159 - The wild one

My next visitor, same day, was Azaila, wanting to speak with me alone. He asked me to recount the duel with Younger Riji, and I knew from how he listened to it that he was here as my war-teacher.

Though there had once been a time, not so long ago, when I’d have put my sword through myself before I shed tears in his sight, I couldn’t help them when I got to the part about realizing I was asa kraiya. He showed no sign he thought any less of me for it, though.

When I got to the end he said the last thing I imagined he would, about a fight I’d ignominiously lost, “Good.” Then he asked, “Why exactly could you not hit him?”

“I…” An Azaila questioning, I thought. Clueless, stuck for words, knowing I ought to know… it’s been such a long time. “I… am asa kraiya.”

“That’s only naming what you arrived at; it’s not the cause. What was the thought, the feeling, behind not hitting him?”

“I…” The only answer acceptable to him was the truth, always; I was rusty enough from lack of recent practice to not remember for a squirming moment that if “I don’t know” was the truth, it was the only acceptable answer. He waited with the don’t-lie-to-me look on his face. “I… I don’t know,” I said finally.

“It’s all right,” he said, which was unusually gentle, for him. “I expected you wouldn’t. I’m going to ask you again after the ceremony. It will be clearer to you then.” Perhaps he’d been testing whether I’d lie.

†

In the morning, I mulled over it. Was I going to tell writers I’d walked into this so as to give myself a lesson in self-acceptance? Hardly. Most people don’t know the difference between choosing something knowingly and being impelled by the deeper self; I had not known myself until I’d started with Surya. Of course I wouldn’t be able to say anything but pure truth, as I’d have to recount much of it again, in court under oath. I had no idea what I would tell them almost up to when they poised their pens over their notebooks and I opened my mouth.

I told them, before I told them anything else, about how Krero had stiffened my security. Then it was that Younger Riji had challenged me to a duel, but given me no choice, else I’d have declined, and that he’d been beating me, by the time I’d been rescued, entirely because I was close to going asa kraiya, though the writers kept saying they couldn’t imagine how the head-blow and the cuts on my calves had made no difference. Even so, I could have given him a wound that would have ended it fairly easily, had my hand been willing, I had to keep telling them. I could remember, searingly, every time my arm had frozen with my sword-tip touching his shirt. Once that ordeal was over, I rode down fast to the courthouse, to say whatever I was going to say under oath.

Senjalias was charged with assisting in murder. A point I should note for those who read this who are not Yeoli: because we think so much in terms of choice and intention, Yeoli law does not differentiate between attempting something and doing it. The fact that the intended victim is still alive makes the intent to kill him no less heinous in the eyes of the law. I am not sure any more that I entirely agree with this; for one thing, insofar as wrongdoers have the possible charges and punishment in the backs of their minds as they act, it encourages them to go for broke in what they do, since they’ll get the same anyway. I also think that a failed attempt at something can belie a less-than-entire intent to do it. But the law is what it is, and Younger Riji’s brother was charged as he was charged.

As an Arkan, he was not entitled to the services of a defense advocate, so he was on his own against the prosecutor. He bore himself with surprising dignity, for his age, perhaps because he knew that was all that was left to him. When the judge spelled out for him his choices, he pleaded justification, because I had killed his father—easily countered, of course, when for me it was fight Riji or die—but it was all he had.

His account was accurate by what I remembered, and he pointed out that they hadn’t just killed me, but let me fight. Had I won, he asked the court, would I have been charged with killing him?—forgetting, apparently, that I’d first declined, and then offered to blood Riji only, if he’d swear to let me be for good. The prosecutor, acting almost more like an investigator, called me up, and I gave my account, in which I had to again explain why I hadn’t won. The prosecutor made a point I hadn’t thought of: they’d come after me knowing perfectly well my intention was to go asa kraiya, since it was commonly known.

Senjalias could not be put to death, as Yeoli law does not allow it, nor exiled, this not being his nation; but he could be expelled, ordered never to return again, and denied safe conduct. That would be just as effective a death-sentence for him than it had been for Sharaina. So the judge decided, and then told him that he could choose to ask me for the kerchief of mercy. Senjalias’ face hardly changed; he’d been expecting death for seven days at the very least. Then suddenly he glanced at me with a kind of yearning in his eyes. I whispered to the prosecutor to ask for a recess so he and I could talk, and we went out into the hall with two guards.

“You want something from me?” I asked him, in Arkan, it being none of the guards’ business.

“I want to show you something.”

For seven days he’d been kept prisoner in the courthouse basement, but he’d asked for everything he and Riji had had at the inn where they’d stayed. Stronger than the usual stone and mustiness, his cell smelled of linseed oil, like a painter’s studio. “I’m not sure why I’m doing this,” he said, “except that you wanted the painting Father made of you. In the last few days before… he was hardly sleeping, only a bead or two per night. I always put the blanket over him.” He must mean his brother, I thought. I followed him into the cell, borrowing a lamp from one of the guards.

Younger Riji had had the Elder’s artistic gift. There was a painting like the Elder’s, which I still had hung in the clock-room: calm, ordinary, as if I’d sat for it. The rest were all of me dueling his father. It brought it back as if it were happening now, again, reflected to me by my own narrowed eyes and wild hair and savage smile, the blur of motion and flying blood, the leaping, fist-waving crowd in the Arkan sun. Here I was the wild one, that Riji had always become when he entered the Ring; fighting me, I thought, he made me at least in part into himself. It was relief to remember that I was asa kraiya. Still, maybe in part because of wound-weakness, I had to put a hand on the wall.

“I think you brought me here to make me see how he saw me,” I said.

“I guess so.”

“We’ll burn every last stinking one of these pieces of rot,” one of the guards said to me; they’d come in with us, wanting to stick close to him while I was there, I guess, even though he was in chains. I signed charcoal. They were too good to destroy. Raw, ragged, inexperienced, yes; but you could see the beginnings of mastery in them, a mastery that the world would never see, now. I would keep them in honour of that, even if not on display.

Senjalias turned away, and one of the guards took his elbow to lead him back upstairs. “You’ve shown me what he painted,” I said. “What about you?”

He turned staring at me, and it was his mother’s stare, exact, when I’d first told her I would do nothing to make them suffer; it brought the moment back like yesterday, even the book and polish smell of Riji’s dark-wood-lined house.

Chained, he couldn’t point, so he motioned with his head. He had the gift no less. On the other side of the room, there were two paintings. One was the duel, but more even-handed; his father and I both mere men. What was most striking was the hands of a child in the foreground, gripping the seat-rail before him: his own hands, as he remembered seeing them. The other painting, unfinished, was of Riji the Elder, in his outside-the-Ring mode, the man who spoke ten languages and had made major contributions to philosophy, standing robed with a book in his hand, a map of the world drawn on the open page. The face, calm but with intellectual passion within, like an inner light, was finished; he’d been working on the hands, neat and graceful.

“You hesitated asking for the kerchief of mercy not knowing how I’d answer,” I said, still in Arkan, so the guard wouldn’t understand. “It’s yours if you choose it, Senjalias. I urge you to. This should be finished.”

He stared at me, his mother again. His blue eyes filled with tears, as I’d never seen hers do. “But I would be betraying him.” I wasn’t sure whether he meant his father or his brother. “We failed; if we failed, we should die.”

“Would that man”—I pointed at the painting—“have wanted the artist who painted it dead?” His tears came harder, and I knew it was something he needed to be alone with. “You need only tell the court before it adjourns, or the guards afterwards, if you change your mind. Make sure it’s before they let go of you out of doors.” I went upstairs, my calves giving a twinge on each step.

He didn’t ask for the kerchief before the bailiff hit the bell with the crystal to adjourn. I got up fast to make sure I was outside first, and had the bailiff slip me the kerchief; I had one gambit I was keeping in reserve. There was a crowd, and, just as with Sharaina, some people were carrying blades quite openly. He stood frozen, while the guards unlocked the chains.

“Think of your mother,” I said to him in Arkan. “She can lose all three and be entirely bereft, or keep one.” His eyes were suddenly full of tears, and he whispered, “Mercy.” In the crowd’s full view, I tied the kerchief around his neck, and embraced him. The people went quiet, except the murmurs of, “You are too kind, Chevenga.” We went back into the courthouse, he wrapped his paintings carefully, and I had Skorsas pay his way by double-wing to Arko.

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