190 - The nine questions

Those who would be at the private asa kraiya ceremony and I went up to the School of the Sword together, like an army unit except that we weren’t in ranks and files, followed by a greater crowd that apparently just wanted to be around the School while it was happening.

It was odd, I noticed as we passed the last house in Terera, to be so afraid while wearing my armour and Chirel. The smoothness within, the lightness that people had noticed, my long vista of life ahead—it was all gone, as if it had never been. The old blackness whirled around my head and heart as if on leather wings. Half way up, I was more afraid than I had been coming home to tell all Yeola-e about my foreknowledge. It increased as we climbed closer. I remembered how I’d frozen on Surya’s flagstone path in Arko. That could happen to me right here, in front of all these people.

I am destroying myself, I kept thinking. This is destroying myself. Why did it seem that way when the truth was the opposite? Why was the feeling so strong if it was not true, pervading my every thought and sensation and motion?

I want to stop at the Hearthstone, though it’s not on the way. I want to sit in the hot tub. I want to hide in bed. I have letters I owe people, a manuscript to annotate. I want to fly, and maybe fall to my death.

Death I have loved. I thought of beheading the Arkan commander on Haiu Menshir, and finishing Riji Kli-fas, and the Shininao of my dreams in his purple magnificence. Can I leave that?

But I already have! I argued back to myself.

Perhaps Surya had been watching my aura all the way, because he was suddenly beside me. “I am finding… that I’m not ready for this,” I said.

“Or so you feel.”

“Or so I feel… you are saying it is nothing but that?”

“It is nothing but that, and it is natural,” he said. “I did not tell you to expect it to spare you the fear of fear.”

“But I’d have known to put a folded towel into my loincloth so that when I shit myself it doesn’t dribble down my legs in front of the writers.”

He laughed, which raked across my soul, and we said in unison, “Breathe deeply. Make the white line. Everything is going as it should.” He almost doubled over from laughing, to hear himself so well mimicked. “You are ready,” he said. “Trust me.”

I stopped by the falls, making everyone else stop too, raggedly. I wanted a mirror, but a wristlet, which Skorsas had polished until I thought his fingers would bleed, would do. My face, narrowed and lengthened by the curve, and framed pathetically by the black fringe that could barely be called curly yet, stared back at me.

Who am I, really? The question was sharp-edged now as it had never had been before, like a scene in harsh sunlight. Now we’re right down to it.... who am I?

Why doesn’t this make sense to me? Why can’t I figure this out? Why must this be so hard? Why have I been saddled with this? Whatever “this” is… do I even kyashin know?

Surya laid his hand, very gently, on my shoulder. I was sick of life being so confusing. No wonder I love war, I thought. It is simple, in its constant absolutes. I am sentencing myself never to be free in that way again. I decided to tell Surya this, and who cared who heard. Why not? “There is freedom in mayhem,” I said. “Freedom in killing; freedom in power. A terrible thing to know. I wish I had never learned it. But I did.”

“Deep breath, Virani-e,” he said. “Start walking again.”

“There is freedom in the mindlessness, both of giving orders, and obeying them,” I said, walking. “In not having to think, just move. It is a vale of tears, being a philosopher in arms. And I cannot stop being a philosopher, apparently, so I have to give up the arms, kyash on it.” Everything seemed distant and swimming, as if I’d been darted with Accedence. “Kevyalin, I wish I were more stupid.” Surya laughed again, and this time a few others did as well. “I wouldn’t be so fikken cognizant!”

Kallijas had worn the Imperial armour and sword for both ceremonies—he wore the red-and-gold in Arko only, never in Yeola-e—and I thought, ‘I have to take mine off, and you don’t, fik you.’ The School of the Sword was in sight now. Keep walking. Surya was beside me. I was beside myself.

I came to the outer gate of the School, which was closed. “Wait, Sheng,” Kallijas said. “You have to stop here, for now.” He stayed with me. Everyone else who’d attend the private ceremony went in, including Surya.

Those condemned to die soon, I have heard, see the world around them as more beautiful, as if their eyes yearn to take in as much joy as they can in the time left. I felt that, like a glistening rime of ice on the black branch of my fear. Maybe I should soul-travel, since I am split apart as if I were being tortured anyway, I thought. Peek over the fence and see what ambush they have in store… No, my will was needed here, to keep my bowels from loosing.

The gate opened, and Iperaiga signaled Kallijas with a look to go in. The crowd stood back, leaving me alone. I waited. A writer asked, “Chevenga, are you all right? You look like you’re about to keel over.”

“I’m not going to keel over,” I said, as much to convince myself as him. I’m not sure how I knew to do it, but I unclipped my helmet from my belt and put it on.

The gate opened.

†

An old woman stood there, in a full-length dark robe, with a white collar open at the base so that it looked somewhat like the double white stripes Haians wear, a style I had never seen before. She raised her hands in the formal gesture to stop, and said, like a sentry, though she was close enough to see me clearly, “Who goes there?”

“Sukala!” It was her voice I knew; I’d never imagined I’d ever see her so formally dressed, and with her hair neatly tied back, like a war-teacher’s.

“No, I am Sukala,” she said archly. “I have already gone there. Who now goes there?” This was the beginning of the ceremony. I am in it.

I should answer with my name. For a moment I blocked on what it was. Chevenga Aicheresa—no, Virani-e Chevenga Aicheresa—no, I was ceremonially reinstated, it’s Fourth… “First Virani-e Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e.”

“Why are you here?”

Why am I…? A voice that seemed to be from outside me answered, in my voice, “To go asa kraiya.”

“Come.” The gate closed behind me, on the voices yelling “Go with All-Spirit! Strength, Chevenga!”

Sukala led me into the building, but not into the gathering-room; instead she pointed with her hand to one of the side-passages, where there is a pilaster carved from the trunk of tree that lived centuries, as it is wide as my arm is long. This was a new one, as the whole School was new, rebuilt after the Arkans burned it, of course; I remembered stretching my arms to try to hug the old one at seven, and then, after a month away in my teens with a carpentry workfast, wondering why it was there when it was far greater than necessary to hold up the roof. Yet I’d seen the same in other war-schools as well, including Krasila’s, and figured it was probably one of those traditions so old that everyone has forgotten why it is there.

Another elder stood by the pilaster, in the same style robe. “Who goes there?” I said my name, and again, on his asking why, “To go asa kraiya.”

He had a third question: “Are you certain this is your choice?”

Am I certain… am I certain I will not shit my kilt… “Yes.” He pointed down the corridor with a fluid full-hand motion.

There were ten ceremonial sentries in the dimly flame-lit passages of the School, leading me deeper in; it was falling dark so the daylight creeping in from under or over doors had faded almost to nothing. Most of them I didn’t know. They all wore the robe with the collar like a Haian’s stripes, like the vestments of an order. Each asked my name, and why I was here, and a third question which was different each time.

There’d always been a mirror by the west corner of the guest rooms; before it had been paned, and now it was one piece of Arkan glass. I had never understood why it was there, since it didn’t seem to be in a place where people would want to look at themselves. I looked infinitely tougher than I felt, a suit of armour full of quivering water. The elder there asked me, “You choose this in full knowledge of its meaning to yourself?”

Can I refer you to Surya on that one? Or better still, the Chevengani Mental State Assessment Committee? But the word that came out of my mouth was “Yes.”

Down the corridor from there is a door with another of those inexplicable old motifs of war-schools; its frame is carved all over with tiny eyes, that seem to follow you wherever you move. There the elder asked me, “You choose this in reasonable knowledge of its meaning to others?”

All too much kyashin reasonable knowledge of its meaning to others. I suspect most other asakraiyaseyel only get called traitor by the odd person. It was if all those carven eyes were those of all those others, looking at me. “Yes,” I gritted.

There was another quirk; why did war-schools all have a kink in their outer corridor, so that it reversed itself completely, then reversed itself again—but with half-height walls, so that you can look back to where you came from? The next elder was in the backwards part, so I saw the way I’d come over her shoulder. “You choose this intending not to regret it?”

My answer froze in my throat. Regret… look back… The eyes did mean those of others… the mirror was meaning to myself… the pilaster—what did he ask me? Certainty. As of a post that makes it certain the building will never fall. All-Spirit... I had grown up with these things, run past them thousands of times, ceased seeing them more than we see the road to work under our feet, or the bedroom door-latch. I remembered what Surya had said about Azaila leading his ceremony: “Of course he does that; he’s a war-teacher.”

The School of the Sword, and every war-school, was also built for the asa kraiya ceremony.

He was waiting for my answer. I looked back down the corridor, and took a deep breath. Everything I have chosen, knowingly, I intended not to regret. It didn’t always turn out that way. I regret worse what I chose unknowing. “Yes.”

What was the question I would be asked, where he pointed me—the wall with the low-relief of faces with their eyes closed? The elder there was very distantly familiar, as if I’d seen her when I was a very young child. “You choose this in acceptance that many will not understand?” she asked me.

I wondered, in the split-off part of me that could still laugh, what their definition of ‘many’ usually was. “Yes.” I had always vaguely thought the carvings of open eyes and closed ones meant us being watched, or turned away from, for being warriors. No, it’s asa kraiya… No, it was both. It worked either way.

She signed me to the door on which there is a painted low-relief of a sitting baby holding a feather like a sword. An elder stood there. I had always thought the baby meant the warrior of the future. “You choose this,” he asked me, “knowing that you will become one of those who will not fight and so must be protected by those who do?”

I flinched my eyes shut for an instant. By how I felt, I suddenly knew that I had secretly held those people in contempt, without admitting it to myself, though they are my people. The feeling is there, among warriors. If it is to their shame, I thought, remembering fighting Younger Riji, then it is to mine. I am that fragile infant, holding that fragile thing. “Yes.” The dark whisper came from very deep. You are destroying yourself. I bit it back.

I was close enough to the gathering room now that I heard the murmur of people. Where two corridors converge is the stone with the sword-hilt protruding, as if the blade has been thrust all the way in. Every student tries at least once to pull it out, whether other people are looking or not, either thinking of the old story where only a born king can do it, or just because it seems like a challenge posed. I’d put myself in a sweat when I was nine, then again when I was fourteen.

Now I will find out what it truly means, I thought, as I saw the elder standing next to it. “You choose this knowing that it means you will have to refuse if you are called upon to help defend Yeola-e?” she asked me.

I flinched again, remembering what I had told the Committee, that I doubted I had it in me not to take up the sword again if Yeola-e was threatened again as it had been by Arko. Asakraiyaseyel sometimes do that, I thought. My mother had. Was it not so etched-in-stone as this? I should answer as if it is. I took the worn grip and gave it a symbolic futile pull. “Yes,” I said.

Next to the room with the sword of Saint Mother is one with a circular window on one side, and a circular mirror on the other; again they are now single pieces of Arkan glass instead of paned as they were before. The person there, wearing the same robe and collar, was Surya. They are all asakraiyaseyel; that robe and collar is their insignia. “You choose this by the urgings of the God-in-You?”

You know the answer to that; it’s in my aura. I heard the faintest note of the singing wind, as I said, “Yes.” He gestured me to the room with the sword of Saint Mother.

The elder there was Azaila. Now it truly starts, I thought, and felt a surge of sickness. I wondered if he would have me lift the sword on its chains again. Instead he signed me to face the wall behind it, which is absolutely blank white, with my back to the sword. It was odd to weapon-sense it, swinging very slightly on its chains, behind me. Looking at the wall, so that I essentially saw nothing, I felt as if in a moment the person holding my shoulders would be Jinai, saying breathlessly, “The die has six faces, the road forks many ways, First Virani-e can take only one.”

Azaila’s third question was one word. “Why?”

When I opened my mouth, I thought I would say “To save myself.” What came out was, “I want to.”

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