208 - I do not deserve to live

I also spent a fair amount of time poring through the Terera asa kraiya archives. “There is hidden history there,” Oraeha Shae-Mana, the archive-keeper, told me. “You might be interested in those semanakraseyel before you who were here.”

I was, and I read their writings with fascination, but I was almost more interested in finding chakrachaseyel who had, since they seemed even rarer. The archives go back twelve hundred years, back to before this maesa asa kraiya was here; it had been up on Haranin before. It didn’t help that the files are arranged not by rank, but by year, so I’d have to go through them all one by one to find all the generals that were there.

There were two I did find, neither of whom I had heard of, though of course I’d have known their names in their times. They wrote articulately of the same thing I felt, the weight on their hearts of all the deaths their orders had caused. “And yet I did so purely in defense of Yeola-e, by the command of my people through my semanakraseye,” Enchenga Irai wrote, in his conclusion. “Never was I the aggressor, unlike those I faced, so I am clean of that.” The other wrote similar.

I could not say the same. However wrong it had been for Assembly to ask me my preference, I had stated it, and it was to be the aggressor. I would never be clean of that, for all there had been benefits. There was no other asakraiyaseye who had been both general and semanakraseye.

“A soul like you,” Surya said when I spoke to him about it, “is simply alone with some things.” There was nothing to do but live with it.

I woke up at the death hour on hyeresora 6, three days before the count, coming out of some huge dream that I had forgotten, but had shaken me to the bones and left my throat clenched as if from weeping. I had only the edges of it, that it had somehow been political; I wanted it to go away anyway. I got up and paced beside my bed.

I’d never get back to sleep, I knew, so I took my lamp and went out, thinking I might sit in the greatroom. I’d gotten used to having no hot tub to flee into from sleeplessness, but now I found myself wanting it so badly I almost wept. But my feet took me to the archive room, and my fingers went digging through the oldest files, though in my searching I had been working backward in time and had only got to about a century and a half ago. I wasn’t even sure I’d understand any writing older than five centuries, so archaic it would be.

So much hidden history. The rise and fall of empires and religions, the changing of ways, the spreading of inventions; it is all there, between the lines of the writings of twelve centuries of asakraiyaseyel, a treasure-trove for some asa kraiya historian who wants to dedicate a life to studying it. Who knows what secrets these musty-smelling boxes and folders might hold?

I found myself leafing through the papers from about a thousand years ago, though I had no idea why, when in the flashes of Yeoli writing I was seeing, I could pick out maybe one word in five. Then one page leapt out at me, because the writing was in archaic Enchian. Foreigners are allowed to do this? I wondered, stupidly, before it occurred to me that I had just persuaded two foreigners to do it the other day. For some reason, as I drew the paper delicately out of its folder, I found my fingers trembling.

Archaic Enchian is closer to modern Enchian than archaic Yeoli to modern Yeoli, and this, somehow, was even easier for me to read than it should have been, when it was both archaic and in illegible scrawl. It helped that I was used to reading my own illegible scrawl.

Myn frayndes d’ cumanitye seurd-beiunde: j rit en dey… it was about that hard to read, with spelling like that. I translate.

My friends of the beyond-the-sword community:

I write and die, on the 17^th day of the moon of Jiya on the 630^th Year of Iyesi, or by your calendar, the 27^th day past the summer solstice of the 523^rd Year of Yeola-e.

The life that I lived, all the world knows. That I wanted to live beyond what I have done, only you know. It is true what the sages say, the sword kills any warrior who does not go beyond it. I could feel it killing me. I came here with the intention of escaping that.

Across a thousand years, he spoke to me as if he were beside me, the only writer in the archive who ever had. My feet and my fingers had led me here, to read this, to learn what I would from it. It was as if all the world stood still, while I took in the words.

So I knelt, and I let you hold my arms, and I let you draw the sword out of me, hearing it ring like true steel out of the scabbard, and seeing it smoke away into air. I will always be grateful for that. I go to my death free of it.

You warned me that when the sword is gone, the horror of what I did before I was beyond it would fall on me in its fullness, that it does for every warrior.

And so it has for me; but that horror is a hundred or a thousand or ten-thousand-fold greater than it is for others. The world knows the routs and the slaughters I led, the mass executions I ordered, the cities I sacked.

A million ways to regret… His writing blurred in my eyes, and I started having to keep wiping away tears to keep reading. This was the asakraiyaseye I’d been looking for, the one who had lived what I had lived. But I would get no inspiration and no instruction in how to prevail here. It had destroyed him.

If there was ever a lesson in why no one should do what I have done, it is that the horror of it is beyond the capacity of any one man even to feel. How can I grasp, in my one mind, the full consequences of my actions? How can I make an accounting for the mass of grief suffered, of pain felt, of considerations and hopes and dreams lost, of last thoughts of those who died, of what they might have brought to the world in philosophy or art or poetry or invention had I not killed them, of all the love extinguished, of the young lives stunted by orphaning, of the soul-shaming of rape, of limbs lost or crippled, of homes burned, of temples razed—all these things a hundred or a thousand or a thousand thousand times over, by a word from my lips, or a stroke of my pen, or my signal to charge?

It is all too much for one mind to encompass in understanding, let alone bear. And because we should not do that whose consequences we do not understand, we should not do what I have done. But I did.

So, I accept what I have imposed. It is still not just; there can be no justice here. One death cannot make up for the thousand thousands I have caused, but I can only die one. So I do so now. I have no right to live beyond what I have done. I do not deserve to live.

Signed in my own blood,

I didn’t doubt he had, because the rest of the writing was in sharp dark ink, but the signature was in a fading brown.

First Curlion.

†

I rousted Oraeha out of bed. I hoped that, as the archive-keeper, he’d understand. I hauled him into the archive and in front of the letter, which I had laid on the reading table. “Is this real? Was it really him? The history says he went missing, and neither he nor his corpse were ever found, and of course Enchians believe he’s sleeping under a hill somewhere and will return in their direst hour, but if this is real he died here—after going asa kraiya! If this is true, why isn’t it known?”

“Emmm,” he said, half-asleep, his voice gravelly. “What is this… old Enchian… oh, yes, Curlion’s letter. Erm…” He blinked and rubbed his eyes. “Yes, it’s real, Virani-e. There are references to him in other’s writings around that time. He did it with a kitchen knife—a drawing-cut across the throat-artery. He was buried up on the mountain somewhere. Haranin, I mean. That’s his blood, that he signed in, very appropriately, war-monger that he was—he cut his wrist first to get some.”

I couldn’t speak, for tears. I wasn’t even sure what was in them.

“Why isn’t it known? Ehh… we keep our secrets. A thousand years later, it’s too late to inform his family or people. Only dusty-fingered historians like me care. I suppose also… well, I don’t know what the asakraiyaseyel thought back then, why they kept it quiet. But I can guess. We are strange and arcane and apart from the rest of the world, but in some ways we’re no different than anyone else. We didn’t manage to bring him through it. Who wants to talk about their failures? Though if you ask me, it was his failure, not ours. He chose, as always you do.”

I lay my head on the table and wept, and he put his arm around my back. “I’m sorry, Virani-e,” he said. “I knew you were looking for someone like yourself. I should have thought of this. But… I guess I didn’t, because he was so different. You would never have attacked the Arkans if they hadn’t attacked us first, and you invaded them by our mandate. He did it because he wanted to, because he was a war-monger.”

The writing appeared before my eyes again, and something whispered to me, it wasn’t that simple.

And yet was it not? For him, and for me?

I wanted to take the letter back to my room with me, as if it were somehow mine. Oraeha didn’t like to let anything, especially something that old and delicate, out of the archive room, but he made a dispensation, perhaps to make up to me what he felt was his error. I lay with it on my night-table, its presence burning in my mind, and waited for the sun to rise and Surya to wake.

It turned out he had known about this too. Did they all? Did my mother? “Why has no one told anyone?” I asked him. “So it was a failure, so what, we all have them!”

“It’s not just that, by my guess,” he said. “Virani-e, you forget: he is a demi-God to Enchians. Do you think they’re going to want to know he killed himself in remorse for all they worship him for, wretched and alone in the maesa asa kraiya of Yeola-e, their old enemy? It would cause them only pain, or anger, at us. Besides… look at how he wrote it, ‘that I wanted to live beyond what I have done, only you know.’ He sneaked into asa kraiya. He wouldn’t have wanted it known. We are keeping his confidence, as we keep all our confidences.”

We were in my room. I lay down on my bed and wept. I seemed to have a lot of tears in me for this. “What is in them?” he asked me, turning back into my healer.

When I could speak, I said, “It’s that… well, the one line encompasses it. ‘I do not deserve to live.’ He tried… and failed.”

“Ah,” he said, gazing at my aura. “Of course.” Then he said something else. I remember the words as he said them; they seemed a truism, that didn’t need saying and didn’t really follow, except that he said them a little differently from how you’d expect, which gave another meaning. I didn’t understand that meaning at the time, and still don’t. Perhaps it is something I cannot, for some reason, bear to understand. I offer his words to you, my reader, in case you can make sense of them.

“But in this life,” he said, “you succeeded.”

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