106 - Holiest of holies

The next dawn, I decided in a bare moment. For one thing, I knew that if I asked, Niku would say yes, sympathy for Komona moving her. But I was also thinking, ‘She has done what she has done, she might not even come back, and I’m worrying for even a moment over whether to do something so needed, that she would probably give permission for anyway?’

Still, it felt like the knife that stabbed the heart of our marriage might be in my hand. Niku tried to be without jealousy—and had her work cut out for her, with me as a husband—but it was there.

Virani-e sang whispering through my mind, without my thinking of it first, as if someone else had said it. Did my mother ever say it to me, in the cradle? No; that would not be like her. The vote had gone charcoal, die cast, gates fast and all go home, so she’d never have even spoken it.

Now, though, it was there. A name you invent for yourself, or have bestowed in life by someone else (such as Karas Raikas) can never have the power of a name thought of, or felt, by your mother while she carries you beneath her heart. I will know myself by it, at least in part, for the rest of my life, I thought, the thought bringing a twinge of vertigo.

I was seeing Surya that day, so of course I told him. “What she felt of you when you were in the womb, I can see in your aura,” he said. “Always have. Look me in the eye, Virani-e—” A shock went down me, as from lightning close enough to feel but not kill. I was a stranger to myself, and a newborn, in one. “Good. Now tell me that is not a healer’s name.”

No, no, no! I am not ready for this much change! We were in his chairs; now I leapt up from mine and paced the floor. The shadow of Chirel was suddenly on my shoulder, as if I could feel its swing and weight in the scabbard; perhaps that was from wearing it on his behest the other day. Or it was something I reached for as if for safety. “Surya, I was just going to go asa kraiya, just quit war, and quit believing I should die young; why are these other things happening? It’s too much—surely it’s more than necessary?”

“You speak of them as if they are circumstances, as if they are imposed on you,” he said. “They’re not. It is you who are choosing all that happens, even if you are choosing from so deep within that the choosing is not in your thoughts. So, never feel you do not have control. You do, entirely. You may not know it, but you don’t need to know it.”

“Ai-ai-ai-aigh,” I said, plunking myself down on the chair again, and pulling on my hair with both hands. There was much to grab; my forelock was so long now I was having to part it in the middle, and yet it would still fall into my eyes all the time, too short to tuck behind my ears. I looked like a shaggy dog. “Like an ocean beneath a minnow, the depth of this for me,” I said. “I’m not even going to try to understand. And you’ll say, just as well, I don’t have to—fine.”

“Many people change their names when they put down the sword,” he said. “Not everyone, but many.”

I stared at him. “You’ve got to be kidding. You think I could escape Chevenga? I’ve spent my life carving a name, under that name; you can’t uncarve it. Sure, if were anyone else—if I wanted to do such a thing, which I don’t—I could move to another town, name myself something else, and start another life with no one the wiser as to who I had been before. But—well, that’s the price of fame! Wherever I go in the world, or at least Yeola-e, I need only show my face, and it’ll be ‘Chevenga!’ Even if I changed it under law, so many people would keep thinking of me as Chevenga that it wouldn’t matter.”

He shrugged. “What does it matter, what the world thinks, if you could get those close to you to change what they call you, which of course you could—and change it in your own heart?”

Just change it in your own heart—that was an idea I would never have even begun to give a shred of weight to, before I’d started on this whole journey. What has changed in my heart? I got a sudden pang through my chest, of Idiesas’s sword, the harbinger of change.

“I suppose… it doesn’t,” I said. He’d changed his, I remembered, not when he’d put down the sword; his Haian master had named him the Haian word for “certainty” and he’d translated it into Yeoli. I remembered how he had thrown down his sword in Porfirias, absolutely certain that he would never pick it up again, at least as a weapon. I envied him.

“You’re in a whirlwind,” he said. “Don’t worry, Virani-e. That is exactly where you need to be.”

†

But here, in the Shrine, by a fire that we’d kindled just to warm the two of us as evening fell purple and deep-water blue, I was certain in my course. “You’re still trembling, but it’s finally easing,” I breathed across the top of Komona’s head, hairs like a zephyr on my lips as she leaned into my neck, eyes closed. “Tell me when you are ready for me to do more than hold and rock you.”

Daylight faded by fingerwidth, the coals of the fire brightening in our eyes to orange jewels beneath whip-dancing flames, gold and blue. Nakedness was comfort, now, like mothers with babies; but we must go beyond that, by our plan.

“I’m afraid I won’t feel anything,” she whispered. “I mean… I feel something… when you stripped, I felt something, of course. But perhaps I can feel nothing when I am touched.”

“It’s only fear,” I said. “Remember what the Haian said; your womanhood is mostly inside.” She unclasped me and pulled back, throwing her mane of black ringlets back over her shoulders. Her gaze wandered down over my body. My pleasure did not matter, but of course it showed.

She stroked her hand down my cheek to my neck to my chest. “I want so much for it to be as I remember,” she whispered, “but I know it can’t be.”

“No, you don’t,” I said. “You don’t know what it will be. But it will be what it is.”

“I am afraid I will cry.” She leaned in, and kissed along my collar-bone, as she had always liked to do.

“If you want to cry, cry.”

“I love the way you smell,” she breathed. “You smell sweeter than you used to.”

“I do?” I stared at her blinking, and she twined her fingers in the tuft of hair on my chest.

“I liked it before,” she said. “I liked to breathe you, Cheng. But… I know what it is. You smell like a Haian. But still you, if you can make any sense of that.” She smelled the same, always with a touch of incense over the warm fragrance of her.

“Oh—you know, I’ve been on Kaninjer’s diet for so long, I’ve forgotten the changes it made. He’s had me all but off meat completely for six years now; he told me that would change my scent. So you’re lusting after Haians now? I haven’t yet married off Kaninjer; I can introduce—” She cut me off with tickling, despite my denials that I was still ticklish at all, and we giggled like teens again, until we suddenly ended it with a kiss.

When I closed my eyes, fourteen years were undone. No torture-scars, no old achy wounds, no buried smouldering coals of old agony in my mind, no Sack, no razing of Shakora, no victory chains, no Yeolis killed for planning to kill a semanakraseye, no Committee; I have never been to Arko, I have never even been to war. No slavery, no cutting and branding in the sacred place, no shadow-sibs, no watching the one I loved duel for all Yeola-e, no slow and bitter healing. We are young, we are brilliant, we are invincible, and life holds nothing but innocence, however significant I imagine my suffering to be. In the wreathing of our tongues we lived that.

“I still moisten,” she whispered, when we drew back.

“You used to, very much, when I did this,” I said, and took the delicate flesh of her earlobe between lip and tongue. She gasped, and threw her head back, eyes clenched shut, then softening but staying closed. The thought flashed for a moment though my mind of Eosenas’s hands, that I’d seen holding stylus or pen, on her, before I stifled it harshly. Now was not the time for rage. She let her hand fall from my shoulder to one nipple, and flicked it. I gasped.

“You remember the idea here isn’t for you to pleasure me,” I said.

“I know. But making love, as I recall—as the old lady I am—is better when both have fun.”

“There’s that.”

“I’m... I’m remembering fast!”

“It seems like you haven’t forgotten a thing, actually.”

Time lost itself, in hands and tongues, hair and skin. I threw another log on the fire, sending up a sparkling, with one hand, while she kissed me deeply. Above, the stars were a shattering of a thousand bright diamonds, against the silver broken band across the sky, that the ancients said is uncounted fainter millions, much further away.

“Chevenga.”

“I know.” I swallowed, and hoped the darkness hid the fear in my eyes. “It’s time.” She shivered against me. “Remember where we are, love: in the place of All-Spirit.” She drew back, and slowly parted her legs. Show nothing but compassion; feel nothing but love. Her chest rose and then fell, quivering.

I could see little in the firelight, so I brought my lips to her, making her gasp. Between the musky petals of flesh, under her thatch of pin-curls, was the ravaged spot, a gap where there should be the joining that is the root of a woman’s pleasure, surrounded by the wrong kind of hardness. I laid my tongue on it, and kept it there, still.

All-Spirit. Something gathered, then rose from somewhere near my loins, but was not lustful, separate from the hardness of my manhood. It rose like a current of warmth, like an unseen light, through the centre of me, my entrails, my stomach, my heart, my throat, with some immense power of its own; I was only the vessel, I felt and knew with certainty. I closed my eyes and poured it out through the point of my tongue, without a motion. Let this enter your ravaged spirit, love, I whispered inwardly. Draw it in, and heal.

She gasped again, and was suddenly sobbing, as was I, my tears flowing down past my nose and onto her. Let them bathe you in empathy. Her weeping went slowly from strained, struggling against itself as it so often is with women who must cry, to full-throated unfettered cries, the weeping that will cleanse right to the core. What was in me flowed into her so hard I shook with it. Heal, love. Take all I give, and transmute it into wholeness.

Take that pain, and transmute it into pleasure. With strokes I made as delicate than thoughts, I tongued her, rejoining all those places that are sensitive to pleasure to the truth of loving touch, making sure I didn’t miss the tiniest spot. They hardened hotly as they should in all but the one place that was gone, and I tasted the sweet juice that is a woman’s invitation.

The pain-cries changed, gasping, to pleasure; the rackings of her body became joy-throes. You already know you are capable, love, I said with my tongue, intensifying the strokes. You feel it like a rising tide. Feel fear fade and ecstasy wash in, and be healed by the irrefutable knowing that you have in truth lost nothing. Fly on the wings of it, and be transformed back into wholeness. Fly on the wings of it, hold nothing back, be whole and strong, be free of all pain.

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