198 - The scream of a soul ripped away

I am still telling it in a calmer and more orderly way than it was. I was a madman, again, for half a moon at least.

Surya, oddly, mostly let me be. Perhaps because I was insane without being inclined to suicide, for a change, so he wasn’t needed to truss me up or tenar-menhu me. Or perhaps he just needed a Chevenga-Virani-e break.

Remorse: For the lives they have taken and the suffering they have caused, as they see it increasingly clearly. So calmly and gently stated, those words, for the unspeakable vortex of horror it is.

I began to have nightmares, in sleep and then in waking—they would seize my thoughts—that were utterly unfantastic, just my ordinary life in war. The sight and the sound and the feel and the smell and the taste was no different in my memory than ever before. I didn’t feel as if it were the first time again, as if I’d never known the clench of living flesh on my sword, or the spatter of blood, or the particular all-encompassing desperation of the cry from a death-blow. It was all the same, except that I felt the true horror of it, just as I had felt about my own tries for suicide.

To fight, you must forget that the enemy is human. Not in your mind or your body, else you put yourself at great disadvantage, but in your heart, which is the part that knows that others feel as we feel, that can share their joy and their pain, that knows bereavement and orphaning. I was seven years old again, not wanting to kill because I had learned from my father’s corpse the meaning of death, except that now I had done it thousands upon thousands upon thousands of times. Every single one was human to me now, with thoughts and hopes and fears, with loves and families and friends, all of it ended by my action.

It was not that it was wrong—I would never have undone the liberation of Yeola-e, or even the conquest of Arko—it was just that I knew the horror of carnage. In my sleep, or as I lay in my room or walked down the corridor to the dining hall, a snatch of a memory of killing another warrior would come unbidden, as if something in me insisted on showing it to me in its true vividness. I would see things I had seen at the time—a man’s arm-muscles built up by so many years of sweat in training, a crease of cares between eyebrows, a flash of eyes upwards in prayer—that I had made mean nothing to me as I killed him, but now felt for. The soul-deep flinch, and the doubling over, and the tears, while Iyinisa patted my back, because sickeningly familiar.

“Everyone suffers this,” Iyinisa told me. “You are going through the same as we all have.”

“Just bigger,” I said. “Like I do everything.” She signed a wry but firm chalk.

Iyinisa the champion, who had never commanded more than a hundred, was as close as they could match to me, because—and no one had warned me about this beforehand—very few generals go asa kraiya. “I’ve got two people going through the archive,” she told me. “We’ll find one.”

“Perhaps because they know at heart it will drive them mad,” I said.

“Shh,” she said, as if I were a baby. “I’ve seen many people go madder than you.”

I stayed in my bed. I wanted to see no one, and let no one see me, as I felt this rip me apart and reduce me to nothing. For a time I forced myself up only to use the chamberpot, sometimes with her help. I did not scream—the maesa asa kraiya has no sponge-lined walls—but I wept and sweated a lake.

This is what the sword in me did, I saw. Cut me apart from part of myself. I was not feeling now what I had not felt at the time. I had felt it, but never let myself know I did. That was what the sword did.

“You just did what you had to do, what all warriors do,” she told me. “You understand that you grew it in yourself, yes?” I signed chalk, from knowledge I had not known I had, that made me even sicker. “Every warrior has done it, and every asakraiyaseye has undone it, or is undoing it. You are on a well-trodden path, and our hands are there for you.”

It changes you. You cannot look at your hands, or feel your body, the same way, while you are in it. I have been a weapon of death more than I have been a human being, you think. How can I ever become one? You despair. Two realities shimmer, one above the other: your hand as a hand, fleshed and warm and capable of gentleness, and your hand as death itself.

I cannot track every thought, every snippet; I had to hope they were molding me anew, into something acceptable. The Enlightened Followers were right: I am a God, a dark God, Shininao in human disguise… All the power I ever wielded, that I loved so much, was built on the scream of a soul ripped away and the fall of a corpse, a thousand thousand times over… the name Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e was made on a flood of blood and tears… all who admire me are fools, or blind, or vicious themselves, with swords in their souls.

“There are several people in the same place as you are, talking about it in the gathering-room,” Iyinisa told me. On legs of glass and water, I went there, meaning to sit silent, which she told me I could if I chose. It was to know I was not alone.

“A child came out of the house,” a man was saying, sobs breaking his voice. “Seven or eight, just a tiny wisp of a thing, terrified, holding a doll in her arms as if she could save it. ‘Your parents are dead anyway,’ I thought, ‘or will be, when we’re done.’ I was sated with raping already, so I just took off her head… and we shit on them for cutting between their legs!”

They said later I fell as if I’d taken an arrow. Of course it will be atrocities from the sack of Arko. Everything these people here are suffering from that, now, is on my shoulders as well. I went back to my room on my hands and knees.

It changes you. You slowly become different, a creature made of a different substance. I had a full wash-basin that had gone still, and saw my face in it, the face that was so well-known, the face of a warrior. How could it not have changed? “I never want to see my own face again!” I cried to Iyinisa, similar to what I had once cried to Skorsas. “It’s the face of Fourth Chevenga! It’s a lie now! My face is a lie, my body is a lie, everything about me is a lie!”

She calmly patted my back. “You know that in healing there are phases, five of them—” Yes, Surya taught me that, I cut her off to yell. Where am I? All of them all at once? If I am a lie… disbelief, then? Knowing didn’t make me feel any better.

It changes you, and the change spreads out. I hated myself for having been a warrior; I hated myself for no longer being one; I was not who I was and I hated the abyss between. I am a traitor, just as they’re saying, I screamed to Iyinisa, I’ve betrayed Yeola-e—but I can’t go back, now, I can’t change it! I can never go onto a field again! I am one of those who must be protected! What have I done!?

What have I done what have I done what have I done… Now the words I’d said in Terera, and transcribed into the maesa asa kraiya tererani book, all seemed false to me, finely-crafted lies from one who’d made a bad choice and was trying to put jewels on a goat. All Yeola-e, do what I have done? If Yeola-e became what I am now, we would all be anybody’s meat. I might as well not have fought the war, and let Arko slap chains on us all.

Well, no, I’d made the correct distinction, in fact. Yeola-e need only make a moderate correction. It was I who needed the extreme. So here I was.

This is what I chose; whatever Surya says about my freedom to go asa kraiya, it truly was the price for the rest of my life. Yes, the sword would have killed me. I could feel that in my bones now. I had been becoming less and less human. What is at the end of loss of humanity, but death?

All he’d pointed out to me was that I was choosing both, choosing everything. As always you choose. A lesson in the rigour of choice: only by choosing had I come to understand the full meaning of choice.

I was bound to the wheel of my choice, now. The days would go on, life would continue, and I’d go down this path whatever I felt. I wished it felt more like walking, or even running, not tumbling head over heels. “This is how it is for everyone in your position,” Iyinisa said, making me wonder who else she could possibly mean. “Everything is going as it should.” Was Surya projecting words into her aura?

And yet even as I tumbled, the dizzying length of the path I saw before me stayed steady. I tested it, by asking myself what future I believed in, each morning. The decades, my children as grown-ups, my grandchildren, all stayed certain in their possibility in my mind, like a grand vista opened up before me, still. It was the strangest mix of ecstasy and horror. I learned the ultimate meaning of tenar menhu: extreme juxtaposition.

“You wonder why such aversion, to what you did so easily before,” Iyinisa told me. “It’s because that aversion is actually the natural state of human nature. We are inclined towards life; it is why we move, why we breathe, why sex is pleasurable. We are inclined to feel and understand the sufferings of others; that is natural too. To be inclined towards death is the opposite of true human nature, indeed the nature of all living things. To kill our fellow humans unfeeling is against it, too. By inflicting death by our actions, we take the spirit of death into ourselves, and we cut ourselves within.”

This was almost verbatim from the book, from parts I had not been able to read before. I would have thought it was nonsense before. Now I had to listen.

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