93 - No one who loves me

Excerpt from the Proceedings of the Chevenga Mental State Assessment Committee of the Assembly of Yeola-e, etesora 46, Y. 1556

Lanai Kesila, Servant of Issolai and Committee president: Now the first to take time, being a half-bead, by vote, is the Servant of Thara-e-Tinanga-e, but he asked that he undertake some further introductory time, which we grant now.

Omonae Shae-Lemana, Servant of Thara-e-Tinanga-e: Thank you sib President, and welcome and thank you again to our witnesses. In particular I want to thank and commend Chevenga, who by now has learned that when he enters this chamber it is to undergo an ordeal, and yet still enters it without hesitation or resentment, and with unfailing good cheer.

Darosera Kinisil, Servant of Thara-e-Kalanera: If I may intercede on the same note: Chevenga, your courage and honesty, and willingness to face the most awful and painful topics, has to my own mind been nothing short of astonishing.

Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e: Thank you.

Kusiya Aranin, Servant of Terera South: I’m going to add in here something I have noticed; we have been talking about the most agonizing things that can happen to a person happening to this man—torture, all-but-mortal wounds, death-obligation, situations painful enough to tempt him to suicide—and yet, nine times out of ten when someone says something to make us laugh, it’s Chevenga. That amazes me, and fills me with admiration.

4Che: I’m getting the feeling of being fattened up for the slaughter here; what are we talking about today? (laughter)

Kusi: Case in point.

O: A fair question, Chevenga, so I will answer it: your upbringing.

4Che: Ah.

†

Many times before I had asked myself, why do Niku and I quarrel? What is the defect in us that makes it happen again and again, even though each time seems it will and must be the last, because we always both come away hurt, and we agree that we have both come away hurt, so to have another one makes no sense?

Perhaps I’d take the question to Surya, and ask his thoughts. It wasn’t as if he didn’t already know she’d considered leaving me.

As day broke with another heavy grey sky, Skorsas came to my office, of course, to chew me out for being alone, chase me into bed and massage me. Niku was indeed in the glass room; I heard her throwing up and Roshten crying. He had a full diaper, so I got up, changed him and bounced him in my arms; of course he screamed, “Wan’ Ama! Nurse now!” When I brought him to her she thanked me without looking at me. I felt dead tired and furious all at once. I knew I was doing the wisest thing, walking away without a word. Skorsas scurried after me.

In the office, I heard the rain start pounding on the roof again, the noise itself like a weight. Realizing I’d forgotten something I went back to the bedchambers, Skorsas sticking to me like a burr. Baska had Roshten. “Did Niku go back to bed?” I asked her.

“No, she went out… up to the wing school, I think.”

I stared at her unbelieving. Did she feel so closed-in she’d gone out of her mind? “Are you sure? Did she say that’s where she was going?”

“No… but she put on the flying leathers, the maternity ones. Probably just to keep off the rain—”
“Chevenga, wait!” Skorsas yelled. His own running footfalls soon faded behind me. He chased me a little way up the mountain in a hastily-thrown-on rain-cape, but gave up running when I got to the wing-barn.

When I look back, I can’t tell what really drove me. In truth there was no chance she would really go flying in this; in my mind I knew it. But what made me run up flat out felt like panic anyway, that if I were too slow, I’d see her sea-eagle come out and leap into the air any moment.

†

O: When your parents disciplined you, what means did they use?

4Che: Words, usually, but if they had to, they’d send us away from company for a time, or if we did something serious, they’d comb us.

O: How often did you get combed?

4Che: Oh, fairly often; I was an inveterate mischief-maker.

O: Can you be more exact on how often?

4Che: Well, it was different degrees of frequency in different parts of my life, so I can’t just say. But I wouldn’t say it was excessive. I think I comb my own children for the same things I’d have been combed for.

O: How would they do it?

4Che: Doesn’t everyone do it the same way? It was generally across the hand; they’d hold my wrist until I grew into enough self-mastery not to pull my hand away if they didn’t. They’d bring the comb down on the palm, once, making sure to miss the thumb.

O: Were any of the bones of your hands ever broken, or blood drawn?

4Che: No bones, ever, but my shadow-father drew blood, once or twice.

O: Were you ever physically chastised in any other way?

4Che: Unless you count being hauled here and there as children are for chastisement sometimes, no.

Surya Chaelaecha: You’re forgetting.

4Che: … Right—my stepfather threw me in a stream once. I will confess it was utterly deserved.

Su: You’re forgetting others.

4Che: …I am? … There was, actually, one time that my shadow-father finger-wrestled me as a chastisement. So, that too.

Su: And…

O: Surya, are you looking at Chevenga’s aura right now? And seeing the… mark of these incidences there?

Su: Yes.

4Che: He… right, there was the time he took me down and held me pinned on the hearthstone in my room for a while… until he mastered his anger, he was afraid what he might do if he didn’t have me pinned.

O: We are going to go over them in detail later; for now we’re getting the overview. Is there more?

4Che: No.

Su: Yes.

4Che: I… I can’t think of anything else.

Su: You are not counting things that happened in your teens?

4Che: … I was asked about chastisements as a child..

†

“Leave me alone!” I’d barely opened the door; this was not a good start. She didn’t have a wing open, but she was standing, as if she’d been pacing.

“You’re not…? I was worried.”

“So now you think I’m stupid, too? And willing to risk the lives of the children I’m carrying? How could you?”

“It’s what you usually do when you come up here. Pardon me for caring enough to make sure.”

She faced me like a warrior closing, fists clenched at her sides. “I’m the one who taught you it was suicide to fly into storms! How could you think I’d risk the lives of the two I’m carrying as well as my own?”

“Because you came up here; usually, the next thing you do is fly!”

“To get away! To be alone! Can’t I get any peace?”

“So you were planning to!”

“No. I was not.”

I took a deep breath. She must not be lying; I’d done what I ought to. “Fine,” I said, and turned to go. Maybe I said it too emphatically.

“You’re the one who wants to risk their lives, not me!” she shouted after me.

I whirled around, prickling spreading out all over my limbs. “The fik I do! It’s a Yeoli custom fifteen hundred years old! I didn’t invent it!”

“And you just think it’s fine because it’s old and Yeoli, and poor you, stuck with it!”

“You think I’m not scared? You think I’m not hurt!?” Kahara, I thought, why am I asking, even rhetorically? That’s exactly what she thinks. There is a dark joy in anger, and freedom in condemnation; it pulled at me now.

“You’re just going along with it! Get rid of the barbaric Arkan laws, oh but the barbaric Yeoli ones are sacred!”

I somehow seized a little calm. “Niku, there’s this principle I live by, that is expressed like this: semana kra. And you knew that when you married me. I warned you about the stream-test, you knew about the stream-test, and you still married me. You even stream-tested Vriah yourself, when I wasn’t even there. And then married me. Was I wrong to take that as your agreeing to it?”

She always got angriest when undeniable truth was flung in her face. Her eyes seemed full of flames. “If I’d really known you’d take the lives of our children as the price, maybe I shouldn’t have!”

You want to fling me into such darkness, I thought, I hope you’re prepared to be flung into it yourself. I was shaking with anger now. “If I was a child-murderer, making a trade of it as you’re saying, then you were no less, selling the lives of your children for my love. You knew perfectly well what the stream-test was, and what it does, because I told you. I never pretended it was anything but what it was; if you did, that wasn’t my fault.”

“So I’m the fool, for marrying you! I’m the fool who killed our baby!” When I’d only said both of us were guilty if one was; there are no words you can say to an enraged Niku that she can’t find a perverse way to twist into the most vicious evil. I was, I realized, tired to the bones of it.

“Maybe you were a fool, to marry me, and I a fool to agree,” I said. “We’d both be happier.”

“I don’t usually regret it,” she hissed. “Until you do some shit thing to make me!”

“Right. Like hold you to your agreements. Or be angry with you for some shit thing you did, like trying to kill my shadow-father.” When I look back, I think, I should not have brought that up; at the time I felt, shit on forbidding myself to say what is true just because it hurts her. I’m tired of pussy-footing.

†

O: Your shadow-father.

4Che: I notice you’ve saved him till last. Before I say anything about Esora-e’s part in raising me, I want to put two things on the record. First, close after the outset of my work with Surya, on Surya’s orders I wrote to my shadow-father, asking him to come to Arko, on a matter of life and death. He came, and I told him my secret, and what Surya had showed me about it and so forth. His answer was that he would do anything he had to to save my life, including give his own, and I knew he was sincere.

Second, though I never dreamed he would do this, he gave his approval to my going asa kraiya. It was difficult for him, because he took such a large part in my war-training, and had such ambition for me when I was a child; I think it took everything he had, but he did it.

I will always be grateful for both those things.

We did not always get along, which I think is hardly a secret. He always had very exact ideas of what a warrior should be, and what a semanakraseye should be, and he held them very strongly, and being more of a free spirit than he liked, I didn’t always agree. He also felt that I was trying to grow up too fast, to claim too much maturity too soon and in that way get above myself, and of course he didn’t know why I wanted to, since I didn’t tell him..

†

“He was trying to kill me!”

“And I threw him out of the darya semanakraseyeni for it, but gave you only a reprimand… I was angry at both of you, but apparently I was wrong to be angry with you!”

“I was defending myself!”

“So was he! Neither of you stepped back!”

“He started trying to kill first!”

I spat out a gout of angry laughter. “Just like one of two brats in the dirt, ‘He started it!’ Oh I understand perfectly well: I and everyone else should restrain our anger, but when you are in a rage, it’s a sacred thing. You have the right to spew it at anyone, no matter how much it hurts them, no matter what it destroys. If I slammed and smashed things like you do, I’d have had a Committee on me and been impeached eight years ago.”

“And you’ve always been perfectly controlled!”

I have run this over in my head many times, wondering whether she was referring to the sack of Arko. I’ll never know. But there was a clear answer at any rate. “At least I have the decency to regret it and apologize!”

Her face changed from fury to deadly contempt, the worst expression one person can show to another, the expression I hope has never been on my face, except looking at, perhaps, Kurkas. “I’m not the one who needs taking care of!” she spat. “I’m not the fikked-in-the-head one, the one who needs a fikken healer to stay alive! Would have had a Committee… well, you have one now, don’t you!”

If she meant to strike me speechless, she succeeded. I stood frozen, staring at her, and she at me, while the rain sluiced down all around and over us, its cold a thousand days’ journey away, as if the burning of our anger was boiling it out of the air before it could touch our skin.

“No one who loves me would say that,” I said finally. To my surprise, my voice came out quiet..

†

O: As a child did you feel that he loved you?

4Che: Oh yes; he just had ways of showing it that were painful sometimes.

O: What would you say was the most painful thing he did to you?

4Che: Telling me after my blood-father was assassinated that he would have been ashamed of me, or disavowed me… that I was not worthy of him, and how could he have produced a son like me, and that sort of thing.

O: How old were you when he said that?

4Che: He didn’t say it just once… it started fairly soon after my father was killed, and went on… well, the last time was after we took Arko.

O: So he has never stopped.

4Che: Well… I’ve never called him up on it, or got a promise that he won’t again, so I can’t know; he might be resolved in his own mind not to… or won’t get the inclination, knowing what he now knows. We came to an understanding, once I told him what I had been hiding.

O: What would prompt him to say you were unworthy of Tennunga?

4Che: It was essentially whenever I did something he didn’t approve of, something improper, or whenever we got into a fight.

O: That sounds quite frequent.

4Che: Well… the more severe ones, I should say.

O: Did you feel at the time there was any truth to it?

4Che: …Yes and no… when he told me my father would disapprove of something I knew he wouldn’t have minded, because he was easier about that sort of thing, I would feel there was none. But… it always hurt nonetheless. And if I questioned it, he would say, “You knew him only for seven years, and you were a child. I knew him for twelve, and understood his every thought and secret.” The older I got and the more he faded in my memory, the less I could be sure…

O: Take your time, Chevenga. Be gentle with yourself, as we’ve asked.

La: I remind you that you may call a rest break if you wish.

4Che: … It’s all right.

Kusi: I will tell you what I find striking here: we know that Esora-e struck you repeatedly, to the point of semi-consciousness, in the temple with his wristlet. But when you were asked what was the most painful thing he did to you, you said, without hesitation, that it was not that, but these words of his.

4Che: That was only blows. I could heal from that.

O: A very significant statement, which I will come back to. Why in your own words, was this the worst he did to you?

4Che: Because… pardon me.

O: Take your time. Maybe a sip of the essence?

4Che: Thank you. My father… my blood-father… was everything to me. I… It’s as I said… I wanted to be like him in every way. When I was a child, that was my highest ambition. When he was gone… I… I wanted to hold him close, in my heart… always. It was like… it was like having him taken away even more.

He wasn’t there to say what he thought… I couldn’t know. It was… it was like losing him over and over and over. I’m sorry, Esora-e… I’m under oath, clear and complete… I always wanted to imagine that if he could see me, he’d be proud. Every prize, every decoration, I would think, “He would have been proud of me.” But without him there to tell me, I could never really know..

†

“Well, you’ve said things just as shitty to me!” And yet there was a hesitation; I'd frightened her, perhaps.

“No one who loves me would treat me as you do, this mix of love and hate, this war and peace intermixed. Skorsas has been telling me that from the first time he saw it.”

“Fine, then, I’m going home.”

“To Ibresi, you mean? Of course; last night you said today, and I knew you meant if it clears. But you were very emphatic, home is here.”

“I’m taking Vriah as well as Roshten and I’m going home.”

I stood for a moment, running this over in my head, asking if it meant what it seemed to. Whatever way I looked at it, it looked the same, except that it was said with more malice than such a thing, if it is true, deserves. She whirled around towards the Independent. Why, I asked myself, do I ever try to best her in inflicting pain? She is so much more ruthless that I.

“And you don’t care if you tear them away from their father,” I said, “so long as you hurt me enough to feel victorious.”

“You just want the ones that came out of the ice-water alive?” she yelled back over her shoulder. “Only they are good enough for you?”

I said no more. Whether just for now or for good, I was nothing to her. That was something much easier for her to do than for me, another way in which she always had the advantage. She hurried downslope, disappearing into the grey of the rain, passing Skorsas coming the other way. They both went off the path, trudging through the wet heather, to avoid each other. The heat of anger faded; underneath it was a kind of numbness.

He told me later he couldn’t tell whether I had tears in my eyes, for the rain running down my face. I couldn’t tell either, in truth. He moved to take off his rain-cape and wrap it around my shoulders, but I said no, I was already wet; he might as well stay dry. “She’s speaking as if she’s leaving me,” I said. “I don’t know whether she is.”

He said nothing, just linked his arm in mine, and pulled me gently along the path. I went docilely enough. “Who am I fooling?” I said, as much to myself as him. “Of course it’s true. She has twins. I knew in my heart, there’s no way she would stay. Well, you’ve got what you always wanted, Skorsas, at least until Kall is done as regent—me, all to yourself. Enjoy it, love. Someone should get some good out of this.” What were the Niah customs of divorce? I realized, I had no idea. Did I have to have the feather-tattoo excised?



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