36 - Treated as I always ought to have been

“I can’t believe the turn my life has taken,” I said to Surya, after I’d rested for a while. “Everyone knows. Tomorrow I set off for Yeola-e, to announce it officially there… All-Spirit knows how people will take it. I’m so stunned I’m spinning. How has this all happened? I can’t comprehend.”

It was a rhetorical question for which I didn’t expect him to have an answer; I was next going to ask him, and plead with him if I had to, to come to Yeola-e with me so I’d have him near.

“Remember those five phases?” he said. “I think now you can tell me which one you’re in.”

That was easy. “Disbelief.”

“Remember, it’s just a phase. Everything is going as it should.”

If I’d been up to grabbing him by the shoulders, I might have. I know I fixed him with narrowed eyes. “You speak as if you planned it!”

“I…!” He so rarely tripped over words, I’d come somewhat to enjoy it. “I didn’t… I meant only, Kahara kra, it was meant to be… and, this is all part of the path you’ve taken.”

“It is? Whichever miserable pissant of a servant went and blabbed my life’s secret to the Pages was being my healer too?” He laughed. “Seriously… I heard that right… you think of it coming out as a necessary part of my healing?”

He signed chalk. I threw one hand over my face. “Probably best you didn’t warn me,” I said. “I think I might well have taken the coward’s way. But… why? Why did it have to be? Why couldn’t I have just have told my closest, left those who didn’t know unknowing, and changed what I thought seamlessly with no one the wiser?”

“Left everyone you had no tie to in the dark, you mean?”

“Exactly.”

“You know, Chevenga, a healer learns something from every client. One of the things I’ve learned from you—though I don’t know how often I’ll make use of it—is how life is for someone who works for an entire people rather than just his family or his clientele or his workfast. You’re saying you’d prefer to have left everyone you have no tie to in the dark. Fair enough, and understandable. In Arko or Yeola-e, who would that be?”

It’s odd how sometimes, when you see a person’s point, your eyes want to clench shut. I sat with my arms folded, the one hand over where the sword had gone in, the other arm locked over it; the wound had the habit of hurting when I spoke with Surya, and because the pain ran right through my chest to my back, it always whispered, ‘You shouldn’t have survived this.’ Now it was as if the people of Arko and Yeola-e held the sword.

“I understand,” I whispered. “Now that everyone knows the truth about me, I’m finally going to be treated as I always ought to have been.”

“Exactly,” he said. “Tonight fifty-thousand Arkans all took the time and trouble, leaving off whatever they were busy doing, to come into the square and light candles to show you they think you deserve to live.”

“Aigh!” I threw myself back on the bed. “They won’t be so kind in Yeola-e! I could be charged for it, in Yeola-e.”

“If you don’t think Yeolis will be ten times more eager to light candles or do whatever they will do to show you, Chevenga, you’re being willfully blind.”

I just lay clutching the wound and trying to breathe deep and evenly enough not to feel any pain.

“Let me ask you this,” Surya said. “When you saw those fifty thousand candles, you were so stunned it almost knocked you senseless. Why? Why was it so surprising?”

“Well…! When you go from something kept sacrosanct inside for twenty-one years to everyone on the street knowing it…”

“But you knew they knew it; it was when you learned what the candles meant that you reeled. Why?”

“Well… it was just… I can’t believe… Surya, I sacked their city. Not that long ago.”

“You already know you have been forgiven for that, by at least as many Arkans; you learned when they voted you back, for they filled the same square.”

“Well, that was very surprising to me, too.” Changed my mind. I don’t want you with me, damned healer. Go away.

“But how else would they react, what else would they do, learning what they have? Chevenga—do chiravesa with them here. Say you have a friend, someone you love, someone whose accomplishments are great and have benefited you so you dearly appreciate them, someone you think the world of. All is going well for him, he’s on top of the world, he seems to have everything well in hand. Then suddenly you find out he’s been carrying this conviction that he should not live longer than another two years, for almost his whole life. All the time you’ve known him he’s been haunted with it, but he’s never said a word or let slip the slightest clue, so you had no idea. But, he tells you, he’s seeing a healer and trying to overcome it. What do you feel? What do you want to tell him? I’m calling you out: chiravesa.”

I wondered desperately if Kaninjer would consider me strong enough to do this. A ridiculous thought; he’d cleared me to work with Surya two days ago. “I’d… I’d be, I’d think…” It kept intruding that it was me. “Take yourself out of it,” Surya commanded. “For a moment, you know nothing of any Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e. Just this situation on its own.”

“I… I’d be stunned. I’d say—I’d want to say, ‘How can you think that?’ ” Tears welled again, as it crept back into my mind, like acid, that it was me, and I was thrown out of the imagining.

“Imagine it was Mana-lai Chereda,” he said. “Imagine this had come out about him.”

That drew me completely in, and undid me completely too. “All-Spirit! All-Spirit! How can you think such a thing!? How could you keep that inside for all that time, when there is so much love for you, when we are all around you? How could you so condemn yourself!? Of course you deserve to live! Blessed All-Spirit, what can we do to prove it to you? You deserve to live! How could anyone think different? Are—are you kyashin crazy?”

I could express nothing but tears then. I could barely think thoughts. I had said it, and heard it, at the same time. “You see?” he said through the haze. “You love him, you say that. Why is it a surprise that fifty-thousand people who love you would say that to you?”

When I couldn’t answer for tears, he said, “Just be with it. There is a yawning emptiness in you, twenty-one years old, that’s being filled for the first time ever. I know it’s the hardest thing, but don’t resist the filling. Let it happen.” I let my head fall back on the pillow, and he put his hand on my brow.

“It won’t be the same in Yeola-e,” I wept. “To Arkans it isn’t a betrayal by secrecy; to Yeolis it is.”

“We’ll see.”

“You kyashin child-raper, I want you with me there, can you do it? Is it possible? Not just for this trip, but when I go home for good?”

He smiled. “Why do you think I didn’t want you to introduce me to the writers, and fill my practice to bursting here?”

†

“What in fik?” I said, at cliff-edge, seeing my and Niku’s double-wing was a regular one, no winch. “I specified relay, as clearly as ever!”

“And I overrode that,” said Niku. “No, I should say, Surya’s standing orders overrode it; I just adhered to them. Besides, I wouldn’t relay you eight days after being plugged through the lung in a thousand years anyway. Chevenga, what were you thinking?”

“Oh kaina! Now the news will get home before I do!” I noticed how she hadn’t said she was doing this until everything was set to go, the wingers all in harness and waiting. I’d wondered vaguely why Surya hadn’t said anything about not knowing how to relay. I could imagine her thought: he’ll swear like a soldier; let him.

“Fikken kyashin kaina kevyala marugh mamaiyana miniren, my life has turned into a nightmare! The Pages’ll get there a good day before us and my name will be kyash when they find out I stayed another night to please the fikken Enlightened Followers, All-spirit help me I am so fikked!!”

“I think they’ll be more understanding than that,” Surya said mildly as he strapped in. “You’re not judging it clearly, for nervousness. And yes, I’m seeing that in your aura. Along with the stab of pain you just got in the wound from yelling.”

“You wouldn’t be able to relay wrapped from head to toes in eiderdown quilts and wearing a pure-air mask and bottle when we’re high as Kaninjer ordered anyway,” Niku said. “No lap-desk either, he said; he wants you to be so bored in the air you’ll catch up on your sleep. We’re doing the three-day way, so you won’t be that far behind the Pages.”

I could stand on rank, and risk losing two healers. That would probably be the same, in effect, as leaping off this cliff wingless. I looked over the edge, thinking, it would be easier. Niku’s arm was suddenly linked with mine, hard. “Chevenga, omores… can you go back to stamping and swearing?” I stood frozen for a bit, caught between despair, rage and laughter, and Surya said, “Take a deep breath.” They were right; it might be the death-in-me wanting to relay. I stamped and spat “Kaina kyashin marugh kevyalin miniren!” a few times, then let them bundle me up, strap me in and mask me. I almost forgot to order another pigeon sent, to tell Artira I’d be a day later than I’d thought.

I didn’t think I would sleep much, even at night, but I did, for several beads each day, rocked on the wind with my head on Niku’s shoulder, the clouds brilliant in the sunlight or silver in the moonlight like sheepskins and pillows below, my dreams full of candle-flames. I had needed to catch up more than I knew.

I was awake when we passed over the circle-stones marking the border of Yeola-e, and I felt a welling of fear. The second night, we stayed as usual at the town hall in Thara-e. The sight of the people of the city going about their business in the streets just before we touched down, the greetings of the Yeoli catchers in the wing-ground, the salutes of the warriors, all made me sick with terror.

I went straight into hiding in my room; let them put it down to wound-weakness. Niku, Krero and the other flyers all ate and then bedded down immediately, as I usually did myself, but I’d slept, as had Surya, and it was barely past sunset. I wondered if I would sleep at all tonight. Surya knocked on my door, and my saying I knew he must be tired and didn’t wish to trouble him did not stop him from commanding me to let him in.

“This isn’t just fear of disapproval,” he said, taking my hands, whose trembling I could not control. “You’ve been impeached before.”

“By Arkans,” I said. “The Yeoli vote was seven-in-ten to keep me. This would be very different.”

He glanced at my aura. “Yes,” he said. “If they did, you would give up.” I knew what he meant, and did not deny it. “No wonder you are afraid.”

We talked; he worked my aura; I exercised; I tried to release it; I took remedies; we hadn’t brought any strong calming juice; nothing touched it. “There is only one other thing I can think of, that I’m certain you would not prescribe,” I said. “To get piss drunk.” I meant it only half in desperation, the other half in jest, since I couldn’t imagine in a thousand years he’d approve. To my amazement, he did.

I wanted to get into an embarrassing state and see no one but him, so we had the wine brought to the room. “Slow down!” he said, as I drained the third cup straight. “You’ll just throw up!”

“Oh nonsense! Everything is going as it should, you keep saying, so this must be, too.” He snatched the cup out of my hand; when I put the flask to my lips, he snapped, “As you relinquished your will to me, slow down! And pour me one!”

My memories of that night are not the clearest. At some point I changed my mind about not wanting company, and staggered down to the mess. Once people found out I was there, a proper party started. Surya, who didn’t drink too much to keep an eye on me, told me later he was afraid the whole time that someone would ask me why I was making the trip—because Thara-e is inland, we had outrun the Pages to here—and I would blurt out the whole answer, but that didn’t happen.

What I did talk about was how afraid I was, about something I assured them they’d all find out soon enough. I did it by giving accounts of other frightening things I’d lived, ending each with, “But I was not nearly as afraid then as I am now.” (It was a good lesson for the peach-chins, who had all sincerely believed that The Invincible had never felt fear.) In fact we all got into a contest, of who had suffered the most terrifying experience in his life. Because Thara-e had been sacked and then occupied, there were many awful stories, but they voted me the winner for being put in full restraint naked and told, by Kurkas, that I was about to be tortured to insanity. “And yet,” I slurred, “even then, I was not as afraid as I am now.” Thank All-Spirit I was feeling it only at a great distance.

I don’t remember Surya hauling me to bed, though he assures me that when he made it a command, I said “A-e kras’!” and snapped off an impressively crisp salute for a man who was in such a state of inebriation. I don’t want to imagine what people were saying the next day; and the less I write of how I felt, as we swooped skyward in the brilliant morning sun, the better. By the time we reached Vae Arahi I felt just an unreal numbness.

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35 - A sea of light

The Imperial chambers are central in the Marble Palace. That night after dark, I went by myself to one of the offices that had a bay window with a cushioned sill, overlooking the city.

It was an overcast night, the only light that of people: street-lamps, brass torches carried by walkers, the orange glow and blue flicker of a brazier, a F’talezonian stained-glass light-globe of green, purple and gold in some Aitzas’s parlour. I swung open the panes, and the night sounds of Arko came to my ears on the still air, same as always: talk, footsteps, the creak of a carrying chair, a harper singing, the melodious burst of a woman’s laugh.

I listened, and thought, “All over this city people are saying to each other, ‘Chevenga has always thought he’d die before thirty.’ ” Perhaps some of the conversations I was hearing, too distant to make out, were about that. The thing that for three quarters of my life I had schooled my mind and body and soul against letting slip by word or expression, the thing with which I had locked myself inside inward stone walls, alone with my ruined dreams, my accommodation strategies, my secret strictures, my shock, my anger, my haggling, my sorrow, my shame, my fear and my hard-won peace, for twenty-one years, was being kicked about over a thousand dinner tables, passed down a hundred streets, distorted to as many versions as there were people telling it. And tomorrow morning I would confirm it officially and give the correct version, banishing entirely the one thing that still protected me: disbelief.

I started trembling, then weeping; I tried to do the twenty-years-in-the-future chiravesa again, but the emotion was too strong, overcoming me like a fever. Afraid for myself, I called a servant to walk me to the clinic. Kaninjer’s medicines again let me sleep. I dreamed I had a tap hammered into me through the wound as if I were a maple tree, and my life-blood was running out into buckets, from which a crowd was tasting it, and judging it like wine. “Ah, a little rich in the foretaste, mellow, yet audacious.” — “Yes, there is boldness there, and an admirable aspiration to refinement, but a rough edge.” And one—of course—shook his head sadly and said, “Alas, this would have been brilliant, with longer aging.”

In the morning I partook of both Haian medicines and un-Haian ones, to get myself telling the writers. The water in my water-flask was half wadiki. Call me a coward: I wanted to feel little or nothing of what I was saying, to be distanced from it as if I were watching from afar. If anyone noticed, they were kind enough not to comment. When I sat at the table Krero and Surya took up positions close on either side of me, like bodyguards.

Like Intharas, most of the writers had been expecting a firm denial, and were stunned. I told it as I had told it to Idiesas, Krero, Tyirian and Kaninjer, about having thought it was foreknowledge all my life, but now was undergoing healing to overcome it. (Beforehand, I’d proposed to Surya that I introduce him to them, since that would probably fill his practice to bursting, but for some reason he would have none of it.) I answered questions until they had no more. I did not say that I would go asa kraiya, wanting to keep something for my own people to hear first. The writers fairly ran out the door, to give my secret to the world.

Minis had attended in his Minakis-guise, fitting right in. He seemed less astonished, when we spoke afterwards, than I expected. “That’s what my father meant in his letter, wasn’t it,” he said, “when he wrote ‘Don’t worry about Chevenga, time will take care of him’?” I had gathered Kurkas had never told him in full, but had never known he’d told him obliquely.

“You have to do what you have to do,” he said, when I apologized for delaying the announcement of his candidacy again, this time for the trip home. “They are your people, we are not.” But he could not be pleased; it would cut down his time to speak to his people by five days at the very least.

In the administrative wing, they tried not to make it obvious, of course, but the bureaucrats and clerks in the offices, the guards at their posts, the messengers in the corridors, all looked at me too long, or looked away from me too deliberately, or stared when I was turned away, thinking I could not feel it like the heat of a fire on the back of my neck. Plain in their eyes, even as they spoke of our everyday business, was the confusion, the pain, the sympathy they did not know whether or not to show, the shock.

It bothered me less when they did say something. Nyatandra Kichere, the bookkeeper who had always been a sort of mother hen among the bureaucrats, caught me in a bone-crushing hug, and said, “Thirty! Thirty! Kahara help us, Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e, you deserve to live to be a hundred! You listen to me! You listen to your healer! And you make good and sure we don’t lose you for a long time, precious boy, do you hear? The world needs you, so make good and sure!” She wouldn’t let go until I promised. Others were more tentative.

“Imperator… before you go…” Anamas Karlen asked me casually into the Officiate’s main meeting room. Everyone was gathered, crowding against the walls. With a bit of a speech, Binchera handed me a gold-wrapped package. The letter with it read, “It is our dearest wish that you should have occasion to use these,” and was signed by the entire Marble Palace administrative staff, Yeolis and Arkans alike. I opened the package, and found a gold-handled walking stick, a fine pair of eyeglasses, and a Vae Arahini marya with the collar an elder wears. Though my mind was not really there, I put them on and did my best impression of myself as an old codger, to make them all laugh.

The Press is running, I thought, imagining the headline, however it would be worded, running through the machinery thousands of times over, to be shipped shipped and carted and flown to every corner of the empire and the world. I hadn’t even eaten yet; I’d fling something down while I was putting on the flying leathers, I decided. But then one of the Palace messengers came to me with a note he said was urgent. It was from Marnas Iisen, begging me to meet with him.

Marnas was the leader of the Enlightened Followers, or, in full, if you must: the Temple of the Enlightened Followers of the Deity on Earth Shefen-kas. I’d tried to have as little to do with them as possible, their very existence making me itch, but as freedom of religion was now the law in Arko, I couldn’t outlaw them.

Despite all that, though I couldn’t put my finger on exactly why, I felt refusing Marnas would somehow be impolitic, so I sent the messenger up the lesser Marble Palace lefaetas to tell the wingers on cliff’s edge they’d have to wait a little longer.

Though I’m sure many would find this hard to imagine of me, or anyone, approaching someone who worships him and would do anything he asked, I felt a knot of fear in my stomach as I went to the Jade Reclining Room to meet him. What would it be—histrionics like Freni-Raikas’s after the publication of Life is Everything? Would Marnas fling himself all over me? Beg me to save his movement? Give me some impossibly valuable thing, a bribe to stay alive? I couldn’t imagine. The old strategic saying is true, the moves of the religious are the hardest to anticipate.

When I came in, he did the prostration with the extra fillip the Followers add to it, the Arkan prayer-sign of cupped hands on the temples. Marnas was then in his fifties, I think, a tall bony old Aitzas, grave of face and bearing. He did not do any of the things I’d feared, and even kept his face emotionless in the Arkan way. He just said, “Imperator and Master, when the last of the sunset has faded from the sky tonight, there will be a gathering in the square. May we beg of you to grace us with your presence, on the Balcony of Presentation? And may I attend you?”

They’ve decided I should have become a sacred martyr after all, I thought, and plan to bristle-brush me with arrows. I told myself not to be silly. His people planned to gather in the same spirit as the administrative staff had; whatever I felt about them, they felt close to me, and wished to let me know their hearts. I got that feeling again, that I should not say no, or even postpone it, even though it meant we wouldn’t fly until the next morning. If the land winds were better than the sea winds, there was still a chance of beating the Pages to Vae Arahi. I sent up to the cliff edge again, telling the wingers we were holding off until morning.

While an indignant Krero ran around making the security arrangements he felt necessary, I worked in an office with a window. When the sky was entirely dark, I went out to the balcony. It seemed everyone else was making more of a fuss of this than I thought warranted; Niku, Skorsas, Kallijas, my mother and the children all fell into step with me, as did Kaninjer, Krero, Sachara, Surya (whom someone had sent for), Minis in his Minakis-guise and too many other friends to fit on the balcony. Marnas was already there, shining golden in his full robes and headdress as the Followers’ Fenjitzas; in my everyday white-and-gold Imperial suit, I saw, I was going to fade next to him. But the Imperial robe didn’t seem right either; this was personal, not official.

I stepped to the rail. The noise from below seemed more massive than could come from the size of crowd the Followers could raise. My ears told me right; the square was jammed. There were fifty thousand people here.

I glanced at Marnas. He said, “Master, it isn’t just us. Others thought well of our plan.”

“Plan?” I wondered if Krero knew it. Marnas did not answer, but turned to the crowd, raising his hands, one of which held a long candle. The people went quiet. He had already spoken to them, I could tell; I had come in in the middle of this, whatever it was.

Someone behind us handed him a lit taper, which he touched to the wick of the candle. Once the flame had risen to a steady height, he lifted it to the crowd. They did not cheer, as I thought they might; but the few lights they had, mostly walking-torches, began to multiply. It seemed everyone had a light, which he now lit from one held by his neighbour; slowly the square became a sea of light, a starfield of tiny flames, shifting and flickering with the life of the people holding them, an astonishing sight.

“Imperator and Master,” said Marnas. “Shefen-kas.” That got him my full attention; he had never called me by name before. “Let me tell you what this means. Every flame you see represents one person who feels with all his heart that you deserve to live.”

†

The glistening below, and everything else, began coming to me only in waves. I didn’t go quite into a full faint, but Kallijas and Niku had to hold me up by my arms. It took me a good tenth to master myself. I’d take a deep breath, and think I had it, then open my eyes and see fifty-thousand candle-flames, and fall apart all over again. I felt Kaninjer’s grip on my sword-hand wrist, fingers on the pulse-points, and saw the eagle-eyed-healer look on his face. I was only seven days recovered.

When I found it in me to stand steady, I wondered what to do. I should answer them; but words weren’t enough. Soon I saw. Everyone on the Balcony was holding a lit candle, but there were some spares. I took one, held it up to the people unlit, then touched it to Marnas’s. When it was burning well, I held it up again.

The roar of the crowd threw me back against Niku and Kall like a sea-wave. I put all my strength into keeping the candle high. “Marnas, I can’t speak to them because of the wound,” I rasped to him, through my tears and over the noise. “Speak for me. Tell them I can’t begin to say how this touches my heart, I can barely believe their love though I see it clearly and will remember it, I will carry it burned into my soul, forever…” I just let the words come, he belted them out to the crowd, and it roared back to me, for a while, while Niku and Kall held me steady, and when we were done they helped me back to the Imperial chambers.




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34 - Love always helps

Who among the four had whispered something to someone who had whispered it to someone else? Not Kaninjer, I could be certain of that; not Krero… not Idiesas or Tyirian either. But then how could I be ultimately certain of any of them? It was not as if I’d sworn them to silence. Or was it just a servant overhearing? The infirmary wasn’t well-secured against that, I suddenly remembered.

As well as scheduling the meeting with the writers the next morning, I sent a pigeon-message to Artira in Vae Arahi saying I would come home to make an announcement to Assembly three days hence. Damn the wound and the rules; I’d relay, leaving as soon as I was finished with the writers tomorrow; it was my only chance of beating the couriered copies of the Pages special edition there, so that my people would hear it from me directly first. I would have to beg Minis’s forgiveness; if he wanted me to be at the announcement of his candidacy, it would have to wait until I got back.

I was done for the day, though I refused to admit it at first. The people in the trap-booth thought that after I took a few moments alone, my colour would come back. When it didn’t—the next person I met with asked me more than once if I was sure my wound was healed enough for me to work—they sent for Kaninjer. After taking one look at me from the booth, he told Binchera to give all the rest my regrets, had a chair brought into my office and would not even let me get onto it unassisted. I was protesting, albeit weakly, when he had my bearers stop beside a wall-mirror and pointed to it. I looked like a corpse with living eyes, my cheeks the colour of ash.

Once in the Imperial chamber with only family and healers around me—my mother had sent for Surya—emotion so seized me that I couldn’t even form more words than “It’s out!” to tell them what was wrong. Surya did one of his tricks on me, putting his fingers on several points on my neck and cutting the emotion apart from the rest of my mind as if with a knife, just long enough to let me explain. When he let go, it came roaring right back. They just held me, taking turns.

Kaninjer would have let it go, except that I was so recently wounded; when none of his drops would work, he insisted I take the full-strength sedative juice. Since there was nothing to do about what was afflicting me other than suffer from it, I didn’t protest that hard. Though all it does to me usually is dull my mind so thoroughly all emotion is leached out, not put me to sleep, this time it might as well have been whatever he uses to put me out for surgery, or a club on the head. I was astonished to wake up at dusk, and as always came the panic of lost time. “You slept both because you are wounded and because you have been overworking for a long time,” Surya said. “So it was good that you did. Now you need to talk.”

I talked. When I tried, on his order, to make sense of what I felt—it seemed a formless black maelstrom—he told me that, in the healing of all wounds over time, there is a logic and a course to it, which everyone roughly follows, even in their different ways. “It starts with refusal to believe, goes on to anger, then a kind of haggling, ‘Perhaps if I am this or do that, it won’t really have happened.’ Second last comes sorrow; then finally—when you least expect it—comes peace. Fear underlies all the phases but peace; they are each a different step in dealing with fear, which is the suffering emotion that underlies all the other suffering emotions. Shame deepens with each phase, worst at sorrow, but vanishes at peace. When one defeats fear and shame by accepting what has happened, that’s peace. It’s not always the same, and you can jump back and forth, but it’s the underlying shape. What’s in your heart?”

“Definitely not peace,” I said. “It feels like the other four all at once, actually, with fear and shame both like landslides crushing me.” It was strange to speak with him as if we were in session, with three of my parents and my three loves all close around, though he must have given them a sign after that, because they were all suddenly gone.

“We’ll get you through,” he said. “I know you feel like you have no strength in the face of this. All that means is that you’ve forgotten that you have immense strength. Tell you what—I have a chiravesa for you. Take a few deep breaths, close your eyes for a little. I want you to truly enter this one, be this person completely, with no trace of you as you are.” This felt worrisome, but I did as he said, settling down the feelings with the breaths.

“You are—you. But it is twenty years from now. You are forty-eight.” Of course my mind leapt right out of it. He gentled me back in like a skittish colt. “You look back on this all, twenty years gone. Your secret came out, everyone felt what they felt, it was talked and written about, it was dealt with. You and everyone who cares about you went through all the phases, arriving finally at peace. It became something about Chevenga that just was. You solved it, you went asa kraiya, the death-in-you faded; you learned the way of asa kraiya and you have known it ever since. And the years passed, since nothing stops them, and life went on.

“Over twenty years, you did all manner of things, busying yourself dawn to dusk again with the affairs of the world, because I can’t imagine you won’t. There was war somewhere, since there always is, and you dealt with it in the asa kraiya way. There was plague, famine, earthquake, storm. You worked towards making the world as you see it can be, and you had some success, as I think is inevitable, so that there are alliances and treaties where there were not before; there is trade and prosperity where there was not before; there have been more inventions, like the single wing and the press, that have changed how the world is, and people cannot imagine how life was without them. Your children grew up, and gave you all sorts of surprises, as children do, whether it was getting into scrapes, or showing some gift or passion you would never have suspected. Tawaen is in his thirties, either semanakraseye, or waiting to be if you still are; he and a few of the others have children of their own, making you a grandfather several times over. There have been deaths in the family too. Among everyone you know, many of the previous generation are gone; you mourned each, still miss those who were closest, but you go on. All the trees around the Hearthstone Independent are twenty years bigger. Your limbs are stiffer, your hands slower, your scars are faded but your wrinkles are more and sharper, and your hair falls down past your shoulders in salt and pepper ringlets, though there is less on the top of your head.

“Just as things happened between eight and twenty-eight that you would never have imagined, let alone believed,” said Surya, “equally inconceivable things have happened between twenty-eight and forty-eight. They are piled up, layer on layer, in your memory, each with the size of its portion determined by how much it touched you. You look back at all of it at once and you think, ‘That’s amazing; I should write a book,’ if you haven’t already.”

“I have,” I said. “This would be the second.” I was weeping; more than anything it was for imagining the tiny warm weight of Tawaen’s firstborn in my arms.

“For all who know your name, the news of the death-in-you is a distant memory, a chapter in history. It happened, it was done. If they ever bring it back to mind, perhaps they shake their heads, thinking, ‘Everything he’s done since then would never have been—the crazy idiot, thank All-Spirit he saw sense.’ ” I laughed through the tears. “And then they forget it again, their minds returning to the present.

“So: forty-eight-year-old Fourth Chevenga—what is it to you?”

I took a deep breath, imagining. “Something I went through, a long time ago,” I whispered. “I know I was formed by it. And I would not be who I am otherwise. But—” I couldn’t believe I was saying these next words even as I said them, always a sign you’re doing a good chiravesa. “It doesn’t matter. It hasn’t… for a long time.”

He put his hands on my head. “Remember this,” he said. “Etch it in your memory. Then, when the emotion seizes you the worst, bring it to mind. If you have to, do it over—and do it well. Karani, Niku, Kallijas, Skorsas—if he needs reminding to do this, remind him.” He tapped my head, back a little from my brow. “Really see that fleeing hairline.” I made the a-e kras’ sign.

†

“Dad?” I’d dozed again; now it was Tawaen, standing over my bed. He was ten and a half now, and had been on more state visits than most his age, ever since I’d sworn to him I would not go away without him.

Next to his head of black-bronze curls, popped up one of white-gold; Vriah, who was seven now, was here too. Both their pairs of eyes fixed me, filled with the kind of burningly-intense hope you only see in children’s. “So,” my son said. “You’re not going to die after all…?”

Had someone told them explicitly, or had he just heard between the lines? Though it didn’t matter; there was no more secret. I’d been dozing; now the knowledge fell on me again, like an avalanche of blackness, everyone knows. All-Spirit, if I could erase one day from my life, it would be the day I told them.

I couldn’t speak. They waited, that gaze feeling as if it would peel my skin off, for what seemed like a bead. “I… well, I’m going to die sometime; everyone does,” I finally said. “But… I told you I was certain it would be soon. Now—I don’t know. Which… makes me the same as everyone else.”

I hoped they’d rejoice at that; I should have known better. Vriah’s look became thoughtful. Tawaen glanced at her; he had learned, as I had, to discern whether someone was telling the truth by her response. I saw him think, half-truth. “You mean, now you might not… but there’s still a good chance… you will.”

I bit back my urge to tell him to ask Surya. “Did you know, love, I’m seeing a healer?” I felt sick, looking into his eyes, as they seemed to scream, “Why don’t you just choose not to!?” Yes, why don’t I? My eyes were clenched shut and full of tears before I knew it.

His small arm slid around my chest, tightening, then hers too. “Shh-shh, Aba, it’s all right,” she said in her piping voice, just the same as I would, comforting her. Swallowing the tears for all I was worth, I put my arms around both of them. “Dad,” Tawaen said gently, “how can we help?”

“Love always helps,” I said. “As you’re already giving me. Beyond that… maybe this isn’t what you want to hear, and for that I’m sorry, but it’s up to me.”

He thought for a bit, then said, “Dad, is not dying… something you’ve set your mind to?”

“Yes,” I said, thinking of my oath and my relinquishment to Surya. That I could say honestly, same as with my parents.

Concern melted off his face, into a smile. “Then I won’t worry. Everyone says that whatever Fourth Chevenga sets his mind to, he does, no matter how hard it is.”

“True,” said Vriah, lighting up as well. “You’ll live till you’re old and crotcheddy.” Where had she picked that up—hearing someone talk about Niku’s mother?

“Good enough, Dad.” Tawaen kissed me on the brow. “I’ll let you off the oath this time. You don’t have to take me to Yeola-e.”




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33 - in which the world finds out

In a cavern in the cliff wall of Arko, by a rivulet that runs down through the rock and turns a huge wheel as in a mill, sits the great press of Arko, the first of all such devices after the Fire, the only one for centuries. I have been there a few times, felt the sweltering heat, smelled the metallic air and the tang of ink, heard the booming and clicking and pinging of its works in rhythm more perfect than any human drummer can make. In the office where the scribes work, it is a deep thrumming that you feel through your feet more than hear, day and night, as if the Earthsphere itself had a racing heartbeat.

Here, they make the Pages, in which one can read all the news of Arko, as well as all manner of other publications penned by all manner of people.

Intharas Terren, fessas, the high editor of the Pages, keeps a personal and private journal of the events of his life, and the events of Arko with commentary too personal to publish in the Pages. It’s by his permission that I have copied his entry for the eight-day of Imbas 17-24, 51^st-last Year of the Present Age, here.

†

“So Intharas,” says Kamias. “I have one that seems completely implausible, but a Marble Palace source, usually reliable, swears on his hope of Celestialis is true.”

“Arumph,” I say without looking up, meaning go ahead.

“Shefen-kas has known since he was a kid he was going to die before thirty.”

“Oh, come on,” I say. “That’s back-alley bottom-fessas tract material. Same people who write trashy porn about him and Kallijas Itrean. Have you let us fall in arrears with the source again?”

“We are paid ahead.”

“He’s pulling your hairy skinny leg then.”

“Intharas, after twenty years working in this machine-reeking hole in a cliff and two thousand times getting fired by you—when not once have you had the decency to really mean it—I think I know whether someone’s pulling my hairy skinny leg. For instance, he won’t swear on his hope of Celestialis with both hands high. My source’s source’s source overheard Shefen-kas telling this to the people involved with that sword-accident he had—the one whose sword it was, the guard-captain, the war-master who was there, and so on.”

“Maybe you’re pulling my hairy fat leg. I mean, with something like this I’d have to be the stooge who went in and asked him, wouldn’t I? ‘It’s an incredible rumour I heard, You Whose Life is The World’s Eternity…’ Kamias, you’re fired.”

“Really mean it this time, Intharas… ple-e-e-ease?”

He is not pulling my leg. I’ve been in this hole thirty odd years. But who’s to fikken believe this?

I call together the other writers who happen to be around, ask if anyone else has heard it. Three others have. It’s just that none bothered to tell me, figuring I’d react more or less the way I have, as my usual unflappably calm self. “My little professional God, get me some booze.”

“Well, it’s Shefen-kas,” Alabrakas says. “He’s always full of surprises, you just never know what he’s going to do next. Else we wouldn’t keep having to order extra buckets of ink just for his moves.”

“You’ve got to be nuts,” says old seasoned Darmas. “I’d be more like to believe Shefen-kas pulling his backing from Kallijas for Imperator and giving it to Minis.”

I had no idea how long an eight-day it was going to be.

“I am thinking,” says Roras, “that if this bug-fik story were true... it would explain a lot about him. I mean, wouldn’t it? Why he does everything so fast, started everything so young. Why he takes all these risks and gets himself racked up as if he weren’t at all concerned about it catching up with him in old age.”

“That could just be being young and stupid,” says Foranas, who knows all about being exactly these things. “Not that I actually just said that or anything.”

Sisaria speaks up. It is still strange to me, having the high voices of girls in here, girls who can write... and too well, curse them, to get rid of them. “I am thinking, he is...” She counts on her fingers behind her desk; her arithmetic is about the same as the average man writer, which is to say, terrible. “Twenty-eight and a half. And he is making sure he and the Yeoli hawks are out of Arko, because he doesn’t trust any other Yeoli Imperator to keep them tame, and he’s put a deadline on it, such a deadline that he is working like a dog and making everyone else in the Marble Palace do the same. Why the big hurry, what for? We’ve asked him that and never got a clear answer. This... would explain that.”

“It would explain some things about his personal life.” The soft Yeoli accent of Shemeya. Weird having them here too. But a Yeoli Imperator did set us free to write what we wanted. They’re also used to being free, which is useful; they’ll just say, ‘Why don’t we publish that?’ and I’ll realize it’s my old pussy-foot-around-Imperium instincts, learned over a lifetime, that stopped me from thinking of it myself. Besides, having a few wool-hairs here helps all Arko comprehend the mysteries of the wool-hair-run Marble Palace. “His first marriage was strange.” A marriage a Yeoli thinks is strange? “It was a three, and not for love at all. He was looking for a couple who’d marry him to further their careers; he asked in each town until he found one. And they set to making heirs right away. So maybe he didn’t think he had time to wait for love before having kids. Or didn’t want to bereave a loving wife so soon.”

“What about Niku?” says Darmas.

“That was in the Mezem,” says Roras, who was working there at the time. “They were both ring-fighters. Neither of them would have been thinking about living any longer than past the next fight—”

“And how many bonks they could get in before,” Kamias cuts in.

“Right. It didn’t even occur to them that they might make a child.”

“Skorsas? Kallijas?”

“You know,” says Shemeya, “in his whole life, Chevenga’s never fallen in love with anyone he ended up staying with, in a normal way.”

“Maybe it also explains...” Alabrakas gives in to an old reflex, peeking over one shoulder, then the other. “Why he’s so, you know… crazy.”

I slam my fist down on my desk. The tale is fitting well enough together that it will be big enough in the street that we have to run something about it. “Get me some booze. I will ask him.”

†

As I touch the little image of Lukitzas that stands outside the Imperial office, I think, ‘I need you more than usual now, you fat old skull-grinning egg-pate.’ No, I need booze, booze is what I need, and none of the scratching bastards actually did get me any.

Sense did catch up with me while I walked here, though, making me realize I’m only going to have to see Shefen-kas for a moment. It will just be a quick denial, maybe an arch look with those black brows and a shrug, and, “Well, I understand you do have to ask me these things right out, Intharas; it is your calling.” Then I smartly grovel in apology, and I’m out of there and writing up his denial. He’s hardly going to say it’s true, even if it is. Nobody is that honest.

Six days after he got stuck right through the lung, and he’s not even working in bed, but at the desk. He looks a tad pale, but maybe that’s from not being in the sun so much, since he’s cut back on exercise. On the back of his sword-hand, between the golden chains joining the ring to the bracelet of the Seal, I see the pin-prick and the bruising from a Haian needle that’s been removed very recently. “Gehit,” he says. “Intharas, welcome. Saekrberk?”

I can’t believe what I hear myself do: turn it down.

What if it is true? What am I doing to him by asking? And what’s he going to do to me in return? –‘Trash-alley balderdash,’ my sense answers me. ‘What he’s going to do is laugh in your face for believing it enough to ask.’

I thank him for again allowing me time on short notice. I explain how we have to ask about these things, even if we don’t want to, as if he doesn’t know this. I beg him not to laugh too hard. I blather mealy-mouthed for a while, laying on the You-Whose’s thick, and he taps his finger on his desk pointedly, and I finally get to saying, “This lowlier-than-lowly one heard a rumour, that is barely believable though the source swore on his hope of Celestialis it was true...” How to word this? More politely than I did to Kamias, that’s for sure. “That You Whose Thought Is The World’s Command have lived all your life with the clairvoyant knowledge that You were going to die before the age of thirty… is that true?”

He doesn’t laugh; he doesn’t arch his brows. He freezes solid, the colour in his face going out of it entirely, as if he’s turned into a marble statue of himself, with an expression as if I just put a sword through his other lung.

Oh, my sweet little scribbling God—I feel my bowels suddenly wanting to squeeze out shit all through my pants. The trap-booth, the darts, are they kill-darts or just stun-darts? My head aches instinctively, my ears hear the snap and hiss echoing again, remembering shortly after I started as High Editor. A face of stone over onyxine, a flat voice through the haze of pain in my head as I woke up, “It is the opinion of the Imperator that you slightly… misunderstood his meaning.” Old Boras, whose retirement gave me the job, warned me: getting spring-darted once is traditional, with either a new High Editor or a new Imperator. Just to let you know what the risk is, keep you respectful. Of course this time it won’t be a Mahid face I wake up to; more likely the rock-cliff mug of Krero Saranyera. But, through the fog of terror, I vaguely see Shefen-kas’s bruised hand do the Yeoli hand-turned-down sign for no to the trap-booth people.

He says… nothing. He keeps staring at me with those piercing brown eyes that are usually so frighteningly, or reassuringly, depending on how you look at it, certain, now frozen in a shock like a death-blow, and his cheeks paper-white. He goes on saying nothing. Silence stretches between us like a moment stopped eternally in time, stretching for beads, days, centuries. He says nothing, like an unending scream to the ears of a deaf man. He drops his face into his two bloodless, Imperial-sealed hands as if the lava of Hayel is falling flaming all around his head. Sweet little muckraking God, not only is it true, I see—but I’m his first news that it’s out.

He says an army-load of nothing, and I want to throw up, and I want to shit, and I want so badly to be anywhere but here that I’d dive into the depths of Hayel in an instant if the gates were open. He’s going to send me there anyway, for this. He just signed no because frog-marching me is less trouble to his guards than carrying me. A trial in which I don’t get to speak… or just into the oubliette, never to be seen again… or, if my family’s lucky, my body found in the Lake. I wait for it, desperately wishing for a last drink first—why did I turn it down? Little press-printing God, it is unbelievable just seeing him like this, you’d never think he could look this way in a thousand years. It’s dizzying.

He says nothing. It must be a whole tenth-bead that passes, in vomit-inducing, intestine-wringing silence. Finally, when I can’t stand it any more, I open my mouth, to say the only thing I can think of. “Imperator... perhaps this wretchedly miserably pathetic one will take you up on that Saekrberk.”

One of his hands slowly rises. I never thought I’d ever see that hand tremble. He makes a sign to the trap-booth people. The drink-pouring sign.

After a few millennia of silence like the inside of the lowest cave of Hayel, the tray comes. He pours, lets me pick, we both say “Korukai” and knock back the first in one draught as is customary. But it seems his body is just moving, his mind in some other world. He pours the second for both of us, and knocks back his just as fast as the first. He is trying to return to this place, I see. It works, two spots of red come up on his cheeks, and, Celestialis be praised, albeit in barely more than a whisper, he says something.

“I don’t want to distract from the elections… with something personal of mine.” He’s barely managing more than a whisper, and it’s dead flat. “And it’s Yeola-e… my own people… who should have known first… But... it’s out, it’ll be distracting from the election already… who knows what wings it’s growing as a rumour…”

Right there in front of me, he calls in his secretary, gives him a series of orders in Yeoli. “I have called a meeting of writers first bead tomorrow,” he says. “I will tell everything to everyone all at once then.”

“So you want the Pages to sit on it today, You Whose Life, em, Imperator.” He nods and does the hand-turned-up Yeoli “yes” sign, at the same time. I was going to do a special edition today. No matter, I’ll do it tomorrow.

I don’t know what else to say. What do you say? “Hard luck, Shefen-kas”? “I’m sorry”? “I’m going to miss you”? “Enjoy your last year and a half”? I look at him, who is always so rock-solid, so steady, so eternal, so… there, that face that all the world knows, those arms and hands that could carve their way into the greatest power on earth, those eyes that always saw everything so clearly and never wavered from his course... and I realize I can’t even imagine him gone, I can’t imagine the world without him. That’s how he is to everyone. But you aren’t that way to yourself, Shefen-kas, and never were. Suddenly it is like he is made of mist, delicate and fleeting like the sun could burn him away in a moment, like I am seeing his ghost.

Our eyes collide, and I can see in his that he knows I am seeing him this way. My intestines writhe again, my ears straining to hear the first hiss of the spring-dart, but his eyes don’t turn angry. The sadness in them clarifies, making me see it has always been there, like an ocean you imagined might be there before, but now you see.

“The Pages will sit on it today, Imperator,” I say. “Thank you.” I bang down the last of my second cup of Saekrberk, do the prostration as fast as I can without appearing to do it fast, and get the fik out.

Everyone stares at me when I get back to the office, so I guess my face must show something.

“Get me some booze right now and then you’re ALL fired, you fikkers!”

“Good professional ink-snorking God,” they all say, or words to that effect. “Shefen-kas doom-touched, special edition!”

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32 - The only possible justice here is truth

On the fourth day, cleared by Kaninjer, I went before the writers to do as I’d promised Idiesas, absolved him and apologized to him, told them it was my error. When they asked me how that was possible, I said “I wouldn’t have thought it was, either, but these things can happen. I am just one of these people who gets wounded a lot.” Before they could nerve themselves to probe more deeply, I ended the meeting, pleading healer’s orders.

The more intelligent of them could smell that there was more to this, as I found when I read the stories, and they hoped they’d find out some day, but they left it at that, for now. Being liked is in so many ways a blessing.

The next day, when I was freed from all but the vein-tube, and cleared to work sitting in bed, Surya sat close beside me, and everyone else suddenly had urgent business elsewhere. Obviously Kan had cleared me to face the music, too. I breathed deep, though it was not easy.

“Kaninjer forbade you to talk about what happened,” Surya said gently. “Did you take that as a forbiddance on thinking about it, too?”

“No, but… maybe it’s from wound-weakness, but how it happened is beyond me, and has seemed pointless to think about. I guess I knew I could count on you to make me.”

He smiled. “Not entirely beyond you; you are certain enough that it was not Idiesas’s fault at all, but your own, as you’ve told everyone.”

I shrugged. “That’s just a matter of who can and therefore should do what in a sparring-match. He attacked; the defense was up to me. He didn’t attack in any way that I didn’t know how to counter—he did the same move, and I countered it easily, four or five times in that same bout. That’s where his responsibility ends; the incorrect move was mine. What’s beyond me is how I could have been so incorrect.” Remembering helped none; in my memory, one moment we were facing each other in stance, with him starting the lunge, and the next, I was skewered. I knew I stepped into it, but only because other people had seen it.

Surya picked up my hand and pressed it between his two. I got a sudden urge to say, “Curse it, you know full well, you can see it in my aura, why don’t you spare me the waiting and give me the cursed mercy-stroke, just tell me why this happened.”

“At least you are not maintaining to me that it was an accident; you’d have a harder row to hoe if you were. I guess a head of state has to shit his people sometimes… Anyway, do you remember our conversation when you came to ask me about going on that raid? What I said about being cautious?”

You are expelling this thing from you. But it can see its own death coming, and it will try to cling to you, try to defeat you.

It hurt to take a deep breath. I did anyway. I had thought this meant throw some doubts my way, put me into a mood of uncertainty or hopelessness, draw some criticism to me from someone who was against my relinquishing the sword, or the like, tempting me off-course. Something’s coming; best you make it as slight as possible. How spectacularly I’d failed.

“You think it’s the sword, the death in me... trying to kill me.”

“Is your death not its aim, its culmination?”

I covered my eyes with the hand he wasn’t holding, suddenly sick, my insides feeling as if there was no solidity in them, just liquid. “Breathe,” he said gently.

“Shit… I’d better not spar. Not until... well, I guess I won’t be sparring after I lay down the sword, either... will I? Curse it… no one’s going to want to go against me again in my life.”

“I wouldn’t say that… they just won’t until they’re all certain it’s been understood and dealt with enough not to happen again.”

I felt my fingers clench in my hair, pull on it, even as I knew he’d spot that as a shame-mannerism. I knew what people must be thinking. Suicidal. Sure, they’d think it possible that I’d do such a terrible thing to Idiesas intentionally—did the witnesses not have the evidence of their eyes? The doubt about me was always the same. Madness. It’s not as if they have no reason, I thought. Why don’t I just admit it, resign everything and wear the green ribbon for the miserable scrap of life I have left?

“It tried to kill you, Chevenga. It came close. But it did not succeed. And it is fighting so hard out of desperation, knowing you are winning. I know it doesn’t feel like that, when you are wounded and weak and in pain. But you are. You didn’t go on that raid, you had the sense to come to me to disentangle your motives instead. Else...”

Twenty Mahid with their darts and gas and who-knows-what, all itching to kill me, instead of one sparring-partner who’d want nothing less? I could not doubt what would have happened.

“So—I have to be very careful. You told me that.”

“I should maybe have been more specific. Still—I said do nothing risky, and that was an order.”

“I don’t think of sparring as risky.”

“You’d let someone untrained do it?”

“We’re all trained.”

“Lack of training isn’t the danger here.”

I heaved out a sigh. “Surya… I’m sorry. I guess… I hate being kept on a short leash, and bucking that is a gift, a skill, almost a specialty of mine. Ask Kaninjer, ask Krero, ask Skorsas, ask my parents, ask First Amitzas… ask Assembly Palace… I’m sorry.”

“Chevenga, don’t apologize to me—that’s not the point—or make excuses. Or flog yourself either. Just admit the plain truth.”

It was there. There was no turning away from it. The wound gave a twinge of pain. “You gave me an order and I disobeyed it. I forswore.” I felt like sinking into the earth.

“It caused you to forswear,” he said. “You don’t know how to act without its influence, not yet. That’s why I made it a requirement that you relinquish your will to me. You can’t make your own decisions in these matters, you’re not competent… Idiesas’s sword served to drive that point home, so to speak. You’re not competent. Do you see it now?”

I let my head fall back on the pillow, and my sight was suddenly blurred with tears. “I see it,” I whispered.

“I know it’s hard. You have enormous responsibility, you are worried you’re failing. In matters of state, you’re entirely competent, far beyond competent… as you know, and as you rightfully take pride in. The only place you aren’t is in the matter of your own life and death. Tell me you understand, and accept.”

“I understand, and accept.” He would know by my aura that I was not lying.

“In that sense, this wound, for all it may seem the opposite, truly is part of your healing, like a giant Haian needle as I was saying… did I ever mention, that in healing, things often seem the opposite of what they are? I thought it might take something this severe to get it through to you entirely. I guess I was hoping it wouldn’t, but… well, things happen as they ought to.”

“Was there another message in this, too?” I asked him. “I can’t make the election come sooner.”

“It’s a make-your-intent-whole message. You can’t do this just a little bit. You have to form your intent complete and strong to undergo the asa kraiya ceremony. You thought you had, didn’t you?” I had no answer for that, ran my hand through my hair. “Optimism is good; delusion is not.”

I took a deep breath, again enough to hurt on the right. Though Kaninjer had said I’d lose little or no function, I’d been trying to measure my own breaths, in vain; only exertion would be a true test.

“But Surya…” It was through a sudden chill of fear I had to cut, to ask him this. “If it got so close—why did it not succeed?” From what Kaninjer had told me and what I remembered, the blade had grazed or barely missed several blood vessels close to my heart because I’d stepped in with my shield-side foot, and a little low in the stance. If I had with the other, and thus been turned slightly more to the shield-side, or the blade had gone in a bit lower, I’d have been dead before I hit the ground.

“Think of the Assembly in you again. Not enough Servants were opposed to keep the wound from happening at all, but they could keep it from being mortal.”

“But why would the Assembly in me so play with chance?”

He shook his head. “Sometimes, Chevenga, you live in a world of denying. If I made a dot on my skin with an Arkan pen, you could hit it with the tip of your sword in a full-speed lunge, could you not?”

“Of course.”

“And you got the elite warrior’s training in anatomy, yes?” I signed chalk. “And, as you said, he’d done the same move four or five times before in the same session, yes? So you knew exactly how he does it?” I signed chalk again, and felt sick, seeing it coming.

“The Assembly in you knows how precise your warrior-skill is. Chance didn’t enter into it.”

I washed out my nausea with tears. It took a while. He just kept a grip on my hand. When they were subsiding, he said, “What do you do when you forswear?”

“Renew the oath. Re-relinquish.”

“We can’t do all you need right now… Kaninjer hasn’t cleared you for exertion. But we will when he does.” Fly on the wings of it… I understood. I could at least swear the oath again. I did, putting my name to it this time.

I still have what he said afterward; I knew I wasn’t entirely understanding it and would forget, so I grabbed a notebook I had on the night-table, and recorded it.

“You set yourself for a fight, you think you will be alone with it, you think you have to carry it all on your one pair of shoulders, since responsibility has been your life. You don’t. You aren’t alone. You don’t have to fight or strive or do anything, other than follow my orders and answer my questions—I’ll carry you until the life in you flames up strong enough to sustain itself. You don’t have to struggle to learn or understand; it will just happen. You don’t have to understand what I’m saying now; you do inside anyway. Just relax, relinquish, experience, trust and let it all happen. Everything is going as it should. You don’t have to hang on to or control anything; just let go. Look at you madly scrawling my every word; that’s trying to control too, that’s hanging on, and I tell you, you don’t need to. The whole thing, Chevenga, is a huge letting-go. Once you learn to let go entirely, you’ll be done.”

†

They let me rest for a time, then Krero came in, with Surya, Skorsas, Kallijas, Niku, my mother, my stepfather and my shadow-mother, all with somber faces. They all touched some part of me with their hands. Niku kissed my brow and slipped her arm under my head.

“You’ll be on your feet soon, Chevenga,” said Krero. “Your family, your healers and I had a talk about it.”

“You must understand why we are worried, omores,” said Niku, tenderly touching my stitches, making them itch.

“I understand entirely,” I said. “Cut the preamble and just tell me what you’ve decided for me.”

Lips pursed all around the room. “Legally,” said Krero, “we can decide nothing, as you know full well. But… well, Surya tells me that you swore a certain oath that ensures you’ll follow any rules that come from him.” Curse them, they’d conspired with him against me; of course they would.

Krero listed them off on his fingers. “No sparring, obviously; no one’s going to spar with you until we—Surya, or whoever—gets to the bottom of whatever shit in your mind made that happen, anyway. No two-person practice at all, in fact, even with wooden weapons, and no practice with steel whatsoever. No flying unless piloted by someone else—”

“No wing-relaying,” Niku cut in.

“—no swimming alone, no riding alone. In fact, someone else with you, all the time.”

“In the army, we’d call this a suicide watch,” I said.

“You are not suicidal,” Surya said. “This is not you; it’s the enemy within you, which is very powerful.” Wasn’t that the case, I wondered, with every suicide? I didn’t say it, though.

“Maybe it would be simpler to lock me in a cushioned room.” Kallijas’s hand clenched so hard on mine it hurt. “We’re not doing that, love,” my mother said. Niku kissed my brow again, and said, “I know it’s hard, omores.”

“Jewel of the world, if I have to remind you, I will,” said Skorsas. “You are still Imperator, freer than free. You are not in the Mezem, with Kurkas holding your chain.”

“Think of it as locking the enemy within you in a cushioned room,” said Surya. “Anyway, however you consider it—it’s an order.”

“For how long?”

“Until further notice,” Krero said tightly.

Surya was more honest. “Until I say.” Their faces made it clear, they’d all agreed with that.

I just closed my eyes and said, “A-e kras’.”

†

So, now I knew why I’d got the wound. How to explain it, to those who deserved an explanation? Seeing the only possible way was like rock grinding on rock inside my soul. Truth. There was no escaping it.

I called together those I thought should know: first and foremost Idiesas, but also Krero, Kaninjer, and Tyirian. Because I was obliged to tell them, I could not swear them to silence. I would have to trust their discretion. “So, Cheng,” said Krero, when they were all seated around my bed. “You’re going to tell us what really happened.” It was not a question.

“Yes,” I said. “The only possible justice here is truth.”

I told them everything, in the two languages I had to for everyone to understand: the vision, my twenty-one years of living in the certainty, the fact that it was in truth death-obligation, my working with Surya to cure myself of it, and that it was death-obligation had drawn me onto Idiesas’s sword. I managed not to weep, but I certainly did not tell it smoothly.

I had never told so many people at once. The silence when I was done, and waiting to hear what they'd say, seemed to open under me like an abyss. They all sat silent for a bit, of course, transfixed with horror.

To Idiesas, at least, it brought the relief a full explanation can give when an earnest assertion cannot. Despite my absolutions public and private, he had not absolved himself entirely, but now he did. I had not known he’d stopped sparring true steel; he began again the next day.

Tyirian said to me, “So, you understand it; but will that prevent it happening again?” I told him I wouldn’t spar until I got clearance from Surya, which satisfied him.

Kaninjer said, “This explains why you refuse to take care of yourself. Why you never listen to me when I say you’ll never see forty… why you have never finished your healing from the torture as Alchaen recommended you should.” I swore I would listen from now on, and finish the healing when I was asa kraiya. Of course this was not the only thing I had ever hidden from him; without any qualm he said, “I wonder what you are hiding from me now that I will learn later?” I swore second Fire come that this was the very last. Later, when I was more recovered and we were in private, he would put his arms around me with tears in his eyes. No one had pulled me out of the jaws of death as many times as he, so that he had something of a proprietary feeling about my life, right in his heart; to know that the one from which he could not save me had been looming so close gave him pain.

But it was Krero, who had known me the longest, who was the most struck, I remember him staring off into space as I spoke, but in truth staring into the past; by his eyes I could see old questions that had haunted him being answered, one after another, like thunder-claps in his head. “I want never to let you out of my cursed sight,” he hissed. “I thought I knew you.” When everyone else was gone, he stayed. “This doesn’t just explain why you aren’t careful of yourself,” he said. “It explains everything weird about you.”

We ran over some of them. Why I’d kept trying to grow up so fast despite all the trouble it got me into with Esora-e; why I’d wanted to marry when I was twelve; why Nyera and Komona had both left me suddenly and would not say why; why in whatever work I was doing, war or peace, I always seemed to be trying to make the greatest difference in the shortest time. Over and over, I apologized for not telling him, although we agreed that Mana and Sachara had both lived happier lives for not knowing.

Finally he said, “Shit, Cheng,” and seized my face between his hands. “So many times, I thought we’d child-raping lost you, and then you’d come back, it was as if you were invincible.” He’d stayed dry-eyed so far, but now the tears came. “This would have been the certainty. We would have lost you, for sure. Shit, Cheng, shit, Cheng, shit—”

For a frozen moment we stared at each other; then he wrapped his arms around my neck and head and kissed me, long and deeply and forcefully, tears raining.

“You still love me, from when we were kids,” I whispered, when he let go.

“Oh, I didn’t for a while there,” he said. “It retreated in fear, from all the cursed mysteries. How could I love someone I couldn’t begin to understand? Curse it, I came close to hating you. Curse it, curse you, carrying this after you convinced me to stay alive… I should break your cursed fingers.”

We were alone. I didn’t see how I could argue. He gently picked up my shield-hand and wrapped his two hands around the little finger. My heart came to my throat. “No, don’t—I surrender, mercy, I’m seeing a healer, I want to live, Krero, I’m sworn second Fire come, I want to live!”

He laid the hand down just as gently, laughing, and touseled my hair. “We will hold you to it, Fourth Chevenga,” he said.

That night when I thought about what I had done, my head spun again. Since starting with Surya, the number of people who knew was double and a half what it had been. That had to stop.

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31 - A giant healing needle

The first night had been easy, and I always felt better a while after Idiesas did healing on me; he did it a few more times. Though Krero hadn’t charged him, and wouldn’t, he had in effect confined him to the Marble Palace, for his own safety, and planned to until the Pages in which I would absolve him came out. Idis stayed away from the training-space on the roof also, and so had nothing to do, except while away the time in conversation with the other person in the Marble Palace who was barred from work. We got to know each other much more thoroughly.

But the wound pain became worst at night. It was as if his sword were still in me, and my nightmares would curl around it like flame around an empty spit.

“Night is the time when all that is living is living less strongly,” Surya told me. It was as if none of my other wounds ever really hurt, until this one. When he got me talking, I found myself saying things like, “I have lived for pain; there is no pain I didn’t in some way relish. The Arkans didn’t have to work too hard, to get me mixing up pain and pleasure. Until this one—it’s pure pain.”

When I was closer to sleep I asked him why it felt like something was flowing out of this wound, even though I was closed up. “It is as you say,” he answered. “This wound is the outward course of the pain you’ve taken and carried. It is the outflow, the expression… I can see it pouring up and out of your body, as out of the mouth of a river.”

“But it’s also as if this wound... is linking, tying me to... something. Am I making any sense at all, Surya? I don’t know what I’m saying, I’m just opening my mouth and letting come out what comes out, should I shut up?”

“No, no, sometimes by allowing yourself words entirely freely, you’ll find wisdom. Maybe if I explain it this way, you'll see everything really is going as it should: it is an ancient expression, he who lives by the sword dies by the sword, but it is also true that he who lives by the sword may be healed by the sword. What do Haians do with their healing needles? Make a tiny wound. Just think of Idiesas’s sword as a giant healing needle.” Laughing hard hurt, but I couldn’t stop for a while anyway.

†

Three days later, Minis came in, bright and smiling. The raid had gone off perfectly. All but two of the Mahid men had used their poison teeth to kill themselves on capture—one of the two was Second Amitzas, too cowardly in the end to do it—but all the women had been taken alive. They were all in custody in the old Mahid section.

“So,” Minis said. “We talk you out of going, we go, it all comes off flawlessly, and—you get badly wounded nonetheless! How do you manage these things, Chevenga?” I just shrugged on the left side as I’d learned to. I was well enough that Kaninjer had assigned an apprentice to be with me most of the time so he could treat other patients, but right now he happened to be here checking on me, and I think he gave Minis a look. “Em… never mind. You’re recovering well anyway, I hear.”

“I meant to announce your candidacy as soon as you got back,” I said, “but I can’t now… I’m sorry. Kaninjer won’t let me do any work or talk to writers until tomorrow, and I think he’ll want me to be quick with them, just the one topic.”

“Correct, Chivinga,” my healer said firmly.

“You need to explain what happened here,” said Minis.

“I had a training accident,” I said. “Aside from making sure everyone understands Idiesas wasn’t at fault, what’s to explain?”

He pursed his lips. The raiding party had probably found out about it from the Pages on the way home, I realized; all of the party being elite, they’d have known that it should not be possible, and said so.

“You and Kallijas could announce it without me, for now,” I said. I hadn’t told Kaninjer that Minis was not Minakis, but whatever was said in this room he would not take out of it, by his healer’s confidentiality oath. “Up to the two of you. Kall? Are you around here somewhere?”

“Hsst!” I’d raised my voice more than Kaninjer would tolerate. “Planning discussions are work, Chivinga.” Kallijas was elsewhere anyway, so once Minis and I had shared a hug, him for reassurance and me for healing, he was gone. Neither of them wanting to the face the writers without me beside them, they decided to wait. I promised I’d heal as fast as I could.

Emao-e also came in while Kaninjer was there, having just debriefed Kaneka on the raid. “Sem’kras’, a question about what we’re doing with these Mahid.”

“That sounds like something you’re supposed to be covering for me. Can’t you consult with someone else?” With my healer in the room, I wanted to make it look good at least.

“Well, no. I was thinking of giving them the same choice as we did with them before, swear allegiance or die.”

“But there’s the minor detail that that would now be completely illegal,” I said.

“Shit.” She smacked herself on the brow. “I didn’t even think of that. You know, I’m not great with this peacetime business, I have no head for subtleties of law... hurry up and heal, Chevenga. Good thing I asked before I did it, anyway. Illegal... piss-pots.”

“Not that anyone would say anything,” I said. “Everyone hates Mahid, the Arkans no less than us. In fact...” I thought, and my healer’s look grew more reproachful. I was definitely forbidden thinking. “This will just take a moment, Kan. In fact, if I recall rightly, it actually isn’t illegal by a special section of law governing the Mahid... different law. I think, but you’ll have to check, that if a Mahid cannot swear allegiance to the Imperator under truth-drug, his life is forfeit. I can’t remember the section number... well, it’s all in Arkan anyway, you’ll have to...” Bring the book here, I was going to say, but seeing Kaninjer’s look I changed it to “get Anamas in the office to find it and translate it for you. But—whatever you do, don’t forget this—when you ask them to swear allegiance to the Imperator, you must specify me the Imperator. Because they have a line of succession in their minds which they see as the true one, and it goes from Kurkas, to Minis, and then to the chief Mahid since Minis is now a traitor to their mind. That would make Second Amitzas Imperator in his own opinion, so that if you don’t specify, he might choose the oath and keep it to himself that he’s swearing to himself.”

“Hah, tricky. Mahid law, Anamas, you the Imperator, got it. Thanks, Cheng. But that still leaves what I first came here for.”

Kaninjer cut in. “Perhaps, general, someone else can help you with it?”

She chopped charcoal. “No. It’s a personal matter, healer, personal to him. Ah, Chevenga, I know now what you’re going to say anyway... it’s illegal. And yet... everyone hates Mahid. And—assuming we’re going to kill him, which seems a pretty safe bet—no one need ever know.” I had thrown off the covers in the heat. She touched the tip of the scar on my stomach that was Amitzas’s first initial with her finger. “The child-raper who did this to you is in our hands now. We’ve been wondering if there is anything special you want done... or to do yourself.”

That’s what she had truly come for: to offer me my chance for revenge. I tucked one hand behind my head and lay back, feeling a little smile grow on my face. My Haian was seeing it; but he also saw the scars, every day.

I remembered how helpless I had been on Second Amitzas’s table, and thought of how he must feel now, equally helpless, not so far from that same chamber.

I had even more freedom to do what I liked than he’d had with me, which he must know. I imagined how he must be tormenting himself, not to have used his poison tooth, how he must be suffering the double agony of fear and shame mixed. Had he got too proud, thinking of himself as Imperator, to do it? Or was he too used to thinking of himself as being on the giving end, never the receiving?

And yet... perhaps it was wound-weakness, but when I truly imagined myself standing over him, I felt sick. They say that the most willing torturers are those who’ve suffered torture, and the least willing torturers are also those who’ve suffered it. I found I was in the latter group, at least right now. My life would be happiest if I knew the man were dead without my ever being in the same room with him.

So I told her that. “Please yourselves,” I said. “For my part... well, you were right to say there is a question of legality... a question that might take some time to settle.”

Her smile grew to match mine, as she understood. No one knows, no one can imagine, so many and such terrible tortures, as a chief torturer who knows he is at the mercy of his one-time victim. The only mercy he had to pray for was a quick end. The torturer never wreaks the worst on us; we only wreak it on ourselves... Second Amitzas had taught me well. However eager or reluctant, the best torturers are those who’ve suffered torture.

I’d been right about the Mahid law. The men were asked to swear under truth-drug, and both failed. I don’t know all that my people did to Second Amitzas. I just asked if they’d pleased themselves, and was answered yes. Only one thing got back to me, told me by Krero, which perhaps was inevitable: for the last part of his life and into the grave, Second Amitzas Mahid wore my initials.

We did not tell Minis’s mother about this; though Minis had seen no signs whatsoever from her stone-like Mahid face all the way back from Jintila, she might feel something for her husband. I gave leave to First Amitzas, Imperial Pharmacist and the eldest of the Mahid who still lived, who had come over to me right away, to speak to the women. Of the eleven other than her, seven did change their allegiance, presumably because there was no one else left to be loyal to, and so passed.

Inensa had said two words to Minis, on her capture—“You turned”—and barely more. All the way home from the raid, he had tried to speak to her, telling her he knew he was her son, explaining that he was going to run for the office, begging her to swear to me and stay alive, bringing her meals. She said absolutely nothing, showing him only her back when she could.

In the Marble Palace dungeon she’d requested, and we’d granted her, every issue of the Pages. How she could be literate when it had been illegal in Arko for women to do so until I’d struck out that law, I wasn’t sure, but I had known she had a good mind. Minis had to have got his intelligence from somewhere.

What he and she agreed to, finally, was that she would continue to refuse to swear, but we’d hold off executing her until the elections, and then she could decide to swear to the Imperator-elect or not depending on whether it was her son or not. As if the vote-count wouldn’t be nerve-wracking enough for Minis already.

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