152 - Calm on one, crazed on the other

Chevenga champions one of the people a bit too much

Anasenga Karetai, Terera Pages : atakina 30 Ye. 1556

When semanakraseye-on-leave and game-field-commander Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e came off the ground victorious yesterday, the news was waiting for him that Assembly has chalked in principle the proposal that he be designated Champion of the People, in honour of his actions in the Arkan war.

Opposition to the measure comes from two strongly divergent parties. One argues that Chevenga has been sufficiently rewarded already, having lived in spectacular luxury as Imperator of Arko for a total of three years, continuing in lesser but still impressive luxury in the sumptuous Hearthstone Independent, and enjoying the many benefits of his magnificent reputation.

The other party argues that the word “Champion” actually diminishes the importance of the semanakraseye’s contribution, since, on the battlefield, a champion generally acts alone at the behest of the high commander, rather than serving as high commander himself. They feel that Chevenga did no less to save Yeola-e than those deemed worthy to be called “Saviour of the People” as a result of their actions in the War of the Travesty; they contend that Arko in our time was a much more formidable enemy, posing a much greater danger, than Notyere in his.

In that sense, “Champion” is something of a compromise.

But as the sweat-soaked semanakraseye sidled through a scribble of scribes, he didn’t want to talk about that. He yearned instead to hold forth on the game he’d just fought.

“Champion?” he spat. “I’ve just championed one unworthy eater of excrement right into the Circle School, utterly against my will.” (He didn’t use precisely the term “excrement.” )

“Did the news not get onto the game-field, semanakraseye?” asked one writer, too peach-chinned to know a hint when he heard one.

“Not while we were right in the middle of fighting, no,” Chevenga answered drily. “I was very busy, being in complete and utter command of Mingora-e’s army.” Without being asked to explain further, he explained much further. It seems that, once on the game field, candidate Mingora-e Chilisa of Hirina told him simply, “You’re in command entirely; win it for me,” and put his feet up.

“By my game oath, I had no choice,” gritted the nascent Champion. “I had to. I had to order everyone else to go along with this. Everyone was disgusted, I can tell you. If it seemed as if our fighting was lackluster, especially in the first part, that’s why. What warrior wants to put himself out for a candidate who does that?”

“Semanakraseye,” another writer said, politely. “The wording of the commendation, Champion as opposed to Saviour… your thoughts on that?”

“You know what he argued?” Chevenga recounted. “That this was the only sensible way, and every other candidate who’d had me was doing it wrong! ‘Look, in a game we do what we would in true war, correct?’ he asks us. ‘Well, in true war, if any of us found Chevenga in our ranks, we’d let him take command without thought. So I’m making a more exact replication than anyone else.’ I wanted to rip out my hair. ‘Yes, but in some cases you don’t do what you would in true war, don’t you get that?’”

“There were those in Assembly who contended that you should not receive any commendation at all,” another writer bravely ventured, “since, they feel, you’ve been rewarded sufficiently informally. What—”

“What I had to do in the end, and it was the only way I could win it for the sheep-fraternizer”—again, not Chevenga’s precise wording—“was to tell all my people, or should I say, his people, ‘We must all do chiravesa here, and it’s this: Mingora-e doesn’t exist. We will not mention him, we will not think of him, we will efface him from our minds. Everyone is going to find out that he handed it fully to me, so it’s my good name at stake, in truth, not his. So from now on he doesn’t exist and you are fighting for me. That’s an order.’ There was no other way.”

“Semanakraseye,” yet another writer assayed, “do you feel deserving of so great an honour?”

“What would have been best, and what I wanted the most,” Chevenga gritted, “was to get killed out. But you can’t let someone do it—that’s violating your game-oath. So it kept not happening. Ironic, isn’t it? Here I am fighting to live past thirty, playing a knife-game with Shininao to keep his beak out of my ear, with so many cursed near-misses—but let me want him, in a game, and he won’t come anywhere near me!”

“Semanakraseye,” a writer said, resignedly, “whoever becomes chakrachaseye, after you go asa kraiya… will they be aware of this Circle School student’s ploy to win his final?”

“Everyone will be. I am not planning to keep it secret.” For the first time, the semanakraseye’s face took on something of a pleasant expression, though it was not quite a grin. “I just told all of you.”

“But, Chevenga—”

“Whatever my people, as represented by Assembly, say I deserve, I do, and it’s improper for me to have an opinion on it. Semana kra.” With that, he strode away.

†

I should never have let the senior students give me to someone going against Toras. Not because he was my friend—with the exception of Mirasae , they were all my friends, or would be—but because he was Arkan, which meant it could get political, and ugly. Because it did, I must be circumspect.

Let’s just say, the last final pitted Toras against Tasera, I was fighting for her, and the upshot was a hearing in Terera, before the elders of the Circle School. I lost Kyirya Sencheli as a friend over it, too, my favourite Yeoli sparring-partner then (my overall favourite is, and will probably always be, Kallijas.) Kyirya was something of a Yeoli Kallijas, actually, not just for being blond, blue-eyed and beautiful, but for similar brilliance as a warrior, and even a similar cast of mind, uncompromising in honour and discipline and loyalty, though fortunately not quite so chaste.

He liked to think of himself more as a fair-haired Chevenga, following me in many ways, most notably training in fighting command, for which he had the talent, but in appearances as well, in the way of youth: the shoulder-scabbard, the long central forelock, even, though I cringe to say it, something of my way of speaking. I often said to him now, “Walking my path as part of your training is all well, but you are a man now, you should take a firmer course along your own.” Of course the best thing for that is war itself, which I wouldn’t wish on him or anyone.

But he was so offended by something I did in the final that he sheared off his forelock before the hearing. I could have avoided it all, had I thought ahead more carefully. When it was over, it was dark and snow was falling lightly. I wanted to be out on the mountain by myself, then into the hot tub and the wine and getting thoroughly soaked in both senses of the word. It had been a day I would willingly have excised from my life.

There’s a shortcut to the Hearthstone Independent, which I knew well enough to take without a light. I knew Krero wouldn’t like it, but I had no plans to tell him. I felt like letting no one see me, as if I were an evildoer. At least the day’s hardships were over, I remember thinking, nothing difficult or painful left to do.

As it was, someone came up behind me on the path, carrying a lamp. Thinking he must be going to the Independent to join the party, and not wanting to be so rude as not to wait for him, I stopped. He wore a hooded cloak, clutching it close against the wind, so I saw little of him, and when we said nye’yingi I didn’t know his voice. He was young, and seemed shy. As I was turning to lead the way, and making conversation to put him at ease, there was an all-encompassing crash on the back of my head, and deeper darkness drove night away.

†

I woke to the cold of snow on one cheek, and a much harder cold on the other. Remembering where and when I was, mostly by the feel of snow-softened ground under me, I thought, what happened? Did a rock fall down from the heights and hit me? I had thought this path was too far away from any cliffs for that. The backs of my calves hurt as if they’d been pierced. In the twilight of half-consciousness I had thought I heard a voice speaking Arkan. Now I heard it again, a youthful man’s. “Wake up, murderer! Wake up, father-killer!” The same hardness slapped my cheek. I opened my eyes, then blinked a few times, not believing what they were seeing, as it was not something I had ever often seen with my eyes alone: the steel of a sword-blade. It whacked my cheek again. “Come on, Karas Raikas. The birds of morning are singing, singing your dirge!” Was I still unconscious, was I dreaming, had I gone mad?

The chain. The brass chain—I wore it for the final—I never took it off! I clawed at my neck, tore it loose. Everything came blazing fire-edged into weapon-sense, the sword in my face, the other one that must be being held by someone else two paces away, who had yet another slung from his belt. The sword in my face was familiar, its feel etched in my memory from long ago: Riji Kli-fas’s, with the quillons wrought as a calm man’s face on one, a crazed man’s on the other, one of two swords by which I had ever tasted defeat, even if just in sparring the day before Riji and I had fought in the Mezem. I’m still in a stun-dream. One thing did come together in my half-shattered mind: it had been no rock. My shy friend had been carrying something in his right hand, hidden in the folds of his cloak, with which he’d hit me, in my chain-induced blindness.

Surya’s words rang in my ears. “Don’t take any foolish risks.” I’ve become so used to it, it didn’t bother me in the game, no one was armed in the hearing and I had so much on my mind… my excuses sounded to me like those of the boy caught with his hand in the honey-pot. Just making the walk alone had been a foolish risk.

By sheer will, I found my arms and legs, then wished I could have left my stomach in oblivion, for it wanted to heave up everything. Pain rose to screaming on the back of my head. The person standing over me put back his hood, and lifted his lamp close to his face. “Remember me? Or does the resemblance suffice?” Yet another Kli-fas reference—he was Riji, with death and the years somehow reversed; there was the same leonine face, piercing eyes, mane of light brown hair, but of an age no more than twenty, if that. I shook my head, swallowed against the churning of my stomach and the spinning of the snow-and-lamplight-flickered world, and looked again. “You know this,” he said, and held the sword close to the light. It fell together in my mind.

I remembered Riji’s wife, Sora, clutching her two little boys in under her arms when I faced them in their house, which had legally been his and thus now, by the fact of my killing him, was mine—as were they—under Arkan law. But the older boy, who was Riji in miniature and about ten, had looked at me with the thought clear in his eyes, “When I come of age, you are dead.” Yes, I’d thought, I will be, and he’d never crossed my mind again.

That had been eight years ago.




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