118 - One child in one stream

I remember a few words only from subsequent times he did tenar menhu. “Go to the very centre of it; I am going to touch you there.” They blur together. “My soul is a city being sacked.” They are mixed like clouds in a storm in my mind, even with Surya’s habit of precise meaning. “You did kill your child; breathe in acceptance.” The mind is such a maelstrom it cannot enumerate them; and yet the change happens. “No, I did worse! I made his mother kill him!” I want to say it is brutal; but it was my salvation.

†

“You are thinking of yourself as the murderer of your own children.”

Now we were in my little House of Integrity, full of the smell of newly-hewn timbers and heather. Oh shit, talk healing. Maybe he could go back to talking to my body? I took a deep breath, and spoke from my heart. “I am the murderer of my own children.” I sound like Niku, I thought. How she’d relish hearing this.

“The stream-test is not murder,” he said. “One died, but you did the same with… how many others?”

“Three.”

“And they lived.”

Surya’s family didn’t do it, as I found out later. And while he’d had clients whose families did, he’d had none whose families did it the ancient, severe way, killing about one in four, as mine does.

“They lived, but they carry the mark I now know I carry. I murdered one in body, and all the others in spirit. Murdered myself, I became a murderer, and as I have murdered them, they will become murderers in their turn.”

“Mm-hmm. So let’s say Tawaen lays his firstborn in the stream, and the child dies. Are you going to have him charged with murder?”

He had me here. If I said “No! Of course not!” he’d say “Why is it different with yourself?” It’s like laesha; you learn to know the moves ahead.

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath. “So I should not think that. Tell me what I should think.”

“Chevenga, I can see in your aura, how much of the death in you comes from your stream-test. I’m interested to know whether you know, how much.”

“You must be kidding,” I said. “Surely you can tell from my aura that I haven’t suddenly become able to see it?”

“Quit quailing and feel inside yourself with your mind.”

I did, and looked down into the churning black horror, the same way you touch your tongue to a tooth so sore it would send even a seasoned warrior screaming. “A lot of it, I think,” I said, the best I could do.

“All right, good. The death in you is only emotion. Here is what you have to understand, what happens with these things. When a person undergoes terrible suffering, especially very young, the emotion is so massive and intense that it convinces the mind that it is both immutable and eternal.”

The thought flitted through my mind, from old habit: It’s not terrible suffering; it’s just the stream test. I cured that by bringing back just a tendril of the memory.

“The extremes that one feels etch deeply on the mind a sense that they are reality,” he went on. “That is the nature of suffering and of the human mind in emotion so strong it overwhelms. You have a clear memory now; you can make use of it. Think back.” Alchaen had said the same thing, in essence, on Haiu Menshir after I’d been tortured.

I am alone in an existence of nothing but my own destruction. It is all I know, all I have ever known, all I ever will know.

“That’s what you were left with. However… well, let me ask you this. If you were a visitor from another Earthsphere, somewhere in the stars, and you wanted to know whether life was good or bad on this one, do you think you’d get a true assessment from a two-day-old child—let’s say he has a magical ability to talk—who’s in the middle of being dunked to near-freezing in an ice-cold stream?”

“He’d be likely to tell you, life is nothing but torture.”

“Right. Because that is his own current experience. But of life in general? Of how kind or harsh the world is itself?”

“He’d only be able to tell you the one thing.”

“Right. For two reasons, yes? Do you see there are two?”

“No; I see only one; that he’s too young to have learned about anyone else’s experience, or even to have much other experience himself.”

“That’s one. The other is the intensity of the experience; the extremes being etched on his mind, as I said. You have remembered them now, so you know what I mean. But—is what he feels all of reality?”

“If he dies, it is all of his reality.”

“But is it all the world’s reality?”

“No, obviously. He’s just one child, in one stream.”

“And in one moment of his life.”

“Yes.”

“Now how do you know that? I mean, from what knowledge of yours do you say that?”

“Everything I have learned… since.”

“Right. All your subsequent experiences, that have shown you that reality has many more facets. And yet, to part of you, your stream-test defines your entire reality, true? While you were dreaming you were back there. When you were confronting your mother, and trying to kill yourself in the stream again, and having the attack afterwards, your mind considered your stream-test your whole reality, did it not? You felt as if the entire world was shattering again, all those times, did you not?”

It boggles the mind. How could he so easily put into words what had happened without my having even the trace of a single word for it, so that I didn’t even know it had happened until it woke full-blown in my head, on his words?

“Yes.” I could not say more.

“So, while you were in the middle of that… where was all the knowledge derived from your subsequent experiences?”

“I… it was…” I remembered how with my hands on my mother’s shoulders, I had been unable to speak. “I forgot it. It was gone.”

“Chevenga, listen to me very closely.” He brought his face in close to mine, stern and unsmiling, and tapped the side of my head. “It’s still there.”

In spite of everything, I laughed. Something else I’ve learned about great healers and teachers; they can give you as many of your moments of enlightenment with laughter as with tears or intense thought. The corner of his lip quirked only slightly. “Bring it back!”

“A-e kras.”

“Say it—summarize it.”

“Everything I know?”

“Yes. Starting with your age.”

“I’m twenty-eight… I had the semanakraseyeni education and the full School of the Sword and Circle School trainings, I know everything I’ve learned from the wars I’ve fought, I speak four languages, I’ve read every book on general-craft ever written in three of them, I’m not bad with Haian remedies, I taught Diverse Foreign Philosophy at a doctoral level in the University of Arko for several months, I’ve learned more than I ever wanted to know about healing, I know Yeoli law inside out so I could even tell the judge she need not look up whether I’d be impeached if I were ruled incompetent… All right, it’s back. Or still there.”

“So, in the light of all that knowledge, where does the sense that your stream-test is your whole reality come from?”

“I… when these things happen, I go right there. It’s as if I’ve gone backward in time, I’m in the stream again, and everything else is undone.”

“Because…?”

“Because… I remember so… intensely, as you say.”

“Intensely in the emotions and the sensations, yes? They are huge?”

“Indescribably huge.”

“Then do you see it? The sense that your stream-test is your whole reality is an artifact of emotion: the extreme shock, terror, anger, pain, despair and shame that you naturally felt. It was extreme, yes; but still, it was only emotion and sensation. Not the sum total of reality. The sum total of reality is also what you have come to know from your four languages and remedies and trainings and everything we learn just by living our lives, yes?”

“As much as one mind with its limitations can know it, yes.”

“So is your stream-test your whole reality?”

Part of me made my tongue trip over it, but I said, “No.”

The aura-seeing gaze came into his eyes. I knew why, almost as if I could feel his thinking; he wanted to see how deep my “no” went.

“It doesn’t go deep enough,” I said. “I know it doesn’t. The emotion is still there, I can feel it simmering under a closed lid. The blade of ice, too. What do I do about this?”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Just keep doing what you’re doing.”

“My children—the lucky ones—are carrying this without knowing it, just as I did.”

“They’ll come to the point of healing when they need to and are ready, as you have. You will be in a very good position to help them. You already have, in fact; just by beginning to heal the incident within yourself. It extends up and down generations.”

“I… would do anything to help them, with this.” I clasped my crystal as I said it, instinctively.

“The hardest thing is remembering, and you’ve already done that.”

I wept for a while then, imagining them remembering, and the temptation of death once more tongued my heart. “All-Spirit,” I sobbed. “Best they remember… before… no, All-Spirit, All-Spirit, I can’t let them, I can’t let them do it to their own children.”

“Virani-e, do you see where this is going?” He put a gentle hand on my shoulder. “It’s clear in your aura.”

He and I stared at each other, as the flash went through my mind.

I will see the stream-test abolished.

How did I have any choice?

I covered my face in my hands, and just rocked on the bed.

†

Why was it familiar, this I’m-going-to-catch-a-world-of-shit feeling? Why, when I’d never even thought of abolishing the stream-test before, did it feel somehow as if I’d already done it?

It came to me in a moment. It was in Arko. The purification.

I’d never say it publicly, of course, because every Yeoli would be offended beyond forgiveness by the comparison, but I saw the similarity clear. It was something done to children against their will, leaving them scarred through and through, done as a sacred ritual, and rarely talked about. The differences were superficial.

Of course in Arko, I could prohibit it with the stroke of a pen. Here, I’d have to talk everyone out of it.

Yet underneath the nervousness, something inside me that had been screaming was suddenly quiet and calm. I felt a lightness I hadn’t known was possible, as if I’d just put down a shoulder-crushing burden I hadn’t known I’d been carrying.

“How many Yeoli families, do you think, still do the stream-test?” Surya asked me. “Say out of a hundred people—what would be your estimate?”

I had no idea. How can you know, when it’s the one thing we never arm-wavingly talk about? The oddest thing here was that he sounded as if he were testing me, as if he knew. Had he had enough Yeoli clients? Or could he just see it in everyone’s auras, every day, while in Yeola-e?

“They study it on Haiu Menshir,” he said. “I found out as part of my training. Every Yeoli who goes to the island for healing, they ask, and even those who are just visiting, if they can. As well, the healers practicing in Yeola-e ask their clients, and send the numbers home. At the University they keep track.”

I couldn’t remember Alchaen asking me, but then there was much I couldn’t remember of that time. Perhaps he hadn’t even needed to, knowing that the semanakraseyeni line does it. Had he asked my mother, Esora-e, Krero, and all the members of my escort whether they’d had it done too? We’d have pushed the incidence upwards.

“They have a count that goes back a thousand years,” he said. “You see ups and downs due to this or that event, but overall, a gradual decline. The oldest count shows seventy-three in a hundred, though obviously there was a time in which everyone did it. So now…what do you think?”

“I don’t know. I’m guessing. Half—fifty?”

“About seventeen,” he said. “Though that was when I was training… you can bet that someone’s writing a paper now about the effects of the Arkan war on the rate. Maybe they’ll predict it’s gone down, since with so many killed, people want to keep their babies; or up, from people thinking that the Arkan invasion succeeded because we were weak… anyway, you’re actually in a quite small minority.”

I was hardly hearing him. I’d frozen all over. I wasn’t even sure what I felt. He was looking at my aura again. Maybe I should ask him what I feel, I thought acidly.

“Seventeen in a hundred,” I finally managed to say. “That’s… that’s not very many. There must be many people who act as if they’ve had it done when they haven’t… especially among warriors.”

“From my own time in the army, I think you’re right,” he said. “When I learned the number, I was surprised, too.”

“You know how it is… you’re not a real warrior if you aren’t stream-tested. Only seventeen, though? It must be higher in warrior families.”

“You could find out. The Haians have the records. But it’s also possible that it seems like more to you because we are drawn to those who have suffered the same as ourselves, and we pick our friends accordingly.” As a child, I’d been part of a tight clique of five, all of whom were dead except for Krero and me. We’d all been stream-tested, I realized, as had both the Yeoli girlfriends I’d talked marriage with. How is it that Haians know more truth about ourselves than we do?

“Why do they study it?” I asked. “I would have thought they’d treat it with revulsion.”

“Because they’re healers. It’s what they call a ‘national trauma’—something to look into, with every single member of a particular people who walks into your office. Like the Arkan custom of purification.”

It’s not just me seeing the similarity, I thought. “So let me guess,” I said, feeling slightly sick. “They’ve also measured and tabulated and examined what execrable messes our minds all are because of it.” I don’t know why I even asked the question, knowing the answer so certainly.

He just said, “In your campaign, you’ll have good evidence.”

“Campaign,” I hissed between my teeth. “If anyone in all Yeola-e still respects me, I’m a straw-hair’s uncle. I’m not even kyashin legally competent.”

“Mm-hmm,” he said.

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