145 - All the joy of war

So, all the circle-collars in Yeola-e who can come to the Circle School Annual Games do, and I invited them all to the Hearthstone Independent. I wondered if they would come, now that I was a traitor to the warrior’s way, but my guest-beds had all been spoken for a month ahead, and now Skorsas was assigning lengths of floor.

The contestants tend to come early if they are from the lowlands, to get used to the high air; often the veteran commanders come too, especially if they are mentoring game-generals. Thus, eight days beforehand, I already had about fifteen, good for nightly parties around the hearth, and frank talk from wine-loosened tongues—lines which I will cite without attached names, such as:

“If you’d asked me which would happen first, Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e going asa kraiya, or the sun falling out of the sky and landing on my head, I’d have said the latter.”

“I can’t believe some shit-brained bitch of an ex-so-called Servant plotted to kill you.”

“Hey—I never lit a candle for you, at least not when you were looking. All right, everybody… Now light yours, Chevenga, and get that through your stone-dense skull.”

“Imagine that jackanapes Linasika Aramichiya getting you charged with being demarch and being able to save us. I can’t believe you took a flogging for that. You should have wrapped the whip around the sheep-diddler’s balls and rammed the handle up his ass.”

They were good parties.

About five days before the Games, the generals were dragging me over the coals yet again for going asa kraiya when Hurai said, “You haven’t put on any fat, Chevenga; you must be keeping up your training. Young and graceful yet, among the rest of us old and creaky farts. You know, you may be done with fighting, but nothing’s stopping you from being in the Games.”

They all seized it up. “Ha, there you go!” said Emao-e. “All the joy of war without the pain!”

“Can you imagine how that would throw the cat in among the pigeons,” said Renaina, “those tykes having to command you?”

“Do they appoint you their second and give you your head?” said Hurai. “Use you as a duelist? Set you loose at night to do darkwork? Keep you in their tent to make sure no one does darkwork on them? All of these things? The possibilities are endless!”

They went on, roaring and laughing. Some would say my judgment was impaired at the time, but I found I liked the idea even much later that morning after sleep had sobered me up. Last time I’d fought in any war-game had been just before I’d become semanakraseye, nine years before.

Of course I cleared it with Surya. You use wood, wicker and blunted arrows, of course, but like any training, it is not without danger; every few years someone gets killed. I think he examined my aura down to the bones. “I’m surprised by this, but yes,” he said. “Just don’t take any foolish risks.”

“Foolish risks? Me?” Fleeing his office I went down to Nainara’s. “You, in the Games?” she said. “Well. Hmm. That could be interesting. The seniors were just about to start…” A day later I had their full assent.

Then of course I had to get consent from the Committee, which they chalked six to one. It was about that time, incidentally—after the break for the equinox festival—that the Committee showed Linasika the door. That meant they had to go to Assembly to seek an eighth member once more. They didn’t specifically request it, but the position should obviously go to a detractor of mine, and so Etana-lai Kensai, the Servant of Tinga-e-Anika stood, and was accepted. He was plenty sharp with his questions, but much more careful than Linasika when speaking to writers.

†

The day before the start of the Games, I had a visit with Surya. “Why do I fear what you will do to me for signing up for that?” I said, realizing only after it had come out of my mouth that it was one of those jokes that isn’t in truth a joke, but you are pretending to yourself is, to allow yourself to say it. It didn’t help that he’d sent up a note the night before telling me to have nothing but juice before I came to him.

Appropriately, he took it seriously. “What I will do to you? I will do nothing to you. I have never done anything to you. You will do it to yourself, as always. When you fully grasp that, you’ll be done healing, forever.”

“When I am certain I have utter control over my fate, you mean?” Even now, I hadn’t learned not to debate him. Or perhaps I did it out of curiosity, or for what it might teach me.

“Yes.”

“But no one has utter control over their fate. There’s a rockslide that knocks everyone over, at one time or another.” I was thinking at that moment of Arko the rockslide, knocking over Yeola-e. Of course then the rockslide had reversed.

“No one has control over rockslides. But we have utter control over how they hit us. Don’t worry that it seems incredible; it’s not easy for anyone to come to the point of understanding how easy it is. You’ll get there. On the table.” I stripped and lay down.

“All-Spirit,” I said. “When am I ever going to learn how to undergo this with panache?”

“No, face down.” I turned over, relishing burying my face half in the pillow, as if it could be some sort of escape. “Never, because you always undergo it with fear, and that’s as it should be,” he said. “We heal by going into what we are afraid of. You’ll never undergo healing with panache because when you can do that, no more healing will be necessary. Can you not be satisfied with undergoing it with courage, which you invariably do?”

It is when we feel least courageous that we are likely being most, I reminded myself. I wasn’t going to delay him with any more words. “Deep breath,” he said. “Make the white line, from here to here. It’s the sword within you we’re going to do again, today.” I got a touch of nausea, remembering last time, and drove it away with the depth of my breaths and the whiteness of the line.

“You remember how it felt, Virani-e, to have me touch it; and what I told you, that everything you were feeling was nothing more than the habit of having it there not wanting to alter, yes?” I had to cast my mind back to remember, but it came, and I signed chalk. “I told you that it would be out of you on your asa kraiya ceremony. What I didn’t tell you was how.”

I wanted to bury my face entirely in the pillow, and forbore perhaps for no other reason than how silly it would look to him, as if it mattered, here within the sponges, and as if he couldn’t see the silliness in my aura anyway. He laid his hand gently on my shoulder, something like the way healers do when they’re about to tell you the disease will kill you in a year. “During your asa kraiya ceremony, I am going to reach into you and take a full grip on the hilt, you’re going to let go of it, and I’m going to pull it out of you—deep breath, make the white line. It’s all right. Your asa kraiya ceremony won’t come before you are ready for it.”

He gave me some time, to return to calm, then said again, “Breathe deeply, and make the white line, very solid.” Touching the nape of my neck with one finger, he unerringly found the hilt. I grabbed the table-legs with my hands, as if to keep from flying off the earth. “Relax,” he said, without letting up on the touch. “Slow and deepen your breathing. Don’t close your eyes, stay in the present. If it hurts, yell. I am still just going to touch it, not move it, not yet, though I am going to touch it more. Remember, the only thing that disorients you so is habit that does not want to be changed.” I tried to cling to that.

He kept me there, with just one finger on the hilt, telling me just to breathe in acceptance of feeling it, for a good half-bead. By the end, I was keeping equanimity, more or less, while I felt it. “Keep breathing,” he said. “Keep feeling it without my finger there for a moment.” He went to get a thick towel, which he put under my hips. He’s going to do something to me that makes me piss myself, I thought. “I think you are ready to feel the full length of it,” he said.

I will do my best to convey it, knowing I am failing. You can’t know unless you’ve lived the like yourself, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Very slowly, over another half-bead, he ran his finger down my spine, but in truth down the full length of the sword, as he’d said. His finger, I would swear, stayed inside me, the whole time.

I felt all my warriorhood, as a line, a steel edge, inside my vertebrae. I felt everything I had lived as a warrior, but it was all along the line, each point holding some aspect of it, and all in the physical, not the abstract. Warriorhood is a rhythm, that thrums inside you; I had danced to it all my life, and now I lay feeling what it was to me in my deepest self, illuminated by Surya’s finger.

No stiff-lipped accepting now; he said, “Let it all out, everything, leave no stone unturned.” I war-cried as in the charge, and laughed evilly as when killing someone I’d hated. I screamed and shook, in the fear I had seen in the eyes of those who faced me. When his finger got to the centre of my back, I got the most violent attacks of vomiting, as with any of the thousand thousand horrors I’d seen; because I had not eaten—this was why—he gave me water just for something to throw up, and I did it off the end of the table into a basin. I wept, a lot; I kept going back to that.

When he was close to the sword’s point, I felt that which warriors so often keep among themselves. I know what the healers say, that the sexual heat comes with bloodfire, from the joy of being victor rather than vanquished and so relieving the greatest fear, that of death—yet it still seems a horror to me, always, afterward. My mind filling with the sight, and my hands with the feel, of thrusting Chirel into a heart or slashing across a throat, I came like an explosion, out of nowhere and with almost no warning, feeling as if it would rip me apart, the most violent I’d ever had in my life. That was why the towel. Afterwards as I lay clenching my forelock in both hands, and he stood with his finger still on the sword, he said, “You think I never felt that, Virani-e?”

When he finally reached the sword’s point, he was ready with another towel, and the kyash of terror burst out of me no more by my will than the orgasm had. “I never did that… not once… ever…” I sobbed, as he wiped me clean, keeping his finger unmercifully on the sword. “You think I never felt that either? These things are just human.”

It was all of a piece, all joined by that one line of edge. “Try to understand it wholly,” he told me. “Try to hold it all at once in your mind.”

When he finally drew his finger out of me, the feeling remained, a silvery line down me, full of a dark shimmering. “Give yourself to the pain,” he said, and I was crying full-throated almost before I realized it was pain. I went for another half-bead or so, by my reckoning afterward—time always stands still for these things—while he held me in his arms.

The sages say that the thoughts that rule you are not the true you; the true you is that which can observe those thoughts. Now the truth of what my warriorhood was, in all its pain, was clear to me. I had observed it for the first time, enough to know that, for all it hurt, I would mourn the loss of it. Did that mean, I wondered, I was being my true self, with respect to it, for the first time? I was too spent to word these thoughts to Surya, but I suspect he saw them in my aura.

When I’d lain silent and lax in his arms for a while, he carried me to the couch, where I slept like the dead for two beads. When I woke I felt as if my insides had been bathed in watery light, and were peaceful in a way that disturbed me to the core.

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