120 - They die of broken hearts

My plan was to maintain equanimity. As it was, I tore down the slope full-tilt with Shaina, whose shift it was, trailing behind yelling. I decided it would take too long to go in the back door and up the stairs, and so leapt up onto the top of the water-conduit that feeds the house from Haranin’s nearest spring, and ran straight onto the roof that way.

The twins were far enough along now that Niku was wearing the loose-belted flying leathers. Somehow, in less than a month, Vriah was tall as my hip, and Roshten had started to become lanky. All the other kids all came boiling onto the roof again, and were all over me, not knowing I wasn’t cleared to be with them. It didn’t set me reeling this time, though. It was what I’d decided to do, alone, that got me through it. Never again, I thought, as I got down and wrapped my arms around them, and piping voices cried “Aba! We missed you!” and “Daddy, are you coming back down here with us again?” Never again, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, never again. Your little siblings within need never fear, and somehow I will heal you, and I will make sure no child in the world suffers it, ever again…

How I should greet Niku, I wasn’t sure; not with an open-mouthed kiss, obviously, and yet the friends’ kiss and the two-handed welcome to the house didn’t seem appropriate when she’d arranged its building and lived there almost as long as I had. As usual, with indecision, decision was taken out of my hands; she threw her arms around me and we hugged and kissed on the cheeks like friends.

When Shaina got to us, gasping for breath, I saw her eyes flick from Niku to me, and knew she was weighing whether, when we wanted to be alone, she should let us, which was a legal question. My spouses were my guardians, and Niku and I had not formally divorced. She’d said left with our two children for a moon with no indication it wasn’t permanent, and my signature of consideration was on the certificate. Yet now she was back, with them.

Finally Shaina, who, like most bureaucrats, was ever a stickler for correctness, chose openness, saying she didn’t know what to do. “Well, the essential point is this,” I answered her. “Do you trust Niku to keep me from… you know.” We were still in a crowd of children. Shaina decided yes; by Niku’s perplexed look I saw that no one had told her my situation in full. Probably they’d started, but I’d got there too fast for them to finish.

She wanted to eat and bathe, of course, so we went down to the kitchen, and then she bribed all the children to leave us alone in the water room for a moment with gifts of Niah chocolate. She slid into the hot tub, her brown nakedness, sword-edge muscular in the limbs and massively round in the middle, barely more than an arm’s-length, and yet a world, away. I could think of nothing but the words, scribed pigeon-small: about Vriah, about Vriah, about Vriah.

“I’ve been ruled legally incompetent, at the moment,” I said, “though they filed for reversal of it yesterday… other times, I could try to kill myself with impunity, but not any more, not with Surya on it.” She didn’t laugh, as I’d vaguely hoped, but heaved a deep sigh, her eyes closed for a moment, and ‘Why did I have children with this?’ written all over her face. “It’s my spouses and healers who are appointed my guardians, and Shaina wasn’t sure… how to count you.”

“Chevenga… why, this time?” The pain in the question twisted in my heart like a knife. Whatever she’d said, she hadn’t granted herself the mercy of stopping caring about me.

“I remembered my stream-test,” I said. “I dreamed it… it drove me completely insane, for a time. I lay down in the stream, meaning never to get up again, but Surya guessed I would, and had me stopped. He sequestered me, up on the mountain… that’s where I was coming down from. It’s not remembering that did it, that just made me angry… it was knowing exactly what I had done to…” I couldn’t go on, for choking up.

“Ama Kalandris…” Her eyes were closed again, her hands clenching the edges of the tub. She pulled herself out suddenly, leaving in only her shapely brown feet; pregnant women never want to stay in hot water long. I waited for it. It wasn’t enough to see one die, to make you see sense; only remembering it happening to you. Then I jumped, startled; in her uncanny way, Vriah was there, having crept in silently. Niku didn’t send her away; what was the point? She lay down at the edge of the tub and wrapped her arms around my neck. “Aba, it’s all right,” she said. “Shh, shh, it’s all right.” You comfort your murderer, I thought. The blackness of madness grew in me; I took several deep breaths to drive it off.

“Chevenga, what I came to tell you was this,” said Niku. She put her hand on Vriah’s head. “Back then, you were worried that I might not stream-test her properly… I didn’t. I laid her in a stream, yes… but there are no streams on Ibresi that are cold. It was no worse for her than a bath. She was just burbling; when she came out, she laughed. I lied to you.”

For a moment I could not move. Then I pressed my face into the tiles, pouring tears. Only three. Not four, three. She was spared—our Mezem-child was spared. I grabbed Niku’s feet, whispered “Thank you,” and dove under to kiss them.

“I meant to take the secret far beyond the end of your life, to when I went Lord Friend myself,” she said, when I’d come up and leaned my brow on her shins. “But from your pigeon-message, you’ve renounced the stream-test… Ama Kalandris, you really have renounced it… Chevenga, please stop that.”

“Yes, I have renounced it. All-Spirit…” I flung my arms around our child, who took it with equanimity. She didn’t suffer it. She didn’t suffer it. She felt none of those things. “Aba,” she said, in that hugely gentle little voice. “It’s all right.” It was, it truly was; from the sweet touch of her arms and hair and tiny body, I drank it in, my tears like rivers.

When we finally let go, Niku said, “Run on back up to the rooms, birdling; Aba and I need to be alone again,” and Vriah did, skipping. Now it’s coming, I thought. I’d have no answer, I knew, other than, yes, I was selfish. I readied myself to say it.

“So you remembered it…” She trailed off. Thinking how to word it politely, perhaps?

“I have not told you all,” I said. “When I wrote ‘Never again,’ I didn’t mean just mine. When the time is right—when everything has settled—I am going to set my mind to seeing it abolished. It’s hardly fair to say ‘Never again’ for my own and no other children, is it?”

She stared at me, her eyes suddenly full of tears, and heaved a huge sigh. “Ama Kalandris… Aba Tyriah… of course, of course! How much I love you! The Oracle spoke true: you cannot help but change the world.”

Now I heaved a sigh. “I wasn’t setting out to change the world…” Of course I had been; I just hadn’t thought of it that way, right then.

“I... know. But it is what you are, omores.” I wondered if she was saying 'omores' only by habit, same as Komona and I, or whether it meant more, as, perhaps, Komona and I.

“Of course being deemed competent again will help,” I said, and laid out for her my plans, such as they were, so far.

She sat thinking for a bit when I was done, her face unreadable. “Chevenga,” she said finally, “there is something I never told you about… when we stream-tested the twins.”

“I know now, as I didn’t know then, that it was the first stream-test you did,” I said. “You were brave enough that I never would have guessed.”

“Roshten’s brother… when I pulled him out… I was feeling what he felt.” Her voice was very quiet.

My heart was suddenly in my throat. “Niku, I never said anything, for which I’m sorry, but… I knew that. I didn’t admit to myself that I knew, but I knew.”

“I took him away into the woods—away from the stream, away from you—to try to save him, though I knew I couldn’t. He was still breathing, but he was dead. But also… it was either that, or scream at you what I’m going to say to you now.”

I took a deep breath, and she laid a hand on the side of my face.

“When you set out to have it abolished, Chevenga, tell your people this. They don’t die of cold. They die of broken hearts.”

I just said, “I know.”

†

“Chevenga…” She cast her eyes down, and I wanted so badly to caress the ends of her long eyelashes, feel them like a delicate brush, I could feel it like an ache on my fingers. She looked up, fixed me with her eyes. “When I was back home, I realized… my true home is here. My mother said I was daft to leave you… I was thinking, that if you and Shaina and Etana will have me back…”

I hadn’t thought I’d stare at her if she said something like this, but I did. “So it was just another run, then… and so you’ve come back. But, now you know what state I’m in, aren’t you wisely having second thoughts?”

“Chevenga…” Her face looked a touch angry now. “This the hardest question I think I need to ask you. Were you trying to make me angry enough to leave, to save them?” She ran her hand over her round belly. “Or am I making it mean more than it does?”

“I wasn’t thinking that. That doesn’t mean that some part of me wasn’t doing it; if there’s anything I’ve learned in all this, it’s that I am ruled by much more than the thoughts I know I have. Not just me, though; you might have been doing the same.”

“Then let me thank that part of you instead of yelling at it,” she said gently.

“If there is indeed such a part,” I said, “it says ‘you’re welcome.’ I am the speaker for the Assembly within me, I guess.” That got a smile out of her, and I almost found one in me.

“Then I think I have the strength to stay through anything else; what we still haven’t fixed between us, is between us and we can do that...I want never to leave again.”

Right, I thought. The strength to bear anything else the evil ogre Chevenga throws at you. I told myself firmly, that’s not what she means.

I had not mentioned that I’d signed consideration yet. I decided not to, right then, since, if it set her off, I would not be able to do anything about it. Someone who is legally incompetent can neither sign consideration, nor undo such a signature. Then there was the other thing I’d thought of.

“Niku... I think we should hold off deciding anything until Surya is done with me anyway. You don’t know who I am any more, really. Any more than I do.”

“So I will have the joy of finding out, same time as you do.”

“You didn’t have the joy of seeing me hauled up in front of a judge trussed up.”

“Trussed up?” She raised one black eyebrow.

“I guess no one wanted to tell you that part,” I said. “Surya had me in bonds for eight days, so out of my head I was. I’m also no longer semanakraseye; it’s Chevenga Aicheresa again, not Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e. Part of being ruled incompetent.”

First Virani-e, something in me whispered, that I did not voice.

“But you’ll get over it, and they’ll give it back to you,” she said, with a confidence that seemed almost childlike, somehow.

“You could read the court proceedings,” I said. “Easy to get—it was in most of the spawn-press pages entire.”

“Do you want me to?”

“Not particularly, but it’s up to you.” I gave her the short version of what had happened in court, which seemed to be enough. “Getting it reversed is going to be more interesting.”

--