95 - Those who tend not to apologize

We lingered in the bath. In warm water was solace. Perhaps somewhere inside I imagined I was floating again in the womb, before my troubles had started? “She wants to torture you with not knowing,” Skorsas said.

“If I never know what she’s thinking, I can never keep my balance, can I? And she can always come back and say, ‘Oh but I didn’t really mean that,’ if she changes her mind. ‘Why did you take it that way, Chevenga?’”

I heard a cough, the kind a person makes to let you know he’s present, from Esora-e. “Chevenga..? Are you still in here?” He had the I-have-to-tell-you-something look on his face.

“I like long baths, now that I have time. Keeping the other off-balance... I’ve done that plenty. In the Mezem, in the war in every way: hand-to-hand, strategy, tactics, logistics, intimidation—all the time. It’s something you do to enemies.”

“As a man who has lost his marriage,” Esora-e said, “I think it’s not as bad as you fear.” That made me feel so much better.

“You wouldn’t know her well enough to see this, Esora-e, but, Chevenga, you ought to,” said Skorsas. “In her heart of hearts, she thinks everyone is an enemy. It’s always there... if you can’t see it, it’s hidden underneath. She always has to be on her guard, never really trusts anyone, and is always in a fight in some way. With everyone.”

“That’s not true,” I said. Skorsas didn’t see Niku’s most loving moments.

“Yes, it is. You just don’t like to see it.”

“She just needs to cool her blood, come back and apologize,” said Esora-e. “She does that.”

“She’s not going to come back and apologize,” I said. “Not apologize—never.” She’s no more in the habit of doing that than you are, I thought. Unless your transformation extends even to that...

“Or she’ll apologize and it will mean nothing because she’ll do exactly the same again,” said Skorsas. “She does that, too.”

“Skorsas! She was the one who agreed to stay with me, despite… what I can now speak of openly.”

“Because nothing would put you more in her debt than that, would it?”

“That’s a rather cynical view.”

“You may call me cynical, love, but as long as you don’t call me a fool, as you never have, I will know that I have been right often enough,” he said, with just a trace of smugness. “Be honest: because she did that, you’d forgive her for pretty much anything, yes?”

“I haven’t forgiven her for saying I now have a Committee, in contempt.”

“You’ve been telling me for a good bead now how she was just angry and it’s about the twins and you said just as mean things as she did, and so on—deny it?” I could not. “Why? To set yourself to forgive her the moment she comes back, whether she apologizes or not.”

“You still love her, of course, my child,” Esora-e said. I stared at him. It was as if he’d become another person. Tyirya’s influence? It had to be. They had become inseparable. I signed chalk.

“And you’ll keep on loving her even if she rubs shit in your face, first, because you have such a loving nature, and second, because you feel you owe her so much,” said Skorsas.

“Maybe she feels that Chevenga no longer needs her, because his secret is out,” Esora-e said. I almost let myself gape like a speared fish. Had he been taking training with Surya too? Or was this perhaps Tyirya’s thought that he was just repeating?

“If she thinks that,” I said, “she’s dead wrong—em… sorry. Very wrong.”

“Just a thought, my child,” Esora-e said. Did Tyirya call him “my child” all the time, and that’s why he was calling me that? “I still have to settle… things with her. That was bothering her here.” Who was this man, and what had he done with Krasila’s son?

“If it’s about the twins, this is all moot,” I reminded them. “I did say mean things to her; I pointed out her warts just as she pointed out mine.”

“What you said about her anger, about how she holds it sacred over everyone else’s, that is absolutely true. She needed to hear that.”

“Not flung at her as an insult in a fight. She’s not going to listen then.”

“The committee called me to in for tomorrow,” Esora-e said. I remembered, he’d come back with something on his mind. And let us talk about other matters without cutting in. It made me wonder whether there could be grown-up changelings.

“Yes, they were leaning that way,” I said, awkwardly.

He looked uncomfortably at Skorsas. “Arkan, may I ask you for a moment or two alone with my shadow-son?”

“What, right now?” He was seeing me as still-bleeding wounded and himself as the first healer’s apprentice to get to me; as well, learning that Esora-e had hit me on the temple with his wristlet hadn’t inclined him to trust me with him alone, as if I couldn’t better defend myself now, if it came to that. And there I thought I was the only one whose secrets would be revealed, I thought. It was something of a blessing not to be entirely alone in that.

“Let’s leave it for now, Skorsas,” I said. “It’s not as if it’s going to go away. You can pick up trying to turn me against her later.”

“I’m not trying to turn you against her! I just see what I see!”

I put my arm around him and kissed him on the temple. “It’s all right, love, I don’t resent it.” He kissed me back and went.

“You know he understands Yeoli,” I said to Esora-e, rapid-fire, “but not if you talk fast? You can bet he’s curious about what we’re saying, because he wants to be inside my every thought. In a good way… when he thinks I’m misguided he wants to correct me.”

“Like a certain shadow-father,” he said ruefully.

“Of course, the more he talks against her, the more I have sympathy for her. He should ask for tips from you… why don’t you come in, to talk?” Not just the pads but further up my fingers and toes were wrinkly now, but I didn’t care. He stripped and slid in beside me, not quite touching.

“Shadow-son… I... I have to say I’m sorry for… a lot of things.”

“You didn’t drive her away.”

“I certainly didn’t try to help you keep her, especially since I never apologized to her about saying that she wasn’t good enough for you, in her hearing and everyone else’s... especially that time when we fought.”

Would the wonders never cease? I would have to accustom myself, to the new Esora-e.

“But she doesn’t blame me for that. Trust me, shadow-father, she didn’t mention—well, actually, that’s not true, she did, but only because I brought it up. She wouldn’t have said a word about you, except that I brought it up.”

“It’s something else I came to apologize for, something that has nothing to do with Niku,” he said, very quietly. “Chevenga…” He opened his arms, as if offering comfort: knowing it was in truth need, I opened mine. “I love you.”

I found my eyes suddenly full of tears. “I love you too. I thought… you were going to tear my head off for what I told the Committee.”

“I thought so too,” he said.

“You still could.”

“I would have been wrong to do that… after what’s happened with Niku… or at all.”

“And you want to apologize for something and I don’t understand because I don’t think there’s a single thing you’ve done that you haven’t made right.”

“Chevenga, I was angry, even though every word you told the Committee was true, because I didn’t want to admit I was that harsh on you. You weren’t wrong, my child…”

“You were harsh, so what? It prepared me for life.”

“You were right. Your shadow father should never have beaten you almost senseless with his wristlet. I should never have done that.”

“Oh. That? That’s what you’re apologizing for?” Because he’s read the transcript, I thought, and so knows what a big fuss the Committee is making of it. It’s scared him.

He signed chalk. “Your mothers nearly kicked me out then, for that… I’d never heard Karani raise her voice like that. She called the Haian, and tore a strip off me, and she and Denaina told me if I ever raised a hand like that against you again I was out of the marriage.”

No one tells me anything… I sat stunned, the hot water swirling all around me. They took him sparring Niku as raising a hand against me, in effect, I thought.

“I tried to get her not to call the Haian,” I said. “It wasn’t that bad.”

“What I did nearly made you kill yourself. I would have been no less responsible than if I had hit you harder and cracked your skull.”

“What? Where’d you hear that?” I asked him, my habit of secrecy making me forget he’d read the Committee transcript.

“You figured you shouldn’t have come out of the stream, if I could beat you like that. Karani told me. You almost caught your death in it, and with the aftereffects of having your chimes rung; the Haian pulled me aside and told me in detail what I could have done. I got mad at him as if he were accusing me…”

Is the entire world making a wisp of smoke into an inferno? “I didn’t nearly catch my death! I got out when I was shivering. And Haians don’t understand how well warriors can control how hard they strike.”

Esora-e took my chin in my hand, and made me face him, eyes to eyes. “Shadow-son… love. You don’t need to make light of what I did to protect me from condemnation any more. Don’t make it less than it is, please, or I’ll be asking Surya to look into it. I beat you, out of my own anger and fear, and I was very very wrong to do that.” I felt what saying this cost him, in the trembling of his hand under my chin, and saw it in the tears quivering on his eyelashes. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

It was as if it reached into some deeper cavern of feeling in me, that I hadn’t known was there. I froze, feeling a deeper-than-earth thrumming in my core.

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