73 - Open him completely

When we went back up to the Independent, Niku went back to sleep right away but I did not. In my office I sorted through the papers on the desk, all manner of things I’d been doing that I’d had to leave or beg off to serve as Imperator for the second time. I had a few boxes of personal papers coming by ship and land from Arko, including the memoir, not that I needed it. I’d given up writing it after I’d started with Surya, since the wheels of the carriage of my life had come off, at least in how I looked at it, anyway.

Some time during my first term the Pages had proposed regularly putting out monographs culled from philosophical things I’d said at one time or another, and though it had felt a bit cultish to me, in the end I hadn’t been able to resist such a chance to frequently voice my opinions. Now they were collecting them all to publish as a book, they’d asked me to go through and make any annotations or refinements I might want to, and I’d been making Intharas wait for a good three moons now, much to his displeasure.

So I should finish, but I was also thinking that immersing myself in my own ineffable wisdom might keep my mind off the fact that in a few aer I’d be in front of a Committee of Assembly answering questions about my sanity.

No such luck. I couldn’t keep from feeling my words had the stain of madness upon them.

†

Kuraila Shae-Linao, Servant of Ossotyeya: I shall start by asking you a question to which we probably already know the answer, just to get your thoughts in your words on the record. Though we would not like it if a semanakraseye were unwilling to co-operate with what we are doing, so that we would have to legally compel him… I can well imagine why one would be, why he would not want his emotional innards examined publicly, his every secret probed and recorded and assessed by a public body. I can see why he might seek legal means to resist it, or at least try to dissuade Assembly from undertaking it. You, however, have made no objection at all, in Assembly or elsewhere, either by legal means or in speech; you are here and have sworn to answer everything we ask, without compulsion. Why is it you are willing?

Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e: Well… the people wills. That must sound like a pat answer, but it’s what comes to mind. I know that after what I have revealed, the people of Yeola-e must have questions, must have doubts, and the traditional way we deal with such in this nation, and the best way in my opinion, is a public analysis. We hold, and I hold myself, that it’s better to have it all out in the open and dealt with than left festering in people’s minds, ‘Is he fit to be semanakraseye, can we trust him with that power and responsibility, are we safe with him there?’ I know that, depending on your findings, I might receive a strong confirmation that I should stay in the position; I also know I might be asked to resign and impeached again if I refuse. It will depend on an imperfect process; but it’s as perfect as any process can be, and I do not doubt you will be thorough in your research, and so I am willing to entrust my professional fate to it. This is one reason why I thanked you all for being conscientious from the start.

Kurai: Chevenga, I’m going to personally commend you again, on the record, for your courage and your equanimity. It is very impressive to me (assent).
4Che: Let’s see if I can keep it up for the next question (laughter).

Kurai: Well, to tell the truth, it sounds like you’ve got a bit of a taste for a challenge, so I’ll give you one. Our mandate, as you know, is to investigate your state of mind. So what is your own assessment, currently, of your state of mind?

4Che: (Laughing) You know, when I first reported to Hurai Kadari, as an apprentice general, and he gave me my first assignment… he says, “I want one brilliant battle-plan, as comprehensive and detailed as you’d have to give if you were me, both practical and inspired in every aspect, sure beyond a doubt to give us a great victory at slight cost—in short, an example of perfection in the strategic art—and I want it by this time tomorrow.” Now I feel that way again.

†

I’d forgotten; it came back to me as I walked down to Assembly Palace and the Committee’s chamber, as they sometimes can when the bit of them you retain is more a lizard’s tail than a wisp of smoke and so you can grab it and pull the entirety back into your mind. I’d had a dream.

I am swimming in water as cold as winter sun, burning my skin. I go under, look up, see the silvery underside of the surface like a rippling Arkan-glass mirror. I will not come up again before I pass out but there is no ritual monk and I think, ‘Shininao is now a fish.’

I’d spoken to Surya, and was trying to keep his words in my mind. “The Committee will be your healers,” he had told me. “That is not their task or their requirement, but they will act that way nonetheless. Their task is an investigation, and every word will be permitted to every person, so that you will have no choice but to undertake it yourself with them. They are going to do their utmost to understand you entirely, so you will gain equal understanding of yourself yourself.”

†

4Che: I’m not… depressed, I’m not mind-frozen, I don’t have fits or attacks, I haven’t lost touch with reality, I’ve been able to fulfill my duties; I asked to go on medical leave so as to concentrate on my healing, not because I was somehow falling short as semanakraseye. What I have, in terms of state of mind… what happened was that when I was a child, I came to believe that I would die, and I ought to die, at around the age I am now. And if you carry something like that for so long, it doesn’t go away easily. That’s my problem, and it is what I am working to free myself from, with the help of Surya Chaelaecha. That’s my own assessment, for what it’s worth. I’d trust Surya’s much more.

Lanai Kesila, Servant of Issolai (presiding): Many questions: sib gentlefolk, I ask that you make note of them. As Kuraila noted to our witness, we want to be gentle with him in terms of time.

Kurai: Thank you, Chevenga. What I am going to do next is have you elaborate on this by running you through a list of questions that I use in my own practice, so as to gain a summary understanding of my clients’ mental states, if you agree to that.

4Che: Yes, of course.

Kurai: Would you say your usual mood is reasonably good?

4Che: Yes.

Kurai: Do you ever have bad moods for which you have no clear explanation?

4Che: No; if I’m angry or nervous or sad, I generally know why.

Kurai: Do you feel in control of yourself, generally?

4Che: … Usually. Not always.

†

Without getting out of the silver-blue water, I somehow find myself face-down on a table, whether a healer’s or a Mahid’s, I cannot tell. Fingers shackle my wrists and ankles, leaning my mind toward Mahid. I am naked and they are talking over me in a language I don’t understand but which isn’t Haian, while laying cloths over me here and there, sliding a needle into the vein into the back of my shield-hand, putting a glass mask over my mouth and nose. I feel a hand gently grip my penis, and a tube slide up into the inside of it. I’ve never had that done while I was awake before.

†

Kurai: We’ll return to this if we judge it relevant. How are your relationships with family?

4Che: Well, it depends on the person, of course, but it’s much more good than bad… I have no kin I’d rather be without, let’s put it that way.

Kurai: How about with friends?

4Che: I’ve had the odd quarrel, but it’s generally very good.

Kurai: Those with whom you work?

4Che: Generally good. I always make sure there is love there, and lots of it, as best I can… that’s true with everyone, actually.

Kurai: Do you feel sufficiently loved?

4Che: Yes, I count myself very fortunate that way.

Kurai: Do you love yourself?

4Che: …That’s… that’s an interesting question. The answer that springs to mind is yes, of course—but I know I can’t entirely justify it when… you know… when I seem to hate myself unto death sometimes. I guess… most of the time I love myself… but not always, not in all ways, not with all things.

Kurai: How are you at forgiving yourself for mistakes?

4Che: Terrible. I… I can’t, with some of them… it’s impossible.

Chanae: If I may intercede, I wonder if that’s simply a consequence of being in a position of great responsibility, in which even small mistakes can have great results.

4Che: It might well be.

Kurai: Well, tell us—what happens when you make a mistake?

4Che: A lot of people suffer for it. During the war, the whole fate of Yeola-e hung on my not making mistakes.

Kurai: So that’s what comes to mind when you think of mistakes you’ve made.

4Che: Yes, always. My worse mistake ever was allowing the sack of Arko… which left the blood of thousands on my hands.

Kurai: Do you feel you have control over the course of your life?

4Che: Kahara, no, I’m semanakraseye, it would be illegal (laughter).

Kusiya Aranin, Servant of Terera-South: If he had control over the course of his life, he wouldn’t be here (laughter).

4Che: Seriously… beyond the necessary bounds of obligation, yes. I haven’t always, having been enslaved twice, but otherwise, I generally do.

Kurai: How do you deal with that which you cannot control?

4Che: Try to find a way in which I can, and until I do, grit my teeth and bear it.

Linasika Aramichiya, Servant of Michalere: If I may intercede… truly, Chevenga? You try to find a way to control, for instance, the will of the people, and until you do, grit your teeth and bear it?

4Che: No! I thought… did I misunderstand the question?

Li: I suspect not.

Kurai: Well, let me interpret; there is that which we cannot control that makes us suffer, and that which we cannot control that does not. I think Chevenga’s answer in truth applied to the former, going on the words “grit my teeth and bear it…” perhaps because in the previous answer he made reference to slavery.

4Che: Yes, that’s what I was thinking.

Kurai: That which you cannot control that does not make you, or another, suffer, Chevenga, how do you deal with?

4Che: I let it be.

Li: But sometimes the will of the people is going to make you suffer—

4Che: In that case, I accept it. I’ve done the Kiss of the Lake twice, Linasika; were you there?

La: I ask an end to the intercession so the questioning may continue.

Li: Certainly, sib President.

Kurai: Is there an event in your life, Chevenga, that you know has left a lasting mark on you?

†

I want to ask what they will do to me, but some sort of propriety forbids me. It is all following some sort of protocol that must be done absolutely properly, by strict standards and actions so tightly defined they are in effect rituals. I feel that in every movement of the surgeons, or torturers, in every touch. The sound of my voice would be improper, a crude stain on the pristine fabric of the procedure. I am the only dark thing here, everything else brilliant white.

“Open him completely,” says the person who is presiding.

†

Kurai: No reason to fight it, Chevenga. Just let it come freely. We are not judging you, as we swore. No one ever would anyway, for this.

4Che: (Weeping) I… it was so long ago.

Kurai: But you remember it like yesterday. Or even as if it’s happening, as if you are back in that time, as you recount it. That’s the nature of these things. Just let the emotion take its natural course. Again, we ask you, we require of you, that you be gentle with yourself.

4Che: … All right. It was by that, and the way he moved when they moved him, that I understood that he was gone, forever.

†

The blade, which is burning icy as if made of that same water, slices my back neatly and quickly from the nape of my neck to the start of the division between my buttocks. It is so sharp it does not snag on a single nerve to cause even a twinge of pain, just the blank flatness of the cut. I feel the coolness of the air and their gaze on my vertebrae, which lie open and drying.

Someone lifts my mask and gives me a sip of water from a Haian bottle, as they talk again in words I don’t know. I feel on the edge of making some of them out, as if I should, as if they are simply more complex or compounded terms for things I know, but they quaver just beyond my understanding. The first instrument is laid down for another. As if I have heard Surya’s voice, I breathe deeply, and make the white line. More slowly and with more force, it cuts down through the line of vertebrae, severing each in half in its turn.

†

4Che: The black-haired man, I knew, was someone very familiar to me, though I couldn’t put my finger on who, and that was bothering me, and I kept thinking about it. Then I happened to pick up my mother’s mirror and look into it. And I saw, he was me.

Kurai: Pardon me for interrupting, Chevenga, but I want it in the record that Chevenga is telling us this utterly without expression, his voice entirely flat. He has ceased to show feeling. This started when he began describing that the corpse had changed. Thank you, go on.

4Che: It was over the next few days that I calculated and started thinking about time. I would die young, not more than thirty. From then on, the way I lived my life was informed by that measure.

Kurai: At least until… you came to a different realization, working with Surya.

4Che: Yes.

Kurai: Chevenga, just now as you were telling us about recognizing that the black-haired man was you, what were you feeling?

4Che: … Distant. A little light-headed.

Kurai: Anything else? Any emotion?

4Che: No.

Kurai: I want you to become very aware of yourself, feel what you are feeling, know where you are. Are you with us?

4Che: …No. Not really. I’m… I’m half elsewhere. All right, I see that. I see it, I’m sorry.

Kurai: No need for apology, Chevenga, it’s just a natural reaction. I just wanted to address it for the record. This is something that you’ve kept locked in silence a very long time, and only recently revealed. And it’s not as if you’re not still answering us as required; I think you went out of yourself, in fact, to enable yourself to do it. How many times have you told it to anyone in detail as you have us?

4Che: I never have.

Kurai: Never?

4Che: No. Not in detail. I’ve said, “I had a vision,” or “I saw my own corpse,” but not in detail.

Kurai: Not even Surya?

4Che: No. You don’t have to tell him anything, he sees it all in your aura.

†

My spine bisected lengthwise, I feel I should lie very still, lest muscles pull out of tendons or joints come apart, balls falling out of sockets, just by my intent to move. I try to breathe imperceptibly, making the inhalations and exhalations so slow they shift my ribs only extremely gently. I keep the white line so strongly that my mind becomes the white line and the white line my mind.

I feel their gaze penetrate me deeper; then a finger pushes gently into the end of the incision that is on the nape of my neck, and then runs down along it, deep, but cautiously as if testing the edge of a blade.

“There.” I hear the voice of Linasika Aramichiya. It is his finger. “There is the thing he has always hidden from Yeola-e, the dark, evil thing. I knew it would take this.” In his anger his arm tenses too much and presses the edge, cutting his finger and my core at once. He gasps in horror. I can’t breathe. I feel his blood mingle with mine; through it his agony spreads through my body like blood through the water in the Greater Baths in the Marble Palace. I whisper, “I am sorry.”

†

Kurai: Are there other ways it touched your life?

4Che: Well, there was also the secrecy; it was so much a part of my life that I had to train myself not to let anything slip. I made a discipline of it… of anticipating what the slips might be in every conversation, so I could prevent them beforehand, of practicing acting like someone who didn’t know this, and so forth. This… wasn’t pleasant for me. I much prefer to live in the open, nothing hidden. With hiding there’s always a sense of shame. It’s all the worse for living a public life. And people who are perceptive will sense it, and because you are committed to not telling them, it can breed suspicion and distrust, and as semanakraseye I was, and am, subject to much more severe accusations. I know that Linasika, for instance, has never considered me entirely honest, and I can’t deny there’s truth in it, there is something that I have always been concealing from him, and from everyone. The one blessing behind this all coming out is that I have come clean and I no longer feel the shame and the fear that goes with hiding. The shame and the fear that goes with revealing, maybe, but at least that’s an honest fear and shame (laughter).

It drives me, and has since I was seven. I am always in a hurry, always pushing, always straining… always overworking, my healer—my Haian healer, that is, Kaninjer of Berit—would say. When I was seven I began thinking that if I wanted to get anything done in life, I’d have to do it fast and start it now. So I just adjusted everything, I put myself on an entirely different schedule.

I guess also… I feel close to death, or that death is close to me. I have felt that way since then. In ordinary life, in peacetime, people don’t think about it much; for me it has always been there. It’s more so among warriors, which perhaps is why I get along so well with them, though my intention now is to leave their ranks. As a warrior I have ended up in places where death was all around me, such as the Mezem in Arko, and fighting in war, of course, itself. Surya would say I am drawn to these things, by the death in me. With the Mezem in particular, I’m not so sure, because I didn’t actually go there by choice.

Kurai: Is it in your dreams?

4Che: Yes… I have dreams about time passing more quickly than I was thinking, which is a horror to me. I have a recurring dream in which Shininao renders me helpless, then makes love to me and kills me at the same time.

Kurai: How old were you when that started, and how often does it happen?

†