105 – Virani-e

I pretended I didn’t hear. “I had that on Haiu Menshir. She was a volunteer from one of the privateer ships. I will remember her with love all my life, even though we weren’t in love. She was very loving. And very passionate…” I felt the memory make me smile. “She gave me back my confidence. I wonder where she is? Oh, no—it’s a man you’d want.”

“You are totally shameless, Fourth Chevenga.”

“And it’s one of my most endearing qualities, I know. You always cherished it. But seriously…” I took the smile off my face. “Perhaps Kuraila knows of one.”

“I’m sure she does. I will ask her.”

We sat in silence for a while, still in each other’s arms. The wind made a soft hiss blowing through the pines, and an eagle cried far above.

“You don’t want to ask me, do you?”

“Sorry?” I said. “Ask you what?”

“If you can be the one to help me.”

“I was thinking, if you wanted it to be me you’d say so.” Nonetheless, the two points of my cheeks went so hot I knew they must be scarlet. I’d felt it start, in truth, when I’d said ‘Ask you what?’ She was humouring me, I guess, letting me get away with playing so innocent.

“Well… I do know you… I don’t know, Chevenga.”

“It's up to you, Komona. Whatever you want. I said I'd do anything to help you and that means anything, whatever it is, even if that means nothing.”

“I also don't know if it would be a good idea. Do you?”

I found my eyes studying the gravel of the path. “I don't know. Skorsas and Kallijas wouldn't even blink. Niku... it would be best if I asked her. But she’s not in town.”

“You could write.”

“Ehh… no. You know she took the two of my children who are hers? She also wrote me telling me not to write her, that she must make her own mind up whether to come back.”

“Whether to come back? Oh, Chevenga… I didn’t know.”

“I’ve kept it quiet. May I ask—“

“Of course, of course. My lips are sealed, love. I mean…” She took a deep breath. “I shouldn’t call you that.”

And I signed consideration. I didn’t say it, still not trusting my reasons for wanting to.

“She makes me nervous, Cheng.” No reason why she couldn’t call me that.

“She makes a lot of people nervous.”

“I wouldn't want to hurt her feelings.”

“That’s why I should ask, and respect it if she said no, of course. Curse it… if you were just some hip-swinging warrior around a campfire who I'd never seen before wanting to drag me off into the bushes, I wouldn't need to ask her. It's that we were in love.”

“I gathered that.”

“I am also now without the thing that drove you way. Well, possibly… but more likely. It’s no longer the certainty.” Why, I thought, did I say that? The moment it left my lips, it sounded so much like persuasion.

“Chevenga… I think at most… we could be occasional lovers. And that would stop once I found someone to marry.”

I spoke the realization as it came to me. I’d been too blameful of my loins. “You know what, Komona? I don’t want to be your lover. I want to be your healer. That’s all, but I want it more than anything.”

She laid a hand on my cheek, with feathery tenderness. “I know. You never knew, back then, how much you wanted to give. You had it in you, but you didn’t think you did.” I froze with the freezing of revelation, again. A smile quirked one corner of her lips. “Surya was right, about you being a healer.”

I brought my hand to my forehead in not quite a smack, and heaved a sigh. Here, I could not throw pillows, sadly. I liked hearing this; but I should not, so wrong it was.

“I can’t imagine who I could feel safer with,” she whispered.

“Let me… let me think on it,” I said, even as my heart and my loins both cried out, ‘What’s there to think about?’ “I think Niku would not like it if I wanted you as a lover. But as a healer… that’s different… without being able to ask her I have to choose myself, so I have to turn the ethics of it over in my mind.”

“And if you choose against, love, don’t worry; I’ll find other ways. It does not all lean on you.”

You are only saying that because it’s proper to say, I thought. Her heart was crying out to me, whatever her voice or her face said; how she could think I could not hear it, I didn’t know. We said only banter after that, and I told her I’d be back when I could.

That afternoon it was all the Mezem: the hollow mountain of a building like a circus-adorned living crypt, the golden sand, the look of eyes seeing nothing but their own death looking at me, the cold of Mahid hand-cuffs. Afterwards I felt wrung out—an apt expression, in truth, meaning washed, empty and strained all at once.

I wanted to talk to my mother, I found, so I invited myself into her rooms in the Hearthstone Dependent after the Committee released the tear-sodden remains of me. She made me just sit with my head leaned back and drink tea silently, for a while.

“I don’t even know why I’m here, what I want to ask you,” I said. I’d thought perhaps it was the marriage ethics of what I wanted to do for Komona, but it seemed the act of a childish fool, running to my mama with that, so I kept it behind my teeth.

“There needn’t be a reason,” she said. “I am happy you are here, as always.” I let out worry with my next breath. She was so good at that.

We sat in silent communion for a while. In time, it came to me. Surya had assigned me to ask her something. I’d been afraid to, so far. Now, somehow, I was not.

“Mama…” Well, perhaps a little afraid; I found myself unable to go to it straight on. “I was named… I know… you felt that Yeola-e needed that. A warrior-semanakraseye.”

“Those were more war-like times,” she said. “And you were Tennunga’s first-born, so people… made their plans for you. Now, of course, you are leaving that to adhere to your own plans.”

“You too, made that plan for me?” She pursed her lips and looked into the fire, though it was not burning, as if it were winter. “Mama… I know it was three chalks to one charcoal, to name me Chevenga. Who was the charcoal?”

“You know full well we swore an oath never to tell.”

“That was swearing to conceal from the one whose business it is more than anyone’s.”

“I should say nothing without the consent of the other three, and one is not alive to give his consent.”

“Or risk whatever it is you worry that you all risk, by my knowing,” I said. “I think, if he were alive now, seeing what I am doing, he would want me to know. I bet Esora-e would consent to it too, and even if Denaina didn’t, you and Esora-e are a majority.”

She let out a pursed-lips breath, with a bit of a hiss. “My stubborn-as-a-mule politician of a son. I am asa kraiya, you will be; let it remain a secret between asakraiyaseyel. I was the charcoal.”

To suspect is one thing; to hear it strikes much deeper. I was affected much more than I’d thought I would be, something stirred up inside me, as if by a wind blowing through places no wind ever blew before.

“Why?”

“A mother…” Her brown eyes, from which mine had been formed, flickered a touch; it was something she’d never put into words before and so they came out slowly and creakily, like me telling my secret. “A mother knows something of her child, when he is still in the womb, love. What I knew of you... ‘Chevenga’ did not suit.”

I felt the dizzying sensation of everything changing again, as if the turning of the Earthsphere had suddenly lurched into an unknown direction. “What… would have suited… what did you want to call me?”

“There wasn’t a name that I told anyone,” she whispered.

“Mama, if you could put a name to it, to what you knew of me, in the womb... what would it be?” My heart, I realized, was in my throat; my mouth went dry.

“Virani-e.” She said it so without hesitation that I knew it had always been there, from when I had been in the womb. It is a word untranslatable into any other language I know; it means integrity, or wholeness, but also truth and freedom: the truth that sets us free, let us say.

I put my head back and closed my eyes again. I had the world spinning end over end for me so often these days that I was almost doing its antithesis; getting used to it.

--