180 - Peace awaits you

I stayed away from the bedchambers, where he, Shaina, Etana and Niku had tucked their children into bed and kissed them good night a little earlier. I was the one who was assigned to him right now; their first question to me would be why wasn’t he with me, and their second, where was he? The thing that people usually think of last—that a person has come to grief by his own hand—would be the thing they’d think of first. How could I tell them, ‘He went to kill himself but I let him go because I trust him not to’? If one of them came toward me, I decided, I’d duck into an alcove.

His office was more suffused with the aura of his touch than anywhere else. Here the glow-globes cast a light that was the colour of flame, but softer. I knew the bookshelves, their doors made of beveled Arkan glass, held every war-craft book ever published; I wondered whether he’d planned to donate them all to the Circle School when he went asa kraiya. He said he didn’t have time to write a note… so why am I looking? Maybe he’d just meant to throw me off, and there was one, intended for someone else. Or perhaps I was looking for something else.

On the oaken desk, the battered ebon lap-desk with the brass corners dented here and there—he’d carried it with him all through the Arkan war and two terms as Imperator—sat closed. Papers lay all over, some handwritten, some machine-written, some Enchian, some Yeoli, some Arkan; everywhere was his fast firm athali scrawl, not only in black but here and there in red, blue and green; were the different colours random, or did they have some meaning? A book lay open right in front of his chair: something of significance? No, just an Arkan-Yeoli/Yeoli-Arkan dictionary. His map-globe, with the known world painted on it, and the unknown side shadowed in darkness, stood on a corner of the desk. Around one of the glow-globes stood a half-circle of beautifully-wrought porcelain statues, of his children—Lakan-style, they had real hair, donated by the children themselves.

Atop a stack of four books I saw an Enchian edition of The Yeoli Ritual Immersion: Origins, History, Incidence and Sequelae, by Meninder of Haiuroru University; the other three were also works by Haians about the stream-test. He was studying it. A medicine-box in the Haian style stood open; I saw the transparent glow of the medicines, each with its different hue, radiating from the tops of the vials. Had he somehow worsened his moment of truth by taking something?

To the inside of the lid was strapped a leather-bound booklet, entitled, in Yeoli, Manual of Home Medicine Use; the cover was inscribed, “For Chevenga, on the occasion of your birthday, Y. 1554; in health, Kaninjer.” Something made me untie the strap, and open the booklet. It was annotated all through in his hand. “K says unfailing on colds that start with sneezing.” —“K says stomach worse also with eating onions.” —“K says take one at the thirtieth hundred-potency before single-wing-flight, and no airsickness.” —“K says theme: ‘wants to but cannot’.”

How can you think you are not a healer?

A bead in the clock on the desk clicked. It was ten and a half beads, by the noon to noon way of reading an Arkan clock. He’d left around the ninth. The more time went by, the higher the odds were that I was wrong. The storm was gone, but sleet pattered on the glass of the office skylights; he’d been wearing only a shirt and a kilt, no cloak even. Even if he can’t find it in himself to turn the sword on himself or leap off a cliff, he could still freeze to death… or become dazed by the cold and step off a cliff without meaning to… Most likely he was kneeling warrior-style on a ledge somewhere, holding the sword-edge to his throat, trying to make the final argument to himself.

A paper caught my eye, by how the lines mostly fell short of one margin, leaving more of it white than usual.

To: Fourth

From: Fourth

a 63 1556

Ilesias, I am no writer, unless you count political correspondence, draft laws and that sort of thing, or putting my rambling tales to ink, which anyone can do. To get any good at it I’d have to practice more than I have time for. (In the day, I mean. Always I have to clarify such words, now.)

I’ll say, though, that I recently did find myself wanting to describe something I remember feeling—you know how it is—to pin a moment in time so that it is captured forever, like a flying insect in amber, so that you can always live it again by reading the words back. So—my first attempt at poetry. Please be merciful and forgive the flaws, but point them out so I can correct them.

We turn our faces into the wind

Your brown sword-hand and my pale shield-hand tender on the bar

Our other arms clasping each other.

Naked as birds we run off the edge giggling,

the trees beneath us turquoise with haze,

a hawk circling a hundred man-heights below.

When you taught me, you said feel;

You no longer have just arms and legs, you have wings.

The frame is your bones, the silk your skin;

feel through it what the wind and the pull of the Earthsphere

are whispering to you.

Move with all of you but nothing of you,

Embrace the void, slice the liquid and be borne by the solid

which are the substance of the sky, all at once.

Then together we learned to be in such harmony,

that we could make two hands of different hues on the bar

Into one pair of hands.

The sky is a blacker blue than you see even from mountain-peaks,

the clouds bright against their shadows on faint land;

we take a shock as icy as a mountain stream as we leave the tower of warm air that lifted us;

our breathlessness is not only from joy.

Can we do this?

Do we know each other so well?

We have both seen people die trying it, singly.

One tumbling tail over tip, jewel-bright wings as helpless as a cast stone;

another spun so fast we all knew she could no longer think when she hit ground,

though she could no doubt fear.

You say: omores, the only risk is half-action. Neither of us is known for that.

We close our eyes and kiss,

in case always and forever as long as we have

ends here.

We pull hard and dive like an eagle spying prey.

Wind thrums past the wires, hisses through the silk, beats our faces and clenched bodies.

Without a word, we uncurl, reach and arch backwards as one.

Now the sun shines up from beneath, caressing your womanhood and my manhood and all our war-scars.

Now above our heads and the wing are the shadowed stone low-reliefs that are Hetharin and Haranin, the sapphire of Terera Lake, the specks of Hearthstones and Assembly Palace.

For the most perfect and deadly moment, we are a cloud, a feather, a ghost, as empty of weight as the void in which we float—

then we find the substance of the sky liquid and then solid again, catching us hard by wing and harness.

We both would die happy, if it we died this way, but for now

we live.

Your friend always,

Virani-e, called Chevenga.

It’s to Ilesias Mahid; Fourth Ilesias, that’s his Mahid number, hence Fourth to Fourth. Dated yesterday; did he write the poem then, or earlier? There were no corrections; either he’d copied it from another draft, or it had come from his mind onto the paper perfect enough to satisfy him. Why isn’t it sent? It was as if he’d simply been interrupted in what he was doing, by the resurgence of the death-in-him.

Or else—this had been the start of the lethal chain of thoughts. Their marriage has become delicate enough that he signed consideration on their certificate, and I haven’t let him hold the bar while flying for the better part of a year.

No. I reminded myself: he was in his moment of truth, the last battle. Most people who fail it turn off the path and just stay trapped in whatever they’re trapped in, and the healer simply doesn’t hear from them again. Failure would put him on his pyre. That had always been the danger.

But I had my prognosis. I reminded myself: I am certain.

Yet my certainty made it no less his choice. I suddenly knew what I wanted to say to him, through the spaceless pathways of thought, if he could hear. It would be best if I had an image of him. On the open shelf near the desk was his copy of Lives of Notables. I pulled it out, opened it to his entry. The Arkan engraving was from when he’d been younger, a freshly-ascended semanakraseye, his face less roughened with scars or worn with cares. I put my hands on the page where his shoulders were pictured.

“First Virani-e Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e. I have said and done all I can, as have you. Yes, you and I both always knew, in the end, it would come down to your choice, to what you want in your heart of hearts. You have been entirely free in your choices, in truth, throughout.

“Whatever you choose, All-Spirit is with you. If I never see you alive again, I will know that is what was meant to be. If I do: same. I said it at the start, and it hasn’t changed, because it never does.

“Whatever you choose, know that you are loved, and know that you are one with the all. Above all, know that what you need and want by far the most in the world—peace—awaits you, either way. Be with All-Spirit, my client and my friend.”

--