81 - The universal commonality

“Here is what you need to understand,” said Surya, his arm across my back. “It is something to change, of course; but it’s nothing to be harsh on yourself for. I’ve spoken before of the”—here he said two Haian words—“have I not? Or maybe you’ve forgotten. It means ‘the universal commonality,’ which is to say, we are all the same, or more exactly, anyone exposed to the same circumstances will react the same way. For your purposes, it means, anyone who went through the same things you have would have the same intermittent yearning for death.

“You might say it’s not so simple; that if people didn’t vary, the Haians wouldn’t have so many medicines, and that’s true. But the precise truth of it is that the more extreme the circumstance, the more universally common the reaction, or as the ancient sage of healing wrote, the stronger the disease, the more the patient manifests it rather than himself.

“Consider a slap across the face. To one person it might be a heartfelt humiliation; to another a laughing matter. You might smile into the slapper’s face and say, ‘Feh; try harder’; you might slap him back; you might burst into tears and cry ‘Why?’

“Now consider a sword through the guts. No matter how tough you are, you’re going to go down, and you’re going to be in agony, and you’re going to want a healer desperately and immediately, and you’re going dread the triage verdict, terrified that the healer will declare you uncurable and leave you to die. It’s the same for anyone. Alchaen knew how to heal you of being tortured by his experience; what he saw in you was the same as everyone else he’s healed of torture, which was why he sometimes seemed like a mind-reader, because torture is extreme.

“The corollary is that there is a reason for everything. Right now you are looking at yourself and thinking I am so fikked in the head, the unspoken premise being ‘by comparison with everyone else,’ because you look around and most people you know haven’t tried to kill themselves once, let alone three times. Yes?” I weakly signed chalk. “But wherever there is such an apparent difference, there is simply a lack of explanation. They have not done the same as you because they have not had the same things driving them to it.

“So don’t condemn yourself for it, Chevenga. That’s the whole problem, that you condemn yourself far too easily. That’s what you have to get out of the habit of doing.”

I remember this all well enough to cite him, it seems, though I didn’t think I was truly listening. I spoke my thought. “I’m not so worried about condemning myself right now, so much as the Committee condemning me. How will they not say, when they hear this, ‘He is so fikked in the head?’, then write that in their report, from whence it will become history?”

“Now you’re doing what people always do: expecting others to think the same way you do,” he said. “You condemn yourself so you expect them to condemn you. But it’s explicit in their mandate that they must look for and understand causes; ‘to investigate the circumstances of the semanakraseye and his state of mind,’ it reads, so it’s right there, ‘circumstances.’

“If they do their work well—and remember, they plan to speak to every healer who has helped you that they can get their hands on, and causes are our stock-in-trade—the causes will come very clear to them. They will understand exactly why you have acted as you have, probably faster and better than you will, since they aren’t afflicted with the same blindnesses you have about it.”

“Right,” I said feebly. “I feel so much better now.”

He stifled a grin. “You’ve been hiding it from others as well as yourself,” he said, with a sidelong auric glance or two. “Everyone knows about you jumping out of the Marble Palace window after the sack; but no one that you leapt off the ship after you were impeached, or that you considered it so seriously as a child and a youth. No one knows the extent.”

I had raised my head; now I laid it back down on my arm again. I felt strengthless. “Well,” I said, “they find out all of it, starting today.”

He patted my shoulder. “No more secrets. There never really are, anyway, Chevenga. I know that goes very much against the grain for you in particular to think, but remember how many people have said they saw signs, or weren’t surprised, or that this explains so much about you. Further into the healing, you’ll see that more clearly too, and why it’s true.”

“Maybe I should just have Linasika truth-drug-scrape me, as he wants to,” I said. “Get everything all reamed out of me in one great mother of all reamings.”

I was half-joking, but he said, “Perhaps there’s a little wishful thinking in there; if you have honesty forced upon you, you avoid the difficulty of choosing it. But to be honest freely, and have your people witness you doing so, is best for you and them both.”

“Of course,” I spat. “As if I have any choice.”

The list, which was scrawled in my usual fast Athali, lay on the drink-table before me. Surya tapped it with his fingernail, making a ticking through the paper. “Most important is that you are honest with yourself. Don’t lose this, that’s an order. It links you to yourself. Do you feel that?”

I did. It was a kind of awful straining inside, a painful pressure distinctive to me, that could only be stamped with the name Fourth Chevenga, and that from now on I would wear in sight of all the world, like the dagger-tattoo on the cheek of a convicted Thanish murderer. And yet I felt the feeling, that is very hard to describe, of being more strongly linked to myself too, a kind of mix of relief and inspiration. “A-e kras.” I tucked the list into my inner shirt pocket.

His eyes flicked to the place where I had it, and then to my aura, and got a quizzical look. “Chevenga, may I read it?”

No secrets; what ones did I have from him anyway? “If you can read Athali,” I said. “My Athali… it’s famed for its illegibility.”

“I can’t read Athali at all; will you read it to me?” Of course he saw the bolt of fear. This Committee questioning was going to be a world of joy. “It will be good for you,” he said. “Reading it to me first will make it easier to recount it to them.”

I did. As if I were being tortured, my mind went far away as I did, so I felt unreal, my voice not mine.

“It’s not complete,” he said, peering at my aura again, mostly around my face and neck. “But what I see doesn’t have a look of your having forgotten—aigh…!”

He so rarely even raised his voice, let alone yelped, it made me jump. “Surya? Are you all right?” I confess a certain satisfaction in seeing him discomfited, though. It was so rare.

“It’s… the Kiss of the Lake,” he said. “That’s… you…” He took a deep breath, and I felt my smugness dissolve in the face of my own surge of horror.

“The Kiss of the Lake? That’s not suicide, Surya! You’re telling me it looks the same in my aura? It can’t!”

Just as Komona had, he pulled himself together fast, much faster than I could, by use of his discipline. “But when you do it, it feels like… you tell me, Chevenga. How does it feel?”

I took a deep breath, almost without willing it, which reminded me how, each time, I’d made the mistake of doing exactly that, so the agony of not breathing lasted longer. “Like… yes, like killing yourself. You have to—” My throat closed, cutting off the words, and my eyes were pouring tears almost before I knew it.

What is this madness? I thought; the emotion had torn up through me out of nowhere. I accepted it, I did as a child, I am due—overdue—to do the third, All-Spirit, I can’t let myself be ruined for it! I told myself deep breath, even as he was saying it. “Whatever you do, keep your breath flowing; don’t hold it,” he said, laying a hand on my back; he would do that sometimes, so the feel of it would be a reminder to keep breathing deep. “Go on; you have to…?”

“You have to throw yourself away,” I whispered, stammering through the tears. “You have to say to yourself, ‘I die,’ and renounce all claim to life.”

“Then it should be on the list.” I heard horror in his voice, that the Committee would learn it. In his time in Arko, he had not ceased being Yeoli. That was why he’d cried out.

“But I didn’t choose it; it’s required!” I saw the falseness in that the moment it came out of my mouth, and heard my father’s voice in my ear clear as if he’d been there. Its power is that we do it by choice. Our love for the people alone binds us to it. “Required by my love for Yeola-e, I mean… it was not from wanting to destroy myself, not pain or self-condemnation or to protect the world from me or any of that suicidal kyash!” My hands were in my hair, I realized, pulling it.

“The idea of listing the instances is not only that they are evidence of what caused them, but that each one has left its mark on you, also,” he said. “The Kiss of the Lake did. Deny it?” I signed charcoal, clenching my eyes shut. The cliff tempted me again, when I thought, I have to tell the Committee this. “Chevenga…” He gazed for a time at my aura, with something I’d never seen before in his green-grey eyes when he did it: disbelief. “How old were you when you did it the first time?”

“How old was I? Surya, I followed a regency, it’s always the same—twenty.”

He took a deep breath, and chopped his hand charcoal. “No secrets, no secrets, Fourth Chevenga. You haven’t forgotten, I can see that in your aura. You aren’t a liar by nature. It’s fragmentary again, make the pieces one, make yourself whole. The official times and the secret times were both the Kiss of the Lake. In both, you told yourself, ‘I die.’”

Prickles went down me all over as I saw what he meant. I would have to tell the Committee. I could not speak. “No secrets,” he said, his voice hard. “Say how old you were. That’s an order.”

“A-e… kras…” It took some time to get it out, even so. He waited in resolute silence, that for me was full of the wings of darkness, beating around my head. “Eleven.”

“Add it to the list,” he said in the command-voice that brooks no protest. “However many times it was, and the age you were, for every one. Right now.” He held out the pen to me. Mindless, gone far away, I obeyed, and tucked the list back into my shirt. It was time to go down to Assembly Palace. I walked on legs of wood, feeling shattered.





--