172 - Love without the condition

It occurred to me as I lay awake before dawn that that I had not spoken true, saying I knew no one who’d been drawn to death as a refuge. Krero had been at least leaning that way; in fact he’d been setting up to make me his killer, in punishment for his part in my impeachment. I had cured him of it, by a method that Haians would most certainly not approve, since it involved the breaking of fingers. Too bad I didn’t know tenar menhu back then, I thought. That would have been more humane.

I fell asleep again and dreamed that the Committee called me in again, and decided that I was not open enough to them so they must open me sexually. They stripped me, laid me face up across the oaken table, had me clasp my arms behind my back so I was pinning myself, and arch my head back off the edge. Omonae took me like a woman, thrusting very deep and hard; I had to open my mouth for Linasika’s manhood, and bring him to ecstasy while he gripped me around the throat, pressing here and there on the various death-points; other hands, I knew not whose, seized my manhood and my nipples. Needless to say, it was all official, with Lanai presiding as usual; they spoke formally and in turn, passing the crystal, and voted on everything they did, while the scribe dutifully recorded.

Skorsas and Niku could tell I’d had a sexual dream, of course. I thought I might get some sympathy when I described it, but they couldn’t stop laughing.

I went to Surya’s healing room after eating. A thousand times blessed is the patient with such a healer. You can think he has turned over every stone, you’ve weathered it all and all is well; then he turns over the one you so didn’t want him to find that you forgot it was there.

I’ve never written about it before, and but for the scrivener’s oath I wouldn’t. Still, it’s not much of a secret in warrior-circles in Yeola-e that, let’s say, I have a certain sexual predilection for helplessness, for giving passionate physical expression to semana kra.

Of course Surya didn’t ask about this. Instead he caused my body to demonstrate it on his table, without a word, after which I turned as much of myself away from him as I could, in shame.

“You remember that I never judge, nor tell, and that this is something I’ve known from the first session, don’t you?” he said. Of course he’d have seen it in my aura, like everything else. No doubt it fit with everything else in some perverse way; the horror I faced today, probably, was finding out how. “There is nothing that you feel that is not natural,” he said, as if reading my mind, “nothing that doesn’t arise out of what you hae lived, somehow.”

He tried a number of things. It’s amazing what you learn, doing deep healing. I’d had no idea, for instance, that having one’s breath cut off almost to senselessness will intensify pleasure for anyone; it’s some sort of bodily function, and now and then people who’ve taken it too far by accident are mistaken for suicides when their corpses are found. I have to say, now I have found out some of what they know, that Haians will never seem innocent to me again.

I’d never thought much about why it pleased me to be helpless, I realized, when he asked me. I’d always guessed it was, as I wrote above, another aspect of semana kra; as well, a friend in the war whom I will call only Rao once said something else that rang true, that being in a position of such power and responsibility, I yearned for respite from it, of the most complete kind.

“Mm-hmm,” said Surya, when I told him these things. “They are part, but they’re not the main.” He got me thoroughly into position, and said, “Feel. What is in it?”

Aside from wishing I could be in the very centre of Arkan Hayel if it meant I didn’t have to be here, which I told him emphatically and repeatedly, I couldn’t find words to describe what I felt. There was some sense of limitation, of restriction, being somehow necessary. When I gave up, he laid his hand on my shoulder and had me breathe deeply for a while before he even began to explain, which I found very ominous.

“What is sex?” he said. “What does it mean, when someone makes love to you? It is the purest, most direct, expression of love for you… the sincerest manifestation of another person’s wish for your happiness… yes?”

“Yes,” I said, and it was if some sort of crashing started to sound around my head, while inwardly I heard myself say oh shit oh shit oh shit, over and over. He was going to tell me something I would know was true the moment he said it, and would be so terrible that I would wish it was unbearable so that it would kill me.

“Deep breaths,” he said. “Make the white light, from here to here.” It was a thread of burning, a frozen lightning bolt in the centre of the fear. He took my head between his hands, one under, one across my brow. “You cannot accept love,” he said, “without a condition on it that you’ve laid yourself—a limit that you require of yourself. You cannot let people love you without thinking, ‘I deserve it only because I am going to die young.’”

I threw my hands over my face. The crashing with was deafening; the room spun. “So you cannot fully feel the pleasure of love given you, without feeling a reminder of the limitation.” No, no, no, no, no… inside my mind I screamed, the sound of denial dying. I wanted to fling myself off the table; I wanted to fling myself off a cliff. All-Spirit please don’t let this be so, I begged, even as I knew it was.

“Breathe. Keep the white light strong. You learned this in a talk we had with Niku; but you’ve forgotten it. It happens, with anything very severe. You are taking it deeper now; that’s why you feel as you do. Breathe, Virani-e, keep the white strong, stay with me.” Even with him holding my head, I barely hung onto my senses, while he spoke.

“Ask yourself how far back it goes.” Seven. I couldn’t speak; but he saw the answers in my aura. From then on.

“Ask yourself, whose love.” Everyone’s. My spouses, my family, my friends, my warriors, my people, all who love me even slightly. I gasped in air, to stay conscious. “Don’t fight, just breathe, and relax all over. When you can, tell me what you feel.”

“So much love I’ve been given,” I rasped, when I could. “And all of it, I’ve slung back in their teeth, as if it were worth nothing! I thought I knew how to love! I thought that part of me was sane!”

“Breathe. You do know how to give love. You don’t know how to take it—not freely. Not without etching again in your mind, each time, ‘I may, because I will die.’ Breathe, Virani-e.”

“Surya, that’s crazy, that’s so fikken crazy—I’m crazier than anyone can help! I’ll never get out of this! I should just kill myself and be done!” My body itched and tingled, waves of it running all over, while the desire for death burned.

“You are getting out of it. That’s what you’re doing right now, by seeing it. I wouldn’t have raised this if I couldn’t see in your aura that you are ready for it, even if you don’t feel as if you are. Breathe, Virani-e.”

I breathed; then the tears came. He stopped speaking for a while, just kept his touch on me, while I thrashed and screamed.

“Let me guess,” I whispered, when I could. “This is my reality… this horror… so I have to accept it… so you are going to do tenar menhu on me.”

“No, no. Harder. That would just be more of the same. Your reality… tell me, if you love someone, if you take pleasure in their presence, do you want that to continue, or to end?”

“Continue, of course.”

“So how is it for those who love you?”

I took a deeper breath even than the deep breaths I was already taking. This was such madness I was ashamed even to correct it. He waited, pointedly. “They want me to live,” I whispered.

“Right. That’s your reality, which you must accept. It’s thinking that you can only be loved if you are doomed that is the delusion. The vast majority of people didn’t even know, until recently, that you were going to die young—and they still loved you. Tell me—you remember the chiravesa I had you do, imagine if Mana-lai Chereda—”

“They’d be horrified, and mortified, and appalled… I know, I know, I know.”

“But you need to accept it all the way down… accept love without the condition.”

He laid his hand on me again, and I knew what he would do, and it was just like after I’d been brained, the room turning end over end. “I love you, Virani-e… not the let’s-live-and-sleep-together kind of love, of course, but as a healer and a friend and a citizen. I give it to you in the context of healing, for healing purposes, but it is still an expression of love. I give it to you now on behalf of everyone who loves you, of everyone who wishes you well. There is no condition on it. None of us love you only if you die. That’s your reality… breathe in acceptance. I want you to take it without the condition, for the first time in your life.”

“I feel as if that will kill me,” I whispered.

“It won’t,” he said. “What it will do is transform you. The part of us that resists transformation fears transformation like death, because that part, with its fear, does indeed die, as I said at the start. But that is what you chose, and came to me to help you with. Don’t fight it; let it in. You relinquished your will and that’s an order.”

“A-e kras,” I breathed.

He made the streak of pleasure up my centre grow. “I do this to you, and am willing to, whether you live to thirty or to a hundred and thirty. That is your reality; breathe in acceptance of it.”

I am committing a crime. I am doing evil. I am evil. I clenched shut my eyes, and wept again, a wordless begging for mercy. He didn’t relent. “Breathe in acceptance. What you need to understand—the hardest thing to understand—is how easy everything should be, in truth. What you cling to so hard that it feels like you are locked in death-battle is refusing to see that all you need to do is let go. You refuse even to comprehend these words; that’s all right. Once you’ve passed through what you must you will look back on them and they will make perfect sense, and confirm the experience. Virani-e, you need do nothing. You need only relax and feel and breathe in acceptance.”

All who have gone down this road, on which there is no turning back, know how it is. I would change, entirely. That was etched in stone. What I would change into I had no idea. That meant, in a sense, total freedom. I was naked in that.

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