119 - The sooner one accepts truth

The unraveling of a great mind

Tyalaya Neshari, Terera Pages, etesora 70, 1556

The recent revelations of the Chevengani Mental State Assessment Committee are no surprise to the truly careful observer. Clues that the mental state of Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e is innately delicate long predate the Committee’s formation; all the earnest group of Servants has done, really, is taken stock of them.

The semanakraseye’s famously-remorseful leap from a window of the Marble Palace, followed by four days of refusing food or water, happened to become known due to its timing; less celebrated but equally symptomatic is his collapse into catatonia, and a suicide attempt on the way to a three-month stay in the House of Integrity on Haiu Menshir, after being impeached. Now, the Committee has unearthed incidents of the same ilk all the way back to his childhood.

It’s long been said that genius is a hair away from madness. Extreme sensitivity and great intelligence are akin, if not one and the same, the psyche-healers tell us; and the same predilection to live intensely that fuels extraordinary efforts can strain a mind to breaking. Chevenga has flown inimitably high, and paid the commensurate price.

What is most tragic is that, despite the best efforts of the aura-seeing healer Surya Chaelaecha, the degeneration of Yeola-e’s finest military mind in generations seems to be accelerating. A mental lapse while sparring wounded him almost mortally in Arko; on returning to Vae Arahi, he felt it necessary to take a half-year medical leave from the semanakraseyesin; the decision to go asa kraiya seems an insanely-extreme reversal for the quintessential warrior.

Finally, on etesora 66, Chevenga took so severe a turn that he was ruled mentally incompetent, and de facto removed from office, on the request of his spouses—attending court in arm and ankle bonds on the orders of his healer. When, if ever, he regains his freedom is anyone’s guess.

For all the well-deserved love and gratitude Yeolis hold for Fourth Chevenga, it seems certain that now, in the twilight of his sanity, we have irretrievably lost him as semanakraseye and chakrachaseye. Harsh, but the sooner one accepts truth, the better, as a rule.

†

Dear Chevenga,

Oh this is just stupid. You won’t write until I do because I told you not to. I should just write this stupid letter [erase waxboard]

Dear Chevenga,

I miss you...

Dear Chevenga,

Will you take me back?

Dear Chevenga,

I didn’t mean it

Dear Chevenga,

I can’t stand it. Do you still love me? Are you finished with me? Am I running away before you can throw me out? oh this is stupid [scrub sand on the beach]

Dear Chevenga, you must be tired of this, I have to stop being afraid, do you still need me? oh [erase waxboard savagely]

Dear Chevenga,

I shouldn’t have said...

Dear Chevenga,

The twins...

Dear Chevenga,

Rojhai and...

Dear Chevenga:

My ama is asking me if I’ve gone insane with this pregnancy...

Dear Chevenga... I want to grab you by the ears and kiss you till we both turn blue but...

Dear Chevenga, I’ve written that opening a hundred hundred times and torn up or erased all of them or flung them from heights. I love you and want to make it all work. I’m terrified but can’t just run away from it. I want to come home. Home isn’t Ibresi any more. Home is Yeola-e. Will you... are we... can we... Ama Kalandris, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I said those things. I’m sorry.

[bits of paper flung from above the clouds] That one was close

maybe the next one I’ll send

†

I am sitting with my legs straight out to either side; I feel the course tickle of the wool of a sheepskin on the undersides of them, and hear the muffled crackling of a fire in a stone-stove. The grown-ups are above, making sounds with their voices. I look up, far, far up, trying to be careful, knowing that if I lean my head too far back, I will fall over backwards and hit the back of it on something hard.

As I listen to the grown-ups make sounds, and look at each other, I suddenly realize: the sounds they are making mean things. I am filled with wonder. The implications are stunning.

Surya was not surprised when I told him this. “Regaining the memory of the stream-test opens the way for your mind to find other memories from early in your life,” he said. I hoped vaguely for the sense of an unbroken line of memory from the stream-test, but that never happened; still, much more did come back.

†

It was my third night in the maesa Virani-e when I woke up at the death-hour and realized Niku should know what had happened. I had a worthy subject on which to write her.

“So you’ve seen the light now,” I could imagine her saying. “Too late for Roshten’s brother. Why wasn’t it enough to see him die, and have two more coming? Why is it that you had this change of heart only after remembering it being done to you?” I’d better write right now, I thought, before I lose my nerve.

How the legally-competent take their freedom, in the simplest things, for granted. “You know I can’t untie you without Surya’s permission,” said Skorsas, who generally took the graveyard shift in their vigil over me.

“I just want to write a pigeon message.” I could send only a few words, but she’d get it sooner, and it was something I could say in a few words.

“Dictate it to me, and then you can do it over in the morning if it needs to be translated.” He was literate only in Arkan.

“It’s personal.”

“Personal, that I don’t know?”

“Personal that’s none of your business. It’s to Niku.”

“Chevenga, one of your guardians has to approve all your correspondence anyway.”

“Well, Surya’s doing this one; I want him to, anyway. Curse it, Skorsas!” I pulled myself up to sitting, clumsy as bonds always make you. “You think this isn’t all difficult enough without you throwing up walls in my way? I just want to write a fikken pigeon-note, how hard does that have to be?”

“If I untied you, and the death-urge saw its chance, seized you and succeeded, I’d have your blood on my hands forever. It’s not as if you’re going to be able to send it now anyway.”

We came to a compromise: he would hold the lap-desk with the paper on it close enough to my bound hand for me to scrawl it out. The writing was messy as a child’s, but it was done. “Niku: Stream-test, you are right, never again. Che.”

Sweat broke out all over me, as Surya read it in the morning. A day or two before, I’d finally decided I had a letter worthy to send to Niku, but Surya, vetting it, had said, “No. All you’re doing is begging her to come back. She’s not going to want to hear that, and it won’t work.” A further three letters, all of which I would have sworn as I wrote them did not take that tone, had all met the same fate.

Now as he read the message, I thought, he’ll never approve it. “Don’t change a word,” he said. I watched the pigeon shoot up out of the Hearthstone Independent coop, wings flashing, with my heart in my throat.

After a good long look at my aura, Surya cleared me to go before the Committee two days later without bonds, though he and Kaneka’s four stuck close to me on the walk down. They wanted to know what had happened, of course. They were almost painfully gentle with me, but even with Surya right beside me doing his calming tricks and my water full of essences, I couldn’t bring myself to describe my stream-test. I ended up forcing a written account out of myself back at the maesa, the hardest thing I’ve ever penned in my life, and sending it to them later. It is what you read above.

As always, they gave no indication how they judged me for it all. I would find out only in their final report.

A pigeon came back from Niku the same day I was before them. “Che: must talk, about Vriah, coming back - Niku.” I was delicate, still; tingles of dread flooded down my limbs. About Vriah? What about Vriah? I told myself firmly that I’d find out soon enough.

Surya and time and tenar menhu did their magic; each day the tide of roiling ebbed and I felt a little more myself. On the eighth day at the maesa Virani-e, when he’d freed my arms as usual in the morning, Surya studied my aura very carefully again. “Imagine being with your children, the stream-tested ones,” he commanded me. It sent a shock of pain through me, but not the breathless desperation to erase myself that had been there before. If I were dead, I would not be able to campaign to abolish it. He freed my ankles. “I want you to stay up here for… perhaps a half-moon yet,” he said. “But you’re done with these.”

You can do some exercise hobbled, but it’s not the same. I ran and climbed all the way to the lower peak of Haranin that day, just for the pleasure of it. Though Surya sent four of the elite with me, only Kaneka could keep up. At the summit he flopped on the ground and stayed there a while, chest heaving, while I practiced flying kicks, including a few right over him. He looked up at me and hissed, “You’re mad.”

Like a lungful of mountain air after smothering dankness, or a good long drink of water in a desert, that sort of thing can fill you with confidence. Back at the Maesa, I said to Etana, whose shift it was now, “I want my freedom; how soon can we go back to court?” They filed the next day, though because it was not an emergency this time, it was a five-day wait to get before the judge.

Sunset is early and golden rather than red in Vae Arahi, though the Maesa, being so high, gets it almost orange. I was looking up into clouds the colour of fire against a sky the colour of the sea around Ibresi, a day later, and wondering how long it would be before I flew again, when I saw a small flock of wings in the sky, dive-circling downwards. When they were closer, I saw the head wing was Niku’s sea eagle.

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