161 - An unhealed wound in your soul

I lay back on Surya’s table, my eyes absently following the patterns on the mandala-cloth hung on the ceiling, his taking on the aura-seeing gaze. This was two days later. My mind was full of the Games, running over some of the game-battles I had fought, and some of the conversations.

How do I redeem myself for Kyirya, and make friends with him again? Or will it just take time? I considered approaches. Surya ran his eyes over my aura. “Who were those ten thousand people?” he said.

“Ten thousand people? What ten thousand people?”

“The ten thousand people you killed in one night.”

My tongue locked solid, my eyes freezing on one purple leaf-like design on the mandala. He went on looking at my aura, seeing, no doubt, the exact mechanism of my speechlessness. “They were Lakans,” I finally said. “Farmers… made warriors. It was in the Lakan war.”

“Hmm. How old were you?”

“Sixteen. It was when I was doing my apprenticeship as a general.”

“When was the last time you talked about it with anyone? Recounted it?”

“I…” I was surprised, in truth, by the answer I knew. “I never have. Since then. I wrote an account of it.”

“As part of the memoir, which no one has read, yes?”

“Aside from the Committee, yes.” Now that it was public knowledge that I’d written it, I’d had a lot of people ask to read it, and had said no to all except those on the Committee designated.

“And they haven’t talked to you about it because it’s not their mandate, or at least they don’t see that it is; you haven’t even mentioned it to someone else?”

“I imagine I must have mentioned it in passing, many times, though I can’t remember. And there was a psych-healer Hurai sent me to then; we talked about it a little. Well… not at all that mattered, in truth.”

“When was the last time you thought about it? Aside from when you wrote your account?”

I wasn’t even sure of that. For a time after, it had haunted me, but that had faded. It seemed I’d had something else to think about, every moment, ever since. “I’m not sure,” I said. “Years ago.”

“Do you think it left a mark on you?”

I found myself suddenly and sharply annoyed. “Why are you asking me? You’re the one who can see it, if it did… never mind, I know—you are testing me again. I suppose if you’re bringing it up, it did.” He stood in silence over me, waiting. “Are you asking me to recount it?” He signed chalk.

In a moment, I was trembling all over. “I reiterate my question,” he said. “Do you think it left a mark on you?” Eat shit, Surya Chaelaecha.

“All right, no, don’t recount it yet, let’s step back first.” He showed mercy so rarely, it was always a surprise. “In all your life, or, more exactly, your war career, what are the things that you have done that were… of a similar nature? I mean: death or harm dealt to people who were, for whatever reason, helpless.” Of course sometimes his mercy was out of the frying pan and into the fire.

“Not that many.”

He signed a firm charcoal. “No, no, no, Virani-e. The idea here is not for me to rake you, or you rake yourself, over the coals for them. The idea is to look for patterns.” He looked at my aura, again, squinting a little. “I am thinking there is one, and it’s very typical.”

“Really? Typical of clients of yours who’ve been personally responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands?”

He laughed. “My semanakraseye, don’t listen too much to the Enlightened Followers. You are human, and you do the same human things as anyone else. Just on a larger scale.”

I took a deep breath. “All right. The worst was the sack of Arko. I know, because I heard it a thousand times, many people feel they deserved it after what they did to Shakora and Tinga-e and Thara-e and Vae Arahi and so on and on and on. Arkans will tell me, they were expecting it. I regret it anyway. Revenge is no less cruelty for being revenge.

“There’s what I did, getting the last Arkans in Tinga-e to surrender… wait—does thumbing, or forcing the choice of death or thumbing, count?”

He considered for a bit, eyeing my aura, and then said, “No, not for our purposes. Because it’s a tradition; everyone expected it from you, and Yeolis would have done it if you hadn’t been there. Stick to what was uniquely yours.”

“A-e kras. In Tinga-e... we had about two thousand Arkans hemmed in on ships, who I wanted to convince to surrender. So I took a few hundred of the Arkans we’d captured onto the dock, and set up an Arkan bead clock. I had ten of them killed, started the clock running, and told the hold-outs that next bead I’d kill double that, and the bead after that, double again, until they surrendered. They did after four beads, so we defeated two thousand by killing three hundred and ten, which is a more merciful ratio than in most battles.”

“Again, Virani-e, you need not mount a defense, because I am not prosecuting. Tell me the next one.”

“It was after the Arkans did the raid on our infirmaries, near Kamalia. I had the prisoners impaled and quartered, which was not something I’d usually do. They’d not only raided infirmaries, but they’d killed Haians. Sixteen of them. You didn’t happen to be in an infirmary that night, did you?”

“No, though I came out of my tent on the alarm just in time to see Arkans charge into one. I remember how angry you were when you spoke the next morning, and how angry everyone got, when they found out they’d killed Haians. How many prisoners did you have executed that way?”

“I didn’t count; I’d guess about two-hundred and fifty. But in the greater scheme of things—”

“Virani-e, I’m not accusing. You know why you keep thinking I am?”

“I dread to find out.”

“Well, you have a bit of a reprieve. Tell me the next one.”

“That’s all. As I said, it’s not that many.”

“You keep thinking I’m accusing you because you are accusing yourself.”

“Well…” Of course I was. “Surya, who’s proud of that sort of thing?”

He studied my aura. “All right,” he said. “Which do you think left the most severe mark on you?”

That was easy. “The sack of Arko. The whole world knows it.”

“Recount it for me.”

Having left the army after Porfirias, he hadn’t been there. Just as well; I couldn’t imagine him taking part in the joy in pure destruction that is a sack. Probably he would have been one of the warriors who tried to hold the other warriors back from sacking, saying no sack order had been given.

I hadn’t seen it much myself, in fact; I’d flown with my best thousand over the ranged armies on Finpollendias and straight to the Marble Palace, led a Hayel-fight through the corridors against Mahid, killed Kurkas and then been emphatically fed wine by those of my friends who were left, who could tell I was delicate, while the rest of the army did what it would in the city. The closest I’d got was seeing houses burning through a window after I’d smelled smoke; from the time I’d leapt through, or at least from when I’d hit the ground, I’d been in other people’s hands, buried deep in the Imperial chambers in the Marble Palace. By the time I was out again, it was long over.

“I had said that I didn’t plan to sack Arko, but that day I didn’t give an order forbidding it, or forbidding the army to enter the city after the battle, so many people concluded I’d changed my mind. I understand now: it was the part of me that had wanted to do it that made me forget. I’d sworn an oath that I would, then decided to break it, then in the end honoured it; there are many who say that the sack of Arko was really a half-sack, so I guess it turned out just as it was in my mind.”

“That is what tends to happen,” he said. “Good. These are things everyone knows... now recount the deaths of the ten thousand Lakans.”

“I was apprenticed to Hurai Kadari. It was in Kantila. We’d captured them… the generals didn’t know what to do with them…” My tongue locked up. I tried to talk sense into myself, staring up at him wordlessly; I took a deep breath. I found words, but only a few, and it was like that all through, all short sentences and long pauses, and he kept having to tell me to breathe. When I came to the night on which they’d died, I had to lie silent for a long time, my hands over my face. He just waited, though I knew he was seeing the whole story in my aura.

It was recounting the one Lakan playing the harp that put me in tears, though I had been determined to tell it without. It was a while before I could speak again. Surya waited patiently.

“The sound of their cries... It’s not like from a sword-blow, there isn’t one death-scream, it just goes on and on and on… ten thousand… I just knelt, and listened, because it had been my idea. And I wept… and Hurai asked me, why the tears? I had conceived this… and this was what my life would be… then he said, because of my age, then, yes, I should weep… and know what war is… and grow up. More terrible than the sound was its fading… until finally there was silence. I didn’t sleep that night. Have I told enough?” Weeping took away my power of speech again.

“There is a stone there, raised in their memory, is there not?” he asked me, when I’d wept for a time. I signed chalk. “Do you know what it says?”

“Yes, it says: ‘In this circle lie ten thousand Lakans, their names too many to know, captured in Kantila by Yeolis under the command of Emao-e Lazaila on etesora 11, 1544, slain by Yeolis under the command of Hurai Kadari on etesora 16, by reason of the will of their king, Astyardk, who would return not even a finger-width of Yeoli land for all their lives. May reason bring peace to the living as death has brought peace to the dead.’ ”

“That’s exactly what it says?” he asked me. I signed chalk again. “How do you know?”

“Every time I have visited there since, I go up to see it,” I said. “Also, I wrote it.”

“Interesting,” he said. “Especially what’s missing.”

“I was a general’s apprentice,” I said. “My commands, my actions, were all unofficial… it was Hurai who was commander and so had to be named.”

“So from which do you still carry the greater mark: the sack of Arko, or this?”

I just closed my eyes and conceded the point with a sigh. When you are a warrior, you forget that you’d have to be inhuman for such a thing not to leave a mark on you. You forget everything of that nature.

Surya stroked a stray lock of hair out of my eyes, and his tenderness seemed a horror, an aberration, too kind a touch for one such as me. “Do you see why? Do you see the difference?” I signed charcoal.

“The sack of Arko is resolved. You atoned for it, quite publicly, by leaping out that window, then by telling all Arko that you had, and rebuilding the city. And you know that Arkans, or at least enough of them—a majority—have forgiven you. They wanted you back as Imperator enough to vote for it.

“But with the ten thousand Lakans, it was all in effect hush-hush. Even the memorial doesn’t bear your name. Have you ever told anyone in Laka that you were behind it?” I signed charcoal, remembering how glad I’d been, while I was asking Astalaz for his alliance against the Arkans, that I’d never confessed it to him. “So—no resolution. You have not confessed to them, you have not atoned, you have not been forgiven. I know it is very different; I know that their king did have the choice and it was done in answer to his choice. But…” His eyes flashed across my aura. “To the part of you that remembers that night and feels all that you felt, this is not enough of a reason. Hence it’s an unhealed wound in your soul.

“Let me put it this way: you have accepted entirely that you sacked Arko. You have not accepted entirely that you ordered the poisoning of ten thousand Lakans. Else you would not be so silent about it, and you’d have had as easy a time telling me as you did with the sack of Arko.”

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160 - I cannot have such wisdom

Excerpt from the Proceedings of the Chevengani Mental State Assessment Committee, atakina 42, Y. 1556

Omona-e Shae-Lemana, Servant of Thara-e-Tinanga-e: Now as we have you both sworn for simultaneous questioning, I direct my next question to Surya. Do you count this… lack of vigilance for his own safety on Chevenga’s part a manifestation of his sense of death-obligation?

Su: No. But I don’t consider it purely a mental lapse, either. A person of his intelligence and ability doesn’t have pure mental lapses of this nature.

O: Will you explain for us what you consider it to be?

Su: Let me start by saying that there was nothing here that was conscious choice on his part—

O: Pardon me for interrupting, but, Chevenga, would you concur with that?

4Che: Yes. I had no thoughts such as, ‘I hope someone comes up behind me, brains me, pinks my calves and challenges me to a death-duel.’ I was thinking only about how the game had gone, wishing I could have avoided what happened and so forth, and just wanted to get home to soak, drink and be among people celebrating.

O: Thank you; please continue, Surya.

Su: But as we’ve discussed before, the deeper mind can have its own ideas. Now I want to make clear here that the deeper mind can have any thought, just as the knowing mind can. Perhaps the best demonstration of this is in dreams, which we’ve all had, and which are the way in which the deeper mind most often seeps into consciousness. As everyone knows, they can be on any subject and have any feeling.

I say this to dispel any notion that any of you might have that Chevenga’s deeper mind is an entirely murderous creature, singularly devoted to killing him, since we’ve mostly talked about it in that context. That aspect is there, of course, which was what he came to me to solve, but it is only one aspect, and of course it’s weakened over the past few months due to the work we’re doing.

4Che: I was halfway there when you truth-drugged me and that was close to two moons ago.

Su: And as I explained with regard to the wound he took while training in Arko, it can be divided in itself also. The part inclined to death tried to incur a mortal wound; the part inclined to life caused him to move in such a way as it would not be.

So what I think happened that night—and this is why I didn’t have him renew his strength-oath to me, though he was sure I would and was willing to do it—was that his deeper mind was tempting something, but it was not death, and it was in fact to further his healing, his deeper mind having sufficiently embraced that it is necessary. What he was tempting was a fight with true steel in which he would both find he’d gone asa kraiya enough to be unwilling to hurt the opponent, and be defeated, which would be a significant step in accepting himself as asa kraiya.

Cha: But, Surya, if I may intercede—if that first blow had been intended to kill rather than stun, he’d have been dead. And if Kyirya and the others hadn’t come along when they had, he’d have been dead.

Su: Yes, but you have to remember here, he is a person who has a proven gift of prescience. Riji’s intention was a duel, not a back-stab, and he had given some warning to Chevenga eight years before, that he’d be coming. Chevenga also must have known at heart that he’d likely be followed along that shortcut, in a short time, by people who would defend him.

O: Chevenga, this is striking you somehow, you’ve got your face in your hands, what are you thinking?

4Che: … You… you go through life thinking it is ruled by the choices you know you are making…

Su: This is the first he’s heard my interpretation.

O: You are feeling out of control… or more exactly, that your life is controlled by something that is not your conscious will?

4Che: You’d think I’d be used to it by now.

Su: But, though most people hate hearing this, it’s the case with all of us. You just manifest it more… spectacularly, shall we say, than most. And the whole aim of the healing work has been to turn that thing which is not your conscious will away from death and towards life, and we are succeeding; that’s what you have to understand.

…

O: Surya, do you count Chevenga asa kraiya?

Su: Yes, I do, at least sufficiently to be called so. His ceremony would have been set for much sooner, a half-moon from then, I was recommending, except that he wanted long notice for the innumerable people from all over the known world he’s invited.

O: You say sufficiently to be called so; do you mean he can go further with it?

Su: Yes, but that’s common to asakraiyaseyel. The ceremony is a start as much as it is a finish.

†

“I didn’t think the deeper mind could be so… devious,” I said to Surya as we made the climb back up to the Independent.

“It is as devious as the knowing mind,” he said. “Else your dreams would always be less complex than your waking thoughts, true?” If anything, mine have always been more complex. “All aspects of the mind draw on the same abilities.”

I kept repeating it over and over in my head, trying to fully grasp it. No doubt the feebleness of my grip was from emotion, not weakness of mind. Or so I hoped. It was in fact to further his healing, his deeper mind having sufficiently embraced that it is necessary. What he was tempting was a fight with true steel in which he would both find he’d gone asa kraiya enough to be unwilling to hurt the opponent, and be defeated, which would be a significant step in accepting himself as asa kraiya.

“So more of me… has come over to my side,” I said.

“All though, more of you has been coming over to your side,” he said. “That’s been the whole idea.”

We walked in silence, as I wrestled with it. The climb was slippery, with a three-finger-width blanket of snow on the ground; more whirled down in minute eddies from the breezy grey sky, a few landing in the frizzy cloud of his hair to perch for a moment until they melted. My calves hurt. It was a day to soak in hot water, read by a fire, and make love to my loves from hot countries so as to solace them for living here.

I wrestled, even as a deep peace about the thought itself tempted me to quit wrestling, whispered to me that the wrestling itself was folly. Life cannot be so good that we so protect ourselves, I wanted to protest. I cannot have such wisdom.

Life is so good if we choose that it is so, a deeper voice in me spoke. You have such wisdom if you wish it. I suddenly found myself looking down to the Shrine, drawn there, as if what was there attracted these thoughts, and me with them.

“I think…” I said tentatively, since it was so huge a thing to declare I worried it was presumptuous, “I am beginning to understand… the deeper sense of ‘Everything is going as it should.’”

“Good,” he said, the sort of ‘good’ that makes a war-student’s heart swell, since he’s been working so hard for it so long. I indulged myself in feeling the glow for a bit, before I put my nose back to the grindstone of understanding myself.

“Still,” I said, as we drew closer to the Independent, “I want to see you try to explain that to Krero.”

“It’s now part of the Yeoli public record. He… and the writers”—a small but growing herd of them were following us, albeit far back, having been slow in spotting us—“can read it in the transcript.” You’d almost think that Surya had been having truck with someone of a political bent.

I am asa kraiya, I thought. That can never be taken away from me. Saying it to myself had a reassuring simplicity.

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159 - The wild one

My next visitor, same day, was Azaila, wanting to speak with me alone. He asked me to recount the duel with Younger Riji, and I knew from how he listened to it that he was here as my war-teacher.

Though there had once been a time, not so long ago, when I’d have put my sword through myself before I shed tears in his sight, I couldn’t help them when I got to the part about realizing I was asa kraiya. He showed no sign he thought any less of me for it, though.

When I got to the end he said the last thing I imagined he would, about a fight I’d ignominiously lost, “Good.” Then he asked, “Why exactly could you not hit him?”

“I…” An Azaila questioning, I thought. Clueless, stuck for words, knowing I ought to know… it’s been such a long time. “I… am asa kraiya.”

“That’s only naming what you arrived at; it’s not the cause. What was the thought, the feeling, behind not hitting him?”

“I…” The only answer acceptable to him was the truth, always; I was rusty enough from lack of recent practice to not remember for a squirming moment that if “I don’t know” was the truth, it was the only acceptable answer. He waited with the don’t-lie-to-me look on his face. “I… I don’t know,” I said finally.

“It’s all right,” he said, which was unusually gentle, for him. “I expected you wouldn’t. I’m going to ask you again after the ceremony. It will be clearer to you then.” Perhaps he’d been testing whether I’d lie.

†

In the morning, I mulled over it. Was I going to tell writers I’d walked into this so as to give myself a lesson in self-acceptance? Hardly. Most people don’t know the difference between choosing something knowingly and being impelled by the deeper self; I had not known myself until I’d started with Surya. Of course I wouldn’t be able to say anything but pure truth, as I’d have to recount much of it again, in court under oath. I had no idea what I would tell them almost up to when they poised their pens over their notebooks and I opened my mouth.

I told them, before I told them anything else, about how Krero had stiffened my security. Then it was that Younger Riji had challenged me to a duel, but given me no choice, else I’d have declined, and that he’d been beating me, by the time I’d been rescued, entirely because I was close to going asa kraiya, though the writers kept saying they couldn’t imagine how the head-blow and the cuts on my calves had made no difference. Even so, I could have given him a wound that would have ended it fairly easily, had my hand been willing, I had to keep telling them. I could remember, searingly, every time my arm had frozen with my sword-tip touching his shirt. Once that ordeal was over, I rode down fast to the courthouse, to say whatever I was going to say under oath.

Senjalias was charged with assisting in murder. A point I should note for those who read this who are not Yeoli: because we think so much in terms of choice and intention, Yeoli law does not differentiate between attempting something and doing it. The fact that the intended victim is still alive makes the intent to kill him no less heinous in the eyes of the law. I am not sure any more that I entirely agree with this; for one thing, insofar as wrongdoers have the possible charges and punishment in the backs of their minds as they act, it encourages them to go for broke in what they do, since they’ll get the same anyway. I also think that a failed attempt at something can belie a less-than-entire intent to do it. But the law is what it is, and Younger Riji’s brother was charged as he was charged.

As an Arkan, he was not entitled to the services of a defense advocate, so he was on his own against the prosecutor. He bore himself with surprising dignity, for his age, perhaps because he knew that was all that was left to him. When the judge spelled out for him his choices, he pleaded justification, because I had killed his father—easily countered, of course, when for me it was fight Riji or die—but it was all he had.

His account was accurate by what I remembered, and he pointed out that they hadn’t just killed me, but let me fight. Had I won, he asked the court, would I have been charged with killing him?—forgetting, apparently, that I’d first declined, and then offered to blood Riji only, if he’d swear to let me be for good. The prosecutor, acting almost more like an investigator, called me up, and I gave my account, in which I had to again explain why I hadn’t won. The prosecutor made a point I hadn’t thought of: they’d come after me knowing perfectly well my intention was to go asa kraiya, since it was commonly known.

Senjalias could not be put to death, as Yeoli law does not allow it, nor exiled, this not being his nation; but he could be expelled, ordered never to return again, and denied safe conduct. That would be just as effective a death-sentence for him than it had been for Sharaina. So the judge decided, and then told him that he could choose to ask me for the kerchief of mercy. Senjalias’ face hardly changed; he’d been expecting death for seven days at the very least. Then suddenly he glanced at me with a kind of yearning in his eyes. I whispered to the prosecutor to ask for a recess so he and I could talk, and we went out into the hall with two guards.

“You want something from me?” I asked him, in Arkan, it being none of the guards’ business.

“I want to show you something.”

For seven days he’d been kept prisoner in the courthouse basement, but he’d asked for everything he and Riji had had at the inn where they’d stayed. Stronger than the usual stone and mustiness, his cell smelled of linseed oil, like a painter’s studio. “I’m not sure why I’m doing this,” he said, “except that you wanted the painting Father made of you. In the last few days before… he was hardly sleeping, only a bead or two per night. I always put the blanket over him.” He must mean his brother, I thought. I followed him into the cell, borrowing a lamp from one of the guards.

Younger Riji had had the Elder’s artistic gift. There was a painting like the Elder’s, which I still had hung in the clock-room: calm, ordinary, as if I’d sat for it. The rest were all of me dueling his father. It brought it back as if it were happening now, again, reflected to me by my own narrowed eyes and wild hair and savage smile, the blur of motion and flying blood, the leaping, fist-waving crowd in the Arkan sun. Here I was the wild one, that Riji had always become when he entered the Ring; fighting me, I thought, he made me at least in part into himself. It was relief to remember that I was asa kraiya. Still, maybe in part because of wound-weakness, I had to put a hand on the wall.

“I think you brought me here to make me see how he saw me,” I said.

“I guess so.”

“We’ll burn every last stinking one of these pieces of rot,” one of the guards said to me; they’d come in with us, wanting to stick close to him while I was there, I guess, even though he was in chains. I signed charcoal. They were too good to destroy. Raw, ragged, inexperienced, yes; but you could see the beginnings of mastery in them, a mastery that the world would never see, now. I would keep them in honour of that, even if not on display.

Senjalias turned away, and one of the guards took his elbow to lead him back upstairs. “You’ve shown me what he painted,” I said. “What about you?”

He turned staring at me, and it was his mother’s stare, exact, when I’d first told her I would do nothing to make them suffer; it brought the moment back like yesterday, even the book and polish smell of Riji’s dark-wood-lined house.

Chained, he couldn’t point, so he motioned with his head. He had the gift no less. On the other side of the room, there were two paintings. One was the duel, but more even-handed; his father and I both mere men. What was most striking was the hands of a child in the foreground, gripping the seat-rail before him: his own hands, as he remembered seeing them. The other painting, unfinished, was of Riji the Elder, in his outside-the-Ring mode, the man who spoke ten languages and had made major contributions to philosophy, standing robed with a book in his hand, a map of the world drawn on the open page. The face, calm but with intellectual passion within, like an inner light, was finished; he’d been working on the hands, neat and graceful.

“You hesitated asking for the kerchief of mercy not knowing how I’d answer,” I said, still in Arkan, so the guard wouldn’t understand. “It’s yours if you choose it, Senjalias. I urge you to. This should be finished.”

He stared at me, his mother again. His blue eyes filled with tears, as I’d never seen hers do. “But I would be betraying him.” I wasn’t sure whether he meant his father or his brother. “We failed; if we failed, we should die.”

“Would that man”—I pointed at the painting—“have wanted the artist who painted it dead?” His tears came harder, and I knew it was something he needed to be alone with. “You need only tell the court before it adjourns, or the guards afterwards, if you change your mind. Make sure it’s before they let go of you out of doors.” I went upstairs, my calves giving a twinge on each step.

He didn’t ask for the kerchief before the bailiff hit the bell with the crystal to adjourn. I got up fast to make sure I was outside first, and had the bailiff slip me the kerchief; I had one gambit I was keeping in reserve. There was a crowd, and, just as with Sharaina, some people were carrying blades quite openly. He stood frozen, while the guards unlocked the chains.

“Think of your mother,” I said to him in Arkan. “She can lose all three and be entirely bereft, or keep one.” His eyes were suddenly full of tears, and he whispered, “Mercy.” In the crowd’s full view, I tied the kerchief around his neck, and embraced him. The people went quiet, except the murmurs of, “You are too kind, Chevenga.” We went back into the courthouse, he wrapped his paintings carefully, and I had Skorsas pay his way by double-wing to Arko.

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158 - Everything I've ever been

I almost thrashed off the table, the way a hooked fish tries to flip itself back into water. He gently grabbed my shoulders.

“Chevenga, here’s the thing you need to remember: no one’s ever given you any accolades that you didn’t deserve. The name you have as a warrior and a general, both in the world and in your own mind, you’ve earned, entirely, as warriors always do, with your sweat and blood. If you think the same as everyone else does, how likely is it you’re wrong? It’s natural to feel pride; you’d have to be inhuman not to; you have every right to. It’s the same with everything you feel. I asked you to list them off, and it was hard for you; but there is no one in the world who wouldn’t feel all the same things you do, in your position. Do you see that?”

I had to close my eyes and take this in for a deep breath or two.

“I’ve thought of myself as the best general in the world, too,” I said finally. “There’s no one else alive who’s led the conquest of anything like the Arkan empire.”

“Right. So, of the remaining third, how much—?”

“Not all of it. I take pride in being semanakraseye, too—the peacetime part—more exactly, being a good administrator, because I did it as Imperator, too. And a thing or two else.”

“Between the two, warrior and general, how much?”

“I… I’ll guess… seven-eighths.”

“All right. Seven-eights of your pride in yourself.” He made a motion of his arm across me, as if he were wiping something away, hard. “Gone. You’re asa kraiya. You’re neither warrior nor general. What do you feel?”

I lay shaking on the brink for a bit before I went over. “I’m not semanakraseye either. It’s medical leave, sure, but I’ll only get it back on Assembly approval, and between what the Committee concludes and having been convicted of breaking the Statute semanakraseyeni and going asa kraiya—to be realistic—what are the chances? They might even decide for my own sake. ‘He’s given his share, look what it’s done to him, let him rest…’ I’ve lost everything, Surya; everything. Everything that I’ve ever been, I’ve lost.” Then I curled up and wept like a baby, and he held me in his arms.

When I’d gone for long enough to mostly burn it out, he said, “The feeling you just let take you, name it.”

“Despair,” I whispered. Maybe I could learn to take pride in being good at this.

“Yes,” he said. “You feel that, though I think there’s some lying to yourself in it. Everything that you’ve ever been would include the name Virani-e, and that you are senahera, your plan to work towards abolition of the stream-test, and the love you have for everyone you love, would it not? But you’ve lost none of these things.”

“That’s… true.”

“You still haven’t named the biggest emotion. You’re very determined not to see it… don’t take me wrong. I don’t blame you.”

I couldn’t help but make a sound like someone makes when an arrowhead is pulled out of him. “That wasn’t it?” I grabbed two handfuls of my own hair, not caring whether he pointed it out as a shame-mannerism, and turned away from him.

“You’re in it—right now, this very moment, you’re in it, Chevenga! Just name what you feel.”

I froze, and it came out, again, like the arrowhead comes out. “Shame.”

“A person loses seven-eighths of what he takes pride in, and he’s going to feel shame.” It was indeed the biggest one. I couldn’t move. “You had a setback, Chevenga. You think the setback is letting Riji do to you what he did, yes?” I signed chalk. “You’d be dead wrong. That was a huge step forward. The setback was the Games.

“There you were, on top of the Yeoli military and strategic world, impressing the you-know-what out of everyone with awe at your prowess. But one of the things a person must do to go asa kraiya is give up his warrior-pride, which in your case is understandably huge, and seven-eighths of all your pride. So you set yourself back, winning as best overall warrior and so forth. No coincidence that something happened right after to drive you so hard forward.”

“That little foaming-at-the-mouth mad-faced-sane-faced demon was my healer, too!” I spat. “No wonder I’m doing so well, with such healers.” And yet I knew in my bones he was right.

“You were your own healer, Virani-e. You left him the opening by wearing the chain. This is why I said, you didn’t break your oath. You who have the usename Invincible, who have never tasted defeat, had to—only that way could you begin to accept yourself as no longer a warrior and no longer invincible. I’d thought, and hoped, you might get it some easier way: with a man who’ll take a sword through a lung as a lesson, I should know better. You never do anything by half-measures.”

I just lay still with my eyes closed. I felt as if I’d taken a blow bad enough to paralyze but leave me conscious, and was just waiting for the killing-blow, the enemy aiming his sword at my throat or my heart at his leisure.

“You are asa kraiya,” he said. “You just have to accept it. Yes, that does mean something dying, as I said at the start. But here’s the thing you have to understand: though you were defeated, you are still here. You’re not dead. You may feel like part of you is gone, or you are not quite real. But”—he poked me gently—”there’s the evidence that puts the lie to that feeling. Even defeated, you are still here. And you still deserve to live. You were defeated and yet still deserve to live—that’s what you have to learn.

“Acceptance is the secret, the thing we are always working towards. Acceptance is healing; inside, you know that. The person who accepts everything instantly suffers nothing, ever. No fear, no sorrow, no anger, no shame. You know what we’re going to do next, don’t you?”

I did. “Tenar menhu,” I whispered.

“You get a reprieve; Kaninjer hasn’t cleared you for exertion yet, and isn’t going to for a good half-moon, I think, with two concussions within such a short time. So we won’t do it yet, but I mention it to you because by my doing that, your mind will start doing the work even without you willing it. You are in shock, not acceptance—in such shock that you could not name the main emotion without a lot of help. The extreme juxtaposition is a shock, so it cures shock—remember what you know, likes cure likes, yes?—and brings acceptance. And acceptance banishes shame, fear, sorrow—all of them.”

It suddenly came to me what had changed between him and me. As much as a healer to a patient, he was speaking to me as a teacher of healing to a student—an advanced student, who already knew a fair amount. He’d never said things like this at the start.

“But I’ve done with you what I’ve done today—”

I knew, so like the student, I spoke up. “To get me started making sense of what happened, so that I’ll have at least a slight clue what to say to everyone who’ll be asking tomorrow.”

“Exactly.”

“You’ve succeeded. I do have a slight clue. Thank you, Surya.”

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157 - The best warrior in the world

On the seventh day, the last day before I’d go before the writers and the court, Surya took me, ominously, to his practice room. (Kaninjer was still insisting on crutches, and by then, just for the challenge, I’d got the trick of walking just on the crutches themselves well enough that I could do it all the way down a longish corridor without having to touch the floor with my feet, or having a dizzy spell, most times. At the top of the stairs, as I looked down considering, Surya said, “It may not be the death-in-you tempting you this time; it may just be the injury-that-will-put-you-in-a-basket-for-the-rest-of-your-life-in-you. Don’t even think of it.”)

“You are asa kraiya,” he said, once I was stripped and on his table. “No longer a warrior. What emotions does that bring?”

“Triumph,” I said. “Fear… Sadness… lots of sadness. Shock… lots of shock.” I’d got better at this. It was hard to imagine that I’d once been genuinely sure that I, and everyone, could only feel one thing at a time.

“All right, that’s fairly good, you have most of them. We’ll start with fear: you are afraid that asa kraiya means helplessness.”

“After what happened that night, should I not be? Krero seemed to think so.”

“This is one that, unfortunately, I have no way of proving to you; I can ask you only to trust me. I’ll reiterate what I said to him. Does Azaila strike you as helpless, or vulnerable? He is asa kraiya.”

“Maybe I don’t have it in me to be the asakraiyaseye he is.”

“Do I strike you as helpless to defend myself?”

“Well, let me ask, Surya: if Younger Riji, or someone like him, did the same, or similar to you, how do you think it would go?”

“I would be fine. As would Azaila.”

“Ah. You would club Riji in the aura. And Azaila would just stare at him until he turned into a pile of ash. I don’t know how to do these things, Surya. I just have my hands and, until now, weapons.”

“Not yet.” He tried to say this without cracking a smile at all, but couldn’t help letting a slight one slip. “Virani-e, as I said to Krero, in different words, you’re enough away from kraiya to have lost your warrior-strength, but not close enough to asa kraiya to have gained your asa kraiya strength. I expect that your asa kraiya strength will be as extraordinary as your warrior-strength; that’s how it usually happens. But stronger, because it’s asa kraiya strength… well, that, I can’t explain. You’ll have to wait and see.” I trusted him enough that the fear did ease, some.

“Sadness… well, remember in the very first session,” he said, “I told you it would feel like dying?” I did. For you to live, something in you, something substantial, must die, and that death you will feel as the death it is.

“True, I was warned. I’m sorry I’m complaining… no, pardon me, I haven’t said a word about what I feel that wasn’t on your order… I’m sorry my aura is complaining.”

He laughed. “You need never apologize for that, not to me. I mean only that the sadness is natural; you are mourning what’s dying. You just have to let it play out. Remember the phases. What else do you feel?”

I thought harder, looked deeper. “I guess… anger, yes, there’s anger. That I should have to do this… many warriors don’t have to give it up to live long lives.”

“What else?”

“I think that’s it.”

“No it isn’t, there’s one more.”

I took a deep breath. All through this conversation, I was shifting and squirming and dragging the quilt that he’d laid on me this way and that over myself, a lot. If you have close to forty wounds all itching as they heal, you try to scratch as many of them at once as you can.

“Surya, why don’t you just tell me? I know, I know—better I get it myself.”

“It’s a very big one,” he said. “The biggest.”

“The biggest one and I’m not seeing it at all? Kyash… give me a hint.”

“There’s good reason you’re not seeing it. All right… you’re not a warrior any more. What did being a warrior mean to you?”

I tried to give him a genuine answer, not a pat one, but it came out pat anyway. “Fighting. ‘Those who will not listen to your words of justice or sense…’ ”

He thought for a moment, and chose another approach. “Chevenga,” he asked me. “How good a warrior were you?”

“I was good.”

“Good?”

“Well… very good.”

“I think I am hearing false modesty here.”

I stared at him. I wanted to not be so flat then, so I got up onto my elbows. He said, “No, stay lying down.” What was he going to do to me?

“Among the best,” I said.

“Mm-hmm.”

I really wanted to be up; it was hard to fight it. “Oh, don’t give me this greatest warrior crap, Surya,” I spat. “You know it can’t be proven, especially in peacetime. There are always new ones coming up, and you never know how extraordinary some of them will be. It doesn’t matter anyway.”

“Doesn’t it?” He was looking at my aura, in the way that he did to make me know he was looking at my aura. I took a very deep breath. “All right, let’s take a step back,” he said. “Why does the idea bother you?”

That was easy. “I was always getting it from Esora-e as I grew up. Esora-e and others. ‘You could be the greatest warrior, my shadow-son the greatest warrior, blah blah blah.’ And then… Surya, I am not a braggart. What braggarts do is make others feel diminished; I don’t like doing that. There can be a bitter price for it too; if no one had said I, not Riji Kli-fas, was Living Greatest, he would never have come back into the ring, and so he and his son would still be alive, his other son would still be free, and I wouldn’t so resemble a used pin-cushion.”

“All right, Chevenga, fair enough. That’s in the outside world, of sociality; of course you have to be polite. But you and I are inside your mind, here, so you needn’t stick to the rules; me, you can tell the truth of what you keep to yourself. It’s not as if I can’t see it. Will you concede this much: that you are generally acknowledged to be the best warrior in the world?”

“All right. I will concede that much.”

“And in your own mind, do you disagree with that assessment?”

Truth can freeze, and burn, and shatter, and make you feel as just destroyed as can steel through the heart. “No,” I said. “Fine. You’ve caught me out.” I felt sick.

“Say it.” Go fik yourself, Surya Chaelaecha. Why did he always make me say things?

“I… I have thought of myself as the best warrior in the world.”

“How long have you thought it? No, let’s start this way; when did you first think it was possible for you to become that?”

I had never asked myself this, never let my mind approach it, in my whole life; but the answers were there. “Fifteen. When I was first in an army.”

“And when did you think you’d attained it?”

“When I beat Kallijas.” I couldn’t believe I was saying this.

“All right. Now, if you see your conception of yourself, or more exactly your pride in yourself, as a whole, what portion of it is being the greatest warrior?”

“Surya, I have no kyashin idea! I never think such things! How am I supposed to know?”

“More than half?”

He wasn’t going to let me squirm out of this. I took a deep breath, and put out my hand to see whether it would sign chalk or charcoal. It signed chalk.

“More than three quarters?”

“Two thirds. I think. Maybe. Check my kyashin aura!”

“All right, good, two thirds. Now, how would you rank yourself, in the world, as a general?”

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156 - Yea-many days recovered

“I told you you’d think so,” I said. There is such satisfaction in being right. “But as I said, please assign all the fault to me.” I glanced at Surya again. He was breathing deeply. “I just pulled it off, didn’t unclasp it… it must still be somewhere there, on the shortcut, with a broken link, unless someone picked it up.” How much it had cost him to make, in money or sweat, I had no idea.

“Just say what happened next,” Krero gritted.

“Have you questioned the one who’s still alive?”

“He said you killed their father in the Mezem, and it was his older brother, the one that’s dead, who first hit you and then hacked you up. He said it was in a duel, that he gave you enough time after you woke up that you got up on your own, and fought perfectly well. But aside from a nicely-aimed stab through the heart from Kyirya, the corpse didn’t have a mark on it… you understand why, even though the kid was truth-drugged, I find that very hard to believe?”

I am a private citizen, I thought. Sort of. How interested are the writers going to be in this? How much should I say, how to explain? I got to a knife-edge away from death by accomplishing what I chose. Krero must have seen the wish to evade on my face. “I’ll learn everything, Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e, if I have to truth-drug you.”

So I told them exactly how it had gone, in detail. I managed it smoothly until I got to the realization, and then the tears came too hard and fast to master. “I am asa kraiya. I’m asa kraiya, Krero. It’s what I chose—what I had to choose, over death—and I’ve attained it. That’s why I couldn’t hit him. Your soul says ‘Never again, even if that means death.’ Contradictory, I know… but I knew I was asa kraiya and that was more important. It’s what I had to do.” This all came between sobs; Surya’s hand gripped my arm. I could barely believe what I said next, even as I said it. “I’m not a warrior any more, Krero. I’m not and never will be again.”

He sat for a moment, silence hanging heavy in the room. “So do I have this right?” he said finally. “You’re never going to be able to defend yourself again?”

At a loss for an answer, I looked at Surya. “No,” he said, with blessed firmness. “He will. But he’ll do it in the asa kraiya way, which he doesn’t know yet. Think of Azaila, Krero; would you tangle with him? But he’s asa kraiya.”

“All right. That’s reassuring. How long before you can defend yourself again?”

“Krero,” I said, hearing more tiredness in my voice than I’d intended to be heard, “I have no idea. Right now it’s all I can do to know how to get through the rest of today.”

“He has a lot to deal with,” said Surya. “I think…” He got the aura-seeing gaze. “I think we should schedule the ceremony for about a half-moon from now. It’s only after that that an asakraiyaseye can start the training.”

“That’s too short notice,” I said.

“Oh, right, I’m forgetting, it’s you, you’ll want to invite the whole world—”

“And have me protect it,” cut in Krero.

“But longer than that and we get into winter even in the lowlands, bad traveling… yet I can’t imagine you’re going to want to wait until spring.”

“No, I don’t want to be defenseless that long,” I said. “It should be two months; make it one and a half, and if we start getting invitations out today…”

“No work for seven days,” said Kaninjer, flatly. “Haven’t you noticed that you’re more prone to dizziness today than you were last night? Has anyone told you that a concussion doesn’t just happen with the blow, that it can keep worsening, or that two concussions close together are much worse than twice as bad as one? You value your mental function, don’t you?”

I lay very still and breathed slow and deep, trying to make the room, which was still spinning, though not as hard, stop entirely. It had been going on long enough now that between it and the groin pain, I was a little nauseated. “That’s what you have staff for,” Skorsas said brightly. “I’ll take care of it all, don’t worry.”

Krero had been thinking. Now he got up, leaned over me, seized the hair on either side of my head, and put his nose almost against mine.

“You,” he said, “are going to have at the very least four fully-armed elite warriors within arms’ length of you, every sleeping and waking instant, wherever you go, whatever you do, even to duck behind a bush for a piss, for the rest of your life, and I don’t care if I have to jump up and down on a desk and scream at Assembly to get it passed, but you know what? I don’t think I’ll have to.” Snatching up his helmet, he strode out, slamming the door behind him.

†

I thought that Surya might say it was time to talk that same day, but he signed charcoal. “You need to heal purely physically for a while yet.” It would be three days before Kaninjer would let me walk even on crutches, wanting the calf-wounds well-along in their healing first, and my twice-thumped head to stay on a pillow. So I did the small part Azaila and Surya would let me do of the ceremony planning, which was mostly settling the invitation list. (“This isn’t work, Kan, it’s fun!”)

At one point Krero asked me, “There are going to be how many heads of state here, that I have to keep alive?”

“Be philosophical, Krero,” I answered. “If it hadn’t been this, it would have been my funeral.”

“Yes,” he said without a moment’s pause, “but at least for that I’d have one less head of state to keep alive.”

No one would tell me anything about the ceremony itself except that, at the designated time, I should go to the School of the Sword in my full gear. I gathered I’d be guided through the rest.

I knew it was possible to do an asa kraiya ceremony outdoors, because Surya’s had been, so I asked for that, to allow everyone to see. “You don’t understand,” said Azaila. “It’s supposed to be private. His was in the woods.”

“You must be joking,” I said. “When has anything in my life ever been private?” The compromise we settled on was that the crucial part of it, whatever that was, we’d do inside the School, and the rest outside.

Toras, Tasera and Kyirya all visited that evening, to accept my thanks for saving me. The Games awards had been that day, and they let me know that I’d got only second runner-up for the Gilded Meadowflop Award—given for the most spectacularly dramatic death—in the one game in which I’d been killed out, and nowhere near the overall, an award I’d truly wanted. It’s pointless to have such ambitions against people who dive off cliffs for a pastime, I guess; the man who won had done a twisting double-flip off the crow’s-nest of a ship. I had, however, as everyone expected, won the Steel Circle for best game-warrior overall, an award I didn’t truly want.

I had a feeling Kyirya didn’t want to give me his sword-hand to kiss and press to my brow, in gratitude for saving my life, by the slow way he extended it. I found out later that Toras had had to talk him even into visiting at all, saying it would be wrong not to accept what was truly owed and would be happily given. His hand had a different feel to it, I noticed as I took it in mine; the reason came to me with a shiver. Times of peace make you forget; every warrior of my age had killed too many to count, by the age Kyiri was now. Younger Riji had been his blooding. I should have been the one he talked to about it, if he needed to; I told myself, there are many others just as good, including Toras.

I was not so private a citizen that the writers weren’t interested. Kaninjer insisted on seven days before I spoke to them, though, and I didn’t find myself inclined to buck. They got Krero’s version; he didn’t mention my going asa kraiya, but he did say that my security would be very much tightened.

Just as he’d predicted, he had no trouble getting it passed in Assembly. There were four full-geared elite warriors on my door that night, and a day later two workers knocked, saying they’d come to install shutters. They had the work order, of course, which was signed “Assembly of Yeola-e per Krero Saranyera,” but he’d also armed them with the record of the Assembly vote, listing all the changes. No more breezes from the mountains caressing my cheek at night; the shutters were a handspan thick, bound all around with steel, and had bolts two finger-widths thick. It took them three days to put them in, because they were to be bolted so deep into the stonework around the windows that most of it had to be replaced. I wondered why this seemed darkly familiar, and remembered when they’d barred my window in the Mezem, after I’d almost escaped. Next, I thought, he’ll add a wall and a moat.

The writers wrote what he told them, but rumours flew all over; the reigning notion was soon that it was the death-in-me still working, and people debated whether I should be made legally incompetent and trussed up again. In getting people to see the difference between the death-in-me and asa kraiya, as I had to do, this incident would not help at all.

What would be most convincing, of course, would be an end to these close calls (my life was constantly being measured, it seemed, in ‘yea-many days recovered’). I was reminded again of Iska saying, “You have to stop doing this. It’s bad for your health.” Each time I think it’s the last, and each time I’m wrong, I thought. When I mentioned it to Surya, though—we hadn’t started sessions again yet, but he would come in morning and night to check my aura at the same time Kaninjer was checking my body—he just said, as predictably as the sun rising, “Don’t worry, everything’s going as it should. They will stop when you are finished.”

Everyone came to visit, of course, including Esora-e, who came beaming, “My Champion of the People.” They hadn’t decided for certain, but that was the buzz. At least he didn’t grill me about the duel, a mercy; the second night on the concussion regimen had left my mood, I confess, truly foul.

Even Chosaiya came, though I’d thought she was finished with me, at least until the Assembly re-approval vote. “I want you to be my semanakraseye for the next fifty years,” she said, when I asked why. “And the trial of the street and the dinner-table isn’t over. Champion of the People or not, you’re going to need all the help you can get.”

To the Committee, of course, I’d have to explain everything, but Kaninjer classed that as work. Likewise serving as witness in court; Senjalias had been charged with assisting in murder. It was I who’d have to tell them it had been a little more complicated than that, being the only other living witness who’d seen it all.

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