174 - I was a glacier

It is lucky, I thought, that I knew nothing of Niku’s doubt that I truly loved her when we were the Mezem. I would have worried that she thought I was feigning it so as to escape from Arko. Maybe it’s just as well that her bid to free me failed… yet, if I had thought she thought me false, it would never even have got to that. I’d have spurned her—who can live with that?—and never learned about the moyawa, or had the Aniah as allies in the war. Those who do not believe in love have cynical minds… do these thoughts make me such a person?

And yet, if you were to judge by Niku’s words and actions the better part of the time, you would never imagine she had the slightest doubt that I loved her with all my heart. During those times, I was certain of that trust, so that the times when she lost it always baffled me. It was as if she held two mutually-exclusive beliefs at once. I reminded myself that I had once been certain I would not, and determined I would, sack a great city, both at the same time. But I’d had reason to want to; what reason had she to distrust my love?

I had learned something from the Committee. The answers were in her family and what they had taught her from childhood—unless there was something from a past life, but the chances of that were small, by what Surya said about death being a healer.

I knew her father, who she had always said was very gentle and kind, had been killed by Arkans when she was fourteen or so—in that way she and I were alike—and her mother had lost the use of her legs forever in the same battle. She’d been two years on Haiu Menshir, with Niku taking care of her. Tanra had always struck me as gruff and demanding, but no more so than, say, Esora-e, and one had to take her handicap into account.

Niku had an older brother who was a trader; he’d always struck me as aloof, but I hadn’t heard they got along any worse than, say, Artira and me. Niku felt she’d lived under his shadow, as Artira had felt about me, though I wasn’t sure why, when he had never been more prominent among Aniah than she was, and now must be much less so; she also said that if she needed him he was always there.

Then again, I thought, is my own family the best exemplar, when its raising of me must be studied by a Committee of Assembly? One shadow-ancestor had done the worst evil, I now knew. There is no perfect family, of course; but the families in Yeola-e—or anywhere, in truth—which have seen the like must be vanishingly rare.

Yet when I thought about it, there were as many silences about Niku’s family as there were fond memories. When I’d been away from my mother, I’d written her at least as often as my closest friends; Niku wrote her friends much more. She never wrote her brother, or any other relatives; she’d ask her mother to pass on greetings.

She would take it to Surya, she decided, as we lay in the glow of satiety.

I would tell Skorsas, I decided, after dinner. What is his family truly like? He wrote his mother all the time. His father had reduced himself to imbecility with Arkanherb and wasted their fortunes, of course, which was how his son had ended up whoring first and in the Mezem next. But he only doubted my love when I was not giving it, I thought. As soon as I did, he was in perfect happiness, never doubting whether it was true or deserved in the five unbroken years he’s had it, as far as I can tell.

There always was a purity about him, and it was never just his looks. Once you learn the ways he dissembles that are common to Arkans, because they are taught them as civility, there is no dissembling with him; except perhaps in the matter of the importance of appearances, he neither fools himself nor anyone else. He loves doing all he does, and does nothing he does not love doing.

He had once said to me, “I am not like you, Chevenga. I am a very simple person, when it comes down to it.” I understood now what he meant, more than I ever had before. I was a glacier, full of cracks to my very depths, hidden until you came upon them; he was Arkan glass, not riven within at all. “I know what I want, I learn what I must do to get it, and I do that,” he said. When I imagined thinking that way for myself, chasms opened at and between every step. And yet what I had done for Yeola-e in the war, many had thought impossible.

After dinner, he knew without my saying that there was something on my mind, more than usual. While I was telling, he took me into his arms wordlessly, just as I was struggling to get the words out about being able to accept love only while holding in my mind I would die young.

“You feel like you don’t deserve love unless you pay for it that way,” he whispered. He was holding me too close for me to see his face, but I felt in his arms the sense of longstanding questions answered. “A lot of people think they have to pay for love. With their hearts, their souls... their freedom…”

“I didn’t know I was thinking it until Surya showed it to me. But I know you don’t want me dead in a year; I know that.”

“So will you accept it from me now?” he asked me, his blue eyes as perfect in their clarity as a cloudless sky.

I tightened my arms around him, and said, “Yes.” What I had declared before I knew it was true had come true before. “I’m sorry, love. I’m sorry I never have before.”

“You don’t have to apologize, Jewel of the World.” He drew my head onto his shoulder with a gentle press of his hand, his fingers tangled in my curls.

“The Mezem was the last place in the world I imagined I would—or wanted to—fall in love with anyone. So of course I went and fell in love with two. If Kallijas’s dad had let him be there, maybe I’d have fallen in love with three.”

“But with him it was that much more peaceful venue,” Skorsas said. “A duel in a war. You can try to flee love all you like, Fourth Chevenga, but it’s going to find you, because you give it out so freely. Even locked in death-match. Only a handful of Arkans saw it.”

“But my loves still had to catch me, same as...” I crossed my wrists, as if they were bound together.

He took one in each hand, kissed the insides of each, over the veins where the skin is tender, and gently pulled them apart.

“You want me to be free, I know,” I said, tears catching my voice. “You always did, even if that meant I was gone away from you.”

“Yes. Thank my noblest of Gods that He brought Surya to you, so you will be free.” Skorsas fixed his eyes with mine. “Chevenga, I want to make love to you, untainted with that. Will you allow it?”

“I give myself to you.” What else was there to say, even if the chasms sent up their whispers of terror? “I hope it doesn’t kill me; I told Niku, and she did the same, before dinner. And”—I couldn’t help but laugh at my own words—“did you think you’d ever hear this? I’m not as young as I was.”

He laughed hard. “I will do my best not to kill you. That would defeat the whole purpose, wouldn’t it?”

“It would make the Committee’s work completely pointless. We can’t have that.”

When he was done laughing, he kissed me butterfly-delicate on my temple, just on the hairline. I closed my eyes, and he slipped his hands inside my shirt, and fingered my nipples just as delicately, once. I threw my head back, gasping. “You need pay nothing for this, Cheve—Virani-e,” he whispered. “No price, no bonds. No chains.” Then he joined his mouth to mine, and we were done with words, except for his whispering, now and then, “I want you to live forever.”

It was not as shattering as the night after my fiftieth fight, but that had been fraught with grief and fear. Without desperation, it was sweet almost beyond bearing. I wept some of the time, which he took without alarm, knowing that it was the weeping of relief.

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