154 - 'Never again' comes from the soul

While I stood astonished, the mad-sane sword with Older Riji’s touch all over it was whistling in towards the side of my neck; between a late parry and throwing up my shoulder, I got away with just an ear slashed in half. I am asa kraiya. I can’t do a thing to him. It’s not going to happen. Sensing the weakness of half-action in me, he came on hard using plain strength, and bulled his way into two more hits, one deep enough that the blood still flowed warm on my skin a good way down from it.

I am asa kraiya. I can’t hurt him. I can’t touch him. I hope I may be forgiven for fear coming back. I set myself to do nothing but parry impeccably, and gathered my thoughts.

I must ask myself, I thought, and I must answer the true and final answer. I know exactly what he intends. Would I rather die than put my sword in him?

The answer came all over me, again, the closing of a much greater gate still. I remembered Surya telling how he’d thrown down his sword, thinking, never again. Now I understood. That ‘never again’ comes from the soul, and so it is whole, and entire, and will not be denied, by anything.

I am truly asa kraiya. My sight blurred with tears, not that that made a difference; weapon-sense and memory was enough to make me check a perfect thrust for his belly. It was one of those moves you make not worrying much about the stroke he’s making at the same time, since yours going in will take all the force immediately out of his; of course that didn’t happen. I parried with my forearm and so got two wounds at once, the one on my arm crunching right into the bone, the one on my side bad enough that I felt no pain, just a shock all over.

So, after everything, my journey was going to end right here, a tenth-bead’s walk from my house, in as little time, or maybe longer, depending on how long Younger Riji felt like making it last. I’d never see thirty, after all; if the Committee continued its work it would just be for the historical record; I’d never abolish the stream-test. Krero would tear himself up for not ordering a constant escort for me; maybe Surya too, for letting me wear the chain in a game, or feeling he’d failed in the whole effort. For everyone who loved me it would be as it had been for everyone who’d loved my father.

But… I will die asa kraiya, I thought. And because they will find my body covered with wounds, and him with not a scratch, and because Surya will have known that this was coming as he does with all my changes… everyone will know that I died asa kraiya. That victory can never be taken from me.

I could have conceded then, thrown down my sword and let him do what he willed; I was certain it would make no difference. Instead I kept fighting; my flesh would go down heroically, if pacifistically, just from habit. Perhaps that too had been in the drama that Younger Riji had composed for himself and me.

All through our fight he had been speaking, and I hadn’t heard a word; from tiredness and blood loss and pain, even if I was feeling none of it, I started to lose control of my mind, and so his words got in. He’d decided now to give me the death of a thousand cuts, as I’d seen his father do many times in the ring, and was talking me through it. I was too dazed to stop what he said from seizing me wholly like a Teacher’s words in training, so I took to heart every insult and prediction. It’s the state of mind of utter defeat, that I had seen in the face of thousands, but never known myself until now. So this, I thought, is how it feels.

With such perfect joy in my agony that part of me was moved to sympathy, Younger Riji danced me with slow grace towards my pyre, Shininao’s wings audible in the shimmer of snow-flakes like a distant dark melody that grew louder. It wrapped around the chant that had started within me, as in the woods near Terera, but with fewer words: I am asa kraiya. I am asa kraiya. Then, when I could barely stand or make sense of what weapon-sense showed me, and was parrying like a drunk, I felt at the edges of my range, coming up the path downslope, something that I realized slowly and vaguely was Toras Meneken’s Aras-finger.

Shit… this isn’t in the script. If I called to him for help I was drawing him to his death; Riji was not as good a duelist as me, but he was better than Toras, and there was the brother to think of, too; I had no idea how good he was. Then I remembered, to my horror, that we were still on the path, so Toras would come across us anyway; I thought of yelling to him to stay away and get help instead, but that would draw him just as surely as calling him to me would. As always happens when you can’t decide, decision was taken out of my hands. The Aras-finger was suddenly drawn and coming at a run.

“Oh fik—someone’s coming!” Toras had a light; Riji’s brother had seen it. “Do it now, Riji, kill him!” Somewhere in the mess that was my mind, I found a plan. If I tie up his arms, Toras has a chance. I grabbed his sword-wrist, mindless of his sword; I’d stopped feeling myself getting wounds. I dropped my sword and caught his other wrist as he aimed his fist at my face. With a snarl like an animal, he drove his knee up between my legs; I twisted my hips too slow to escape it. That I couldn’t keep from feeling, somehow, and it paralyzed me, so he could do it again, and again. In a white sea of pain, I lost all my senses but the feel of his wrists in my hands, since I put my whole soul there. I am nothing but my hands; that’s all I need to be.

Then something jolted his wrists and froze him; someone else not Toras, Kyirya! was there driving the Aras-finger into him, and as he fell I let go his wrists, and fell backwards myself. The golden motes of snow, lit by more light now, whirled with motion not their own, and all I could hold in my consciousness was how all-encompassingly good it felt to be lying down and not moving. It was only very slowly, when Toras’s face swam into my sight, and then Tasera’s, and an arm cradled my head, that I realized I actually might not die, after all.

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