171 - Can life really be so easy?

Hold on, wait, slow down, it’s going too fast, I don’t know that I can do this… when does a run down a mountain slope, always a controlled fall, turn into an uncontrolled fall, with stopping no longer a choice, and your frantic steps only keeping you on the bare sword-edge of staying alive?

“Surya, that’s how I feel.” I know what he will say. That’s all right. Everything is going as it should.

“That’s all right,” he said gently. “Everything is going as it should, even if it does feel like you’ve gone from running to falling.” You haven’t lived until you’ve been several aer a day with someone who can read your every thought and emotion.

“All right, talk healing, then,” he said. Oh shit… “I never congratulated you, Champion of the People, so—congratulations. To tell the truth, I think you should have got Saviour, no less than those who fought the War of the Travesty. Our danger was no less, and your effort was far more… Why does it bother you, Virani-e? What is in that?”

Unlike many other topics we spoke of, this one I had thought about. “I don’t know,” I said. “If I imagine myself outside it, seeing someone else do what I did, I would think he deserved it. And think it unjust if he never received it. Why I cannot think the same for myself, I have no idea.”

“What is in that not thinking the same? Put it into words.”

I took a deep breath. “It’s… well, I didn’t do it for that. What I did accomplished what it did, and that was enough. I don’t know… Maybe it’s that I am asa kraiya, and cannot feel I deserve commendation for bloodshed.” My Younger Riji scars should not itch by now, but one of them did, suddenly fiery.

“I didn’t give any of my decorations back when I gave up the sword, nor did your mother or Azaila,” he said. “Or any other asakraiyaseye. It’s not as if the benefit to Yeola-e that came of our deeds was undone.”

“From what some of the warriors are saying, everything I’ve done will be undone, and Arko down our necks again tomorrow,” I said.

“And in some part you feel they are right?” That brought me up short. I had thought I was making fun; now I knew there’d been too much sincerity under that.

“It’s… it’s as if it’s somehow a crime. I don’ t know why I still feel that, when the crime I did commit I took a flogging for, and so it’s done with. Well… at least until Assembly votes.”

“Being commended, a crime?”

“I told you, Surya; I don’t understand it. What do you want here? For me to enumerate the explanations for my squirming that have been posited, perhaps with dates from the Committee transcripts? For me to see something I don’t see, know something I don’t know?” It’s fear making me short with him, I thought.

“No, no. I want you to squirm. Chiravesa, Virani-e: imagine yourself on the dais in Terera Square—I’m sure they’ll do it there—hearing the speeches singing your praises, hearing the cheer of the crowd… you are going to have to accept it with more panache that you’re showing now, hiding your head under that cushion, so it’s just as well you rehearse in your mind.” Alas, I couldn’t entirely muffle his voice. “Someone will tell the story… be right in it, Chevenga. Be right there. Now what is in it?”

It was like a darkness, a curse; as if something were hanging over me, like a blade about to fall, or some unnamed shape, to come down on me and grind me into the earth. “And do what to you then?” he asked, when I’d described it. Destroy me… it feels like the whole weight of Yeola-e… “Surya, this is insane!” I yelled, leaping out of the cushioned chair and the chiravesa, both. “This is all insane! I am completely out of my head! The Committee’s going to destroy me!”

“Mm-hmm,” he said. “Yeola-e commends you, Yeola-e destroys you.”

“I told you it was insane. Surya…” All the strength seemed to go out of me; I let myself sit down hard on the chair and buried my face in my hands. “Surya, are you sure there is cure for me? Are you sure I’m not hopeless? Because if that’s the case… the solution is very easy…”

“Too easy,” he said. “You decided against that back in Arko, remember? Don’t lose sight of that.”

I closed my eyes. Dying seemed less trouble.

“A refuge,” he said. Sometimes his voice and my thoughts weren’t entirely distinguishable. “Be with that, Virani-e. Death has seemed a refuge to you, at times, yes?”

I lay my head on the arm of the chair and wept. “Refuge… friend…” I whispered. “You know the Aniah call Death ‘Lord Friend’? I never wondered why. I always felt…” Like Azaila, he’d accept no less than truth. “Closeness. As if in a way I owned him. Something no one else could understand… that I was entirely alone with… He was precious to me. I know how irredeemably mad this all is.”

“I hear shame of shame here,” he said. “You remember how I warned you. It is not as mad as it seems, much less irredeemable. You have what seems like an impassable stone wall before you on your path, right now. Not only can it be gone, Virani-e, but it will be. You find that hard to believe, I would think—and frightening, too? Imagine it gone.”

It was like the ultimate nakedness, far beyond the finding-yourself-armourless-mid-battle dream that warriors often get, a nakedness as if I had no skin, let alone clothing. Or no body, so that my soul was naked, with no ground beneath my feet. “Frightening, yes,” I croaked.

“All these things you can bear, all these things you have the strength to deal with,” he said, as certainly as he ever said anything. “Trust me, if right now you cannot trust yourself. You have trusted me all along.”

“Perhaps that was madness, too,” I said between my teeth.

He chuckled. “Perhaps. But you chose it, and swore, so you are stuck with it, at least until you can choose to choose it. And understand what I mean by that.”

“Tomorrow, I’m sure,” I said. “About the same time I learn how to do brain surgery.”

“You veer away from it,” he said. Over time he’d got more strict about that. “A refuge, you were saying; go back into it. Do you really think you are alone, holding that choice in your heart in your darkest times? You think no one else has ever taken that on as a possible tactic?”

My surprise showed me I had indeed thought that. “I never knew anyone else… that I knew of. Of course, who in his right mind would admit it?”

“None, because no one wants to be considered insane,” he said. “But in the direst of circumstances, it is merely what it was, and what you know it was, Virani-e: a way of bearing them. In the ultimate pain and helplessness, we can cherish death as a possible means of relief, and choice, and thus alleviate our own pain and sense of helplessness. Yes?” I signed chalk, eyes closed again. “All it is is a stratagem. Nothing dark or evil or insane or horrific. Just a stratagem.”

“I had it—” My tongue locked up. He just waited patiently, while I claimed back the power of speech with deep breaths. It took longer than usual. “I had it… taken from me. In Arko. That was…” Deep breath, deep breath, deep breath. “The worst.” I had never known that before. I curled in horror in the chair, wept voicelessly for a while as he held my shoulder. “But,” I said when I could, “I took it back again… when I healed. All the world knows.”

“You are unusual in how public your affinity with death is, Virani-e,” Surya said. “You are not so unusual in having it.”

I was suddenly reminded of my shadow-grandmother. Witnessing her mother’s death at the hands of her father, she took on death as being in her blood. It came down the generations and I inherited it, bloodlessly: shadow-wise. My own thought stunned me. Where was my mind going? But I sensed that if I asked Surya, he would say this was right, and that I only didn’t understand how it had happened because I was inside it.

“So let me ask,” I said. “Do the Haians know how many Yeolis—or other people—have an… affinity… with death, as they know how many are stream-tested? Have they been following that for millennia as well?”

“No,” he said. “Because it is not so straightforward, not something that patients just answer yes or no. But… well, you read the transcript of Tamenat’s questioning, yes? It is common enough that it can be studied.”

“I… had pretensions, perhaps,” I said, remembering Tamenat’s discourse, on this and that reason that people kill themselves. “That it was something more grand and elegant than just a common suicide.”

“Since common suicides are so contemptible, yes,” he said. “Virani-e, remember you realized that you wanted neither to love nor hate yourself for your fighting ability, but have equanimity? This is the same. It is neither elegant nor contemptible.”

I took a deep breath. Neither elegant nor contemptible; neither love nor hate; can life really be so easy, as not to hold these things?

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