167 - In complete harmony with my true self

“CHEN!!”

The alarm-yell is tearing out of my throat. Twenty blades, all at once, twenty slivers of death in my weapon-sense, all drawn and plunged flashing-fast into flesh, that slows them in that unmistakable way. I wrist-parry mine so it flies wide, but Yeoli agony-cries come in a mass, as if on signal. I whirl around. People fall, clutching at their backs or sword-hilts; horses rear in the panic. I look around, see only Mana and one or two others fighting, the rest on the ground, still, or sliding limply off horses. Most of the Arkans all turn their eyes to me, sheathing bloody daggers and drawing clean swords.

Time seems to slow almost to stopping, like the momentary flow of water changing to the century-slow flow of glass. The leader tries another stab, gradual as a glacier; I draw Chirel and scythe through his neck without effort, watch his head tip off and tumble down, bouncing off his thigh, the long golden hair sheared short too, and the stump spraying its double pulsing fountain of scarlet blood. Two more Arkans move their horses in to flank me on either side, swords raised, still as statues between each moment of motion; I have all the time in the world to balance on my shield hand, pull my feet up under me and leap at the man on my right, banging his sword aside with mine and slashing open his throat on the back-swing as I land straddling him. His neck-blood sprays on me, the heat of his life now landing warm on my lips and metallic on my tongue. Another is thinking to backstab me, so I thrust straight backwards over my shoulder without looking, feel in my fingers Chirel’s point get snagged a little on the bridge of his nose, plunge into his eye and crunch through the bone behind it into the brain that had that thought. I wrench it free and leap again, spinning in the air like a leaf carried by a lazy zephyr, and make a line of myself and my sword. On one end a man’s skull cracks as I drive my heel into his temple; on the other I thrust the point of Chirel into the cleft between another man’s chin and throat where the brain-artery runs.

In this moment, I am in love with my life. All is perfect, in this moment, in all of them as they creep sweetly by, controlled entirely by me. It is all effortless; my hands and legs are never unsure even for an instant. The transcendent skill I have is the true essence of myself, inherent in every cell, and linked to every speck of the universe. I draw it from All-Spirit.

It’s said you have to make the enemy less than human in your mind to kill him; not so for me, I can do it even as I look right into his eyes, admire his beauty if he has it, see all his life-cares in his face, know exactly what he is thinking and feel with him what he is feeling. I feel with him the agony of my blade entering him, and the despair of death, and it is all perfect.

By the flow and the structure of life within myself I know exactly where to find the flow and structure of life in him; through the oneness of my own soul and body, I know precisely how to sunder his. I have no plans nor thoughts nor knowledge, but for the pure moment. I am nothing more than that moment and the action I take in it, but that is everything.

My own death flashes on the edges and points of blades near me, teasing, taunting, but laughably slow; reflecting it in the steel of my own blade I lay the Arkans open and see the core of the life in them, naked and erupting, for the one instant you can before it stops, and it calls to the life thrumming in me, heating between my legs.

When they see their death coming, the “No!” in their blue eyes is as huge as one addressed to a God. The edge of my sword, the dividing line between life and death, is God to them; I live as their God, their destiny, and the pleasure of it roars burning through my loins.

This is me. This and nothing but this is my life and myself, at least right now. Oh, I like presiding in Assembly, and I like the time I share with those I love and doing everything else I do. But I am only acting in complete harmony with my full self, my heart of hearts, and the God-in-Me, doing this. When it comes down to it, this is the truest and deepest nature of Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e.

†

Doing such work can cause the return of memories from any time. I had thought Surya had been hinting that I might start remembering being tortured to insanity in Arko, and had more or less shrugged it off, inside.

I had not expected this. I had remembered it only as a vague blur before, never every instant and sensation, like this; I hadn’t thought it possible, since I’d been essentially berserk, until Vaneesh of Roskat had talked me down.

I lay staring at the ceiling of the bedchamber, with Skorsas snoring softly beside me, and Niku’s sleeping breaths a little more distant, twitching with the echoes of it as they rolled through my mind and body. I had awakened smiling, I realized, and my eyes were wet with joy. But now I was awake, I could reflect, and see full meanings.

I have to be out of my mind to think I have asa kraiya in me. There is nothing but death, nothing but destruction, there. It was ingrained too young to be curable.

I like it too much.

There was no answer for me but a sword through my own heart, I saw; nothing else sufficient, and nothing so fitting. The correct sword, Chirel, hung in the training room of the Hearthstone Independent. I slid gently out from between my loves.

At the door I froze, remembering. I swore… I’m seized with the urge, I swore Second Fire come in court I would go to someone instead. This is why the judge had me swear, for this moment, now.

When his family had moved in, Surya had had the builders add something to his door: a brass handle which was attached to a chain inside that led to a bell near his bed, to be rung only in emergency. I stood for a long time with my hand on it, torn between my oath, and my unwillingness to disturb his sleep for so paltry a matter as my life, while the urge to feel Chirel in my own vitals burned in me. I swore, I swore, I swore, I told myself. I finally managed a feeble pull, which felt like half-action, but was enough.

Surya opened the door in a bare moment, wearing only a long bath-marya, and blinking with sleep. “It’s all right, Virani-e,” he said, half-mumbling. “Now you’re here, you’re safe. Come into the healing room.”

Something bristled in me. Safe? As always, I choose. From myself, I am never safe. I’d followed him unthinking, a-e kras, and he’d clicked the healing-room door behind us; now, thinking this, I spun and grabbed the latch, meaning to go. My hand suddenly had no strength. I glanced at him, knew by the intent on his face that he’d somehow caused this, and made to strike him. It was intended as a feint; I’d turn the latch while he was distracted. Instead, next I knew, I was sinking to the floor, with only enough strength in me to keep from going down hard, not enough to get up again. It was like when I’d fallen from exhaustion, but without the pain or panic; I lay amazed, that I could be helpless, my limbs suddenly not mine, and not feel rage, but only an odd kind of peace. I looked up at him and waited, unable to do anything else, and feeling vaguely stupid.

“You’ve been worried that if the death-in-you seizes you entirely you’ll do me violence to keep me from stopping you,” he said, gently. “I’m making two points here. One is that you need not worry about that. The other is that you need not worry about being helpless when you are asa kraiya.”

“You think I can learn whatever it is you just did to me?” I said, from the floor. It wasn’t even so much that I couldn’t rise from it, but more as if I didn’t want to, there being no worthwhile purpose. It reminded me of being on Accedence, but with less of a drugged and more of a reasoned-out-of-it feeling.

“Of course; it’s just knowledge. That can be learned by anyone who is asa kraiya, which you are; you just don’t know this yet.” He gave me a hand up just as if we were sparring-partners on the training ground, his hand seeming to have my strength and will to rise in it, so that it flowed back into me, and I felt as if it had never been gone. I got docilely onto the table, and he took my head between his hands.

“I dreamed of the fight I had on the way to the peace talks with Kurkas, in Roskat, when the Arkans backstabbed my whole escort,” I said. I recounted it in as much detail as I have written it.

“What do you think you need?” I was the senior healing student again, with myself as the case study. I was still panting, I noticed, so I answered, “The Haian exercise in which you breathe very fast then gradually slow it down to the minimum.”

“Good,” he said, and we did it, and when I’d stayed in the slow state long enough for at least most of me to be calm, he asked, “What now?”

Sometime between sessions, almost in an absent moment, I had told myself, ‘When you can think of no clear answer to Surya’s quizzing, just say tenar menhu; that’s fairly safe.’ It was very hard to say, though.

“You’re locking down very hard on your own sexual feeling,” he said, almost before he touched me. I hadn’t thought I was, but now I knew it. “Why?”

“After what I just told you, you’re asking?”

“Because the dream took you back to the sexual pleasure of fighting, you despise your sexual aspect entirely, at least right now.” I signed chalk. “Virani-e… you’d hardly be the first who is a different person on the battlefield than off it. What warrior is that not true for?”

“Maybe this was an extra goad, not that I needed one, towards going asa kraiya,” I said. And yet I was split again, with asa kraiya seeming a thousand days’ journey away. Tears again; I could fill a lake with all that I have shed since I started with Surya, I thought.

“So that you will never again be able to indulge what you feel is evil in you,” he said, “but only lock it away in the dungeon of your being forever.” It didn’t sound like he was recommending this.

“Right,” I said. “So tell me how that’s wrong.”

“Well, aside from why would you want a dungeon in your being… tell me: what is the message of the sexual urge? If the feeling could speak, what would it say?”

I thought I’d have a long struggle for the answer, against whatever in me was locking down, but I opened my mouth and it was there. “I live.”

“Exactly. I live—so much I can bring new life. The sexual pleasure we have in the throes of our own death is saying the same, a protest against it: I still live. The joy of victory is the joy of survival; that divine power of life and death over the enemy you have, you take pleasure in because it keeps him from having the same divine power of life and death over you.”

“Just as behind anger is always fear,” I said, “and behind power-lust is always helplessness, or a feeling of it, at least.” All-Spirit, I thought, maybe I do know something. On the field I am Chevenga, elsewhere I am Virani-e; that had always been true, even when I was known only by the one name. I saw that clearly for the first time ever.

“Right. The cry from the loins is always the same, always, I live. You see why I did as I did in the first session, and why we’ve done so much tenar menhu?”

I did. It all unfurled out behind me, clear in its wholeness like a tapestry of which you’ve only seen one thread before. I could barely speak, for wonder. “It… this was… my only chance, my only pathway, to life.”

He said no more; words were not necessary. I flew on the wings of it, when he brought me to that, full-voiced and wordless like a bird.

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