207 - To have your gift for a tenth

Chevenga’s opponents urge voting with mind, not heart

Anasenga Karetai, Terera Pages : atakina 90 Ye. 1556

As voting day fast approaches, those parties opposing the re-approval of Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e as semanakraseye are trying hard to counter his strongest point: how much people like him and appreciate what he has done.

So we hear people such as Linasika Aramichiya and Mirasae Shae-Koraha using words such as “deadly charisma” and “charming betrayer,” or bemoaning how Chevenga’s underlings and allies are insufficiently credited with the victory over Arko and he hogged all the glory.

As well, they argue, Yeoli voters should not vote with their hearts, which remember with fondness, but their minds, calculating on the likely results of his reinstatement. By having a semanakraseye and former chakrachaseye who is beyond the sword, Yeola-e would be weakened against its enemies, they argue. By retaining a semanakraseye who was convicted under the Statute semanakraseyeni, Yeola-e is opening itself to lawlessness and dereliction of duty through the example and precedent that sets. Questions asked by the Chevengani Mental State Assessment Committee about the Kiss of the Lake, and Chevenga’s own renouncing of the stream-test, raise the spectre of such massive changes to sacred Yeoli customs as to threaten the very underpinnings of our society, if he is re-approved. And of course there are remarks on his sanity, suggestions that he is too fragile to be trusted in the position, that the death-delusion could reaffirm itself anytime, that he is still prone to suicidal urges, and that his affliction might reappear in some other, unexpected form.

One might ask if these suggestions are indeed appeals to reason rather than to different feelings—predominantly fear—but they are framed so.

The timing of the vote and Chevenga’s ceremony has done him no favours. While anti-re-approval spawn-presses grind out their diatribes, and his detractors are quoted at length in the various Pages, he remains sequestered on Beyond-the-Sword Island, answering it all with not so much as a pigeon-message, when he could be making public appearances and so reminding Yeolis that they like him, and having his retorts to his adversaries also quoted at length. His supporters are plenty active and vocal, but they cannot replace him.

Reportorial queries to the island are always met with the same response from the leaders there: their most illustrious member must keep his mind on his own matters right now. They are tight-lipped about how it is going, though when the rumour of an assassination attempt emerged, it was not denied.

The story is that four crack assassins flew onto the island by night, succeeded at entering his room, but were foiled by Chevenga himself, unarmed, without anyone sustaining so much as a scratch. The spokespeople of the community refuse to say how he did it. What affect this might have on the vote result is hard to predict.

The feeling on the street in Terera is that he will win by a substantial majority. But this is his hometown, of course. There is greater doubt in other parts of Yeola-e, by all accounts. Fourth Chevenga—or First Virani-e, as he would have it—has it anything but locked up.

†

We celebrated the winter solstice, filling the maesa asa kraiya with candles and spruce branches. Two days later was voting day. The lake was still passable by boat, with some smashing of the ice on either shore, so an election official came that way to administer it; ila asa kraiya is a part of the riding of Terera South.

A few people said to me, “Maybe you should go now; this might be your last chance before the count. It can be bad for a month.” But I was not ready. No such suggestion, I noticed, came from Iyinisa, Surya or Azaila.

My mind was still a stew of confusion, my thoughts flailing in the maelstrom of everything I had learned. It would sort itself out, consolidate into something coherent, just by staying in my mind and so becoming familiar, as well as by my turning it over and over. But that takes time.

I had to remember again, I had time, more than I had ever had.

If I looked at it in the light of remembering from times before I’d been born, I had infinite time.

All through those next few days, I worked on this, the revelations dropping into place. I remember thinking, “asa kraiya means, in its essence, not even fighting or not fighting, but understanding fully what you are doing when you are fighting—All-Spirit! My father told me the importance of that, when I was barely higher than his knee.”

The fate of the fourth assassin, who I had not touched inside, began to weigh on me. It wasn’t fair that he shouldn’t undergo that which had caused two of the other three to renounce killing and so be safe to absolve, but Lyasin—that was his name—absolutely refused to let me or anyone else near him, in that way.

He would not listen to me, nor to the other three when I got them to try to talk him into it. “Feh,” Skorsas Noren said. “I don’t really understand, Shefen-kas, why all this persuasion. Why don’t you just do it, as you did to us?”

“No,” Surya said flatly, when I ran that past him. “Vyadim, Skorsas and Meniaj were not consenting, as you have been all through as I’ve touched you, but they opened themselves up to you by trying to kill you. There is a bond there—a bond of death-intent—do you see what I mean?” I did, though I doubt I could explain it in words. He told me that if he had been there, he could have seen it as an auric form, a cord tying them to me.

I thought of somehow giving Lyasin a chance at me, perhaps bare-handed, so as to create that. But I saw he would not take it, since he was already caught. He was actually a mercenary more than an assassin, I had learned, without a string of murders to his name; he’d come along because his strength was unarmed fighting, by which he’d made good money through bets and challenges, between and even during war contracts. We never sparred, but I got the feeling from him that, unarmed, he could take me, if I used nothing spiritual. Now he hoped to talk the Brahvnikian court into commuting his death sentence to imprisonment since he had not tried to enter my room. I very much doubted he could—he’d taken his share of the first half of the assassination payment, for one thing—but he clung to it.

In the end, there was nothing I could do. In Brahvniki, they hanged him with barely a tenth’s worth of a hearing.

Five days from the count, the ice froze clear across, and on the next day was too thick for the break-and-boat way to be practical. I was stuck until it was thick enough to walk, so I changed from praying for warmth to cold. It wasn’t answered, the weather staying overcast and winter-mild. Three days away, I knew I would not make it off for the day of the count. It would be understood, of course, but I still felt wrong in myself.

My mind and heart had mostly settled by then, so I felt fit and able to be in any company, not just asa kraiya. I found myself wanting to write—it is so good for ordering the thoughts—so I went on with what became this book. I was exercising with the asakraiyaseyel then, too, and found that doing warrior’s exercises didn’t bother me. They were just exercises. I even sparred with steel. A sword is indeed a different thing in the hands of an asakraiyaseye, I learned.

Sometime around then, I realized that Surya had ceased being a healer, and become a friend. We’d been heading that way already, but now it seemed complete. I would ask him for his thoughts, but he never offered them with any sense of requirement or suggestion I was not competent to judge them.

We were talking about what had happened that night, that I had seen auras and yet, in a sense, felt more than seen the stories in them, and even the auras themselves, almost as if it were more like weapon-sense than seeing. “I don’t think I had a view as clear as yours,” I said. “Oh, to have your gift, just for a tenth.”

He raised his brows, smiled, and got up, saying “Come with me.” All-Spirit, I thought. Have I still not learned, never assume Surya cannot do something? As always when this happened, I was nervous.

He took me into a room that no one was living in right now, that had a mirror. He had me sit on the bed, and took my head between his hands, front and back. “Deep breath. Make the white line. Close your eyes, but stay in the present.”

It was more difficult than most of the short-lasting changes he’d wrought in me. He did several painless and indescribable things to me, including running what felt like the point of his crystal along the life-energy lines. Then, he began telling me how to think, and that took a while. “You almost have it, good… oh, you lost it… try again, go back to where you were,” and so on, until finally I got my mind into a state the like of which I’d never felt, and he said “Good, good! Hold that!” Then he came around in front of me, and said, “Open your eyes, without losing that state for astonishment.”

No words could ever do it justice. The aura has colours more vivid and bright any you see just by light, colours that there are no names for, a thousand colours where we only see six or seven. I had no idea it would be so ornate, lined throughout with the most delicate threads of light, in different colours and configurations at each layer. Somehow his whole life was in it, too, and indeed his previous ones, scenes within scenes. I instantly understood Surya in a way I never had before, and never could have, without doing this. It all shimmered and flowed and now and then flickered, like flame, or the aurora borealis. I couldn’t speak, or move, for wonder, and the effort of staying in the state in spite of it. No wonder he had not seen the signs on the surface of me that would tell him my name.

“Get up, but keep holding it,” he said. I did, and he led me gently by the shoulders, then got out from between me and the mirror, keeping a hold on my shoulders.

It didn’t look unlike his, except the life I saw the essence of was my own, with its own most recent turn, the ceremony and my time here, standing out most prominent. Everything I had known about myself in fragments, I saw in one now, making it all into a single concept.

“So that’s how it looks to you,” I whispered, somehow afraid if I spoke louder, I’d jolt myself out of the state.

“That’s how it looks now. A lot better than it did when we met.” Tracing with his finger, he pointed out where things were different. “This vortex was closed, twisted… that line went awry… that colour that is sort of blue was more clouded and greenish… all the colours were weaker, in fact. All your scars showed up much worse… and many other little things. And, of course, there was something there that is no longer.”

“Just as well I didn’t see it like that,” I said.

He didn’t answer, except to tighten his fingers on my shoulders slightly.

I stood gazing, and my eyes slowly filled with tears, that I blinked away as fast as they came so I could keep seeing it. It just told all of my truth, that was all. The tears were not from sadness or fear or even joy, but the huge-as-the-Earthsphere wonder of it… or not even the wonder, but the hugeness itself, of everything.

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