186 - The world lies less heavily

“You can do whatever you want,” Surya told me, without even an auric glance, once I was well. “No constraints.” It was winter, a day of hard-edged sun and a good-enough ridge wind. I went flying by myself, no hands but mine on the bar.

I sparred with true steel, but only for the sake of the students. I had no wish to. The idea of putting it through flesh was a thousand days’ journey away.

Shininao tried again in a dream to seize me. I turned from him, easily.

Everything appeared to me differently, free of certain thoughts I had always had, full of new ones I had never had. It was as if a different sun, brighter and more kind, lighted the world.

The sight of life ahead, decades of it, knit together in my mind with the way I now thought, becoming something natural.

I thirsted only for one thing: to begin pushing to abolish the stream-test. I can’t start yet… Surya had told me I should expect to be sequestered after my ceremony, possibly as long as a month or two. “It can’t be two, else that puts us after the twins are due,” I told him. He said, “It will be as long as it is.” He wouldn’t say why, but he did tell me where: the maesa asa kraiya, on the island on Lake Terera. “But it’ll be freeze-up,” I said. “With my luck it will impassible by either boat or foot when Niku goes into labour.” He said, “Don’t worry, Virani-e. Everything is going as it should, and it will continue to.” I couldn’t argue with that, now.

Surya made me practice keeping equanimity while he touched the sword in me. The people began coming. A solid contingent of the Enlightened Followers showed up, as did the Disciples Chevengani, who had not been discouraged at all from worshipping me by any recent revelations. Of course there was a herd of writers, but only one head of state, as it turned out, or two if you counted Minis, to Krero’s great relief. Most of the rest sent kin as emissaries, so I got to see Reknarja again, and Klaimera.

Reknarja looked better than I remembered him, wearing a waist-jacket of red, of all things, trimmed with gold. “So we’re not only seeing you give up the sword, Sievenka, but commended for leading the Arkan war… am I hearing that right? Your people didn’t get around to that until now? You look better, somehow, though still shorter than me; has the Haian been feeding you something magical?”

Once we were in private, and sipping the unearthly-smooth nakiti he’d brought, he apologized for never writing a letter. “My pen couldn’t find the words; my tongue’s better. Now I understand why, when we were young, what I said to you was such an insult.”

“What, calling me a slip of a boy when I was one? It wasn’t an insult. I think you mean now you understand why I was so angry; and it’s true. You couldn’t possibly have known.”

“No. That was no one’s fault. You, dying young… that changed the whole idea of our friendship in my mind, Sievenka. And not being a warrior any more… the way you fought the Arkan war, you had to be more a healer than a warrior.”

He’s talked to Surya, too! This was starting to remind me of the time just before I’d fallen from exhaustion, that everyone around me had been telling me to see my healer—that, as it turned out, had been a conspiracy. But I wasn’t close enough to Reknarja not to play innocent. “Really?” I said. “How do you mean? Strange as it may seem, I remember a lot of fighting and bloodshed on my part.”

“You healed my brother, and me, of what was afflicting us,” he said, swirling the deep amber liquid in his glass. “I can’t imagine you didn’t do that for other people, too, though of course it is none of my business, seeing how things went in the war.”

“That’s what a friend does… or a general trying to keep together a fractious army. All I did was talk to you, and him.” As if on a signal, Surya’s voice in my head said, Talk-healing today.

“Ah, well.” I saw his thought in his eyes: a good emissary does not argue with someone so thick-headedly stubborn on the topic. “I raise a toast: to fighting through, to the friendship.” I drank agreeably to that. “I am glad you are going to be around, anyway; losing you as a warrior is worth that.” Of course he might be glad as a future king of Tor Ench, never having to worry about facing me on the field.

“So how go things in Tor Ench?”

He let out a little laugh. “Well… the commodes of God opened up, splattering all over the Tor, when my brother let my father know that he wants to marry Kelaepo. You know how Jak fooled Dad into sending him as ambassador to Hyerne, because no one in the army had the nerve to tell him that Jak and she were an item?”

I snorted with laughter and cringed at once. In truly monarchic courts, even close kin of the king can end up dead for something like that. “I would have told him, except that I didn’t know no Enchian would!” I said. “When I heard Jak was in Hyerne, I thought your father approved of it. Maybe Jak should plan to stay there for good. Is she going to award him the honour of being first husband, or further down the line?”

“Oh, first husband, of course! He is royalty. But she won’t turf out the others. I think, tell the truth, Dad is most upset about being in-laws with Segiddis. He keeps saying, ‘They dangle testicles as trophies on their spears. Testicles, those demon-women! Arkan testicles, true… but still, testicles!’ Poor Dad, I hope it doesn’t give him a turn.” Well, perhaps you do, I thought; if he had enough of a turn, it would put you on the throne. Jak’s disgrace put Rek in a better position, too. How long had it been since I’d learned enough cynicism to understand things monarchical? Still, it wasn’t too much to stop us from toasting to friendship, so we did several more times.

Klaimera had never visited Vae Arahi, or even Yeola-e, before, so I got her to bundle up and gave her the tour, including a short double-wing flight. It was the shrine she liked the most, so we sat inside the hall for a while, warming our toes by the stone-stove. It was good to know she’d got over me enough to able to see me.

And yet perhaps it would have been harder for me to see her than I’d known, when I’d come seeking Astalaz’s alliance, all those years ago. I had wrestled a long time over why her part in the harvest ritual had so disgusted me, when my own hands were red with a hundred times more blood; finally I’d realized that it was that she had killed him while making love to him, perhaps the ultimate perversity to a Yeoli heart.

Since then, I had learned enough to dull the horror. War had seasoned me, and I had done the Ten Tens, twice, an experience that opens the mind a thousand ways. The memory no longer pierced or burned so much, and seeing her face again was almost pure pleasure. I remembered what that impossibly long hair felt like in my hands, or the feathery black strands on her neck, against my lips. Like mine, her face had gained character over time.

“You have more scars, and yet you still look better than I remember,” she said. “Happier, as if the world lies less heavily on you. This ‘asa kraiya’”—she pronounced it perfectly—“is a sacred thing, J’vengka, yes?”

Trust her to ask me a question that forced me to think before I answered. “Well... yes... you could say... though it’s not bound to any deity. Sacred insofar as... being truest to ourselves is sacred. In Yeola-e, that’s thought of as being with the God-in-Ourselves.” I couldn’t help but say it haltingly, feeling my way through the words like a child, though supposedly I already was asa kraiya, and my ceremony was tomorrow. I am probably making no sense at all to her, I thought.

“Yes,” she said, with the slight dip down of the head which means that in Laka. “You know, J’vengka, I think I was always most attracted to that part of you. The understanding of sacred things.”

Maybe I did make sense. She, and Komona. “Did you know it then?” I asked her. “I know I did not.”

“No, that was before quite a few years of thinking.” She smiled. “I was blinded by the thought, ‘but he’s a warrior—how can he be a priest?’ You fooled me.”

I laughed. “You weren’t alone. I fooled myself most of all. Look at this.” I lifted the crystal circle out from under my shirt. “This is the sigil of the senaheral: these people lurking about this place in red. I am one now. I have one of those robes, though according to the esegradaiseye—you’d say the highest elder priestess—I don’t wear it enough. Can you believe it?”

“What a strange country, where priestess can command priests. Of course I believe it. It suits you, down to your bones. Better than the warrior life, which is why you’re leaving it. I see by my own visions, and you look like a monk to me. If you talk to a Haian, I’ll bet they see you as a healer.”

I heaved a big sigh. There was nowhere to flee to from this. “All right, the truth of the matter: I became a monk just to humour you all. And I’m shipping off to Haiu Menshir the day after tomorrow to undertake healer training. There; feel better?”

She laughed so hard it sent waves down her hair, right to where it was coiled on the bench beside her. “I miss the way you make me laugh, J’vengka.” You do? I had no idea that meant anything to you... “So what do Yeoli monks do? Pray to your God who is not?”

“Don’t be silly, Klaimera. You don’t pray to a God Who Is Not; you worship Him by not praying. Since we don’t have to waste time praying, we busy ourselves raking the paths, sitting in trees, and telling overly-raucous Servants of Assembly to shut up. And other sacred tasks.”

She laughed again. “I see.” But she went serious, stood up and made a gesture to me, turning both hands out and lifting them. “I’m glad to know.”

“What did that mean?” And why did you do it so beautifully, so that I’m finding, after everything, curse it, that I still want you? Like Reknarja, she was still taller than me.

“In Laka one priest will greet or depart from another priest that way.”

“Ah. I thank you for the honour.”

It suddenly hit me; I was more in love with all the world. I was more inclined to love in general, in my new happiness.

I found myself wanting to tell her spiritual things; why not? I told her about the Ten Tens, which she had read about, and my dreams of the Gods of Arko, and the singing wind. I even told her what I had shared with none but the esegradaiseye, Komona and Surya, about the spirit-animal in the woods near Terera, since I’d never heard the thoughts of anyone who was not Yeoli. Of course I could tell none of it it dry-eyed.

Open your heart, and others will open theirs. “I... when I accepted that I was to be a priestess....” Her eyes went shiny with tears too, making me want to wrap my arms around her. “My challenge... my test... my choice... was to open myself to the elemental Fire. It was terrifying. I was very vain as a girl—I still fight that—and the fire threatened my looks, my body... my existence.” I flinched inside myself, at the thought of flame touching her graceful mahogany cheek. “When I ceased being afraid... it was the most intense experience... I can only remember it in tiny pieces. Never all at once.” She sat for a bit, the memory glowing in her eyes. I asked, and she told me, much more about this, which I will not write as it is personal to her, and afterwards we sat in shared silence for a while, being together without looking at each other, while the fire in the stone-stove quietly crackled and spat.

“And yet, you know what is odd,” I said. “You could say I had the ultimate Arkan initiation—the Ten Tens—twice. And I saw the Gods in my dreams. And yet not a few months ago the esegradaiseye told me, and I had to believe: ‘All-Spirit to you is but a member of your command council.’ As if different spirits live in different parts of the mind... I try to understand these things, so far in vain.”

“In my experience, priests know and express the Divine starting with the ways they know. You knew command council. It was a way of making it bearable until you could know that it wasn’t enough any longer.”

“Well... I think more what she meant was that I didn’t hear All-Spirit except for the flash and the singing wind I’d get with a good idea for a battle-plan. But... that was where I needed to, back then. War was my life.”

“Exactly. People accept what they can, what they need.” Her delicate brown hand gripped the edge of the bench, and I wanted to touch the back of it.

“I think she was telling me I’d neglected it elsewhere, which was fair. This was right before she had me staked out overnight in the woods.”

She laughed again. “I would love to meet with your esegradaiseye. She sounds very wise.”

“I’ll introduce you. Though I can’t give you her name; I don’t actually know it. Everyone uses her title. Because... she’s gone beyond personal identity. Or something like that. A monk thing. I’m changing my own name, did you know?”

“No—you are?”

“Virani-e. That’s why you’ll hear people call me it.” I told her what it meant and its origin, and her gaze at me changed, as if she recognized me in a deeper way. She made me teach it to her until she could pronounce it perfectly.

That night I realized: being more in love with the world and more inclined to love, I can do more in the world.

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