122 - Are we of one heart, enough?

That same day, a runner came up with a letter for Surya, which turned out to be from the Committee. It asked him, of course, not me, whether I would and could allow Alchaen to assess me on the effects of being tortured in Arko.

“He’s here? In Vae Arahi?” Surya signed chalk; it was at the Yeoli taxpayer’s expense, at the behest of the Committee, it turned out.

“They had him before them yesterday, about that,” Surya said. “I gather he told them that the last time he worked with you was five years ago, so he could not know how you are now, and he agreed to assess you on it, if you agree.” One thing Surya was not allowing me, while I was in the maesa, was the Committee transcripts. Reading them, I found as soon as I was deprived, was habit-forming.

“Tell the runner I agree,” I said. Incompetent and so forced to delegate, I could at least pretend to be commanding it.

He’d started letting me take visitors, at least chosen ones; if anyone should qualify, it was Alchaen. His face was not one I’d ever imagined against the vista of Vae Arahi, but he came up shortly after the letter.

“If there’s anyone who should feel at home in the house of Integrity, it’s you,” I said, once we’d hugged. He looked the same as ever, with that expression of content and compassion mixed that is so typical of Haians. “I’m incompetent, but I can offer you tea.”

After we’d caught up, he told me how it had gone with the Committee. “How well did you follow my recommendations after you left Haiu Menshir, Chivinga?” he asked me. “Whatever you didn’t do, I think they are going to take you to task for, especially the one—his name is Li-something—just to warn you.”

I couldn’t remember all of the recommendations; just that he’d told me that my healing was incomplete and I should do the rest when I had time, and hire a Haian personal physician, which I had done, of course. They were in a file in the Independent office, somewhere. I had a feeling Linasika would be able to take me to task handily.

We set the assessment for next day, while Surya took Niku’s shift; the Committee, it turned out, were asking her to come before them. They would ask her about our relationship and any effect it might have on my mental state, which would be interesting. I hoped that Surya would let me read the transcript of that.

I was sane enough to be bored. At my begging, and after studying my aura for a bit, Surya cleared me to read my mail, which Skorsas had been faithfully laying on a growing stack on my desk in the Hearthstone Independent. That night he brought the stack up, though not my lapdesk or pens; better I wait, we both felt, until I could write back without it being vetted by one of my guardians.

How this letter had slipped my notice—or perhaps it had been delayed somewhere in the wing-post?—I could not know:

My dear Chevenga,

I suppose I should call you Imperator still, but you won’t be for long. I’ve just heard that you’ve always known you were going to die before you were thirty.

I look up at the walls of this place where the idiot lived and you, and I and wonder how we keep going and the same answer always comes up for me. ‘Take another breath. Get up. Start again.’ I understand that there is a chance for you to beat this, to live past your time, and if you’ll take some advice from an old friend it is that. However many starts it takes: start again.

I think back and realize the double meanings in things you said to me, the double meanings in what you said to everyone. You get past this and it will be very good for you to be able to speak to people more straightly. It will be a weight off your heart to be able to say one thing and have it mean only the one thing. Aside from it being your life as opposed to the after-life, your life will be easier.

You said it yourself to Maziel: life is everything. Take another breath. Get up. Start again. Words of wisdom from somebody they called Immortal.

Shall we lay a bet as to who lives longer, Chevenga? Loser writes it into the will. A five-hundred gold chain donation to either a school or a hospital or an orphanage. After all, it’s the kids who are the real immortality.

Your long-term friend,

Iliakaj, called the Immortal

Proprietor, the Mezem of Arko

“You’re on,” I wrote him back, borrowing Surya’s pen and gaining his approval. “I have directed a person who holds money that he is willing to allocate on my direction: should I die before the Immortal, five-hundred gold chains goes to the school, hospital or orphanage of said Immortal’s choice. Now you must write the same into your will. Make it payable to Morroa Street House of Nurturance, the largest Arkan orphanage which has never been implicated in the sale of children into slavery.”

†

The next morning at false dawn I lay awake. We’re of one heart on the stream-test now, I thought. A solution more satisfying to her I cannot imagine. But are we of one heart, enough, on everything else? I looked back over all the time we had known each other, took stock of the good and the bad, counting off quarrels in my mind. She will go to Surya, yes, but what happens there is of her choosing, in truth; will I ever be able to trust her to trust me, to think that I’m not some villain out of an Arkan novel out to slight or use or spurn her?

Not that divorcing her would reassure her in that respect. All I need to do is love her more, I thought. Say it in words and looks, touches and kindnesses; if I do that enough, how can she keep distrusting me? But what if she did? I had been never stinted on any of these things, and somehow she still saw me looking down my nose when I wasn’t, being cold when I wasn’t, and above all, over and over, somehow implying she was stupid.

I should forgive, not hold grudges; she might never apologize to my satisfaction, since I might be asking too much, to her mind. Niku, I’d come to learn, saw apologizing as a loss of face no matter how necessary the apology was; you could see on her face and hear in her voice what it was costing her in pride. But if her pride is more important to her than the pain of others, are we meant to be?

“Always and forever.” It was as if I heard her voice. “As long as we have.” She is the one, the one and only woman, who would stay. I owe her everything. But did I? Was my owing her everything what she wanted, as Skorsas had said? Always and forever until the next time I flounce out, a dark voice in me mimicked her. And yet she means it when she’s saying it.

I lay in the sweating darkness as it paled into day, my mind running in circles, back and forth between love and worry and anger. And I wondered why I did, when the worst thing had been solved. I never worried like this before about what are in truth little things; why now?

When Surya came in the morning, I asked him.

His brows rose, and then he laughed. “Truly, you don’t see why?”

“Surya,” I gritted. “It is not fair that, because my life is in your hands, I can’t dismiss you and fling you out the door bodily in a rage when you laugh at me.”

He laughed again. “I will give you a hint, then: it’s a very good sign, showing you are significantly closer to being able to fling me out the door bodily.”

He was going to make me try to figure it out. Because she is back? Because we are more certain to stay together, now I will not insist on the twins being stream-tested? Because that last quarrel was particularly harsh? Every possibility my mind threw up seemed implausible.

“Virani-e, why is anyone fearful when they’ve been repeatedly hurt?” he asked me. “What do they fear?”

I must seem like a child, who he has to break these things down for, I thought. He’s leading me into a blindness of mine. That meant, more likely than not, that the moment my eyes were opened, it would hurt, like a spike of sun through opened shutters. At least this time I had an answer. “That it will happen again.”

“Right. So that concern comes out of…?”

I knit my brows, not knowing what kind of answer he wanted. “The likelihood… or at least the possibility…?”

“Right, and likelihoods and possibilities are where?”

Now I was truly baffled. “In our minds,” I said, even though I knew it was likely wrong. “In our imaginations…?”

“Maybe I should ask, when are they? Where are they in time?”

Why was he asking this? I played for time. “Likelihoods? Possibilities? In… in the future.”

“Right. So you see why this is weighing on you?”

It was like arriving half-winded to the top of the mountain, only to find it is but a bump on a ridge, and you have another three quarters of the climb to go. “No!” I half-shouted. “Just tell me!”

“But you’ve told yourself. You are worried. About something that is in the future.”

“Yes but what does that have—” My words cut off, as if by a blow on the head. The whole world seemed to go silent, as in unconsciousness.

“You are looking into the future,” he said. “A twenty-nine-year-old husband in peacetime usually imagines many years ahead with his wife. But you’ve never done that before.”

I was speechless, so he gently went on. “An instinct to look beyond thirty years, you didn’t have before. But now you do, enough to make a calculation, however rough, in your heart of hearts—how many quarrels per year, over how many years, how much pain, how much fear, how much accumulated weight on your soul over all that time—without thinking. And to feel the threat of it.”

“I didn’t worry about it before… because it didn’t matter,” I whispered. “No matter how many or how awful the quarrels we would have… they’d only be for a few years.”

“You see why I say it’s a very good sign?” he asked me.

“Yes,” I breathed. “Yes, all right, yes, yes, I see.” I leaned my head on my arm on the arm of the chair.

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