituency. “You are right, as always, certainly.”

He took a deep breath. “You know, Chevenga… I wish I could say that I never have despairing thoughts, on this… One would think you’d never had real prescience before.”

In truth, it was only an instant between the second-last sentence above, and the last, but time seemed to slow almost to stopping, as if I were in battle, in the moment between sword-strokes. I heard his voice as if from a distance, through syrup, hazy. I had to make myself hear it again, slowly, painstakingly, examining every word.

One would think you’d never had real prescience before.

My heart seemed to cease beating in the pause between each word of my next thought. Sharaina truly is the Servant of that constituency.

When I came to myself I was on the floor, my cheek pressing into the marble tiles with the grout of gold. “I am at my enemy’s feet,” I whispered. “I am so wounded and so tired I can no longer move. My sword and my armour are gone, I am helpless and he has his sword-tip on my throat. It is over, all that remains is to accept.”

Surya knelt beside me, and picked up my sword-hand, that lay as if dead in his, and I felt on my skin his eyes looking at my aura. Or perhaps I felt it on my aura. “But now you have this knowledge, you can act to prevent it.”

“Why? It fits, it fulfills all, it would be the most perfect end.”

“Of the course you have so far followed. But you’re changing it. I suppose the Second Fire coming would fit too?”

I lay silent, confused.

“I am so glad,” he said, “I got you to swear that oath.”




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