204 - To life’s injustice you sling back rage

“The Committee is pretty good at getting to the truth of the matter, too, actually,” your shadow-mother said, when I came back with her cup, and mine, filled. Too good. I wonder if I would have married Tennunga if I’d known I’d be in for this? Well… semana kra.

“At least Linasika was thrown off, so the last times I didn’t have to refrain from punching him.”

“Always a difficult thing,” she said, laughing. “I wonder what it is with him... why does he have all that hate for Chevenga? It just seems more intense than just the usual worry about power corrupting. Maybe Chevenga looks just like Linasika’s evil uncle or something.”

“Perhaps Linasika has such an aversion to any metal at all that he figured Chevenga’s gold teeth were a danger to his brain.” Clearly the wine made me say this.

“Maybe if Chevenga bit him,” Naina said, without cracking a smile. “I don’t think he has, has he?”

I almost snorted wine through my nose. “His dearest wish!”

“Whose? Linasika’s or Chevenga’s? I don’t know that Linasika would taste that good.” I almost snorted wine through my nose again. Curse my ex-wife: was she going to give me a chance to get a good swig?

“Linasika’s!” I said. “He’s acting like... oh, like the youth who wants someone but doesn’t dare ask... but goes on blaming the object of his old affection for years after.”

Now she burst out laughing, almost snorting wine out of her nose. “You mean you think he might once have had a thing for Chevenga!? Ha ha ha! That is too funny—where’s Karani? I’ve got to share that with her.”

“Well, he’s behaving that way, wouldn’t you say?” She couldn’t answer, for laughing. “Still, I agree. He’d probably taste like ink, dust and old legal drafts.”

“Kyash, I don’t see her anywhere. I guess I’ll stay here. I am laughing so hard, I must be drunk!” she said, and quaffed another large draught.

“Speaking of drunk,” I said, when we’d sufficiently recovered, “how do you like my father’s fighting style?”

I haven’t had a chance to tell you, Chevenga: I asked Dad where it originated. He said the story is that it was in a bar in Selina. Two men got into a fight, one of them drunk, one of them sober, and the drunk trounced the sober one. A fighting-master was watching, and had a flash of enlightenment about what drink does to the spirit, mind and body, and how that might aid in fighting. He began teaching it to his students. That was a few hundred years ago, but my father went to that school.

I wonder what my mother thought of it?

“It is quite something,” she said. “But, wild and drunken as it is, I see traces of you in it.”

I stared at her. “Really?”

“Really. It’s interesting; it’s an aspect of you that I hadn’t seen before and didn’t know was possible. He does some loose, floppy, curving move and I think, ‘He somehow did that like Esora-e would.’ It’s hard to explain. But you know; fighting-style is in the school, of course, but it’s also in the blood.”

“I guess so. Tawaen may not be worthy to lick Chevenga’s boots, but you still see the resemblance.” I’m sorry, lad. I shouldn’t have said that. Or written it to you. She just looked at me. “Sparring my Dad is a lot of fun,” I said quickly. “He was meditating on top of a staff. No, truly—balanced there like it was planted solid in the ground. It didn’t look real.”

She stared at me. “How do you mean? I’ve never seen him do that. Where’d you see him do that?”

“At the School of the Sword. He was there early, before even me. He had his one leg wound down the length of it but it was steady.”

“I’ll have to get there early. I’d love to see that.”

“Would you believe I asked him to show me how to do that without—”

“Becoming an Arkan?”

“Getting cornholed, I was going to say.”

“Or becoming a Yeoli sheep, as they’d say.” We were both sputtering wine again. When did she become so pleasant to be with, after all those years when it was so hard?

“You know, you’ve become much more pleasant to be with, Esora-e,” she said. Right then, I swear. We once thought with one mind, I suddenly remembered.

But I was too startled to know how to answer, so I didn’t. “He showed me. Your hand goes on top and you hook one leg around it, then stretch the other leg down, bent but with the sole of the foot pressed against the stick... to bend it a little... So the stick isn’t perfec... perfectly straight... sorry...” I hiccupped loudly.

Denaina’s face half-contorted, in mock outrage. “Are you drunk, Esora-e Mangu?”

“As drunk as that chocolate woman’s brainless bird—Kvas, I mean, that brainless bird—eating fermented apples. Instead of sandals, like the other… You know what Pitpit did the other day?”

“What?” She fixed her eyes on mine and cocked her head sideways, like she always did when listening intently. I haven’t seen that for years, my shadow-son.

“I found her the other day lying on her back on my pillow, her claws in the air. For a moment, I thought she was dead, like chickens when they do that.”

“What, she’s learned to play dead?”

“I thought, ‘Oh kyash, hurray.’ But then she turns her head and says”—and here I did your voice perfectly, my shadow-son, who I love, just as perfectly as the parrot did. “ ‘Thank you, Kaninjer. I pay you so well because you deserve it.’ I thought my guts would burst, from laughing.”

I wonder if Kaninjer would say all the wine splorting through her and my noses was good or bad for us?

†

The pin-dagger within was piercing his lung from behind, under the shoulder-blade. So different from the Skorsas I knew; it was why he walked slightly bent, I realized; just as the memory of a horror can bring vomiting, the concept of a blade can cripple. Charcoal fires, sausages cooking, blossoming cherry-trees—the aromas of the solas quarter, smelled with childish intensity, wafted from his aura. A neat and well-plastered house, walls hung with curios from all over the western Miyatara; my Mommy, her blue-eyed smile, her baking, her warm milky smell; the training-ground sand-dusted and fenced high all around, Master Adamas guiding my arms, muscles aching from doing the cut over and over with the wooden sword. Then the night Daddy didn’t come home.

Steel-eyed men from the Ministry of Internal Serenity around the dining-room table. “A tiny wound, Serina Noren, but through his heart; he was pin-daggered from behind.” One steely-eyed man from the Ministry Pecuniary: “I’m very sorry, Serina, you are not entitled to the war-widow’s pension; that is only for the wives of solas who die in action for Arko.” I barely understood the words. A smaller, plainer house, the curios disappearing one at a time. A smaller, plainer one yet, barely more than a shack, Daddy’s gear going one piece at a time too, his sword, passed down in the Noren family for generations, that I should have got, the last thing to go. She and my older sister hunched together over cloth and needles and thread, morning to night, their hands, hardened from bareness, flashing. Narrowed eyes of an aunt: “Well, Mira, we said you shouldn’t try to marry up.” Mommy with tears glistening on her cheeks. “Skorsas, I’m sorry, you can’t go to Master Adamas’s school any more.” No more letters or numbers either; I was only eight but I knew that from now on I was okas.

Dreams of blades on a hard bed in sweating dark… the needle-like one that had ended all things good; the Ilesias-era longsword that had been my father’s and my grandfather’s and my great-grandfather’s through all their battles, owned by some stranger; steel itself, any old blade, now only the stuff of my dreams. By myself in our tiny yard, I practiced with a stick, determined to forget nothing and somehow, just by sweat, learn new, while the boy next door said over the fence, “Y’know it’s heaving brick you should be practicing, eh, Skorz? Y’could get the ten-beaded whip f’r that.” The ambition burning hotter each year; no. I will wield steel.

When solas youths come through the okas quarter at night, the Sereniteers look the other way. “Haha… found you alone, and there’s a nice alley close… hey! Is that… Skorsas? Skorsas Noren?” Itasas Ferren, their leader; what a surprise. The one you could count on to whack you harder than he had to in sparring and go “Sooo sorry!” with a big grin on his face.

“Skorsas Noren, solas.”

A burst of laughter, from him, and all of them; likes attract likes. “Well, you’ve got muscles, I’ll give you that. Even if they’re shit-shovelling muscles.” Another bark of laughter. Rage boils away my fear. “But I doubt you remember which end of one of these”—he tapped the hilt of his youth’s shortsword with his pristinely-gloved finger—“to pick up.”

“Oh, I do. It would be the opposite end of the one in you.”

“Ooooooh!” they all say. “That’s one brave-tongued okas,” Itasas laughs, loosening his sword in its scabbard, and nods his head towards the alley. “Why don’t you show me, hmm? Bren…” Brennas, who was the runt of the class and so is now the runt of the clique, sneeringly draws his and tosses it to me grip-first. Itasas draws and comes in, leisurely, nose in the air, ready to play with me. I am keeping red lines from running across my sight purely by breathing; but I have steel in my hand. He chuckles. “You really think you’re something, for someone whose dad was found face down in the piss-ditch outside a herb-hovel.” Everything goes blank white.

When I come to myself, I’m sitting on a warm wet lump of something; the other solas youths are all around but well-back, staring at me, frozen in terror, swords shaking in their hands. I look down, realizing my arm is so tired it hurts. It’s Itasas, or what’s left of him, more red than any other colour. I find his head only by a twist of hair coming out of a red mass. I get up, feeling so cold I feel nothing. “What’s this?” I ask them casually. “Never seen blood before?” They all run yelling away into the night.

“Go.” My mother, trembling, in tears, but her voice strong, while her hands throw together a pack for me, shirts, leggings, under-cloths, gloves. “Go away… anywhere, I don’t know, you can’t tell me, I mustn’t know if I am truth-drugged. They’ll hang you like a thief… write me, even if it’s no more than a child’s scratchings, once you’re somewhere safe, no return address. My baby—a man now, ready or not—I love you—go!”

Of course I washed up where all the detritus of the world washes up, in Brahvniki, tradeless and with nothing to my name but what was in my pack. And a little steel. Thank my bright-greaved God that He’d given me the presence of mind to plunder Itasas of his sword, scabbard and all, which was better than Bren’s, since his dad is richer. The life and future of a man such as me is shaped, of course, by what he is willing to do.

Skorsas, look at the assignments you’ve taken. Through whatever part of me I touched the pin-dagger with, I sent the words. So strange to say the name to a Skorsas so different. You tell yourself because you are matured now, you have mastered your anger; but look at them, one warrior after another, one man after another who you feel you could never take face-to-face. You like to kill what you were robbed of being, by this very weapon; to life’s injustice you sling back rage, which is killing you. See that.

“Aigh!” He did not have Vyadim’s self-mastery. “Aigh aigh aigh kaina marugh miniren Aras Arammph—”

The Enchian slapped a hand over his mouth. “Shut up if you don’t want this dart in you.” Then realizing that in an instant the corridor would be full of asakraiyaseyel on high alert anyway, so it was up to him alone, he flung open the door with his tube to his lips, grabbed the kraumak from Skorsas’s frozen hand and stepped in.

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