125 - I am that man

While I’d been legally incompetent, it went without saying that I was forbidden drink, and so I found myself achingly thirsty for a goodly amount, imbibed in the company of others dear to me, also drinking goodly amounts. But I lingered to talk to the writers outside the courthouse, before going off to arrange this. “I won’t jump off a cliff because of anything you ask me, as I’m now sworn not to,” I said. “Do your worst.”

I told them that what I’d remembered was my stream-test, and when they asked how I’d tried to kill myself I told them; but I stonewalled them on the corrective thing I was resolved to do. I had to remind them that I was not Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e again as some were thinking, so they’d better not attribute my quotes that way; an automatic impeachment for legal incompetence isn’t automatically reversed when the incompetence ruling is, so I’d have to go to Assembly, and in fact I wasn’t entirely sure what the procedure was, having never done this before. So, they asked, would I? I said, “I’m making my considerations.” Of course I meant to dash to Assembly Palace the next day the instant the offices were open, if I wasn’t too hung over, but that’s not proper to announce.

Then once I’d had a bite of a noon meal, it would be straight to the Committee, to be asked how my relationship with Niku touched on my mental state. Reading the transcript of her questioning on same would smack to some, I knew, too much of wanting to tell a story that matched hers, but I did it anyway, as I was eating. “You made me sound like a paragon of sanity, especially when Linasika was asking.”

“Feh. That fahkad shkavi… I could kick his stones up through his nostrils.” Not while the Committee was in session, I hoped.

I went in resolved only to answer the truth, clear and complete. I could not deny that we’d had many quarrels, and I had suffered, but not enough, I felt, to truly affect my mental state.

“Is it true,” they asked me—it was Miniya at that point—“that Niku once threw you up against a pillar?”

“Yes; that was in Arko, in my first term as Imperator, after Vriah was poisoned.”

“And you did nothing to counter it?” he asked, not hiding his incredulity well.

“No. What was I going to do, get into fisticuffs with my wife, whom I love?”

“She seemed to want fisticuffs with you,” Kusiya cut in drily.

“You could have charged her for it, under Yeoli law, which, as I recall, applied in Arko at that time,” said Miniya. “Did you consider it?”

“Pardon me, sib Servant, but you’re not asking me that seriously, are you?” I said. “We’ve given each other worse bruises making love, let alone sparring.” Words I regretted the moment they were out of my mouth; certain writers would seize on them like luscious fruit. “At any rate, just my back hit the pillar, not my head, so I’m sure it had no effect on my mental state.”

I tried, as best I could, to get them to dwell on the fact that she had been the one woman who’d been willing to marry me despite my foreknowledge, and it seemed to go well enough. They also had me swear the written account of remembering my stream-test into the record, though they were merciful enough not to ask me to read it. That sort of torture, only Surya was qualified to inflict.

The maesa Virani-e being too small for a party, since the nights were growing nippy, we held it at the Independent. Once when I stepped out on the terrace for a breath of outside air, a young voice said cautiously, “Dad?”

Tawaen was easier to look in the face than the others, since I hadn’t stream-tested him. His voice had the tone that spoke of trouble for me, though. I braced myself.

“Dad… you remember I let you off the oath because you told me you’d set your mind on not dying?”

“Yes,” I said, bracing myself harder.

“So that if you were to form the intention of dying soon, the conditions of my releasing you from the oath would no longer apply and therefore it would be in spirit canceled, right?”

“I… am compelled to agree, my child.”

“And if you were to then kill yourself, that would be leaving me, wouldn’t it, and therefore you’d be, in spirit, forsworn, don’t you think?”

I think I should go back to the Committee and testify to them that the anaraseye’s education involves far too much training in law, far too young.

“Yes, I guess I would be.” I took him into my arms, and kissed his brow. “I will not forget that, my child.” I am not sure what made me think it right then, but I thought, my mother, more than anyone, taught me how to love.

†

The procedure is for reinstatement after incompetence is, I learned, a vote of Assembly. (There are precedents, the most impressive being an ancestor of mine and namesake of my father’s, Second Tennunga Shae-Arano-e. Because he was both an excellent and much-loved semanakraseye and an inveterate binge-drunk, he was ruled incompetent and procedurally impeached, then ruled competent again and procedurally reinstated shortly afterwards, a total of thirteen times during the twenty-one years he was, on and off, in office.)

I wanted, of course, to stay on medical leave, so I entered my request with that appended, proposing that it be extended to six months starting on the day I was reinstated. In other words, it was entirely ceremonial. I remember Etana-lai Kensai, the Servant of Tinga-e-Anika who was almost as much against me as Linasika was, asking me, “You are troubling Assembly for a vote, when we have important things to do, just for ‘Fourth’ and ‘Shae-Arano-e,’ aren’t you?” Of course I couldn’t say no, because I was; I said, “Assembly has the choice, if it deems my request unimportant, to deny it.”

Most of the other Servants didn’t seem to mind that, though; they were more concerned that a ceremonial reinstatement was still a legal reinstatement, so that at the end of the medical leave I would be able to take office again without a true approval vote. (Second Tennunga toppled senseless out of the semanakraseye’s chair on numerous occasions—I can imagine the gentle thud, and the Servants sighing, “There he goes again”—but never tried to kill himself, at least not all at once.) I understood: they preferred to have the power to approve or disapprove me based on the conclusions of the Committee, rather than, if the Committee found my mind unsound, counting on me to resign, or having to launch full impeachment proceedings against an active semanakraseye if I wouldn’t. It would be much less messy.

I could understand that. What we thrashed out was a conditional reinstatement, that in effect split the ceremonial position from the active one. They took two votes. One was that they reinstate me ceremonially now but subject to a debated vote allowing active duty at the end of the six months, which if defeated would let my impeachment stand; it went chalk with only a handful of dissenters. The second was full reinstatement with medical leave, and it went charcoal by a slim majority. If I tried to argue later that they should allow me the latter, the second vote would come into force.

So: I was semanakraseye again, but not quite. I’d have to prove myself worthy, which was fair enough. I had to laugh at myself, thinking how hard I wanted to hang onto something now that I’d wanted to fling away so short a time before. I knew what Surya would say, of course: everything was going as it should.

Then it was the Committee yet again. Their three moons were almost up, but they had asked for and were granted a half-moon extension.

Just by chance the Servant who was up when it came time to ask me about how well I had adhered to Alchaen’s six recommendations was Omonae, the almost-psyche-healer. He went through them carefully, one by one.

In his way, Alchaen had been thorough and careful in his instructions. They’d been six in all: first, to undertake further healing of the torture, which I had not done. The second was to keep physical and emotional strain to a minimum until I did that healing, as if that was possible leading a war; when Omonae asked me whether I had made some attempt or just thrown up my hands from the start, I had to admit the latter. The third had been to allow myself a quarter again more rest than I would typically, until I’d done further healing, which I had not done either, except by adhering to Kaninjer’s six-aer rule. The fourth was to take appropriate remedies and the fifth to hire a Haian, both of which I had done.

The sixth, he had given me secretly, so it hadn’t been in the file, and the Committee had only found out by asking him, because it was about my foreknowledge: I should go to a psyche-healer every quarter-year starting from the age of twenty-five. I had not done this; Alchaen’s intent was that I be cured of it, and I hadn’t thought that possible.

So, two out of six, or a third—not very good. Linasika did indeed take me to task. Asked why I had been so remiss, I had to say it was from my ground-in habits of overdoing and of not expecting to live past thirty. It would not look good in their report.

†

“I am going to suggest you move back home tomorrow,” Surya said, when we were back up at the maesa Virani-e. I had a feeling he’d been persuaded, more than anything, by how often I now crabbed about not being able to soak my old wounds in the hot tub. “But there is but one thing I want you to do first: a chiravesa.”

“Ah,” I said. “I can’t wait.”

“Good, you don’t have to, for even a moment. You are yourself; it is the time in which you are publicly acting to have the stream-test abolished.” I couldn’t do that quite so plainly, of course, though he might not know that; as semanakraseye, assuming I got it back fully, I couldn’t initiate a law or even a petition. My mind had been burning with planning it though, and I had decided that I would happen to share the idea with a handful of Servants I knew, and then I would simply give the account of my stream-testing to whomever would listen, travelling through every town in Yeola-e. I knew it would likely induce other people who remembered to come forward and give their account, and encourage those who opposed it to speak up; who knew how many did, secretly, when only seventeen in a hundred families were adhering to it? At the very least, Yeolis would discuss it, waving our arms as always, and arm-waving Yeoli discussions can lead to enlightened changes in law. Once I was home, I’d begin reading the Haian works about the stream-test; Surya had drawn up a list for me already.

“A man comes to you—let’s say he is a stranger—asking to speak privately. He has just remembered being stream-tested himself. He recounts it for you, and of course you know just how it was for him…” I had my eyes closed, but could tell he was looking at my aura, either from something in his voice, or by somehow feeling his gaze, auricly. “He has your heart, yes?”

“All of my heart, yes,” I said. “If he weeps, I give him my arms.”

“He does, a little. But then he tells you—open your eyes, Virani-e. I am that man: imagine it. Forget anyone else I might be; I am him. I tell you, ‘My own was one thing…’”

I had not known my aura-seeing psych was an actor too. He did as well as anyone I’ve seen in a play: the halting words, the breaking voice, the flinching body, even real truly-wet tears. It all put me there with him, as if it were real. “My own was one thing, Chevenga… but… I have three children…” He lost words for sobs, then, clenching his forelock with two hands.

Even as my thinking mind knew what he was about—the moves were my own—I did what I would do: threw my arms around him, and answered his anguish with sense. Since he was stealing my words, I could steal his; if your child does it and loses one, will you charge him with murder? Before you remembered, could you know any better? Your wife, who you think you’ve lost because she is with child again and fears for the next, will forgive you… And yet I went my own way, too, in offering comfort, knowing how to do it as I do.

I felt the laughter starting, like the first twinges of an earthquake in my centre, and thought we’d end this in gales, which would be deeply healing. But though he let me have that, for a bit, and I did feel its depth, he wasn’t done with me. “You have spoken as you believe,” he said, “and therefore as you should listen to, yes?”

He wrapped his arms around me. He took the part of me as I had just been. If there was a single word that he missed, that he had not memorized as I spoke it, I do not know. He had learned how to do this on Haiu Menshir.

Being given my own compassion broke the last of the stream-test madness in me. I felt the feeling of facing something I could not turn from, wept the tears that ache, and felt the pains down all the life-energy lines, all those things that I knew were signs of healing that goes right to the soul. From now on, I knew, while the memory would bring a pang every time I invoked it again, as would the knowledge that I’d had Kima, Roshten and his brother stream-tested, and killed Roshten’s brother, it would not fill me with the black urge to be dead myself. It was a very sweet, quiet, peaceful feeling.

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