176 - The tears of pure fear

Warriorhood is a rhythm that thrums inside you, a quality in your limbs that bespeaks the fastest motion, a sense in your skin of the constant nearness of steel, the instant availability of the killing choice in your heart. How was it that I was feeling it more clearly than ever before now, when I was asa kraiya?

The next morning as dawn was faintly greying the sky, I had another flash of certainty that I would live long, and then felt the death-in-me seep over it, changing it back to the grind of limit I had always known.

Destruction lived all through me, in its various modes, as it always had; what I was torn between was the habitual numbness and the new horror. They shimmered dark and light by turns within me.

It’s all more clear than ever before, I thought, because I have attained that.

“I’m fine,” I whispered to Skorsas, who had seen something on my face, by the way he caressed my hair. I’m shattered. It’s going too fast. My asa kraiya ceremony was eleven days away. I’m not ready. I knew Surya would tell me, “Yes, you are.”

“You haven’t spoken to your mother?” he asked, when we were in the sponge-lined room.

“I think telling her that I have never accepted love whole-heartedly would hurt her. It’s something she can’t undo, so, why? Yet…” I felt my brows knit. Was I feeling even such things more clearly? Or were my brows just knit less often these days, so that when they were I noticed it more? “I must have accepted her love entirely once; she’s my mother.”

“Ask yourself when you stopped accepting her love except that you’d die young,” he said. “Turn face down.” He slid the towel under my hips, a very bad sign.

“I… you know, Surya, you can confirm or disprove it in my aura, but I think I never did. When I was growing up, she was the one person I could speak to about it.”

I felt the aura-seeing gaze without seeing it, as if my aura could feel. “It’s true enough,” he said. “Deep breath, make the white line. Breathe deep, breathe whole, breathe flowing, and make it very solid.” He touched the back of my neck, and gripped the hilt of the sword with his thumb and forefinger grip. I felt its whole length right away. I breathed, fighting to keep it from being gasps, until I was steadied down at least to some degree. Then his other hand slid under my hip and took my manhood.

“Aigh kahara mamaiyana no! Not this! Not this!” I’d screamed out the words before I knew it, and whipped away from his upper hand at least, and the sword was gone. “No, Surya, I can’t, I can’t, it’ll kill me, I can’t!”

“No, it won’t. You are ready. I can see it plain. I can see plain also how you feel you aren’t. You’ve lost the line of white light; make it again. Breathe, you know how.”

Fear was like a wall. “I can’t. I can’t… I can’t, Surya…”

“As part of your asa kraiya ceremony,” he said, “I’m going to do what I’ve been saying all along: take hold of the sword, and draw it out of you when you let go of it. That’s reality, Virani-e. It’s the reality of your choice, that you made so many months ago, back in Arko—to live. You have to accept it. If you want to live, which I know you do, you have to accept it. That’s what I’m going to ask you to accept in this tenar menhu—that this is going to happen.”

“I don’t know how…” I wept the tears of pure fear that a child, or a coward, weeps.

“That’s why I’m telling you how. One step at a time, just think of each as it goes, and you’ll do it. Haven’t you figured that out yet?” I had to laugh, albeit weakly. “Make the line of white light. Breathe deeply and flowing.” I did again, and he waited until I had it very solid and bright, and then, very delicately, made me feel the sword. By keeping my breathing steady with all my will, I learned how to endure both at once.

“If I had done this at the start, you couldn’t have borne it,” he said. “You’d have been so shocked your heart would have stopped in your chest and you’d have died right there on my table. Am I right?”

“Oh, yes.” I wasn’t certain it wasn’t going to happen now.

“Then know your progress. You have learned and grown and broken through the walls and vanquished the monsters… you have been astonishingly brave and strong, as we often are being when we feel most afraid and weak. You aren’t done yet, there’s one monster yet to vanquish, but you’re done with all but the one, and I have great confidence that you will win there too.”

“The hardest one,” I whispered. It wasn’t a question. I knew.

“The last is always hardest, the hardest always last.”

“What is it?”

“I can’t tell you… not because I’m holding out; I can’t explain it. I could put it into words, but they’d tell you nothing. They wouldn’t help your fear. Just trust that I know you’re ready. I can tell you when, roughly, because it will happen before your asa kraiya ceremony. Sometime in the next few days.”

“I can’t wait.” He laughed, sending the faintest of ripples into both hands, that I felt like a tender earthquake across my soul. “Relax, Virani-e. I’m going to keep you here a while. Just breathe in acceptance, of both.”

I felt every instant that this tenar menhu would kill me, but it didn’t.

†

It was eight days from the ceremony. “Short session today,” Surya said. “Just about one thing I want to tell you. You didn’t need to go asa kraiya to live past thirty.”

I remember, very clearly, the pattern of the two-man-loomed material on the arm of the cushioned chair, many-coloured flowers on green, as if against grass. It is etched in my mind as with acid on glass. I remember my throat closing up, suddenly strangled with dryness. All I could get out was, “Wha-a-a-at?”

“You don’t have to go asa kraiya to live past thirty. You don’t have to do any particular thing to cease believing you deserve to die at thirty, except cease believing you deserve to die at thirty.”

I remember both my hands going white on the chair-arms, while a distant part of me thought, “If I grip them too hard I’ll break them.” My tongue tried to work through phlegm that felt like glue. The words came out barely more than a whisper, between tearing breaths. “But… but you said… you said, first session you said… lay down the sword or die, go asa kraiya or die… those were my choices… you said…”

“I was lying,” he said. Now the room was spinning; I closed my eyes, and, when that made my gorge come up hard, opened them again. “It was a necessary lie—a life-saving lie. Tell me true, Virani-e: if I had said that you could be cured of it, that you could live, without making such a great change and huge sacrifice, would you have believed me?”

His words had come to me in waves, and now my answer sounded the same to my own ears. “No.”

“You’d never have come back for another session, and things would have gone as they would have gone.”

I could not speak, gasping for air as if I were drowning. “Put your head back, relax all over and make the white line,” he commanded. It took him three more times, and taking my head between his hands, to get me to even start.

“But… the sword in me… getting hacked up by little Riji because I could not touch him… everything I’ve gone through… the ceremony, for the love of All-Spirit, it’s set, the invitations are out, all the guests have made their arrangements, all the writers know…”

“You could still call it off,” he said. “Few of them will have begun traveling here yet; even if they have, it’s still something you can change your mind about, right up until the ceremony is done. Some people change their minds during the ceremony. If you called it off, all those military people who’ve been giving you such grief for doing it would be ecstatic.”

“Surya!” My world had gone mad. “Aaaiiiiigggghhh!”

“The question is, do you want to?” he asked me. I froze. “What did your father say? As always, you choose. That is how asa kraiya truly is and should be—not a requirement for some other benefit, but freely chosen. Here’s the thing you need to understand, which I think you’re ready to, now: you are set free now in two ways you didn’t know—to live past thirty without any condition, and to go asa kraiya because you want to.”

All I understood right then was that I wanted to strangle him. I settled for leaping off the chair and pacing back and forth, alternately pulling at my hair and striking the air, and letting out full-throated screams. “I know,” he said gently, in the pause I took to draw breath. “It’s more freedom than you’re used to. And yes, I did lie to you, so the truth is a shock. But it’s your reality, as it is everyone’s. Breathe in acceptance.”

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