205 - The hope that dies every day in you

“Who needs Chevenga for amusement?” I said. “We have his feathered pets.”

I can be insensitive when I’m drunk, my shadow-son. I’m sorry. “It’s so close in here,” I said. “Shall we go out into the atrium for a bit?”

“Yes, let’s,” she said.

The atrium was much cooler. There were only a handful of people there. Through the glass we looked up to a sky flung across with stars like diamonds. Those weird paila trees made it smell earthy and green. We sat beside the little tree which Niku promises will grow oranges when it’s big. It is good to know you will eat them, my child.

“Esora-e,” she said, after a moment’s silence.

“Yes?”

“I guess I need to say it again... I can’t tell you how grateful I am for what you did for Chevenga.”

I didn’t answer. I stared down into the red-black pool of my wine-cup.

“It was as if you freed him of every load you’ve ever laid on him, all at once.”

“I hope so,” I said with a sigh. “Thank you. For that.”

“Did Surya say anything to you about it afterwards, or did he get the chance?”

“No. His attention, rightly, was on Chevenga.”

“Well.... that’s what it looked like to me. That... freed me of a big load as well.”

Did I ever teach you, that when someone says the same thing twice in a different way even though you understood the first time, it means they really want to say something else? Not that you would have needed me to teach you that.

“He... was afraid... and hanging onto it.”

“Sometimes all it takes is the encouragement of another person... especially the right other person,” she said.

“I had put that fear there. I had to say something. I’m glad.... that it lifted a load for you too.”

“It did lift a load for me.”

We were going around in circles. Why? What was I missing? “I…” I trailed off, not knowing what to say. I was too sober and the wine too far away from her, from here, when I didn’t want to get up.

“Well,” she said. “So you’ll be up at the school again tomorrow...”

“Um,” I said. “Uh, how’s your wine?”

She looked down into her cup, as if she’d forgotten how much was in it since the last sip she took. “Oh,” she said. “It… appears to be empty.”

“I’ll refill it for you.”

“Well, almost.” She tipped it all the way. “Yes please.”

Some more sea-curls had come out of the kitchen, this time crusted with some sort of spicy batter, and with a dipping sauce that was like honey and garlic and chocolate on your tongue all at once. They were out of this world. I made us a plate and brought it back to her, burbling. “You have to try… they’re amazing… especially with this wine… a white now…”

“I’ve never had them cooked like this,” she said. Her tongue flicked over her lips. She took a bite. “Oh, mmm, I see what you mean.”

“Try dipping them in this sauce.” I dipped her one and held it out to her.

Our fingers touched as she took it. It was like a lightning bolt through all my bones. She almost dropped it, took a deep breath, looking down and away from me.

“Yes, mmm… ohhh… that is good.”

There was sauce on the edge of my mouth, so it must be on my moustache too. I wiped with one finger. She handed me a serviette. “Here, love.”

Another lightning bolt went through me. Did she notice herself saying it? “Thanks, Naina,” I said.

“You’re welcome, Esa.” She took another deep breath, and looked up and around us. “Whoever thought we’d land in a place like this.”

“I remember a certain dinner that got very messy,” the wine made me say.

“Oh you do?” She sighed. “So do I.”

You were born, Chevenga, but you were only just walking, I think. The four of us kept getting sauce on each other. And we had to remove it, you know. Ha—shy about this writing to my grown child, who’s probably done this and better a thousand times with his chocolate wife and root-crisp lovers! We did a lot of… tasting.

“It’s… a beautiful place,” I said, looking all around also. “Tennunga would have loved to see this.”

“He would have. But then it probably wouldn’t be here if he’d lived.”

“True.”

“It would have been him and Chevenga against the Arkans,” she said. “I think he’d have given it to Chevenga to be chakrachaseye sometime, but I don’t think that soon. He’d have thought twenty, or even twenty-two, was too young.”

“Have another of these things,” I said, offering her one, dipped. I knew how much sauce she liked. Our fingers didn’t touch this time. The Earthsphere seemed to be standing still anyway. “I think you’re right.”

“Thank you, Esa. I wonder if they would have butted heads. I bet they would have.”

“Absolutely, they would have,” I said. “Like two peas in a pod, thinking they know best and usually being right.” I wanted to be on the ground, so I slid off the bench onto the flagstones, leaning my back against it. I laid my head back on it to look up through the glass. “Look at me, almost under the table.”

“I was just thinking, maybe you should haul your inebriated body off to bed. And me too. We’re not as young as we once were.”

“I… I want to wash off first. Hot tub?”

“Well… let’s give our regards, then, sure,” she said, got up, and reached down to give me a hand up.

Sparks shot through our hands as they gripped, I swear. I wondered if I would be able to walk, between that and the wine.

She was slow to let go. I took a deep breath. “Umm… Naina?”

“Yes?” Her eyes rose to meet mine. They were so soft, in the half-light of the atrium torches.

“Am I crazy? I’m feeling things... but if you aren’t...”

“No, you’re not crazy. How many times have I told you... never mind.” She turned away as if to walk, then turned back. “How can I not feel things, Esora-e?”

I held out my hand, not quite enough to touch, but to feel the glow from her cheek.

“I don’t know, Esora-e. I’m not sure... You are a different person... or so it seems.”

“I… at the risk of sounding self-serving, I like the person I’m becoming.”

“So do I,” she said, without hesitation. “In some ways, he’s more like the one I knew a long time ago.”

She gripped my hand from the outside. Her palm was warm, and tender.

“You choose, Naina. As always.”

“Esora-e… you know, really... when it comes down to it... I never stopped loving you.”

I clenched my eyes shut tight, against… what I was seeing? What I was feeling? The tears?

“It was just... well, you know.” Something made me look. Her eyes were red. “Tell you what… let’s try… let’s try just being close without anything formal. See how it works.”

“I’d love that,” I said. I leaned forward slightly. So did she. My moustache just touched her skin. Our lips… we just let them brush. “Nothing formal.”

“We were going to the hot tub,” she said. A smile quirked her lips. “Race you!” Like an arrow out of the bow she was gone, empty cup in hand.

I dashed after her, keeping as straight a line as I could. “Have mercy on an old man!”

“This old lady wouldn’t dream of it!” she yelled back over her shoulder. She started leaving a trail of clothes as she got close, as did I. People got out of our way. We fairly ran through the cleansing shower, and then she did a sudden swerve and flung herself into the cool pool instead. I followed. “She got away again on you, Esa?” some waggish ass said.

We came back up in each other’s arms. Four or six or perhaps twenty of your spawn of various sizes were there, Chevenga. They all started whispering and one ran off at a dead sprint. We didn’t let go. Shortly afterward, the sprat came back with Veraha, walking oh-so-casually in.

“Naina, do you want to go somewhere more… em… private?” I asked her.

“Since the entire world’s eyes seem to be on us here,” she said, “I think I will say yes.”

So… that’s where we stand, my shadow-son. She sleeps now, as I write. I will give this to the flying mail-carrier tomorrow, so you’ll know at least almost as soon as everyone else in town.

I cannot say how much I love you.

Esora-e.

†

Him alone—or the man outside. Drawn by the three, and inexperienced in this kind of weapon-sense, I had not noticed him, leaning flat against the wall next to the window. He was unarmed. Contingency, in case I flee out the window because I’ve weapon-sensed the presence of the other three. They had it all covered.

The Enchian was in my room. The inner layer of his aura was not the usual pure luminous blue, but a sickly pale, like water slightly clouded green. The assassin’s sword in him, I realized, was made up of something almost too wondrous to see; I cannot describe how I could see it, only knew that I could. It was as if every cell in him contained a minute image of his entire body, each of millions of them with the sword, proportionately tiny, in it. In his aura I saw the secret family crest. His father and his father and his father before him, all assassins; raised to it like a farm-son to sowing and reaping. Laughter around the dinner-table as Per imitates the face of the last one as he died, eyes bugged, mouth chewing for air. “Guess he regrets everything he did, ha ha ha!”

The Haian’s face was joyless as he spoke quietly to my parents, in the parlour, smelling of beeswax as those were my mother’s favourite lights; she was suddenly dabbing her eyes with her lace-edged handkerchief with the threads of gold. They started making me take remedies morning and night, tiny Haian drops under my tongue, that would sometimes make waves of tingles roll over my skin all down my body; they made me eat more meat and more of certain vegetables, less bread and nothing sweet at all. Sometimes, watching my brother eat cake, I cried, and my mother would hold me, but never relent and let me have even a bite. They told me only “The Haian says,” until my sixteenth birthday.

My father’s face, grim and more wrinkled, it seems, than it was yesterday, in the book-lined office in the house from which he does his front-profession, accounting. He is a small man; we marry small women because an assassin is best small. I dream of moving as he does, some day. “Meniaj, my son, I—well, your mother and I—decided you’d be too young to know until you were sixteen.”

“What I’ve got,” I said.

“Yes. I suppose it wasn’t hard to guess you’ve got something… I don’t know what it’s called, my son. The Haian had some Haian name for it. The key thing is, it means that, even with the diet and the remedies—unless God allows a miracle—you won’t live past your twenties.”

It takes a little time for people, even former warriors, to realize they should wake up, get up, open their doors, run out into a corridor, look around, see what they should do. I have a little time to savour this. The mouthpiece of the gun was smooth on Meniaj’s lips; unthinkingly he’d taken in the quick deep blow-gunman’s breath. “It’s his g-g-g-ghost,” whispered Skorsas, still kneeling frozen. “Shefen-k-k-kas.” Damn straw-hair fool, we haven’t made him into one yet! Paleness in the dark, brightening as he reached out his hand with the kraumak: the light showed up the line of forehead and nose and sharp chin, straight thick eyebrows, all framed by a curling fringe that was one with the darkness. That famous face. As smoothly peaceful, with eyes as calmly closed, as a meditating monk’s; of course it was a meditating monk’s. Or a corpse’s; when the soul is elsewhere, the body is soulless.

Your death is on my lips. In my lungs. You thought you were going to escape it… ha, you were so close. But you were wrong. We’re caught now, we’re dead; but so are you, and that’s worth it. For a moment what I saw was triune; my body actually there, Meniaj laid out on his own bier as he foresaw—he was twenty-seven—and my own corpse exactly as I’d seen it the day my father had been assassinated.

“That face,” I said to him in my mind, and his, “is your own.” The killing-breath froze in his tensed solar plexus; all over his muscles turned to stone. I read it in the Enchian Pages, shipping out from Curlionaiz to a Brahvnikian mission, “Chevenga living under death-curse.” How funny that was—you, the great man, had been in the same boat as me… but haunted with it from even younger, just seven, how good was that? Of course I could tell no one in the passengers’ cabin why I was laughing so hard at this grim article.

“But then you read more.” Fingers curling, tearing the paper… of course he has a fancy healer, devoted to him. Of course it’s only a delusion. Of course he has a chance.

“What you see in that face is you as you should be; a young man with most of his future still before him.” A contract beyond my wildest dreams. “Fourth Sievenka? Kill Fourth Sievenka?” Vyadim is one of the very, very few who know about my disease. Big mistake, great man, letting it slip; I didn’t make the same one. “The client thought of a way, and I tell you, it’s sheer genius. I have to learn to read a little Yeoli and we all have to do some good low flying on a very dark night, but that’s why we took those lessons. I thought… you in particular, Meniaj, might like it.”

“What you want to do is make him into you as you are. The hope you’d kill with him is the hope that dies every day in you.” Out in the corridor there were many voices, all at once. “What’s going on?” “Are you all right?” “He’s frozen somehow.” “What’s an Arkan doing here?” “Get Tyaicha.” “He has a oh shit!” “That’s Virani-e’s room oh shit shit SHIT!!”

“Spirit-guide, demon, whatever-you-are,” Meniaj spat back at me in his own mind, and mine, “shut your damned trap, there is no hope for me. And watch this.”

“There is life outside the body, as you are hearing me. And the hope of peace within it, and understanding. So long as you don’t kill the one person who understands, that is. Who do you think is talking to you?”

--