75 - The duel in Komona’s eyes, beginning

“There’s an old strategic saying that’s quite simple,” I said. “Never besiege. Especially in your own land. And I didn’t want those reinforcements to catch me flat-footed. But I had to take it back; it was Vae Arahi.”

“Oh, I know, love.” My heart and my loins both stirred at the word, before I told myself she’d just said it out of old habit. “I didn’t know the ‘never besiege’ part, but I can see why not… I think.”

“Well—it’s all changed now, because of the wing. An enhancement that demonstrates further what I’d always been taught: it all depends on what equipment you have,” I said. “With good siege machinery, you can put yourself almost even with the defenders in a full assault, but otherwise, you’re always taking more losses. I had none, and I didn’t have time or money to build it. But, if you decide to starve them out, unless you have a large enough army to split, which I didn’t, it pins you to the one place, which you really don’t want if the enemy has numbers outside the siege, which they did, so…”

I suddenly realized, I was giving a strategy lecture to a senahera monk who had always been utterly pacifistic. Why, I wasn’t sure, except that she was listening intently. “I couldn’t imagine you’d propose the duel without good reason,” she said. “It’s good to understand it, though.” Though in truth I’d rather never have had to, her eyes said, like all of us.

“For the next two days, no one of either nationality could talk about anything but who was better, you or Kallijas. The Arkans kept saying he had experience over you, and that a duel on a mountainside for stakes like this was very different than in the Mezem. The Yeolis kept saying you’d been trained by Azaila Shae-Chila and had weapon-sense and your fifty blood-sport fights were the best possible training in dueling on the Earthsphere. I asked one of them how old he’d started fighting, he said eighteen, and I told him you’d started at thirteen… or else I’d just ask them, as if I didn’t know and was curious, ‘Chevenga had a title in the Mezem, what was it?’ so they’d have to say ‘Living Greatest.’ My little share in sapping their morale. The plain soldiers, common-rankers, realized I knew more about you than most and started asking; when I think about it, I suspect the only reason I wasn’t truth-drugged was that I was a woman and so therefore shouldn’t know anything about such things, in an Arkan’s eyes.”

“Or it just didn’t occur to Abatzas to do that sort of reconnaissance,” I said. “He was very good at not having things occur to him.”

“Still, I was terrified they would; if they scraped me, they’d learn… you know.”

I just signed charcoal. “They already knew, from scraping me in Arko. If they’d tried to spread it in Yeola-e, I’d just have claimed it was a lie. I’m glad they didn’t; it would be the worse for me to have the truth come out now.”

“Yes. It amazes me sometimes… you guard a secret for so long, thirteen years for me, and it’s as if it fades from existence inside you in a way… atrophies in your mind, apart from the rest of your life. Then to be in the shrine or a restaurant or on the street, and to hear someone just casually say it, ‘Chevenga thought he’d never make thirty’ or however they word it… it jars. It must be a hundred times worse for you. Poor love.” That word again. I took a deep breath. “I can’t imagine how hard that was for you.” I wanted her to hold me, my skin all over aching for her arms; I hadn’t thought I’d remember her touch so vividly, after everything. I knew she wanted it too, but neither of us would risk it. We’d both always been people of discipline.

“However much a fool Abatzas was, Kallijas was studying you,” she said. “The story was that he had a file on you this thick that he’d been given by Triadas. I know one thing; he came asking us where your old bedroom was.”

“Really?” Kall had never told me that. “But I hadn’t been in it for three years; my parents had one of my little sibs in it. What did he think he was going to find?”

“I don’t know. I know he’d been prowling around Assembly Palace looking for clues too. He knew the word ‘semanakraseye,’ the only Arkan I’d ever met who did. That’s part of what I mean when I say he reminded me of you. One thing we did find was a baby-blanket Naingini crocheted for you; she’d embroidered a dedication on it.”

“Blessed All-Spirit… that thing?” I remembered it on several levels; puzzling out what the woolen words meant at age five or so, looking at it and trying to remember being wrapped in it at ten, thinking I was childish to want to keep it at thirteen but keeping it anyway, shoved to the back of the drawer. If Surya was to be believed, somewhere in me I still remembered being wrapped in it. “I didn’t think it was still in existence.”

“He held it with a tenderness that was surprising—another way he reminded me of you. And then he got this look of, ‘What am I doing?’ and handed it back to me as if he’d done something wrong by seeing it, and went off sheepishly. Maybe I was giving him a look without meaning to.” Kall hadn’t told me this either.

“Knowing him, he felt as if it were somehow seizing an unfair advantage,” I said. “Because of the poisoned blade, he was absolutely determined that the duel would be clean, down to the hair. I wore no gauntlets, he took off his, I took off my helmet, he took off his, he even gave me some of his whack-weed because my vial of it was broken; he was deadly resolved about it.”

“I know. I watched it.”

“You… watched… it?”

It’s every sane warrior’s wish that no one who loves him will ever see him in life-and-death struggle, especially if not war-trained—particularly so when he comes so close to grief that it looks certain, even for a short time. I’d had some family watching—my parents, my sibs—and had reconciled with myself, and them, about it. But they were mostly warriors, or former warriors. The idea of Komona having seen it was somehow much more horrifying.

“Yes. Chevenga, you said you’d listen to my story, so will you hush and listen? You’ve made me get ahead of myself again.” I closed my lips tightly and sat still, taking deep breaths through my nose. “Thank you. That night Eosenas, that’s the governor’s chief assistant… he hadn’t called me to his bed for a while, perhaps three-quarters of a moon, because he was getting bored of me. But that night he wanted me, and he kept me there all night—it’s all right, Chevenga, please remind yourself you’ve already killed him—and what I felt in it was anger. He was thinking, ‘This is the last time, here.’ He was cruel—shh shh, love, you saved me, you protected me, you killed him.”

“Too cursed quick, I bet,” I hissed.

She slapped her fingers gently over my lips. “Don’t think that way, Chevenga, especially not on my account. It’s all in the past, you are not a torturer, you know torture makes worse barbarians of those who do it than those who have it done, and you’re going asa kraiya.”

I took a deep breath. Yes, it’s all in the past, I told myself. I wondered if I could ever get over the sense of having failed her, though. “I’m sorry, lov—Komona. Go on.”

“Don’t apologize to me, Chevenga—it’s yourself you hurt the worst with this.” She said it so intently that I suddenly wondered if she’d been conspiring with Surya. No, it was that she was senahera, All-Spirit strong in her.

“I won’t think that way,” I said. “I swear. Please go on.”

“They allowed the slaves to be up on the wall with the guards to watch.” All-Spirit—she’d had a really good view, too. “To further subjugate us with despair when we saw you killed, I guess. But of course that might not turn out as they planned.”

I felt points of red rise on my cheeks, with wanting to ask her, “How did I look?” and of course refraining. Gallant and glorious as I rode up in gleaming armour without a hair out of place, I thought. Less so sprawled senseless at Kallijas’ feet. I guess it’s not just concern for their terror that makes us not want loved ones to see us in such places, but pure and selfish shame.

“I saw the Yeoli party come out, with the banner, and thought, ‘I’m about to see him again.’ You know… I confess… out of pain, I avoided it, after I left you. You remember I sent my regrets, with an excuse, when you invited me to your wedding—”

“For which I forgave you.” It couldn’t hurt to remind her.

“Yes, but I also stayed away from the parade after the Lakan war, and when you did the Kiss of the Lake… it was easiest. I guess I knew, a moment’s glimpse of your face and I wouldn’t be able to hide from myself how much I still loved you.

“I… was right. You’d been only fifteen when I’d last seen you. Now in the full flower of manhood, you were so beautiful…” She touched my face again, with the tenderness of awe. Was she just being polite, or were the scars nothing to her? “At least it didn’t matter so much that I was in love with you, because every other Yeoli was, too. How else could it be? You carried all our lives and hopes.

“And I wanted you… but on the other side of the wall, and in your armour, you were a thousand day’s journey away. And I could not be with you, nor could anyone else, except in our hearts and with our wishes and prayers, when you drew your sword.

“You know, I don’t know anything about fighting, and didn’t understand what I was seeing. The Arkan warriors around me would go ‘Oh!’ or ‘Aigh!’ all at once, for what I’d seen as nothing but a blur, or else they’d say ‘Ooh, beautiful such-and-such,’ some term for a fighting move, that you or he did so fast I probably would have missed it even if I knew what it was. I tried to measure how it was going by reading your face or his, whichever was facing me, but—maybe it was the distance—both of you didn’t seem anything but—and I couldn’t fathom this… ecstatic.”

“It wasn’t the distance,” I said.

“Well…” She looked into my eyes in her studying way. “You and he fell in love over the sword, as the expression goes, as everyone knows. But I confess, Chevenga, I can’t begin to understand that.”

“I don’t know that any words I could come up with will help,” I said. “It’s something beyond words… well, maybe this way. You know how you can come to know a person by making love with them, in a way that you can’t in conversation or any other way?” She signed chalk. I was the first she’d learned that with and, as far as I knew, the last. “That’s true of fighting too. It’s… likewise, a communion of two bodies, minds and spirits… the most close and intense communion… you become so extremely aware of each other that he is your entire world, and you his. And neither of you can hide your true nature from the other. So Kallijas and I came to know each other that way; and what we knew of each other… neither of us could help but fall in love with.”

“But… you were trying to stick pieces of steel into each other.”




--