143 - All it needs is practice

“No, you were not imagining it,” said Surya. “I did say ‘Welcome.’ ”

One balm for whip-welts I hadn’t had in the war-camp in my teens: a hot tub. I relished it now. Beside me sat Kasai, also immersed up to his chin; I’d invited him up, to let him know he was forgiven. “I’ll soak my back and you soak your arm, together,” I’d said.

“My soul,” I asked Surya. “What did it look like?”

“A bright point of white light with your eyes.”

“Really?”

“Well, not exactly, but that’s the simplest way to put it. Try this: you had no face, but I could tell when you were smiling.” To my surprise, I found I actually knew what he meant.

“You mean your soul was outside your body?” Kasai said. “I thought that only happened when you—I mean, when a person—dies.”

“Anyone can learn how to do it,” said Surya. “It just takes practice. The main trick is to get over the fear. I do a little soul-traveling every night.”

“So you didn’t feel the pain?” Kasai’s eyes looked at me full of hope.

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.” The thought that was crossing my mind was of legality; perhaps I’d had too much law on the brain lately. Nowhere in Yeoli law does it state that the soul of a person being duly punished with a flogging is prohibited from leaving his body, but as the purpose of the sentence is atonement by pain, he’s implicitly required to feel it. “I felt it, but… it’s hard to describe. Let’s just say, it made it more bearable.” Of course if it got back to the Assembly, they might consider my soul leaving my body a sign that the flogging had been appropriately severe.

“So anyone can learn just to do it by will, no need to be suffering?” I asked Surya. “Maybe I already can.”

“Only one way to find out,” said Surya.

I closed my eyes, and tried. Nothing happened. “I hope I don’t have to learn this by gradually decreasing the amount of suffering to nothing,” I said. “That would be a lot of suffering.”

Surya cast an aura-seeing glance over me, and said, “Ask yourself about the fear.”

Yes, it was there. And the feeling that I could do it that I’d had while I was being flogged was not. There is nothing to fear, I told myself. No harm came to me last time. I’ve done it in front of Surya and Kasai both before. I fixed my eyes on a crack between two tiles on the opposite side of the tub, slowed and deepened my breathing, made my muscles relax all over. Seeing I was putting myself into trance, neither of them said anything. Everything but the crack faded from my vision; time slowed; then the feeling came again, that I could do it, though it was not so strong. I closed my eyes, and I was about an arm’s-length above and behind my own head, seeing the three of us from behind. Surya turned his head to look right up at me, and smiled. I snapped back into myself with a bit of a yelp.

“All it needs is practice,” he said.

†

I had healer’s orders, of course, to live an easy life for the next few days. I mostly lazed around the Hearthstone Independent, writing the odd letter. There were no sessions with Surya, who busied himself overseeing the removal of walls in his chambers in the Independent, then helping Anchera, Janinara-e and their children move in. The four-to-be and their young were all hitting it off well enough, it seemed to me, when they invited my four and young for dinner on the second night.

The only thing I did every day, such as it was, was practice soul-traveling. I always did it wearing the brass chain, which somehow seemed to make it easier. Surya gave me a little more advice: not to go into it fearful, and not be surprised or frightened by anything I did see. The other world is full of creatures that we cannot see in this one, and not all of them are kindly.

When I started training again, Surya had me try it wearing the brass chain, which Azaila approved of. Hardest was sparring with it on. I had to keep reminding myself, ‘This is just for training; I’d never do it in a real fight.’ Then, ‘I’m planning never to be in a real fight again anyway.’ Then he had me wear it for whole days, now and then. It was all disorienting enough to be transformative, I assumed.

I did go before the Committee a couple of times. The two Servants assigned to read my autobiographical scribblings had finished, and the others had read the parts they’d excerpted, and they wanted clarifications on this and that, nothing too harrowing.

Chosaiya was right—I sometimes wondered whether she’d ever been wrong in her life—that the flogging would bring a backlash, so to speak. The press pages got many letters decrying the unfairness of it from all over the country, as did the Servants of Assembly. I paid little attention; my back healed, and I wondered vaguely when Surya and I would get around to settling the matter of whether I truly wanted to be semanakraseye or not.

By now, the shepherds had brought the sheep down from the high heights to the mid-heights, the corn was all in, and the Circle School Annual Games were approaching.

The Games, in case you don’t know, are the final step in selecting the three people who will be admitted into the Circle School, which is now held to be the best academy of general-craft in the world, each year. Any Yeoli may try to enter, and the school is funded entire by the public purse, so even a person who is dirt-poor can graduate.

To get in, you first have to write a lengthy examination; then you have to face eight other candidates in one-day war-games around the country. The twenty-four who do best compete in the Annual Games, with an army of twenty-thousand split between them. We’ve made a festival out of it, of course; for a half-moon every fall, Terera and Vae Arahi both are crawling with warriors, and the tavern-keepers and vintners all make up any losses they might have suffered in the rest of the year. All the generals in Yeola-e, also, unless they’re on duty somewhere, use the Games as an excuse to get together, enthrall the bright-eyed up-and-comers, drunkenly second-guess each other’s old battles, and try to clobber each other on the sand-table, laesha-board, and so forth.

I am going to reveal a sordid secret of Yeoli military history, here, since confession seems to be the turn my life has taken. As I wrote before, once I had my wristlets, I formed the ambition to beat out Naishana Krai, who entered the School at sixteen and graduated at twenty, to be the youngest Circle School student, and graduate, ever. But, aside from falling short on the examination at thirteen, and the preliminary games at fourteen, I was fighting the Lakans for two years after that. I made it into the School at seventeen, and became demarch when I was about two-thirds of the way through. What is not so well known is I was still missing the naval aspect of the course—I was trying to fit in some time in Selina to practice commanding ship-battles—when I went to Arko, which, of course, finished my chances to do anything but fight and work for six years.

When I got back to Yeola-e and joined the army in Ossotyeya, with the whole nation’s life-and-death hopes pinned on me, Nainara Shae-Miya, the dean, came to my tent to give me the Circle School’s news. Like everyone else, they had suffered and lost at the hands of Arko, about a third of the teachers and students killed in action before Artira ordered the rest to cease to preserve themselves. They’d split up then, those from the south mostly joining Renaina Chaer, those from the north staying with Hurai, and some from the plains joining the resistance there, allowed to study and consult on command councils, but not fight. “So often,” Nainara said, “the lesson was, what did we do wrong, and they do right?” Nine times out of ten, I noticed, the meat of the lesson was the work of Triadas Teleken, one thing that urged me toward assassinating him.

“So,” Nainara said to me, “we are at your service, the teachers to consult, the students to learn.”

“To learn?” I said. “Three quarters of them must be as qualified as I. Here I am, appointing myself First General First, and I haven’t even graduated.”

She seemed to slightly flinch on the word graduated, and flashed a glance over her shoulder almost involuntarily. “You know, Fourth Chevenga, sometimes honesty and openness just do not suit,” she said, her voice a little lower. “None of us mentioned this to anyone, in fact we all swore silence. You must agree this is for the best.”

“Well, I wasn’t about to proclaim it. I just don’t have the pin, if anyone looks closely.”

“Probably no one will, just as no one seems to want to ask us. We were thinking of giving it to you honourarily, on the assumption you will finish later.”

I had thought of this, but was too shy to bring it up myself. “If you think it best,” I said. “My honour as a warrior opposes it... but Yeola-e can’t afford me to have anything but a demarch’s honour now.”

“It’s only sea-borne strategy and tactics you’re missing,” she said. “We never did get you to Selina. Is it true you fought against Arkan quinqueremes on Haiu Menshir? I’ve heard the story, but it seems so implausible on so many counts, not the least that the Arkans would attack Haiu Menshir in the first place.”

“Utterly implausible,” I said, “but true—they did. What else in what you heard was implausible?”

“That you defeated them with only a handful of warriors and a herd of sailors, taking no losses at all. Even though you were still considered to be, em...”

“Insane. Well, it was more than a handful: I had my guard, who were twenty, mostly elite, and seventy Srian archers. I hid the green ribbon under my wristlet. Aside from that, it is true.”

Nainara pulled a notebook and pen out of her satchel. “This sounds like an interesting study. Will you tell me the whole story, from the beginning of anything that was relevant to it, leaving out no detail? No, wait—let me send for the students.”

I recounted it for them, and they drank it in like the first swallows of water in a desert, as all Yeolis did then, it being their first taste of victory against Arko.

“Here is what we will do,” said Nainara, when she and I were alone again. She took off her own Circle School pin, awarded her when my father was a baby, and held it out to me. “People are even less likely to ask me than you. Borrow it until you receive your own. No protests, semanakraseye: semana kra.”

I didn’t graduate until four years later, when I’d been impeached and therefore had time to visit Selina. I did it almost more for the principle of the matter than anything else, so I could graduate before I died.

So there is the shameful truth: the freeing of Yeola-e and conquest of Arko was led by one whose Circle School education was incomplete, and was in fact fraudulently wearing the dean’s pin. I hope Linasika Aramichiya doesn’t find a way to have me charged after he reads this.

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