78 - [June 29] Not a life peaceful enough

Then it turned into a pursed-lipped smile. “Fourth Chevenga. You’re incorrigible.”

“What? I… Komona, no! I don’t mean that!” I got up and paced a bit down the shade-dappled sacred path, mostly to get further away from her, just to prove the point. “You’ll never touch me again, of course not, I’d never dream otherwise, that’s not my meaning. I just think you do wrong to yourself, condemning yourself never to have another man because you said no to me.”

“It wasn’t because I said no to you—at least it wasn’t just that.”

“What was it, then?

“It was a matter of where I put my attention.”

“Komona… no one else may know how passionate you truly are, but I do. Is it the way of All-Spirit, to cut that off for life? I know nothing of spirituality, next to you, but that seems unlikely to me.”

She cast her eyes downward, thoughtfully, then raised them again to meet mine. I had never forgotten, how beautiful they were. “If All-spirit offered me... such a marriage, and I did not have the strength to bear the pain that came with it, then... I should give all my attention to All-spirit. So I thought.”

“Then it was because of me.” A tendril of sickness reached up through me. I’d always suspected; it was another thing again to hear it from her.

“But it was my choice, love! Don’t blame yourself.” Love—why, love, must you use that word?

“I like to think that those whose lives my own life has brushed up against were the better for it… or at least not harmed,” I said.

“An odd thing for a warrior to say.”

“I’m too odd for a warrior and so I’m going asa kraiya.”

“I have not been harmed, Chevenga. Celibacy has its own intense pleasures.”

“Mm-hmm… Have you talked to the esegradaiseye about this?” I had never met the eldest elder of the Vae Arahi Senaheral, but I had heard much about her.

“She tells me it will come clear when I am ready for it to. To me it seems clear already.”

“May I show you something? You remember what I looked like before.” I took off my shirt. I didn’t need to strip more to show her well enough.

Her breath hissed in, gasping. “So many scars, Chevenga,” she shakily whispered. “So much pain.” Her sympathy I felt as keenly as if she’d touched me.

“You were one of the very few people I’ve told about not wanting, when I was a child, to kill anyone when I grew up,” I said. “Since then, every fight I’ve fought, however much I loved it, was against my own conscience. So I punished myself for it. All this is that. So I have learned, at Surya’s hands.” I looked her in the eyes. “Now you are doing the same with this oath.”

“It’s hardly the same!”

“Not the same mode; but the same inclination. You disagree? Fine; Surya could see the truth in a moment. I dare you to ask him.”

Now there was a trace of anger in her raven brows, and then almost instantly it was gone, calmed by deft application, no doubt, of her Senahera training. She poked my bare shoulder with a disapproving finger, the faintest smile quirking her lips. “Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e. There you are, thoroughly married and with a thousand lovers, and look at what you’re doing.”

“No! Curse it, Komona, I just wanted to show you, how harsh we can be to ourselves...” I threw the shirt back on and did up the clasps all the way to my throat.

“Oh, come on. Anyone sees all those scars, what are they going to have the urge to do?”

“There are four urges I’ve seen. Jump my bones as you’re saying, run for a Haian, throw up or weep. Occasionally I’ve seen someone get all four at once. So, I cannot predict certainly.”

“And yet, if someone was in the bushes spying on us, you know full well what they’d think: ‘There’s Chevenga trying to talk Komona out of her oath of celibacy. Is nothing sacred? Making love to his entire army was not enough.’” She succeeded at her aim, making me laugh.

†

“It’s just as well,” she said. “There hasn’t been another man I wanted.”

“I don’t want to hear that. I don’t want to know that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“How would you even know, when there isn’t another man you’ve tried? All-Spirit, I wasn’t even a man.”

“Yes, you were. You were a man when you should still have been half-child. And you honoured me, trusting me enough to tell me the reason. I am the kind who can only love one at a time, and I still love you.”

“Komona!” I leapt up from the bench again, as if I could walk away, as if it were honourable to show her my back. I still love you, too. The cruelest thing I could say; I kept it behind my teeth, true though it was. “I wish you had never met me. You would be so much happier.”

“I think I would still be senahera, in which case my path would be essentially the same, or at least converging on the same place.”

“It was bad enough when I had you convinced it was true.”

She did not need to ask what I meant. She thought for a while, pressing her hands together before her as she did while thinking. “I’m sorry for misleading you, Komona, though I did not intend to,” I added, making the sign of shame.

“I was angry when I found out,” she said finally. “I’d be lying to say I wasn’t. At you; at myself for being too cowardly, for not believing that things would turn out for the best in the end anyway… for not seeing the signs, which were all over you, on retrospect. I’d accept your apology except that I don’t know that you should, when you were telling me what you were certain was truth.”

“You should have sent me a long ranting letter in red ink. I wouldn’t have minded.”

Blessing of blessings, she laughed. “I thought about it. But I soon saw I didn’t need to. I saw that everything was still unfolding as it should.”

“Aiigh!” I couldn’t help it. It tore out of me. “That’s what Surya says all the time!”

“Of course he does.”

“I’m lying stuck all the kyashin way through the lung with a sword and it’s ‘Everything’s going as it should!’”

“The esegradaseye says it to me a lot, too. That is all we all need to learn, she says. That and nothing else.”

“The whole kyashin world knows my secret and what a mess of a kyash-pile my mind is, ‘Everything’s going as it should!’” She let out that long rippling laugh, that I felt all over my skin and between my legs. “A committee is struck to peck through my emotional entrails, Linasika signs up for it, ‘Everything’s going as it should!’ He starts saying I committed a crime by not revealing it before I became semanakraseye, which would be fine except that it’s true, and: ‘Everything's going as it should! No, really, Chevenga! Why can’t you see, everything is going as it should!?’ And who am I to disagree with him? What do I know? I’m not exactly enlightened.”

“You are, more than you think. Of course much of enlightenment is how much you think you are.”

This was far too deep for me. “Right. While I’m thinking of it, I forgot to mention: you’re on their questioning list.”

“Wha—the Committee?” Suddenly she looked a lot less sage and philosophical.

“Yes. I’ve been reading their proceedings, and you’re there. Because I told you, I imagine.”

I saw on her face again, her drawing on her training to gather herself. “Well, I will just answer with the truth,” she said.

“That will be your duty.”

“And being here in the Shrine is going to help you a lot, soon, I think. Has Surya sent you here much yet, and I’ve just missed your visits?”

“No, but you’re right, I’m sure he will. What’s been most laughable is him telling me I’m a healer… I know what you’re thinking, love. ‘A whaaaat?’”

Kyash, I thought. Old habit, it slipped out, love, I’m sorry.

“No, you do not know what I’m thinking,” she said. “What I am actually thinking is, he’s right.”

“All-Spirit! You too, infected with madness!”

“Chevenga… you think you’ve changed, or you are changing, but in truth you are not. You’ve always been the same, and always will be. You’ve just carried delusions... rather extensive ones, in fact. Deny it?”

I took a deep breath, and signed charcoal. “But come on. A healer? Surya is a healer. Kaninjer of Berit is a healer. I am a killer with occasional good intentions.”

“Who is going asa kraiya, for some reason. It’s as I say: in our true selves, we never change. You loved me at least in part because I am senahera, and you were drawn to that. We both know that.”

I opened my mouth and what came out was not what I intended to. “I still love you.”

To the cruelest thing I could have said, while I stood wanting a blade through my heart, she answered with the most merciful. “I know, Chevenga.”

We held each other, pressed our faces together, and she ran her hand through my lengthening hair. Of course I wept, wetting her cheek as well as my own; of course she stayed dry-eyed. “It wasn’t meant to be. I was right; I could not bear to live in your world. Look where you’ve gone, all you’ve done, dancing with death, so that only others who did understood you.”

But you do more than they; when I go asa kraiya, come and live with me, I thought, but did not let pass my lips. “It was not a life peaceful enough for you, Komona. You could not have done what you wanted.”

“It was not a life peaceful enough for you either; you did not do what you wanted. Now you know.” I just signed chalk, silently. “I felt an inkling when we were together, then became certain of it once I learned in my training to trust my inklings more,” she said. “But I am not your aura-seer, I could not tell you. Well, I guess no one could have, then.”

I signed chalk and said, “Not a chance. You know how it would have gone; I put on the black robe with the white stripes, and then it’s ‘The So-and-So’ians are on the border’ and I’m tearing it off and grabbing Chirel. I knew Arko was coming, and I knew my duty. Then I had habit, so I had to have the sword a hair away from my throat before I would listen. Which is like me, isn’t it?”

“Wait, wait—now there’s another thing I never understood, why you had a name for being cocky when you would pile so much earth on your own head all the time—but wait,” she said. “You knew Arko was coming, you knew your duty, and you did it. So everything was going as it should, yes? And now that that duty is no longer needed, and the sword a hair away from your throat, you are listening. Is not everything still going as it should? And was all along?”

She could ever defeat me in debate.





--