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?”

--