104 - Soul to soul

I took a deep breath, thinking, “What she hasn’t told me actually may not be what I have in mind at all.” Meanwhile her hand was on my arm. “Chevenga, are you all right?”

“I… have a… question.” Deep breath, deep breath. “It’s… I know it’s unlikely, but not knowing for sure… my peace of mind…” Yes, a distant part of me thought, I’m being very stumble-tongued. “Did they… you know… what Arkans do to their own girls…”

“Chevenga…” She linked her arm around mine and pulled me along the path to one of the stone benches. “I think you should sit down. You’re a man, and you’re even more sensitive than most men. All-Spirit, you’ve gone death-pale… Chevenga, it’s all right, I’m all right.” Nowhere in it was a ‘no.’

“I wasn’t here,” I said. My voice came out croaking. The trees of the shrine and the blue mountain slopes beyond loosed themselves again, spinning end over end, as if I’d done a wing-loop that had turned into tumbling. “I wasn’t here, I wasn’t here, I wasn’t here aiiiiggghhhhh…”

I didn’t pass out; I flung myself on the ground willingly, grinding my own face in the dirt, heaping clods and dead pine-needles on my head, screaming into the earth, slamming my hands down double-charcoal. “No, no, don’t do that, don’t, love,” she said, kneeling beside me, taking my wrists. “You freed us. You were where you had to be. You could not be everywhere.”

“It never ends!” I screamed. “Give me back Arko, to sack another ten times, another hundred!” I was killing Arkans again in my mind, hacking out their throats, their guts, their arteries, my body twitching with it, wanting so much to be doing it for real that pain shot up my arms and legs.

She curled her fingers in my hair, pulled gently. “Don’t speak that way, ever, for my sake. I’m alive, I’m happy, and that wouldn’t pay for my pain anyway. It would just make the world, and thus me, worse. You already freed me from those who hurt me. Shh, Chevenga, love.”

What was it? A minute bit of flesh; something every woman in Arko had had excised as a matter of course, and yet lived, and worked, and smiled, and raised the next generation. But I need only think of it with Komona and it threw me into madness, a whirl of rage and shame and horror so enormous they transcended the words that named them into something else, too huge to allow thought to continue, that could allow only the motions of violence.

Make the white line, I told myself. What is in this feeling? In time words for it came. I communed with that bit of flesh; through it we became as one, soul to soul. It was the holiest of holies to me. Understanding brought pain like a knife and shattering tears, but the sense that I could regain calm, at some point, if I kept breathing deeply. All through, she kept her arm tenderly around me.

You should not be comforting me, I thought, sat up and seized her in my arms, saying her name over and over. Komona, my Komona, my love, suffering that, my sacred Komona… I did not stop it, cannot stop it, but if strength of intent is what decides, I can heal it as if it had never happened this very instant... “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’ll pull myself together.”

“What you are forgetting in your emotion is that I’m all right,” she said gently.

No, you aren’t. I should know. I tightened my arms. “I’d hold you forever,” I said, “if you needed it.”

“I know, Chevenga. Thank you. It feels very good.”

“Komona…” Deep breath, keep them all so. “Tell me… what you can about it… what you need to tell… what will help.” I should be Surya here too, I saw, as I had been with my shadow-grandmother; it would just be more of a challenge, here. I loosened my arms so they’d just be there, as she needed them, not holding her together like steel bands. She took a deep breath herself.

“Well… I went to Kuraila about it first… on the recommendation of the Haian in Michere. There were things that needed setting right with surgery, so I went to our Haian here…” I couldn’t help but flinch upward from between my own legs. “It’s better now. I… I’m telling it backwards, I’m sorry. I should start with what exactly they did…”

“But you’re afraid I’ll end up on the ground again.” She signed a slight chalk. I took my crystal. “I won’t.”

“They cut… it was the size of a fingernail, and they branded it so it didn’t bleed much…” I flinched worse; I knew what branding felt like. “After it healed, it pulled some of the time, so that’s what I had surgery for… But Eosenas wanted me left open… for him. First time was that day.”

Tell me where he is, so I can brand his balls to ash. Leaving him open. For the branding iron. I did not say it, knowing she’d scold me, just tightened my arms around her.

“The pain eased over time. And both Haians said that most of my womanhood is still safely there, inside… I’m learning how to feel around the edges of that scar so I can get to ecstasy again. It doesn’t hurt any more.”

I had to close my eyes, and breathe deeply, and let the tears flow, remembering how it had been between us. “But I am not entirely whole again, yet. Sometimes anger gets the better of me.” It was hard to imagine, in her, but it could be no other way.

“Will you tell me what happened to Eosenas?” I said. “That… would complete the story, for me. Even if his death was unfortunately merciful.”

“Well…” She looked at me contritely. “I told you you killed him… that wasn’t strictly true. I meant figuratively; he was gone. I don’t know what happened to him, in truth. I still pray for him.”

“You pray for him?”

“Chevenga, he wasn’t evil, just very afraid and lonely.”

“Afraid and lonely! Oh, the poor soul! He should have been praying for himself, or otherwise paying heed to his own God. He should pray hardest if I ever find him.”

“Most Arkan men are afraid,” she said. The head-smacking truth of that stopped my anger short for a moment; it was one of those things that you know is so vastly true the moment you hear it that you wonder how you couldn’t have seen it. All the way up to Imperator; I thought of Kurkas and water.

“So he was chief assistant to the governor then—Madutas?” She signed chalk. “He would have retreated with him. What was his surname?”

“Dusakis. Fessas.”

“Eosenas Dusakis? A bit shorter than me, thin hair, hook nose, dimple in his chin, mole here?” She signed chalk. “Aigh! All-Spirit! He works in the Marble kyashin Palace! I’ve leaned over his kevyalin desk!”

“Chevenga… Chevenga, please…” My mind was coursing. It’s a matter of sending a letter to Minis, I thought, asking that the shit-eater be arrested; he’d do it. Charge him under Yeoli law because he was on our soil; he’ll argue that what he did was not against the laws he was ruled by; I’ll argue that Yeola-e had Arkan laws forced upon it… “Chevenga. I can see in your eyes you’re making plans—stop. It’s not your matter, to make plans for.” Oh, yes it is. Soul to soul, Komona; maybe in your pain you’ve forgotten, but I haven’t. “So he got home safe,” she said. “Is he well?”

I almost choked. “I can’t believe you’re asking me that!”

“I don’t like him much, but I don’t wish him harm.”

“Being charged isn’t harm—it’s justice! I know, love—ripping him limb from limb with my bare hands is illegal, now, and I’d never do anything illegal—but law is the weapon of justice.” It was such a balm to imagine it, though.

She stared at me, as if she’d never thought of this way. “Charged? It was during war, Chevenga.”

“You weren’t a kyashin warrior!”

“Yes, I was, in my way; I was giving knowledge to the shadow-sibs, remember? Charged… I don’t think I would want that.”

I took another deep breath; the world had been threatening to unhinge around me again. Love, are you out of your mind? “Let me understand this clearly, Komona,” I said. “You feel it’s fair and just that this foreign invader, who was there to help enslave and use and grind in the dirt all your family and friends and every fellow Yeoli, committed an atrocity on you, because you were working to get him and his ilk back to where they belonged so that all your family and friends and every fellow Yeoli could have the peace and freedom they’d had before?”

She sighed. “Put it that way… no. But there is a larger view.”

“In which he should get away with it entirely?”

“Chevenga, people who destroy bring the worst destruction on themselves.”

“All the more reason to charge him, then, to keep him from doing the like again and further harming himself, poor soul.”

“I would rather he understood the harm he did me, than be punished. He thought he was improving me. Why punish someone who doesn’t understand, except for vengeance, which is not good reason?”

“How do you propose to make him understand he’s harmed, which is to say, committed a crime, without charging him?”

She took a deep breath. Could it be, I was besting her at debate? Only one possible reason, I thought; she argues from fear, not wisdom. “I’ve just never considered it,” she said, as if to confirm that.

“From what you told me, you’d be the only witness against him. But you could request that he be truth-drugged, and then if he refuses, of course, it’s as good as a confession…”

“I told you, Fourth Chevenga, it’s not your matter to plan.”

I tightened my arms around her, letting out a sigh. “It’s true, it isn’t. You understand, though, why it feels like it is?”

“Yes, I understand.” She touched three fingertips to my cheek, delicately. “Why don’t you understand that I am all right?”

“Because you are not. You say yourself you have not healed it entire. Besides, I know from myself. They tortured me in the loins—even gelded me, did you know that?”

Her mouth dropped open with a gasp. “They…! But…” Her dark brows creased, baffled. “You and Niku have had a child since then… and have another coming, I heard.”

“Yes. They didn’t take my jewels right off—”

She’d gone tight as rock. “Oh those fikkers!” It was startling, coming from her, like a war-cry in a temple. I’d forgotten she’d learned Arkan; now I forgot we were in the Shrine.

“Just cut in with sharp instruments and stirred. A lot.”

“Aiighh!” She curled in on herself, fists clenched. “Chevenga! They—how dare they! Those kyashin straw-haired fikkers…! I could… it makes me want to…”

I couldn’t resist. “Oh, I’m all right, love! I pray for them… I don’t like them much but I wish them no harm…”

She stared at me, her mouth still twisted into the white line of rage at first, then breaking with a twitch into a stifled smile. “Right. Eat kyash, Fourth Chevenga.”

“For you, love, anything. I really am all right, though. It was a drop in the bucket of what they did to me, really, and I don’t remember it at all, so for all I know I was drugged out of my senses. And it’s as you say, I’m a father again since then. I mentioned it in part to make a recommendation. There’s a Zak on Haiu Menshir, a man by the name of Piatsri, who does surgery with his mind. He undid it. I am wondering what he could do for you.”

She was shy of the expense, of course; I reminded her that Assembly could be approached for such things. “The public trough is there for you to shove your nose into; shove it in up to the ears, I say. I didn’t send all that Arkan gold home for nothing.” That got her laughing again, but also considering. “It may also be that you can’t heal fully without…” I added, trailing off. How to say this, so she wouldn’t misconstrue it? Probably there was no way. “…the help of someone else.”

“I thought you might suggest that,” she said, a smile quirking her lips so fleetingly that if you didn’t know her you might miss it.

--