74 – How it was for Komona

As if I’d been on Surya’s table, I wanted only to sleep; if that was any measure, then the Committee were indeed my healers. Blessing of blessings, now I could without falling behind on something world-shakingly important. This is what it is, I thought as I settled into the sweet pillow and closed my eyes, to put aside everything else to devote oneself to healing. The part of me that drank it in like water in a desert overbore, for once, the shame.

I woke next morning thinking, I have nothing to do. Everything is being taken care of by someone else that I put in place for it, or was already there. It was marvelous. Surya had said we would start again, but not yet; he’d judge, I could see, by my aura. “Will you take me up for a fly, love?” I asked Niku. “Not to go anywhere; just to commune with the clouds.”

“Yes, omores,” she said. “You haven’t had enough of that.” In a sky like sapphire between the peaks we were an ascending spiral on the rising breath of the earth. “You are not alone, Vaimoy Sala,” she said, using my Niah name, when we were breathing hard, the peaks great studded shadows and the Independent and Assembly Palace specks beneath us. “Here.” She gave me the bar, wrapping her arms around me. I could not kill myself without killing her and our child within as well, and that she knew I would not do.

In a moment I was blind with tears. How I had forgotten that ineffable harmony of arm and swing, wing and wind, that the A-niah cannot describe, since they need not to their fledgling young, so much it is in their half-bird blood. I danced on the muscle of the wind, now yielding so it enveloped us in waves of caress, now down-slashing through it so it scraped our skin like rough hands, screaming through the wires and burning our dripping eyes. Like one of the children who are bright birds over the beaches of Ibresi, I wheeled and banked and looped—she trusted me even to do that—until I was laughing like a maniac, and at the same time our bodies, clenched lightly together, grew hungrier for each other in the fondling of the breezes. We made sky-love again, as we hadn’t for far too long, all the world beneath us seeming one in ecstasy.

From above the shrine was a knot of dark green. I need to be there, too. I had meant to do a seven-day abstinence soon after I got home, but now with the Committee wanting me whenever they had questions, I couldn’t. But they weren’t having me in today. Once we were down—I had not forgotten how to do a double-wing foot-landing, either—and I had eaten a little, I went there.

In the calm green gloom of the woods and the stillness of the standing stones was a balm not new like the wing, but as old as my memories. I turned a corner where I heard the rasp of wooden tines on stones, and saw moving red between the green leaves of the brush; a monk was raking the path, working in the unhurried way they have that would last an eternity. I stopped short when I saw her hair and face. It was Komona.

We cried out each other’s names in delight, and hugged, though it surprised me. Thinking back, I marveled; I hadn’t met her for more than a greeting in the street, mostly during my year of peace, and not touched her at all, since she’d left me. She hadn’t seemed to want more. Had my deciding to go asa kraiya changed that? Something in me lifted inordinately at the thought.

“It is good to see you here,” she said. “As it is good for you to be here. All-Spirit!” She seized my face between her hands. “Everyone knows, now. How hard that must be for you.”

I took a deep breath. She was ever one to cut straight to the heart. “Yes. Everyone knows. That means I no longer live with the shame of secrecy.”

“True. And you have a healer, now, and hope.” I signed chalk. “Is that what brings you here, you seek the spiritual side of it?”

“I… hadn’t thought of anything quite that enlightened,” I said. “I just felt the need. So perhaps it’s true. I’m just as happy to talk to you, though. You know what my life has been all this time; I’m shamefully ignorant of yours. In the Arkan war… I’d heard things. Will you tell me, in full?”

She smiled the smile she did when she was a touch embarrassed. Monkhood had not cured her of that, it seemed. “If you listened in full to everyone’s story, you’d have no time for anything else even if you lived to be two hundred,” she said.

“Well, I don’t listen to everyone’s story. You… you know, everyone I’ve ever loved has part of me, and is part of me. I want to know because it’s you.”

“There are parts of it that will hurt you.”

“Every Yeoli’s story from the Arkan war has parts that hurt me.”

She led me by the hand to a wooden bench at a crossroads in the Shrine paths, and we sat.

†

When the Arkans were drawing close to Vae Arahi,” Komona told me, “we moved the government lock, stock and barrel further up into the mountains—I say ‘we’ because it could not be done unless everyone lent a hand, so everyone did.

“They sacked Terera, as you know, but not Vae Arahi itself. Instead they put up that awful black wall around it. I think they wanted to show that they meant to imprison Yeola-e only, not destroy it. They would own all that we were.”

I remembered Kurkas, sipping a half-century-old Tinga-eni wine and saying, “Many things to offer, your home has,” sounding as if he were a worldly traveler to my ears, until I understood he meant “many things for me to take.”

“Or perhaps Triadas was holding Vae Arahi hostage,” Komona said. “I don’t know. But we smuggled all we could out of the shrine after we’d done the government. I went back one too many times.”

I’d heard she’d been a slave, and my mind had shied away from it. Now in her presence it couldn’t, and I felt anger and shame tense me all over inside. I was not here. It was a thousand times worse imagining her violated than remembering suffering it myself.

“I don’t need to tell you, how it went,” she said. “They thought of me as beautiful, in a dark Yeoli way. The governor’s chief assistant had me…” She was telling me even less than she’d first meant to; my face was showing enough that she had decided to spare me. “You want to kill him, Chevenga…” Let’s just say, I didn’t feel very asa kraiya right then. “You don’t have to, because you already have, even if through someone else’s hand.”

“So I used my time with them—three months, in the governor’s office—to learn. Their language, their ways, their thoughts; it might in some way be useful. What do you strategists say: know the enemy? I knew there must be people working in the shadows in the occupied lands, people working to weaken the Arkans. I made contacts soon enough… passed on to them things I learned by overhearing the governor, who thought I was too stupid to understand, being a woman.

“The black monstrosity they built around Vae Arahi, I had a hand in; they may think of women as weak, but apparently we have the strength to heave stone when they don’t feel like doing it. To defend Vae Arahi against those to whom it belongs… how wrong, that you would have to besiege the place in which you were born and raised and should be serving.”

“I wouldn’t be the first,” I said, thinking of any number of other capitals the Arkans had conquered and garrisoned.

“Well… at least you were back soon. We were all heaving in sacks of grain and hanging up cow-meat to dry for the half-moon before, hearing that you’d killed Triadas and were on the move. I remember how I felt, seeing the dust against the sky, and then the dark fringe on the earth that was the army. ‘They’re here.’ Joyful but hit with fresh fears all at once.

“You were hurt, we knew; the Arkans were all talking about how you were supposed to die, though they never said why you should. I only found out later it was that Kallijas Ityirian had wounded you with a poisoned blade.”

“He was ordered to,” I said. “Either he did it or his general charged him with active insubordination—in other words, chopped off his head.”

“Ah, Chevenga. You’re protective of his honour, even now.”

“The last time I hear his honour impugned is the last time I’ll be protective of it. Though I know you aren’t… are you?”

“No. I met him… I’m getting ahead of myself, but I met him in Vae Arahi, the night before the duel. Even though he was Arkan, something about him reminded me of you.” I felt an odd pang, not of jealousy, but that hard-to-define feeling you get when you find out two people you’ve loved who ought never to have seen each other have crossed paths nonetheless. “Anyway, the Arkans kept looking for the smoke from your pyre, but didn’t mention his name. I think, on retrospect, they were all ashamed.

“Then you liberated Terera… that night the Arkans doubled the guard on all the posterns and confined us to quarters on pain of death, so we couldn’t even hear the celebrating from a distance. We told each other, ‘They’re afraid.’

“They told themselves it would be a long siege; there was enough food for four months if need be, but they were hoping for reinforcements from Arko long before that. And they were saying to each other, ‘The kid knows duels. He doesn’t know sieges. When’s he ever done one?’ That’s what they called you, the kid or the boy or the peach-chin; they’d found out somehow you were only twenty-two.”

“I let my age be known when I was in the Mezem,” I said, “trying to get through the Portals of Propriety in the library.” Her Arkan was good enough to use the Arkan words, I decided.

“The Portals of what?”

“The Portals of Propriety… that separate the rooms in Arkan libraries. There are books you’re only allowed to read if you’re seven or older, books you’re only allowed to read if you’re fourteen or older, books you’re only allowed to read if you’re twenty-one or older, books that only certain officials may read, and books that only the Imperator may read. Possibly, I imagine, there are books that no one is allowed to read; I didn’t personally go through that part of their statutes. Anyway, I told them my birthday was atakina 13 instead of 19 in case they happened to look in Lives of Notables and see atakina 19 for Fourth Chevenga, but otherwise it was when I was twenty-one, and the writers found out.”

She pursed her lips in mock reproach. “Lying about your age again, Chevenga. Shame.” But then she turned serious. “And of course women aren’t allowed to read any books at all. Arkans are an insane people.”

I suppose the last time I’ll be protective of Arko’s honour, too, is the last time I hear it impugned. “There are many who manage sanity despite their customs,” I said. “They even have some sane customs.” I was thinking of Jitzmitthra. “Besides, women are allowed to read now.”

“I am told I should ask you to recount in detail the Ten Tens,” she said.

“I’ll do that, sometime, sure. Though have a stack of kerchiefs ready, because I cry my eyes out with joy if I even think about it. But as I recall, you’re telling your story.”

“Yes… the kid, the boy, the peach-chin.” Her lips took on the trace of a teasing smile. “I took hope from it, because I knew it was their fear talking. Then they were saying, ‘Well, we were saying he knows duels, not sieges, weren’t we? Damned if the little shen-eater doesn’t want a duel instead of a siege.’ ”



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