a s a • k r a i y a

[AN: asa kraiya is now up on the new site]

2010-01-31T23:18:00.003-05:00

Whether you are a new reader or returning to dip into chapters you enjoy or do a full read-over, you'll like asa kraiya : beyond the sword at my new website, currently here. (www.chevenga.com).

I am still counting ak as in beta now, as I haven't fully checked over everything, so if you notice any errors large or small -- or indeed have any comments on the site or the reading experience as it is now or whatever -- please let me know.

Enjoy.

213 - It's very simple, what we want

2010-01-26T17:05:00.005-05:00

In the hubbub, I learned later, Kaninjer signaled both the adakri and Darosera from the door, holding up one hand with all fingers extended. Darosera proposed a resolution that they allow me five days before I started again, and it went chalk unanimously. I was not hiding as well as I meant to that I was injured, I suspect.

Most of the rest of that evening I remember as a happy blur. When I requested painkiller, it was poured for me copiously. Linasika congratulated me, a little wanly, though he also leaned in a little close and whispered, “I bet you’re glad now I talked you out of resigning,” making wine burst out of my nose with horror or mirth, I’m not sure which.

I was swept up onto shoulders before I could change into the semanakraseyeni shirt, so I did it aloft. They carried me once around Vae Arahi, but then down to Terera too, and through every street. There wasn’t much Kaninjer could do about it, or I for that matter, but at least my weight was off the leg and my back out of reach of those who’d pound it. I’d wanted to introduce Krasila to every one of her kin, even the cousins twenty times removed, but had to leave that to my parents.

Between Kaninjer holding me to my promise I wouldn’t go too late, and Niku, who was genuinely tired, wanting me with her, they got me back into the sleigh at a decent hour. “Hot-tub, I treat you, then bed,” he ordered crisply. With everyone else having their hands full, I went down to the water-room alone.

Everyone had been too busy to light the lights, it seemed, so I took a lamp from a sconce in the corridor. The sky was still clear, and the just-waning moon shining on the snow on Haranin, suffusing everything with a silvery blueness through the windows, would probably have been enough to see my way anyway. I stripped and went in silently to savour the quiet, the peaceful trickle of the waterfall the only sound. Then from the hot-tub I heard a soft female sobbing, the voice one I didn’t recognize. I padded closer, dousing the light, and saw the grey-white spear. The sobbing cut off abruptly.

“It’s me, shadow-grandma,” I said. “Let me guess—not sadness, but the emotion that’s hard to name, of the hugeness of everything.”

“I know it’s you, Cheve—Virani-e. Congratulations, semanakraseye.”

“Or maybe you aren’t even sure what it is. The hot-tub relaxes—nothing like it for old achy wounds—and loosens internal knots… it can catch you off-guard.” I climbed in and sat across from her, leaned my head back and closed my eyes, and felt the heat deliciously erase the pain in my back and calf. I wouldn’t be long for the waking world, I felt right away. It had been a long day.

“I had no idea you liked babies so much,” I said.

“Of course I do,” she said. “They haven’t had time to turn rotten yet.” I let out my breath in a long sigh. I was too tired to come up with a good-enough answer to that.

“When I asked you tonight how you got hurt, shadow-grandson, you said, ‘kriffiyah accident,’ knowing full well that would tell me absolutely nothing,” she said. “Now you’re not coated with drooling drunken adorers, would you care to tell me what exactly a kriffiyah is, and how can you have an accident with one?”

“It’s a device for snatching up a person from the ground onto a double-wing, and you can have an accident with one through inexperience. But it’s not fair, shadow-grandma, that we should talk about what afflicts me and not what afflicts you.”

She pulled herself straight, fast enough that I heard it, and felt the ripples the movement threw off lap on my own skin. “Fourth Chevenga… I’m too old to change as much as you all want.”

“How do you know how much we all want you to change?”

“I’m not a fool, boy. You showed me what you wanted when the lot of you descended on me at my school.”

“Oh did we? And that was? You say you know, so I’m testing you.”

“My son, quite rightly, called me a layer-forged bitch this evening.” I’d seen no sign of a quarrel, so perhaps he’d said it jokingly. I hoped so. “He knows me well. A layer-forged blade cannot be melted and recast. It just breaks.”

Now I straightened, and looked her in the eyes. “Shadow-grandmother, it’s very simple, what we want,” I said. “You.”

She got up, waded to the steps and began climbing out. Unlike the front of her torso and limbs, which were seamed with old white scars, the back of all of her was wrinkled only, as unscarred as a Haian’s, the mark of a warrior who has never fled the field. “Good night, shadow-grandson. I’m tired.”

“For Esora-e and me, as kin. Tyiria, as a friend. That’s all.”

“Congratulations, semanakraseye, and good night.”

“You don’t believe me? Must I swear on my crystal to my own kinswoman?”

She stood for a moment, a towel wrapped around her, her face unreadable in the darkness. Finally she said, very quietly, “I believe you. Virani-e.”

“Thank you. Sleep well, shadow-grandma. I love you.”

“I… too.”

Krasila turned and strode away spear-straight, and I suddenly knew, as if I could see it in her aura though I was not seeing it, why she was fleeing me. It was not what I’d said, or that I had tried to touch her aura, since I had not. It was that my presence alone made the spear in her shift, ever so slightly.

Some day, I thought. In this life, or the next.

The faint whiteness of her body and the towel fading into darkness as she went suddenly blurred in my sight; just as I’d told her, the hot-tub can catch you off-guard. I let my own tears fall freely, full of the emotion that is hard to name, of the hugeness of everything.

vinya (the end)

[Author's note: what next for me?]

Well, before we get into that, a reminder: the next Character Chat happens 2 p.m. EST this Saturday, Jan. 30. The very chatty Chevenga -- or should I say, Virani-e -- will be there, with his reflections on asa kraiya.

My writing plans: I've got into a two-project per weekday habit and at least some of my readers have as well, but since that was putting me on the edge of burnout, what I plan to do is post The Philosopher in Arms alone, at least until I get the new site truly up to speed. I might also devote some serious weblit time to publicity and advertising, to grow my readership.

After some discussion with Shirley, I think my next project will be a collaboration with her. It's a book we conceived years ago and have partially written. Start date TBA... not to worry, we'll generate enough hoopla that you'll know. We will locate it on the new site. Here is the blurb.

~:~

THE GAMES

A weblit novel by Karen Wehrstein and Shirley Meier

There’s only one way to get into the greatest school of generalship in the Fifth Millennium world…

TASERA KRIL

Her blood-mother died by her own hand. At heart, she feels she has a brilliant strategic mind, but her shadow-mother and her two shadow-sibs laugh at her ambitions and say she’s only good for farm-work.

If she goes back home a loser, it’ll be the final proof that she has no talent, only pretensions.

ELERA SHAE-TYEBA

He was working his way up the ranks of the Yeoli army quickly, until he got busted down as a result of his own obsessive envy. “A fine commander,” his military record reads, “as long as he doesn’t have Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e under his command.” As if that could ever happen.

Guess who decides, on a whim, to show up.

TORAS MENEKEN

Forbidden by Arkan law to command more than a hundred fellow solas for most of his career due to his caste, he is capable of much more. Now he’s free to pursue his dream of becoming a general… but he’s alone among foreigners who hate his people for what they did as conquerors.

For political reasons, this year will be his only chance.

What do they have in common?

They’re all out to win…

THE GAMES

212 - The count of the votes of the people

2010-01-25T17:20:00.003-05:00

My mind was suddenly full of the sight of her holding Esora-e that way as an infant. “Katanrani’s around somewhere, too,” I said. I wanted both of them to feel this touch as the first thing they knew of her.

“Keep naming children like that and we’ll have mouthfuls like the Enks… er, Enchians,” she said, rocking from one foot to the other unthinking as mothers do, while I introduced her to Servants, administrators, judges, writers and so forth, as well as Kaninjer, Minis, Kyriala and every other foreigner I could pull in. She barely took her eyes off the baby to greet any of them.

Then she was insisting on changing his diaper, and chuckling when I opened the wrong pouch, pulled out the semanakraseyeni shirt by mistake, and whipped it back in before anyone could see, I hoped. “Good strategy, bad tactics, lad… where can I do this?” I went with her, Kaninjer notwithstanding; gooey as she’d turned, some part of me worried she’d sneak out back with Tyiso and lay him in the stream.

As we came back, the bell started ringing. I saw Kuraila hastily kiss Surya and then scurry towards the Assembly chamber door. “Go on,” Krasila said. “I’ll get him back to his mother; it’s not as if she’s hard to spot.”

“I’m on leave, so I’m not actually required until they resolve to invite me to sit in the visitor’s chair,” I said. “So I’m going to lurk by the door.” I spotted Niku, mouthed to her, “You’ll never guess who’s here!” and, when she came over, introduced them. They swapped babies, and Krasila wanted to change Kat’s diaper. “Just born today... and you’re already in a political crowd,” Krasila cooed to her. “My poor kids can’t avoid it,” I said. “Though maybe I, and they, will be tossed out for good in a moment.”

Inside the chamber, Artira began calling Assembly to order; then Skorsas was at my elbow, so I introduced him to Krasila. He was, of course, in his finest, far outshining me or anyone else here, even Minis, and she looked him up and down without hiding it. “Enchanted, Sera,” he purred down his nose. “I’ve heard so much about you, all of it deeply impressive.”

“Mezem boy? You must have seen many fighters, then.” It was absent again, though, her eyes drawn back to Kat and her face softening again.

“Oh yes.” He laid his hand tenderly on my chest. “But really, only one. You have war-students here, as I understand, Serina; how many guest rooms will you and they need?”

“Oh, I hadn’t thought to presume on my shadow-grandson’s hospitality... we’re in an inn in Terera.”

That struck Skorsas blessedly speechless. “Shadow-grandma!” I said. “You’ve got so much family in this town that with this latest two I’ve lost count, and you’re paying for a room?”

“That is proper, given our years of estrangement, is it not?”

“Shadow-grandma, I told you you have a standing invitation, that our doors and our arms are open to you! My house is yours!”

“I recuse myself from presiding and relinquish the speaker’s crystal to the angaseye daiga krisa,” Artira said, inside the chamber, in her official voice. There was but one item on tonight’s agenda.

“Well, I… thank you,” said Krasila. In between her making mush-eyes at Kat, she and Skorsas worked out how many rooms, just in time for my parents to show up insisting she stay at the Dependent with them. The compromise we worked out was that my parents would all stay up at the Independent tonight. Skorsas had started the hot-tub draining as soon as we’d got out; it would be filled again by the time we were back.

“We convene so as to record and certify the national referendum on the matter of re-approving as semanakraseye First Virani-e Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e,” the adakri said, “in light of his conviction under the Statute semanakraseyeni sections 21-1 and 21-5-7 and the findings of the Chevengani Mental State Assessment Committee as stated in their final report.”

I could no longer pretend to myself that my heart was not in my throat. Kaninjer probably had calming essence, but I didn’t want anyone to see me take any. I’d never imagined I’d be in Krasila’s presence while the results were read; somehow that made it more nerve-wracking.

“Now, little girl... are you going to be big and strong too?” Whatever my people had decided for me, I reminded myself, I had twins, and I’d keep both of them.

“I propose that we invite Virani-e to the visitor’s chair as it would only be appropriate to this occasion.” Darosera, bless her.

“Strong, like your mama and papa both?” Something made me take a deep breath and still myself inside, then look at Krasila. My eyes must have taken on the aura-seeing gaze. Inside her, from the crown vortex to long past the base one, low as her knees, was a spear, sickly grey-white, like pus, with age.

“Discussion... I see no hands requesting the crystal. That we invite First Virani-e Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e to the visitor’s chair as it would be appropriate to this occasion, all chalk, all charcoal, all abstentions, I have seen chalks only, carried unanimously. Runner, enact.” Barely behind me was the Arch-Keeper of the Counting Chamber, with the papers. She’d be called in next.

“Beautiful like your papa, even if in brown, hmm?” Krasila drew Kat in close, and I saw the spear in her curve away from the baby, and the blue around her arms strengthen, between it and her, as if to protect her from it. Krasila could not know she was doing this.

“Chevenga.” The runner touched my arm, and several more hands patted my shoulders as I went in. It was written afterwards that I sat forward in the visitor’s chair from tension; in truth I was keeping the cracked rib off the chair-back.

“As I hold both my own and the crystal of the Assembly of Yeola-e in my hands, in the worldly witness of the people of Yeola-e as represented by the Assembly of Yeola-e and the spiritual witness of All-Spirit,” said the Arch-Keeper, “this vote and count was completed entirely properly and legally, no procedure omitted and no precaution neglected, in the witness in every counting-room in Yeola-e of the Counting Senaheral, Second Fire come if I am forsworn.” Deep breath. The spirit of Surya, I think, will be with me the rest of my life.

“As you have so sworn, sib Arch-Keeper of the Counting Chamber, we ask that you reveal the count of the votes of the people on the question, that we fully reinstate as semanakraseye First Virani-e Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e in light of his conviction under the Statute semanakraseyeni sections 21-1 and 21-5-7 and the findings of the Chevengani Mental State Assessment Committee as stated in their final report.” I stood up, feeling drops of sweat trickle down between my shoulder-blades, as she handed the packet of papers to the adakri, who opened them.

“Oh yes, and fly on one of those mad contraptions like your mama, yes!” When there was a baby in Krasila’s arms, the rest of the world didn’t exist for her. Several people around her said, “Shh!”

“The vote of the people of Yeola-e on the question, that we fully reinstate as semanakraseye of Yeola-e First Virani-e Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e in light of his conviction under the Statute semanakraseyeni sections 21-1 and 21-5-7 and the findings of the Chevengani Mental State Assessment Committee as stated in their final report, we have duly totaled as, of two thousand thousand, seven hundred and fifty three thousand, four hundred and twenty two proper and unspoiled votes: chalk, one thousand thousand, nine—”

I gasped—I couldn’t help it, and it rang out clear through the chamber. I threw my hands over my eyes.

“…hundred and seventy-one thousand, five hundred and seventy-three; charcoal, four hundred and eighty-seven thousand, nine-hundred and seventy-one; by our calculation a majority just shy of seven and one quarter in ten.”

Everything dimmed, and the room was spinning. I sat down fast, put my head on the table and buried it in my arms; it would be wrong to break my neck keeling over in a dead faint after a seven-and-a-quarter national chalk telling me to come in to work tomorrow morning. The result showed me what I had expected at heart, though I had hidden it from myself: either a slim win, or a slim loss.

The Servants were doing the somber applause that is proper from them; the crowd in the gallery and outside the door were madly cheering, some jumping up and down. A hand touched my shoulder; the adakri, asking, “Semanakraseye, are you all right?” I sat up hard and threw out a firm chalk, hurting my back; she still had to proclaim it and I to say, “The people wills.” But it was still all I could do to not bury my head in my arms again. She put her arm around my shoulders and said, “Take a little time, lad.” It was all too much.

[AN: end of book whine; Chevenga chat]

2010-01-23T11:29:00.006-05:00

I have it planned out, and the last post of this book is going to be on Tuesday.

Of course I will go back and revise; I've spotted one plot string I never tied up and there's an opinion piece from the Terera Pages that needs inserting somewhere, and of course I will have more ideas. A weblit piece is a living thing.

But that's not the same as writing every day and knowing that people are out there waiting for me to click on "publish post," sweating over the Friday cliffhangers, feeling and thinking things because of what I have written. I should be relieved because it means an end to the killer schedule, but I'm not. I'm sad.

Of course I'll keep going with PA until its end joins up with the beginning of ak, and then I will present them both as one work. (It will be well over a million words long, I estimate, and I plan to divide it into seven books, titled separately, under one main title.) And of course I will write more: more Chevenga stuff, more Fifth Millennium stuff, more who knows what.

But none of it will be asa kraiya. For personal reasons, for emotional reasons, even for spiritual reasons, this book is very, very special to me. Chevenga's transformation is my own, or, at least, runs parallel to it. Because of that, much of ak plotted itself. I've never had so many surprises from a book that I myself was writing, and I've never been so inspired, or inspired in quite that way. I don't know whether I'll ever have that with any other work. I hope so... I imagine it's possible... but I don't know. That makes it tough to leave this one.

Shirley and I announced that our next character chat would be a solo Chevenga (though again, surprise entrances by other characters are not to be ruled out) and now we're thinking it should be about asa kraiya since the book is concluding. I also know that there are people interested in chatting with Surya.

So.... we'll tentatively set the date and time for next chat as: Saturday, Jan. 30, 2 p.m. until... whenever. Location, same as before, here. Hope to see lots of you there.

--

211 - Guests I did not expect

2010-01-22T14:37:00.004-05:00

We had decided that if we had two boys we’d call them Tyiria and Esora-e, if two girls, Karani and Tanra, and one of each, Tyirisora-e, the names of father and son merged to symbolize their rejoining, and Katanrani, the names of our respective blood-mothers merged formally, just as Roshten had informally merged the names of our blood-fathers.

So, though we had meant to name them as soon as they were born, as is also done in families that don’t stream-test, with the first one, we’d have to wait until the other came.

Kima wanted a sister, Tawaen a brother, saying, “I have enough little sisters,” to great outcry. “Daddy,” Kilalere asked me, “this isn’t something we can vote on, is it?” Meanwhile Niku had pushed out the first after-birth, and Baska taken it from the midwife’s hands and slipped away; I was too shy yet to tell my parents about the Niah custom of the mother frying and eating it, just as they eat the hearts of their dead. (I’d never had an argument with her eating my heart after I died, but I wasn’t sure it would be so with any other Yeoli; now it was good not to have to worry about that happening so soon.)

“No, loves, this is a no-choice,” I said to my squabbling spawn. “You’ll love him or her, and she or he will love you, either way.” The second twin’s head crowned, and then on the next push (on which Niku and I were both seized with fits of giggling between pushing-yells), he was out. He was a boy, but his sex was suddenly the least of our troubles, as he did not breathe, and turned blue as the blood ceased flowing in the cord.

As third eldest, Vriah should have the knife, but she was almost too young anyway, and the midwife said sharply, “Cut it now,” so Etana did it, and Natandra passed the baby straight to Kaninjer, who sucked I know not what out of his mouth and nose with his own mouth, then worked points on his tiny chest.

We all went silent in terror. “He’s scared,” whispered Vriah. Niku buried her head in my neck; feigning calm for all I was worth, I told her, “He’ll be fine,” praying that it prove true.

It took time and work on Kaninjer’s part, but soon enough came a tiny coughing and gasping, and then he started mewling, and all the children cheered and danced, Vriah crowing, “He likes breathing!” When he’d turned to his true colour, Kaninjer brought him back to us.

They both took to the breast well, one apiece. “Welcome to the world which we will fill with love for you, Katanrani,” I said. “Welcome to the world which we will fill with love for you, Tyirisora-e.” Once the second after-birth was delivered and spirited away also, and it was clear that Niku was not bleeding, it was truly over. The four of us basked in the water, while the midwife and Kaninjer packed up their things.

“I suppose you’re going to wave it in everyone’s face that you’re not stream-testing them, by asking us to put up the flags now,” Esora-e said to me.

“Absolutely,” I said. “Red for your shadow-grandson, blue for your shadow-granddaughter, hop to it.” He went out without a word.

Kat—that would be her name from now on in the family—slipped off the breast with a tiny sucking pop, fast asleep; Tyiso hung on even in sleep, and so I carried her and Niku carried him when we finally climbed out, and she lay back in the bed. Kaninjer insisted on checking me before I joined her, then tenderly slathered my back and calf with whack-herb cream, gave me several remedies and ordered me to spend the whole rest of the day in bed. This was just as the vague memory was coming back to me that there was a referendum count happening today about whether I’d remain semanakraseye, and I was due down at Assembly Palace.

“How were you going to get the results on the island?” he asked me, when I stood back up again.

“I’m not there now, I’m here, and I can get to where I should be.”

“You have a good excuse not to, if being with your new children and wife who is recovering from bearing them isn’t enough: healer’s orders.”

“For two bruises?”

“The cracked rib was more what I was thinking of. This one, here.” He pressed his point with a hard enough finger-poke to draw a yelp out of me. “And what you have on your calf is not just a bruise but a hematoma. You’ll have to suffer the hardship of staying here with the new life you’ve made.”

“Cracked rib?” Niku said from the bed. “Hematoma?”

“Getting kriff’ed took two tries,” I said. Taking her demand to tell her everything as evidence that she was strong enough to hear it, I told her. She took several deep breaths.

It was she who came up with the compromise that settled it, that I rest here until the last flyers were in. Tawaen helped by offering to act as runner and accounting for them. Vriah patted my shoulder. “You don’t need to worry, Aba. You said, either way it would be good.” At least I’d hid my nervousness from everyone else.

We posted Tawaen on the terrace as lookout. Down at Assembly Palace, a crowd grew as dark fell; each time a wing came in, they’d send up a huge cheer, the last getting the hugest. “That’s my signal,” I said. “A bead or so, and all the summing-up will be done. Whoever’s coming, coats and boots on.” The kids raced out in a yelling clot.

“Take a horse-sleigh down and back, stay sitting the whole time and no late partying,” Kaninjer commanded.

“If I’m reinstated,” I begged him, “can I let them carry me around Vae Arahi on their shoulders once?” He decided his best bet for keeping me under his thumb was to come down with me. As Skorsas and Krero were setting up the sleigh and escort, I dressed properly: austerely, of course, but I folded the semanakraseyeni shirt into my pouch, just in case.

Then Niku decided she was up to coming, too, which meant everyone; my mother slung Kat and Niku slung Tyiso and they stepped up into the sleigh beside me, and we all went down, like a parade. No one could argue we did not already have reason to celebrate.

The counting-room has a public gallery, but I’d look too hungry if I sat there. Instead Kaninjer set Niku and me up in chairs on the dais of the stone-stove in the ante-room to the Assembly chamber. The place was jammed with people; Kaninjer kept dragging me back down into my chair by my shirt when I’d stand up to take their I-haven’t-seen-you-in-a-month hugs. There were a few I definitely did not expect.

“Surya?” I’d never seen him dressed formally, except as an asakraiyaseye, so I didn’t even know him until he was right beside me, Kuraila beside him in her Assembly kerchief. “How in Celestialis did you get off the island?”

“The only way, the same way you did. We decided we didn’t want to miss it so we sent one of your pigeons up to Sijurai.”

“You mad fool, do you have any idea how dangerous that is? Didn’t you see that when I did it?”

He slapped his hand over his eyes. “Just when I think you’re cured. Well, I tell you what…” He glanced around, spotted what he wanted, pointed. “Argue that with him.” My next question, “We?”, died on my lips. Next to my mother, caressing Tyiso’s tiny brown cheek, was Azaila.

Then a blond head and two white satin shoulders with gold that I knew but couldn’t believe appeared. “We thought we’d surprise you!” Minis said, throwing his arms open. “Kall sends his regrets, you know, Imperator… but I’ve brought Kyriala.”

His fiancée had the typical bred-for beauty of ancient Aitzas houses, like Liren, from which she’d come, with the silken, almost-silver hair, the fine skin, slim wrists and ankles and perfect features. It belied her strength, though; he and she both had relayed here, which made her the first woman who’d ever done it. So had his two shadows, both of the new Mahid, dressed in deep wine rather than black, with just a silver buckle as a nod to the tradition, and smiling freely. As I welcomed her, I mentioned I’d heard tales of her courage from her husband-to-be, which turned out to be a gaffe; I didn’t know they’d never been re-betrothed after he’d released her. She gave him the ‘we-must-talk’ look, and he blushed a colour not unlike the uniforms of his new Mahid. Just the fact that they were here together would be a scandal among some Arkans, so I don’t blame myself.

Then I caught sight of the girl from Krasila’s school who’d asked me if she was good enough to be in the School of the Sword, Merao Shae-Lishiyin. Esora-e’s mother had finally softened enough to let her try out, it seemed. I could introduce her to Azaila right here. She seemed surprised I remembered her. “Yes,” she confirmed when I asked. “Kraiyasenseye brought us to apply, three of us.”

“Brought you? You mean—she’s here?”

“Yes… somewhere in this room.”

“Tell him I told you what I did, that you’re good enough.” I waved over Azaila, introduced them and left them to speak, and headed back to the dais to search the crowd for my shadow-grandmother. She found me first.

“Virani-e. I understand that is the current name you are going by. Integrity… not Rao?” She was still wearing a deep grey woolen coat with a thick fox-fur collar, and black gloves, though we were inside, and stood spear-straight as always, so the coat looked as if it were hung on an armour-stand.

“Shadow-grandma!” I threw my arms open and said what I was saying to everyone, “Around the shoulders, please!” She gave me a stiff short clench. “I didn’t know you were coming.”

“Neither did I. But here I am. New-child blessings to you, twice over... imagine it, twins. Your chocolate wife threw them? May I see the little brown blighters?”

“If we can find them; they’re getting passed around. Trust my luck they’d be born on the same day as the count.”

Her brows drew down hard. “Born? Today? Then they haven’t been stream-tested yet? The flags were up and Esora-e said they survived.”

So she’d spoken to him first; I wondered where I’d find the blubbering ruin of him. I could see just how it had gone; she’d said something about them both surviving though they were twins, and he’d said, “Yes, they did,” so as to avoid the subject, knowing he’d be able to say he’d thought she meant survived the birth.

“He must have thought you meant survived the birth,” I said. “The boy almost didn’t. But we aren’t planning to stream-test them, that’s why the flags. Ah, here…” Ignoring her glare, I caught sight of my youngest son in Artira’s arms, introduced her and Krasila, and took him. “This is your shadow-great-grandson… Tyirisora-e.”

She stared at me hard again, but her hands, as if independent of her mind, reached for him, and as his tiny warm weight went from my arm to hers, she transformed. Her hands were suddenly tender as a new mother’s, she softened all over, and her face lit up with a smile, dropping twenty years in a moment, as she stared into his. “Well, young man! Aren’t you the little bruiser, hmm? Aren’t you something?” He smiled and burbled back; soon she’d pulled the gloves off with her teeth and unbuttoned her coat, to snuggle him inside it, cooing non-stop.

I stood blinking in amazement. Krasila Mangu, a sop for babies—who’d have imagined?

210 - The all-consuming task that is birth-labour

2010-01-21T16:56:00.002-05:00

When I opened my eyes, cold scalded them, and I saw only grey; I didn’t know up from down until my back hit mud, the lake-bottom. I got my feet under me and clawed back up towards light, hoping I’d either find the hole in the ice I’d made, or could find the strength, though I had no air, to make another one. My head and arms burst through the floating ice-shards—the water was about chest-deep—and when I could I drew a gasping breath. Some people were running towards me along the dock, others scrambling down through the snow on the shore, ready to wade in to pull me out.

I signed them off—the water was too kyashin cold to stay in long enough to be helped, or for them to get into in the first place—and used the swimmers’ ladder on the dock to escape it, breaking my way through the ice with hammer-blows to get there. Suku would circle back to see how I was; if he didn’t see me walking, he wouldn’t be willing to try again. Too soon, I was too soon on both the run and the jump, I thought, that’s all. From nerves—no, just from not knowing. Now I do. The experience that teaches best is the hard-won. As the asakraiyaseyel threw several cloaks around me and started pulling me toward the maesa, he soared back around, low enough for me to hail him, though yelling hurt my back while I was doing it. “Again, after I get changed!” He yelled back, “Foa-een, I get height! Flash or wave when you’re ready!” He turned into the smoke and was wrenched skyward.

“You’re trying it again?” several people said. “You’re lucky that thing didn’t break your neck.” As if to remind me why I was, a birthing pain hit right then, a hard one. She’ll be pushing soon… I hoped it didn’t work both ways, making her feel what I did; cloaks or not, my hair was frozen solid by the time I got to the door, and the pain on the spot on my back, on the sword side and below the shoulder-blade, was worsening. I didn’t let Tyaicha examine me, suspecting he’d tell me I was too badly hurt to try again.

When I was in dry clothes and had taken a few whacks of whack-weed, I had them build up the fire again, went to the south end of the dock, shook out my arms and legs, warmed myself by pacing, and, when I saw Suku was high enough, gave him the wave. I didn’t know it at the time, but from the shore across from the island where Krero was waiting for me with the rest of my guard of four, he was screaming, “No! Nooooo!! Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e, I forbid it, I’ll kyashin run you in before Assembly if you live!!” Luckily, I couldn’t hear him.

Though the asakraiyaseyel were more nervous this time, I was less so, somehow, perhaps because I knew I could now judge how soon Suku would be here by where he was. The human-built bird of prey came down, enlarging unearthly fast again, wind whistling through its wires. I set off easily this time, though every footfall was a stab of pain through my back, hit full-speed a little before half-way, and this time had the kriffiyah lined up in my mind all the way, with the harmony of timing between me and it that should be there.

It caught me at the perfect apex of my jump. The only thing I did wrong was not pull my sword-side leg up fast enough, so the calf got hit by the same spar, another blinding pain, then trapped between them as it closed. But I was whipped forward and swooping skyward, wrapped fast by the netting and grabbing the spars nonetheless. I went swinging up behind Suku, then a little down again, and he looked over his shoulder from where he was gracefully curled most of the way through the bar, to balance my weight, and laughed. “Ha! Got you this time!” The cheers and birth-blessings faded fast in the rush of wind. He turned us towards the smoke-column, and I closed my eyes and held my breath until heat turned back to cold as he steered us out. Three more dips into it and we were high enough to make the crossing.

They hadn’t yet conceived a way to bring a kriffiyah’ed person down lightly without catchers, so as we came over the shore and he began to float us down towards Krero’s four, he yelled to them, “Catch him, I catch me on my feet, catch him!” They did, Krero at my head, as gently as a mother takes a baby. Once I’d been sprung I gave Suku a fast hug, told him to flash Daku to flash Niku that I was a tenth-bead away, and took off running, though it hurt my leg even to stand and the back-pain was a dull scream. It was only pain; I could use it to drive myself, especially the pain that was intermittent, and getting more and more frequent.

“Curse you, Ch’eng’, where are you going?” Krero barked. “It’s my job to check to see if you’re all right!” I yelled back over my shoulder, “No, it’s your job to keep up with me!” They did their best. Kunarda got ahead of me at the start, no surprise, but I left him behind about three quarters of the way up the shortcut.

At least I had a good excuse to streak right through the herd of writers at the door. They tried anyway. “Chevenga, what do you think your chances are?” “Chevenga, you haven’t campaigned at all, but your detractors have been all over!” “Chevenga, if you lose, what will you do?” “Chevenga, we heard you foiled four assassins unarmed and sick and without bloodshed, is that true?” I answered with but one sentence; asa kraiya or not, I still had my battlefield voice. “My wife is about to give birth!”

As we’d planned, they had the water-room set up for it, with all of the midwife’s things ranged on a cupboard, spare tables, a wide bed set up for afterwards and so on. The kids frolicked in the cool pool. Niku paced, leaning on Baska’s arm; Skorsas bustled; all of my parents and siblings and other spouses sat ready to fetch and carry when needed; Natandra Kyaina, the Vae Arahi midwife, and Kaninjer stood by.

The whole room was decorated with ribbons and evergreen branches; that was not a Niah custom, else she’d have had the room in the Marble Palace where she’d given birth to Roshten and his brother done up similarly. Just someone’s idea? Everything was much more joyful then I’d ever seen before for a birth, the children giddy with excitement, the grown-ups full of smiles. I realized why. We will not stream-test them. That changed everything. This is how it must always be, I thought, in families that don’t do it.

“Niku, I’m here!” I cried. “How are you, love?”

“Omores, thank Ama Kalandris…” she breathed. “Aba Tyriah, I’ve missed you. I’m fine.” Of course my spawn got to me first, not being so encumbered as she, and were all over me, having not seen me for a month; I gave them all hugs and pushed through them to her and we kissed just in time for the next pain. We held each other through it, her fingers leaving marks on my arms, then she said, “How are you?” with a little concern in her voice. I was limping, and flinching on some of the hugs, and had come in gasping for breath.

“I am wonderful,” I said. “Though maybe I could use a little whack-weed.” My remedy-pouch was drying out in the maesa asa kraiya, of course, but Kaninjer had some. “We’ve got a little time before the next one, love, can you spare me for a bit?” She said yes, and I threw off my clothes and let myself fall into the hot-tub and float on my back, in delicious heat—the water was not the usual blistering hot, but gently so, as we’d planned for her sake—and blissful stillness. “You didn’t have to risk life and limb to get here!” she said, as she saw the bruises. “How else was I going to get here?” I answered. “I’m in one piece.”

About then, Krero came growling in, chest heaving. “Curse you, curse you, Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e! You know kyashin well I’ll forgive you for this time, like all the rest!” I shot him a look that meant “Don’t tell her what happened!” Bless him, he didn’t, and bless her, she was too distracted to ask.

We settled, then, into the all-consuming task that is birth-labour, the mother’s part to do and suffer it, everyone else’s to make it easier and safer for her, a time apart from the rest of life for all. Her waters had broken this morning, about two aer after dawn, and it was going faster than last time; to me it looked like the twins might even be born before dark.

She came into the hot-tub, sat on my lap and said, “That’s it, I’m staying here,” so I wrapped my arms around her. Niah women often do what they call “dolphin births,” in the sea; this was the next best thing. She wanted to bear down, and so Natandra stripped and got in with us, and after feeling her inside, told her to go ahead. The children were wonderful, the perfect midwife’s assistants, bringing Niku water and fruit, wiping her brow with cool cloths, giving her kisses and strength-blessings and jokes.

As the sun fell behind Haranin, the first one came, shooting out into Natandra’s hands like a little fish, to the joyful shriek of all the children. The cord had been wrapped around her neck but the midwife freed it easily enough. A girl, her tiny squinched face tender brown and her eyebrows mine if I’d ever seen them; she had a good strong voice and a ready smile.

“Tawaen,” the midwife called, as if he should have known to be there already, and handed him the cord-cutting knife. I had no idea that this was how it was done in families that don’t stream-test, that the oldest child cuts the cord when the blood ceases running through it; I’d seen my siblings’ births all from a distance. He did it smoothly enough, and Kima tied it off; first and second-born blood-siblings, that’s the custom.

Niku said the traditional Niah words, vriah sala mi totoh, ash ni ash reeshen: “Freedom of the sun to you, little child. Fly far, fly high.”

I said, “Strength, my little one, against—” and cut myself off. Against the cold that tries you, is how it goes.

I’d never say it again.

209 - The kriffiyah

2010-01-20T17:52:00.004-05:00

The day before the count, the weather turned bitter cold, too late. In the afternoon, I felt a tightness between my hips that was not quite pain, but had a sense of promising pain in the future, and then was gone. Two more and I knew what it was despite my not wanting to. Niku was in labour. It was early, but not implausibly so, especially for twins.

How long would it be? By the degree and the pause between and from the last time, I guessed she’d give birth the afternoon of the next day—the day I’d been scheduled to go home anyway, the day of the referendum count. Two all-important events of my life in one day, and I wouldn’t be there.

Assembly and the people of Yeola-e would understand, I knew. A labouring Niku, not so much. A winger came by above, and dropped a note on a stone, from her to me. It read, “Omores, you must know. I don’t know how you are going to do it, but get up here.”

“Stretch flat on the ice, with two long poles, as the assassins were planning,” I thought aloud to Iyinisa and Surya. “If I break through I swim until it’s thick enough again to climb out…”

“Over my dead body,” Iyinisa said matter-of-factly.

“Mine too,” said Surya in the same way.

“A double-wing… rope… hook me up somehow…”

“Has anyone ever done that with a person?” asked Surya.

“Ehhhh… no.”

“You are not going to be the first.”

“My wife is in labour, she needs me!”

“I doubt she’d prefer losing you for good to not having you there while she gives birth,” Iyinisa said. “Though the way the note reads makes me wonder… is it just that she’s in labour or is she always like that?”

“She’s just asking the impossible of me in return for my asking the impossible of her with… well, several things,” I said. “Our marriage is like that.”

One kindness that Surya had done me was bring four of my pigeons, that home right to the Hearthstone Independent, onto the island. I sent one to her saying “Stumped so far; ideas?” A bead later, someone came in from the training-ground, where they’d been shoveling off last night’s snowfall, saying, “There’s a winger above us, yelling something that sounds like ‘vie’ and ‘moy’ stuck together to wake the dead, and I figure it must have something to do with you, Vir—oh I guess so, there he goes.” Fading behind me I heard, “I’ve never seen someone jump up from a chair and land running before.”

The winger was Sijurai, circling just low enough to hail. “Vaimoy! We get you by kriffiyah, yes?”

“Sure!” I bellowed back up. “What’s a kriffiyah?”

He let go the chamir with one hand and made a snatching motion with the other, broad so I could see from a distance. “Catch! Snatch! Grab! Diyadesai invent! Like sea-eagle get fish!”

Away from home for a month, I was no longer up-to-date on the wing innovations. Niku had mentioned something about them working on a way to seize up a person from the ground onto a double-wing. I hadn’t thought it was far enough along to have built the first one yet, though, let alone test it. It also occurred to me that the fish usually doesn’t come out of the sea-eagle’s talons alive. But the next tightening came up just then, and I imagined Niku chewing her nails to the quick. “Tell me what to do!” I yelled up.

“Wait, I come back!” Of course part of the climb he had to do on foot, today’s updraft not being good enough to carry him. I saw the long red speck that was his wing, folded up, on his shoulder, dashing up past the falls against the white of the snow. By the time he was flying over again, the cloud-dimmed daylight was just starting to fade, early as it does in early winter, and he dropped another letter.

Omores, Krero’s saying no to getting you by kriffiyah and he’ll go to Assembly to make it illegal, unless he sees with his own eyes ten other people do it and come out unharmed first. There isn’t enough day left to do that. It will have to be tomorrow. I don’t think the babies will come tonight, and the midwife doesn’t either, and at least I have Baska with me. I still wish you were here. I love you, always and forever, sleep well.

It really was untested, then. I found out later they’d done it only with straw manikins, attaching eggs to them to see where they’d break. It was probably best that I didn’t know. Of course part of me cursed that I would not be the first. Krero knew me too well.

Sleep well? You must be joking, I thought. First was the party; every time someone leaves the island at the end of his time of transition, there is a celebratory goodbye, with a lot of hugging and toasts, the night before. This wasn’t certain, but we decided we would party as if it were so as to strengthen the chances. I only had a cup or two of wine, though, suspecting that I should be at the top of my form for whatever it was I had to do to be snatched. I spent the rest of the night pacing, mostly, as the tightenings gradually grew more intense, Iyinisa staying up with me until about midnight when I told her she need not. Sometime after midnight came the first one that I had to admit to myself couldn’t be called anything but a pain. Niku was probably pacing too.

At the first paling of the sky I went out to the northern point of the island to see what I could see, if anything, of the testing. Once it was light enough, I saw wings on the gentle slope of Haranin, diving then swooping up, with something seeming to slow them slightly at the lowest point, but it was too far away to see more. At noon or so, Daku flew over to drop me another letter. By then the clouds were patchy and a brilliant sun shining much of the time, so that at least we could flash-signal now. A wing flew lazily over at a far greater height; when I saw its colours, blue and green, I realized, it was carrying the vote-count from one of the most distant ridings. It began diving down over Vae Arahi.

The letter read:

Omores, it will be Sijurai who snatches you. The kriffiyah is made of silk netting and bamboo spars. It’s set forward at first, but when it hits it swings back and closes on whatever, or whoever, it’s got. To get enough height with you afterwards, he has to do a fast dive to you, so what you have to do is run full-out and then jump and tuck good and high, just as the netting is about to hit you. By the time Diyadesai’s students had practiced enough that Krero was happy, they were having too much fun to want to stop.

Suku thinks he cannot get enough height after the dive to get across the water, so what you must do is have a big fire burning on the island, fairly near the dock, for a brandilmoy. We’ve scouted all over the island, and we suggest that little field near the big house, that we understand is the training-ground.

The only place that has a long and wide enough clearing is the dock—there are too many trees too near the training-ground and the roofs are all too steep. Make sure every last snow-flake is shoveled off; your foot slipping could mean death. The way the wind’s blowing, it’s best you run north, so start at the south end. He’ll aim to snatch you when you’re at about the middle, so you have enough dock left to stop if it’s a miss. Don’t wear anything loose or hanging.

Daku’s going to circle. We will know you are ready by the fire. Ama Kalandris and Aba Tyriah grant you a safe kriff, I love you always and forever, I will see you soon.

Every last snow-flake? Spoken like a woman from a winterless home, I thought. Because it is not used in winter, the dock is usually not shoveled until the ice breaks up in spring. Because the weather had turned cold after wet, underneath the five-odd handspans of snow was another hand-span of solid ice stuck hard to the dock’s flagstones. Iyinisa was suddenly a commander again. “Every person on this island—yes, the prisoners, too—find every shovel, axe, hatchet and broom on this island, and report to the dock!” she bellowed through the maesa and beyond. I swear I heard several people say “A-e kras!”

“You don’t think it’s the death-in-me inclining me to do this, do you?” I quietly asked Surya, as we used our axes carefully, so as to smash the ice without chipping the stone. Iyinisa had wanted to exempt me from the work, but it would warm me for the run, not to mention help my nerves. “No,” he said, “I think it’s the life-in-your-wife-about-to-come-out. Somehow I doubt you’d want to die without seeing them.” Iyinisa inspected the dock and had me do the same, once every ice-chip had been swept off, then I ran the length a few times to get the feel. While they were lighting the fire—they piled up a goodly amount of their winter firewood—I changed into unsweated clothes, with nothing loose or hanging, and went back out onto the dock.

Soon I could see not only smoke, but the odd flash of a flame above the trees. From far below, the wing with the kriffiyah didn’t look unlike a giant bird of prey, with straight talons angling forward stiffly under it. It had to be lighter than it looked. Suku did one tight east-north-west-south circle, which meant a query: was I ready? I flashed him back yes, and he headed straight south. All along the shore the asakraiyaseyel, and three of the four assassins, had ranged themselves, none wanting to miss this; now they all exhorted me with waves and blown kisses. I didn’t have the heart to tell them I’d never done it, seen it done or even seen the device, from anywhere close.

As the speck in the sky to the south began growing larger fast, I realized I had not only to time when I jumped, but when I started running in the first place. Surya’s voice was in my mind: Deep breath. Deep breath. The nerves were about the birth, I knew, not this, but they’d still affect this. I thought to measure his speed by memories of doing dives myself, but I hadn’t flown for a month, so the memories were not sharp.

When I guessed the time was right I sprang out, keeping a gaze over my shoulder like a relay-runner about to receive the branch. Half-way down the dock, with him still behind, I realized I’d started too soon, slowed a bit then speeded again as he came streaking down, a monster bird roaring through air. When it seemed right I jumped up with everything I had, pulling my legs up and my arms in. But then I was past the apex of the jump and coming down again and I hadn’t been seized, so I had to uncurl again to land; I heard Suku yell “No no Vai—” and then there was a blow so hard on my back it knocked both the breath out of me and all light out of my eyes, so I knew only by the feel of stone against the parts of me tumbling over it that I’d curled up to roll out of the fall. Then I was in air again for a moment, and there was a crackling smash all around me, and instant burning iciness, soaking in all over me, just like the stream-test.

208 - I do not deserve to live

2010-01-19T22:32:00.007-05:00

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.”

207 - To have your gift for a tenth

2010-01-18T22:33:00.004-05:00

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.

[AN: Ergofiction on how to be a weblit fan]

2010-01-18T16:52:00.003-05:00

The idea of doing a big ask for donations kind of makes me itch, but, really, they are necessary to keep us weblit writers writing.

In my own case, for instance, as soon as I'm finished asa kraiya, which is going to be within days, I will drop to writing just one post per weekday, so that I have a schedule that, between weblit and journalism, isn't killing me. But if I was making enough money at weblit so that I could stop, or even just cut back on, journalism, I could go back up to that output.

Jan Oda, founder of the e-fanzine ergofiction, has written a very good piece explaining things like maybe the biggest mistake weblit fans make: thinking that if they can spare an amount of money, it's not enough. I quote:

If you think a book is worth $5 for the author (which is more than an author gets on a normal paperback sold through Amazon!), don’t worry whether it’ll be enough and give it to the author. If 200 people think like you, the author makes $1,000. If 2000 people think like you, he makes $10,000. Which isn’t bad for a book.

(Possibly Jan doesn't even know how much more $5 is than an author gets on a normal paperback. At least ten times as much.)

Read the whole piece here.

She also has another one up with six ways to contribute to a writer's success without spending a dime (though we writers would love to see you do both!), here. I added a seventh in a comment, and I would also add, specific to Shirley and me: come out and participate in our character chats!

UPDATE: Gabriel Gadfly has even more ideas on how to support your favourite weblit writer, here. Form a local group... disseminate flyers or bizcards... costume your favourite character... translate their work into your language... (Gabriel would host a translation of his work, and so would I.)

--

206 - How can I have changed so completely?

2010-01-15T17:22:00.005-05:00

The time of an eye-blink passed, and a second, and a third, then a hand seized the dart-tube and another touched the side of his neck, making total darkness fall for him. Iyinisa, with one of those asa kraiya tricks. She expected to hear his “huff!” and a dart skitter off the wall; but later they would find it still in the tube, unshot. The kraumak fell and smashed, bringing total darkness for everyone else, except vague flickerings outside the door—and auras, of course, for me and Surya, if he was here. “Light! Get light! Get Tyaicha! Virani-e, Chevenga, wake up, wake up!” Iyinisa found my face with her hands and whipped the covers off me, the fourth assassin sprang away from the wall and ran, and I went banging back into my body.

Which I regretted in an instant, as it was sick as a dog. The torch-flames that came in blazing were an assault on my dark-accustomed eyes, the cold air an attack on my shivering skin; the probing hands on my aching muscles, as they checked every finger-width of me, were violations. As after the flogging, pain mattered again.

“Yes, they came to kill me,” I rasped, my own voice in my throat like sandpaper over a scrape. “No, they got nothing into me. Second Fire come. There’s a fourth one—he was outside, he ran. I’m fine. Except for a horrible case of change. Thank you all, I love you all, now will you put the covers back over me and tuck them in around tight so they don’t let in any drafts and let me go back to sleep, please?”

†

I woke in the afternoon. My dreams always seem utterly real to me, until the cold light of wakefulness reveals their implausibility. “I had the most bizarre one last night,” I said to Iyinisa when she peeked in on me. “It started plainly enough; it was here, and I was flat-on-my-back sick with this awful fever, every muscle aching, my throat scraping-raw, every little draft like a finger of ice…”

“You don’t feel that way n—aik!” She started, pulling one leg up a little. “Curses, I thought I got all the glass last night; well, it was night. You look and sound a lot better; mind if I open the shutter a tiny bit to find it?”

“Not at all… glass?”

“From that glow-globe they had. And dropped.” I felt nothing untoward, in throat or muscles or on skin, as if I’d never had a fever in my life. “Oh, we caught the fourth one—caught more like one catches a fish. He was trying to walk/swim off the island.”

The worlds of dream and waking smashed wholly into one another. I was still lying stunned when Azaila and Surya came in, and asked me to recount it all to them as I remembered it.

“Well,” said Azaila, when I was done. “There’s nothing more I need teach you. See? I told you you could do it. And that you shouldn’t sweat techniques.” I had done, I realized, exactly what he’d said.

“Nothing more I need teach you either,” Surya said, chuckling. “You hear now and then about someone really good holding off more than one adversary, unarmed against weapons, without breaking a sweat. But you usually expect him at least to get out of bed.”

I had to get up, just to feel real, as well as test myself. Usually the memory of sickness clings closer in the body, so soon after; it seemed in the distant past. My case of change is over? Then I was trembling all over, thinking I did that… I really did that, and had to lie back down. It had happened often enough in training, that Azaila or another master had told me something that baffled me, I’d wrestled desperately with it for days or months afterwards, thinking I’d never get it, and then suddenly got it. Or found I had it when I needed it without knowing when I’d got it. Why it should terrify me this time, I couldn’t understand, but it did. Through the covers under which I’d buried myself, he and Surya patted me, chuckling and saying, “You’ll get used to it.”

†

The maesa asa kraiya is the last place in the world, except Haiu Menshir, where there should be a prison, but there was one now, makeshift; the four assassins were trapped here by the too-thin ice, same as me. As soon as I’d eaten, I went to see the three I had met. After what I’d done to them, it would be wrong not to.

Odd, to see their faces for the first time, utterly unfamiliar and like looking in a mirror, at the same time. Meniaj was the only one who knew for sure who had been speaking to him. Skorsas looked as if he’d been hit with a board when I told him. “You mean I was right, it was your fikken ghost! Hear that, you two shen-heads, you should have listened to me!”

Naturally, all four were giving themselves up for dead—they’d be charged and no doubt convicted in Vae Arahi, then turned over to their home nations for appropriate punishments, as the friendship treaties were solid enough for that now. In Brahvniki (the fourth was Brahvnikian also) and Tor Ench it was hanging, in Arko beheading, if Skorsas was lucky. They all had a fair amount of equanimity about it; an assassin may not be a warrior, but his life is no less dangerous. Their escape plan, in truth, struck me as a touch implausible; to cross the ice such as it was on their bellies like snakes and with two long slender poles apiece to spread their weight. I understood though; they were all top-of-the-line, able to afford things such as kraumaks and wing-lessons, the sort of assassins who can pull off impossible things and so like trying.

Beyond telling the three that it had been me who had done what I had, I found myself stuck for words and awkward in the ones I had. I was ashamed, I realized, to know so much about them. No wonder Surya never looked at auras without consent. I did manage to say the important thing: if they agreed to do what I had done, finish going asa kraiya, I would entreat the court and their home states to grant them amnesty entire.

The fourth man, who I had not touched and so had no concept of asa kraiya, just spat in my direction. The three I had were at a loss for an immediate answer. They were all in shock, which I knew all too well. “You have until the ice is passable to think it over,” I said. I told them they need just ask whoever was guarding them if they wanted to speak to me, and I’d come.

Who had sent them, Vyadim said he’d have told me freely enough, since he’d be truth-drugged anyway, if he knew. It was the usual thing, a person in a hood and mask with a sack of money for the upfront half-payment, not in the Knotted Worm but another place just like it. We’d get everything we could out of Vyadim and set Ikal on it.

Much of the rest of my time on the island I spent in the company of the three, speaking of asa kraiya, the blades within, and all manner of other things; with each of them I shared the harmony of knowing each other’s innermost secrets. We even swapped assassination stories; it was oddly satisfying, all things considered, to be commended for how I’d offed Inkrajen and Edremmas Forin by true experts.

It was Meniaj, not surprisingly, who sent for me the most. “At least your foreknowledge is honourable, being true,” I said to him, first thing. I wept for him, and took him in my arms in compassion, for being bound to the fate I had escaped. I was the only person outside of family who ever had, he told me, so tightly he’d kept his secret.

We shared our stories, of hurrying, of secrecy, of itching to action, of forbidding ourselves, however unsuccessfully, to mix foreknowledge with love. He had never married, indulging only in short flings; “the line will go on through my brother,” he said, “if King Kranaj is merciful and does not scrape us and run us in for everything else we’ve done.” At the very least the family would have to change callings, go into accountancy for real. “I can’t believe I am capable of saying this, but that now seems like a good thing,” he said. “How can I have changed so completely, in one night?”

It helped him that this didn’t surprise me, just as it had helped me that nothing I’d said had surprised Surya. I told him the story of my first session, entire. “Let me ask you this,” I said. “Before that night, if I had told you, ‘Don’t worry, everything is going as it should,’ would you have understood?”

He spat out a bitter laugh. “You are joking, right, Sievenka?”

“How about now?”

His eyes filled with tears. “Yes, I do understand,” he said, when he could. “When I learned you’d thought you were doomed too and laughed at you, when I took the contract because I hated you for escaping it, when I aimed the kill-dart at you and then couldn’t shoot, everything was going as it should. That all had to happen, for me to get to this. You promised me, and here we are.”

Skorsas was the angriest, at first, perhaps because, being an Arkan, he anticipated Hayel. He did not send for me for a while. But when he did, he said, “I was planning to tear your head off with words, Shefen-kas… but now I see you, I can’t. Anger was my ruin and my corruption, wasn’t it? Even understandable anger… I never saw that before. I always told myself I killed Itasas for my father; I see now I did it to satisfy myself, and so it was choice, not obligation. There is comfort in the freedom, and there is comfort knowing I will never backstab another soldier, and there is comfort in knowing my execution will be a just one, all three—somehow—I don’t see how it can make sense, but it does. I will die a better man, and perhaps the Gods will take that into account, after all, when They judge me. I owe that entirely to you.”

In the end, two of three chose to do the ceremony. Meniaj did not want me to argue for mercy, as it would be a quicker death than the one he faced from his illness, which would eventually stop his heart or his kidneys or both; I was the only person he’d ever told that he was already weaker and his eyes were going, so all he was giving up was two or three years of increasing helplessness and pain.

Skorsas knew he’d be scraped in Arko and so was sure he’d be condemned several times over at the behest of several Aitzas families, whatever I argued; he asked only that I entreat Minis to spare him torture, which, since I am always against it, I would have done whatever he chose. But he decided to do the ceremony anyway, “for the good of my soul,” he said. Without telling him, I also asked that in all the documents and the record he be named Skorsas Noren solas.

Vyadim had a wife and children, and felt that enough highly-placed Brahvnikians had been clients to counter those who’d been victims that he might have a chance of freedom as well as the mercy I’d ask, at home. But, he said, he’d do the ceremony regardless. “What is happening to me is like tumbling down a mountain,” he said. “I cannot stop it.” I understood so well. He had a face as hard as a crag of rock, but he need only think about my touching the blade in his heart, and his ice-chip eyes would be full of tears.

We did their ceremonies five days after they’d tried to kill me. Azaila pulled each man’s blade out, while I held him. For all I was still an asa kraiya greenhand with a mentor myself, on their asking, I became theirs.

[Author's note: character chat instructions]

2010-01-15T12:19:00.000-05:00

OUR FIRST CHARACTER CHAT event takes place tomorrow at 2 p.m. EST. Here's how to join in.

Go to http://chevenga.digitalnovelists.com/node/10

There you’ll see the chat box entitled... what else... “The Puckered Fig.”

You can either sign in as “Guest” or, if you want to use a screen name and avatar, click on “Sign Up.” Create an account at Chatroll. The chatbox will then identify you by your screen name.

Once you have an account, you can log in on the box at the bottom of the chat box… useful for future character chats we might hold!

If you want the chat in a separate screen (which we’ve found sometimes works better) click on the little window with arrow icon, bottom right of chatbox.

We are going into this with the attitude of, "First time, technical difficulties are almost inevitable so let’s assume they’ll happen and be pleasantly surprised if they don’t.” Bear with us if they do.

Tomorrow's chat will feature the Spark of the Sun's Ray himself, First Minis Kurkas Joras Amitzas Aan. He doesn't bite. Mostly. You may lurk if you like, we don't require verbal participation.

N.B. -- we're holding the chat on the nascent version of my upgraded website. So if you want to do a little exploring elsewhere on it, go ahead. None of the book content is there yet, but there are blurbs, FAQ, the Millennipedia, etc. There is also a nascent forum -- only one we've got, which we hope to develop into a true community once the new site is going. So register as a user and play in there if you like, and if you have any comments, suggestions or requests for the website, let me know in a comment here or a forum post there.

205 - The hope that dies every day in you

2010-01-14T18:39:00.004-05:00

“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?”

204 - To life’s injustice you sling back rage

2010-01-13T18:25:00.003-05:00

“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.

203 - The world is mine

2010-01-12T18:58:00.003-05:00

“I’ll take that under advisement,” she said. It seemed coy to me at the time, Chevenga, but maybe that was the wine. Maybe it was just that natural reserve that women have.

“You know, if you’ve found someone to keep you company... to fill out your four... I’ll throw the engagement party for you,” I said.

Her brows came down. Ehhh, I’d stepped in the kyash again. Men should learn more natural reserve. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she said. “You know you’d have heard about it if I had.”

“I’m just saying...”

“If things are going well, why are you saying things like that?”

“Denaina, I’ll wish you love with all my heart,” I said. “I want you to be happy... I’m getting maudlin... I either need more wine, or less, I’m not sure.”

“You need to learn to quit saying the exact opposite of what you really mean,” she said. As she has so many times before.

“What? I don’t understand,” I said. As I have so many times before. Denying it. I’ve done too much of that. I felt Surya peeking over my shoulder. “Well… yes I do. You’re right... but what did I say?”

“Esora-e, everyone with two eyes and a brain around here knows that you want, and will always want, yourself and no one else as our fourth.”

“Well, yes, but if you don’t want me it would be wrong... for me to push.”

“But you’ve pushed all along anyway. You never let a chance go by to show that you don’t and can’t accept what we decided.”

All-Spirit—lad, am I that transparent? You know how hard it is to keep your heart secret… oh no, you don’t. You managed it. You kept your heart completely secret, for twenty years. If I ever really want to, I should come to you for lessons.

“For that... I’m sorry. It was my fear.”

“Fear? Of what?” Her eyes stayed angry.

“Well... I thought it proved I wasn’t good enough for you... the thing I was always afraid of... It just proved you didn’t want to have to deal with the kyash in my soul since I was spreading it to you and everyone around me... I... was afraid of being miserable... so that’s what I got. And passed around. For that... I am truly sorry.” Or something like that, I said. Maybe less coherent.

“I said about a thousand times, Esora-e, that you weren’t not good enough for me. Or anyone. The kyash in your soul you were spreading… yes.”

“I know that,” I said. Though as I read my own words back, it’s clear that I don’t, really, do I?

“Especially on Chevenga,” she said. “That’s what got me.” I just signed chalk. “You know... I think, when I look back, I sensed something about him,” she said. Probably I shouldn’t be writing you this, lad, but I will anyway. “I sensed that even though... you know how incredibly tough he is. But… there was something very fragile about him. Something that needed love, not harshness.” I just sighed. “Maybe I picked it up from Karani, who knew, somehow. She was always so gentle with him, even when I wondered why he needed it.”

“Like glass,” I said. Funny how you see these things clearly only when you look back.

“He always had a sense of bearing too much. It didn’t seem unnatural once he was semanakraseye and then Imperator, but when he was a child... it was weird.”

“Yes. That look he had, of knowing too much, and seeing too much.”

“But I know you were following Krasila’s tenet, greatest warriors, strictest teachers, and you had your heart set on making him into that.”

“Yes. I did that. I hammered on him the way she hammered on me.”

“Arguably he is,” she said. “Or should I say, was”—I’m sorry, Chevenga, but it’s still like a sword through my own heart. “But at what cost?”

I said the truth. “It nearly killed him.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, looking down into her wine-cup, which was empty. “I’m rehashing what you already know. You’ve been over it inside-out and upside-down with Surya. Not to mention the Committee.”

“Why be sorry? It’s the truth, and should be said, not hidden. And you chivied me to eat after they grilled me, with Karani... Did I ever thank you for that?”

“Probably. You’re welcome.”

“May I get you a fresh glass of wine?” I asked her.

She looked almost a little startled, and a little hesitant, but said, “Oh… sure, Esa. Please.”

†

Through the curling chambers of the point-man’s fast but steadily-beating heart wound the stabbing-knife, its blade twisted, like the root of a centuries-old tree on a rock crag. I needed to think only of touching it, and I’d touched it, without thinking of which part of me I was touching it with; not thinking of that was crucial. If I’d had another thought, this is something a healer does, I’d never have done it.

Know what is in you, Vyadim. It’s killing you, lacerating on every beat. It has been, ever since you first used it. The sight in his aura—a street in the squalid quarter of Brahvniki, dust-grimed cobbles burning hot from the sun under bare feet; at least we don’t have to worry about finding a fire at night this time of year. Ache of hunger in the stomach, sending us to the market to beg peaches that are half-rotten so no one will buy them anyway, a fish that will be off by tomorrow morning. Or steal if we have to. As good to die spitted by the market-guards as to starve. A fire built of trash, leaning into each other’s shoulders, until sleep takes us curled together like a litter of puppies; talk of the boy we saw skipping in the market with his mama holding his one hand, his papa the other: “What must that be like? He looked so happy.”

The whore-madam, whose sign has the mysterious squiggles that we know say The Pearly Oyster, spits out a string of curses. “This stinking corpse of a drunk lying on my step all the time now, I kick him off, he comes right back, still breathing so the dead-cart can’t take him, Bear-fucking bad for business. Some lives are truly useless.” She looks at me cunningly, beckons me. “No one would suspect someone so young.” She’s still talking half to herself. “Boy,” she whispers in my ear. “I’ll lend you a knife and give you a silver dragonclaw, if you’ll put it through that puddle of shit’s heart.”

A silver dragonclaw… that’d feed the gang for a month. And buy me a shirt, that not even Stehv would begrudge me. My mouth waters. The man looks already dead, just as floppy. Drunks are not even dangerous when they’re still standing, if they’re swaying; whether it was stranger, uncle, papa before he threw us out, we’ve all dodged their fists.

He’s still on her step late that night, a stretched out rag of a man. Stehv and Byor go to either end of the street to look out for the watch, or anyone. His breath reeks to peel your skin; I hold mine as I kneel beside him, heart hammer-banging. Knowing nothing, not every vein and artery as I know now, wondering where his heart is, knife in my fist. She said his heart but he’d be just as dead if I cut his throat, and that’s what she really wants, so she’ll still pay me. A place that beats like the heart under the jaw… praying to the Honey-Giving One, who feeds all, I drive the knife in. His eyes pop open, white all around, mouth too, gasping, while blood spurts out all around my hand, black in the darkness and hot as soup. I am doing this, I am killing a man… I suddenly feel like the Honey-Giving One myself, all-powerful. Strength fills my arms as I grab his hair to hold his head still and work the knife back and forth a few times in his neck, making him gurgle with his tongue sticking out. I’m doing this to you, I, Vyadim the Street-spawn, and I’m going to get a silver dragonclaw for it. He whispers a name through bubbles of black broth, what’s left of his breath still stinking, and his eyes are looking for someone else when they go still.

Me and the knife washed in the horse-fountain at the corner, I give it back to the whore-madam and she hands me the money, in a tiny sack that smells like garlic, telling me to count it myself in front of her so I may be sure it is the correct amount, like a proper businessman. Tomorrow I will go to market with my head held very high, and I will buy whatever we want. Ten years old—round about that, anyway, I think—and the world is mine.

The first power you ever knew, I said to Vyadim in our minds, enough to build a life from; but now you would feel as power and helplessness both at once, the truth, if you allowed yourself to feel anything at all. Never hungry for thirty years, but your mouth still waters when you sign a contract. Feel it. The scream that wanted to tear out of him he swallowed so that it was no more than the faintest of moans in the back of his throat.

He sank to his knees, his breath frozen by his act of will as much as by terror. His two comrades’ first thought, naturally, was that someone else was doing what they themselves were doing, so they clapped dart-tubes to their mouths without a sound and spun slowly all around, controlled, peering into the darkness, trying to aim for whoever had darted him. Silence yawned, but for his ragged breaths, that he kept quiet with savage will.

“There’s nothing… no one.”

“I didn’t think this damned place was spring-darted!”

“No, just shennen haunted… don’t you fikken feel it?”

“Skorsas, quit with the superstition.” The Enchian steadied the point-man by the shoulder. “Vyadim, say something.”

“I’m… done…” he whispered. He thought his heart was failing. “Go… do it.” Don’t abort the mission to save me. The other two exchanged a glance for only a moment, and then the Arkan took the kraumak from Vyadim’s trembling hand, palmed it in three fingers and reached with thumb and forefinger for the door-latch, blow-gun in his other hand and close to his lips. Just another contract, he intoned inwardly, just another contract. I realized I could hear it because of how firmly he was saying it to himself. “The moment we see him, no matter where he is,” he whispered.

202 - Go for what you truly want

2010-01-11T21:04:00.003-05:00

Dear Chevenga:

I can’t sleep. My mind won’t stop, like a boy’s. No doubt you are snoozing serene and undisturbed in that peaceful no-blades-allowed place. I will write, as I once used to to the person who I thought didn’t exist. You are the one I want to tell this first, but I can’t speak to you, so I will write to get out the words.

It’s about your shadow-mother. Poor lad, the one person who didn’t get to be at the party in his honour. After they shipped you flat on your back down to the ila asa kraiya, we decided you’d prefer we went ahead and partied anyway. Besides, Skorsas would be beyond wounded if we didn’t, after all that preparation. Perish the thought.

Your shadow-mother came up to me. This was in the main hall, all done up with evergreen branches and white ribbons for asa kraiya. And tiny little candles everywhere. It must have taken them beads to light them all… and you never got to see. “Esora-e,” she said, sort of formally, “I just wanted to say, that was a beautiful thing you did.”

Of course like the clumsy fool I am, I stammered out a thank-you and said “Not as beautiful as you… sorry. Sorry, I’m drunk.” In the lamplight she looked younger again, soft-eyed and long-lashed and with that perfect nose.

“I don’t know that he could have done it without you doing that,” she said, civilly ignoring my slip of the tongue. Telling you to let go the sword in you, she meant.

“I believe he would have,” I said. “But if I could make it easier for him.”

“I guess we’ll never know... but it doesn’t matter. You did it, and it very obviously helped.”

“Ha!” I said. “I bet he’ll be an astonishing an asakraiyaseye as he was a warrior!”

Was a warrior. Can you believe, I still can’t believe I’m saying that, sometimes?

“I guess. I know nothing about asa kraiya, but Karani seems to think something like that.”

“She’d know.” In a way, I wanted to be anywhere but here, shadow-son. It was suddenly worse than asking for a first date.

“Anyway... I just wanted to say that,” she said. “You’ve been doing a lot of wonderful things lately.”

“Thank you. I... ummm… ah…” I said in my silver-tongued way.

“I’m glad you’re reconciled with Niku.”

I told her how that all went, as I’ve already written to you, how your wife beat me to apologizing after all, and told me she was worried I still wanted her dead, and I’d set her straight, and so forth. And said the truth, “She didn’t deserve me treating her like that.”

“No, she didn’t,” Denaina said. “Nor did Chevenga.”

“He didn’t. He didn’t deserve any of it.”

“You wanted to hand her a drubbing, didn’t you?”

We’ve never talked about it before, Chevenga. She just walked out without a word, didn’t even sign consideration, as you know, and everything after that was just the formal words. She has never asked before why I did my part of it.

“I did,” I admitted. It was surprisingly easy to tell her.

“To show him she was not so good?”

“I wanted to prove my stupid prejudice,” I said.

“Having no idea she’d given him the thing no one else would. The thing that was everything to him. None of us but Karani had any idea.”

“Talk about trying to move the mountain by spitting on it,” I said. I suddenly felt too sober, but didn’t want to pour myself more in front of her. “And she’s good, in a lot of ways.”

“Better than you thought, eh?”

“Not just with weapons. All-Spirit, I couldn’t credit she was in the Mezem, same as him…”

“I’ve never understood why not,” she said. “He’d hardly make that up.”

“I didn’t want to credit it,” I said. She was saying things she’d never have said to me before, and I was saying things I’d never have said to her. “I was being stubborn and pig-headed as usual.”

“If she hadn’t been in the Mezem we’d never have got the wing,” she said. I signed chalk. “So in the end you opened your arms to each other?”

“She hugs solidly,” I said.

“That doesn’t surprise me. I’ve seen her seize Chevenga.”

“That’s different! He’s her husband!” Now I was laughing. Laughing with your shadow-mother, Chevenga. Can you believe it?

“She’s still trying to persuade me to learn to fly,” I said. “I’m thinking I might take her up on it. My dad’s thinking of it, and I can’t let the old goat put me to shame. You don’t have to hold the bar tight, she and Chevenga both tell me.”

“So they tell me, too. I’ve gone double a few times. It really is amazing… there’s nothing like it.”

“I’ve doubled to Arko,” I said. “When it got bumpy I threw up right from the insides of my toes.”

Now she laughed. It threw me back twenty-five years, just like that, Chevenga. You know how you can get that, very clearly and vividly, with wine? Well… twenty-five years back, you wouldn’t know. She and me and Karani and Tennunga, sitting under the plain trees at Kyara’s in Terera, drinking wine and feeding tidbits to the stray cats. Tennunga is a brand-new semanakraseye. We’ve been married for maybe a year. We all still have two thumbs. Life is perfect, and we can’t imagine how the future can be anything but just as wonderful.

“I might look the idiot but I’m willing to try,” I said. Well, there’s a bit of the future that was more wonderful than we could have imagined. “Everyone would have to get out from under me.” She laughed again. I’d keep making jokes, I decided, just to hear it. “I hear the couriers just piss in the wind... making sure they’re over uninhabited places. Unless there’s a war, and then they piss on the enemy.” We laughed together.

“You are still nicer than me,” I said.

“You’ll have to keep working on it,” she said.

“I will,” I said. “I need to write to ma, soon. Even if she would never show it... she’s lonely. I wish she’d take up Chevenga’s invitation to visit, even if it is hard.”

I certainly have not told Denaina what we learned from my mother that night, nor has my dad. And I’m sure you haven’t. She doesn’t know. If she were still my wife I would have told her in a heartbeat, as we told Karani.

“I hope so, for her sake.”

“Maybe just as well she never spoke to us,” I said, though I’d never said such a thing ever. “She would have been a kyashin horrible mother-in-law.”

“You didn’t move so far away for no reason.” So many times, she’s said that. Probably never within your hearing, lad. “But something somewhere in between would have been nice. Like... answering our letters.”

“At least she never threw any of them out.”

“So that Chevenga now knows all the sordid details of his parents’ courtship and marriage,” she said. “Just watch, they’ll end up in his memoirs.”

“It’s as if I was a big secret in her life,” I spat.

“As if everyone in Chavinel didn’t know she had a son.”

“Or the semanakrasaeye as a shadow-grandson. How could I dream of going back? I’d rather be here.” Beyond the thick of the crowd around the drink-table, lad, two of your whelps were climbing up the wall after a wing-cat, as if to make my point. “With a shadow-son who is alive and happy, and whose children actually like me.”

“Definitely better,” she said.

“Have you tried those little pink sea-curls?” I asked her. “Niku told me about them and Dad likes them, with that golden sauce.”

“Oh yes, they’re delicious,” she said. “Very delicate... not overly salty or sea-weedy like so many other things from the sea.”

I imagined myself feeding her one, slipping it between her glistening lips with gentle fingers. I made myself stop imagining. “I could stuff myself like a pig on those.”

“Anything you stuff yourself like a pig on is something,” she said.

“My stomach is easier now.”

“Yes, I know. And it’s good.”

“Surya and I were talking about my mother, and he said that’s one thing that people who fight dogs do to their fighting-dogs: starve them to make them mean.”

“It seems like everything is good these days,” she said. I can’t blame her for not wanting to talk about fighting-dogs.

“Yes, life is good. And for you too.”

“Yes... good enough.”

“Denaina... if I’m overstepping... smack me, all right?”

She looked surprisingly unwary. “I’ll just put it down to the wine. You are always overstepping anyway.” But she said it smiling.

“Surya once said to me: whatever you want for life to be better than good enough... you can have.”

“You really believe that?” She said it without raising her brows, though. Well, without raising them all that much. “It doesn’t sound like you, I have to admit.”

“I do, because… finally…! I gave up what I was afraid of, and all of a sudden, what I was fighting to get was just given me.” She looked at me, puzzled. “A living Chevenga... a happy family... being at peace with myself... I eat better... I’m a good war teacher... and that’s just the start.”

“Ah,” she said. “I see what you mean.”

“It gets better, in ways I never dreamed... my life isn’t perfect, but it’s improved out of all recognition. Denaina—I’m sorry to overstep to give you unasked-for advice—but whatever it is that makes you say it need only be ‘good enough’ Don’t settle for so little. Go for what you truly want.”

†

It didn’t wake me entirely, and was dream-like in and of itself. They were blades within, not steel, though their bearers had those too: blow-guns like Mahid, garrote-wires, slings with lead bullets. You’ll be able to see the sword in others once yours is gone… Surya hadn’t told me I’d weapon-sense it too; perhaps he hadn’t known. I’d never sensed one before, I guessed, because no one else on the ila asa kraiya had one.

I have been where you are. There is hope, there is freedom; trust me. That auric steel was deep, hard, well-rooted, in all three of them, the one on point the most; even from this distance I could feel that. Still half in the other world, I slipped out of myself easily, though I had not been practicing since I’d got here, flung off the earth enough as it was. I went through the door and to them.

Who were they? It was assassin’s tools they had inside—a thick-bladed stabbing-knife, a pin-dagger, a short dark-bladed sword, wreathed and embedded for years in bones and lungs and hearts, slowly growing. I saw it all when I was close enough, like flames within the lampshades of the brilliant blue of their inner auras. Now and then they whispered faintly to each other in Enchian, using the soft-lipped whisper assassins use so as not to be given away by their sibilants, which can carry so far through still air.

You’ve come to the right place, for what you need. Through our common humanity, we have chiravesa too; I found their feelings, and even some of their thoughts and knowledge, as they crept wordlessly into the corridor with the sleeping-rooms, and the point-man drew out of a pouch a fist-sized kraumak that shone the colour of a dim candle-flame.

Nervousness was overlain by long experience in ignoring it. Just another contract, just another contract, just another contract, the shield-side rear man was telling himself, in Arkan. The point-man was harder, nerves made stony by decades of cold sweats; this is my life was emblazoned on his whole aura. The third man’s killing intent was frosted with hate, red and coruscating, for the intended victim. Their skill and grace in moving silently, they drew on unthinkingly to reassure themselves, as anyone with any skill does; likewise their knowing where they were going, from what seemed like good instructions.

“One of these.” Pausing beside a door, the point-man held his kraumak up to the sign, and I hovered a handspan above his shoulder to read it with him. By the accent in which he spoke Enchian, he was Brahvnikian. “Remember, we’re looking for that fake name he’s taken on, not his real one. Shi… mi… sae… No.” The Arkan, on his left, gave a sudden shudder. “Shen… is this place haunted?” The point-man ignored that entirely and went to the next door. “Ma…ro—No.” He’d learned his classic Yeoli letters, I heard in the echo of memory around his thoughts, just to do this. “Vi… ra… ni-e. Here. Ready tools… take your time.” They unclipped blades, unsheathed blow-guns, reached delicately with their fingers for kill-venom-filled darts.

201 - We're at peace, then

2010-01-08T21:37:00.002-05:00

So, Chevenga—I’m sorry. I should use that other name, that came from your mother. Virani-e. It just sounds… wrong on you… I don’t think I’ll ever be able to truly know you as anything but Chevenga. Sorry, lad.

I grit my teeth and girded my mental loins and went to seek Niku. She keeps to her rooms a lot now. The babies have dropped; she looks like she’s about to pop any day now. I ran into her in the corridor. “Oh!” she said, when I told her I wanted to speak with her. “Shadow-father-in-marriage, I was just looking for you. How may I help you?”

“I’m not asking for help. I just need to speak… somewhere private.” Your little hellions have ears everywhere, shadow-son. Ikal couldn’t do better.

“All right. Why don’t we go up to the music room. There’s no one in earshot up there.” We walked there together in a bit of a tense silence, and sat down among the drums and Lakan stringed things and Arkan stringed things and flutes and rattles. I wonder why she wanted it to be there?

“What I wanted to say was…” I couldn’t say it smoothly, lad. “Em… it’s about… um… what happened in the war…. I… em… I should say something to you about it.”

She looked at me with those big black eyes and her brown forehead darkened browner, the way it does when her brows go down, with confusion. “Shadow-father-in-marriage, a lot of things happened in the war. If it’s about the… um. When… um, er…” Well. I wasn’t the only one who was going to trip over my tongue.

“When you and I, um, you know.”

“When we started by sparring and ended up trading real blows.”

“Yes.”

There was this silence, big and long and deep enough to drop a largish walled town into.

I set my teeth. I’m going to say it, I told myself. I’m going to say it now. For Chevenga’s happiness, for my family, because it is right. I’m going to say it, and not care if she doesn’t say the same. Not care if I win or lose. That is not the point. I… apologize, Niku. What I did was wrong. I am sorry. No, there’s a better way of wording it. For what I did, I am truly sorry. It was a very bitter mistake. No, no. Niku, I am sincerely apologetic for what—

“Shadow father-in-marriage…” She was a little breathless, as if she were scared. But you know how she gets that kind of decisiveness when she’s scared, like, I’ve got to overcome it by doing something right now…? “Thank you for actually bringing it up… I came to tell you… I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry about raising my hand against a possible family member, and someone Chevenga loves so much.” All-Spirit, tears welled up in her eyes. “I feel like a total shit thinking about it!”

Lad, you know when you go fishing and you hook up a nice big one and it’s lying on the ground with its mouth kind of flopping open and closed and its eyes bugging and glassy? I know I looked exactly like that.

I fumbled for a kerchief, found one, passed it to her. “Uhh… well… um… I meant to… you needn’t feel like a total shit. No more than me, anyway. Less, really, since I made the challenge. I… was coming to apologize to you.”

She looked up at me. Second hooked fish, mouth opening and closing, eyes buggy. “Uh… really… you were? I… I thought I’d dragged my feet enough talking to you… I’m so crabby when I’m pregnant I didn’t think I could do a sincere apology justice and I really… um… thought you wanted me dead rather than with Chevenga…”

Well, of course she did. Why wouldn’t she? “No, no, I didn’t want you dead. I just wanted to, em… humble you. For which I apologize, I should never have done such a thing.”

“I… uh… suppose…” She took a deep breath, as if Surya was telling her to. “My war teachers tried to get me to realize I’d a problem with pride… I… accept your apology if you… accept mine. It was a pride thing… for that I’m sorry too. I was afraid… you’d want to keep humbling me if I admitted fault. I really do want to be able to talk to you, more than ‘please pass the salt.’ It’s hurting the whole family.”

“Yes, it is,” I had to agree. “And none of us need it now. None of us need it ever. Of course, I’ll accept yours. Niku…” I made the apology gesture with both my hands.

She took them, and said in a very formal way, like these tribal people can do so well, “I truly accept your apology. I’ll do my best not to step on your toes with too many… Niah things.” We let go hands, and she flipped hers over and did the apology gesture to me. “I am sorry I hurt you.”

I said, “I accept.” I also decided it was about time I did this: kissed her hand and said, “Thank you… as Chevenga’s shadow-father… for being the one who was willing to marry him despite… you know.”

She twitched, almost pulling away. Even now, lad, people who kept the secret aren’t used to talking about it openly, and people who didn’t, not at all. “You’re welcome… I always thought he was worth every instant I could have with him, and now… well.” Her face broke into a beaming smile. “Everything is good.”

“We’re at peace, then,” I said. My heart was in my throat, for some reason, shadow-son, as I slowly, tentatively, opened my arms.

She whomped into them like a battering ram into a gate, and hers smacked around me so hard it hurt.

“Shadow-daughter-in-law!”

“Shadow-father-in-marriage!” Now we were both in tears.

We laughed and cried together, until she pointed out that perhaps we should let everyone know I hadn’t given her a smashed-over-the-head drumhead collar and she hadn’t beat out the Paean Against Arko on my skull with the sticks.

You see why I had to write you immediately.

All my love, which feels so much bigger these days,

Esora-e.

†

So, Piatsri, to continue:

Mer’s right, of course. I should do it. And I shouldn’t even wait. It’s been, what… six years.

And… I feel like a shit for this, too. I’ve been thinking in the back of my mind that it doesn’t matter whether I apologize to Esora-e because… the person I really want to do it for isn’t going to be around much longer.

But he is, now.

So I heave myself up off the couch in the sun-room, and beat the parrots off me so they won’t follow me and keep interrupting while I’m trying to tell him, and head waddling down towards his room. And who should I run into in the corridor. “Oh—Esora-e!” I say. “May I speak with you?”

He looks tense for some reason, I notice. “You… no, I need to speak to you,” he says, in his gruff way. “Somewhere private.”

Well, fine. What’s this about? I swallow the bit of anger. What’s he done, really? Besides, I can’t apologize angry. “All right,” I said. “Why don’t we go up to the music room? There’s no one in earshot up there.” And you’re less likely to try and hit me with a drum, I think.

We go up, neither of us wanting to say anything.

“Shadow-father-in-marriage,” I say. “I want to speak about… what happened in… the… um… er… ehh… war.” All of a sudden I’m as stumble-tongued as a girl first asking a boy to make love to her.

“What… happened… in… the… em… war?” He’s as stumbled-tongued as the boy. “You mean… when we…”

“Yes,” I grit my teeth and say. “When we sparred and it turned into a real fight.”

“Yes,” he says.

“Yeah,” I say.

“Yuh,” he says.

“Look, shadow-father-in-marriage—” You know me, Piatsri. Once I decide to say something, I rush into it, with a bunch of words. “Thank you for bringing it up, I—”

“I’m sorry!” he blurts out, like it’s been wanting to burst out from behind his teeth for ages.

You know how when you spear a fish, it stares at you with these eyes that are white all around, and the mouth that is gaping open so big it is big as its face? I must have looked exactly like that right then.

“Uh… you are?” I say. “No, I am!”

“You are?” he says. “I… look… let me say it, I’ve been planning the words… I… was meaning to humiliate you. Which was wrong. I should never have done such a thing. I apologize, sincerely.”

“I’m sorry for my half,” I said. “I’m truly sorry that I raised my hand against family member, and someone Chevenga loves so much. And I’m sorry I took so long to say I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry I took just as long as you did.”

“I… was afraid you’d keep wanting to humiliate me, if I admitted fault by saying sorry,” I tell him. “But… I really want to say more to you than ‘please pass the salt.’ I… accept your apology if you’ll accept mine.”

“I will accept yours if you accept mine.” He gives me his hands in the formal Yeoli way that means apology, holding them low and a little apart and palms turned up, as if to offer something. I take them, which means I accept his apology. And then we do the same the other way around. And he kisses my hands—that’s the formal Yeoli thank-you—for being willing to marry Chevenga when I thought it would only be for a short time.

“We’re at peace, then?” he says. I say yes, and we hug. He has not a bad hug for a Yeoli, reserved as they are. And we both cry, with relief. Why did we wait for so long to do this? Were we both idiots or what?

Everything’s so good, Piatsri.

More next time.

Lots of love from your friend forever,

Niku

†

It was just as Tyaicha had said; even after I’d found the will to get out of bed, I was back in with sickness for about half the time. Heat, chills, aches, rashes, nose running like a river and throat in agony: I got all of it. Once while I was staring at the ceiling, too weak to do anything else, I remembered what Surya had said, that he’d got everything that was going around and more, leading up to his going asa kraiya. “I don’t have a case of illness, but a case of change, I know,” I said to Azaila, when he told me he had no intention of being any easier on me because of it. “Surya told me what you told him.” But for Surya it had been entirely cured the moment he’d laid down the sword; why for me was it happening after? At least the idleness wouldn’t give me flab after all; I was eating like a bird, having no appetite.

Twenty-one days of my twenty-eight were gone when I got an awful chilly fever that tore up my throat and laid me absolutely flat. It didn’t help that I was beginning to worry about how I’d get to Vae Arahi for the referendum count; the weather had been so mild that the lake was only just beginning to freeze at the edges, and whether it got thick enough to walk safely in time depended entirely on how cold the nights got. A sky full of thick wet clouds every day boded ill. “Look, Kaninjer always just gives me something by the symptoms, whatever the kyashin cause,” I said to Tyaicha in a scrap of moaning voice, the best I could do. “Please!…?” He just stroked my brow and said, “Nothing but water. Trust me, no Haian remedy would touch this. It’s not really sickness, it’s—”

“Change, I know, go eat kyash.” I pulled the covers over my head.

That night, weapon-sense tweaked me out of sleep, like a scratch on the skin of my mind. It was pitch-dark, the death-hour in the death-time of year, when people light many lights just to see light, and a particularly dark night even for then, with no moon and stars clouded over. Just inside the entrance of the maesa asa kraiya, three blades moved, those who carried them creeping silently into the corridor.

200 - The commonality of mutual humanity

2010-01-07T23:11:00.002-05:00

“You can do it,” he said. “So long as you get off thinking that you can’t.

“Remember what asa kraiya is,” he said. “The natural state. Any time life is drawn away from that—you’ll know this from whatever you’ve picked up from Kaninjer—it is urged back to it, hard, however much that urging is hidden.” I almost was not hearing him, my mind in a whirl, anger and fear and shame all tearing at me. “Remember why you had no will or ability to fight him—the commonality of mutual humanity, you called it, or something like that.” I sat down again and buried my face in my hands, lost, furious, bereft, terrified. He patted my shoulder, and stood to go. “You don’t have to understand it immediately, no one’s attacking you tomorrow. Let it roil around inside and it will come in time.”

†

Dear Chevenga:

I can’t stand not to tell you this, but you’re on asa kraiya island, so I have to pretend to write a letter as is my habit to the people who are not with me.

You were right to tell me to hold off trying to make peace with Niku the day you were ceremonially reinstated. An insincere apology… yes, she’d have seen right through it.

It’s my father who finally got me to see the light. He has made me see the light about so many things. It’s like he’s raising me. I’m being raised the second time. My father never got a chance to raise his child back then so he’s doing it now. I would have thought it was far too late. But perhaps it never is.

It’s about accepting her as a human being, he said to me. “She’s your husband’s wife. How can you not accept her as a human being?” I wanted to ask him, how do you deal with all those… foreigners?

“I look at her and, like with a Lakan, I can’t help think about monkeys,” I said to him.

“You imagine your shadow-son in bed with a monkey?”

We were in the hot-tub at the time, and I happened to be taking a sip of tea, and it came spluttering out my nose. “Well…! Um… no. But if I think of her as a human being I have to do chiravesa… I have to. It wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t. And I really don’t want to. I don’t know if I can… she’s Niah. I bet she wouldn’t want to do it either.

“It could be; she’s a foreigner, she hasn’t grown up with the custom.”

“That means I don’t have to!” I said. Papa laughed. I write all of this to you hoping to All-Spirit you’ll forgive me, my child.

“My shadow-son meets her in the vilest, most ugly place in the world, a place that we should have razed as far as I’m concerned… and falls in love with her. She gets away, but doesn’t manage to get him out, for all she loves him…”

“That wasn’t her fault.”

“No… true. Then she goes home and they nearly cut her throat because she’s told my shadow-son about the wing. Some spat on her shadow because we were going to know… they couldn’t take it. There was one older guy, pretty damn swarthy, dried-up old stick… he just could not get it through his head that we were…”

“Human beings?”

Touché, Papa.

“Everyone else apologized for him, their excuse that he wasn’t all there. I don’t want to be the old uncle who isn’t all there.” I guess I am saying this to you, Chevenga, more than I was saying it to him. “When I was a kid, I didn’t even dream of this… a tenth of the changes… it’s too fast, it’s too much…

“I figured I’d prove to him that she wasn’t good enough for him, sparring… I didn’t think, really, about… I couldn’t see her as a warrior, aside from being ornamental, muscular but ornamental; they weren’t warriors. I wanted to show her that she shouldn’t be with my shadow-son. I was so angry. I can never just sit and just do nothing but talk, I have to do something…” He just listened. So gently. “I blamed her for Chevenga being mad at me. In some part of me, I still do. It was as if he rejected Yeola-e by choosing her.”

“He didn’t reject Yeola-e. Look what he did.”

“No, his Yeoli girlfriends rejected him.”

“Now we know why.”

“I mean… how could she… I was astounded that someone not-Yeoli could say yes, once I understood! And he had to get so mad at me to protect her… in a foreign country. I know what he did and why, and I was wrong to do what I did. Some part of me can’t forgive her for being right yet… because if she’s right than I’m wrong.”

“If you forgive her,” my father said. “You’re both right.”

“That’s like putting my head on backwards… I don’t know how. I’m so used to one right and one wrong… it just balances wrong. I’ve heard it said that both people in a disagreement can win… I don’t understand it, I don’t see it… in any conflict there is a winner and loser, and I don’t want to be the loser. Papa, you really want me to do this, don’t you?”

“I want you to have peace in your family,” he said.

“I did say I would do anything. If it means that he’s happy, and she’s happy… and it’s just at the cost of my pride, that’s worth it.”

“How is it at the cost of your pride?” He looked genuinely puzzled, Chevenga.

“Like I said, that’s all I know… how else can I come at it? I can apologize sincerely and honestly and absolutely down to my guts… That kind of thing I can swallow. I’ve done it all my life.”

“You don’t think you’d feel happier?”

“I don’t know. On some level it’s easy enough to split yourself in two… you throw what you feel in a corner and put a lock on it… you do what you should, you do what’s right. I can do that, I know how.”

I think, Chevenga, he didn’t understand a word. I think perhaps you don’t either. Or perhaps you do… or did… all too well. I will write the rest of this later.

†

Dear Piatsri:

Merao and I were in the hot tub when we got to talking. In water is the only place I can feel light, now that I weigh as much as three people. Even in the air I feel heavy. But it relaxes you too. Maybe that’s why she picked this moment.

She looks me straight in the eyes. “Niku... your husband has gone asa kraiya. The way of peace. You think maybe now’s a good time to make peace with his shadow-father?”

I stare back at her. “Umm. It... it’s peace enough, isn’t it?”

“Hmm,” she says. “If I were to ask Chevenga, what do you think he’d say?”

Piat... where do the Yeoli women learn to be so pointed with their words? “He’d say... they’re polite to each other, but don’t get along.”

“And that would be peace enough?”

“He leaves my children be and that’s what I watch him for. I... care... when I think about him wanting me dead rather than married to his shadow-son, but I try not to think about it much.”

“Hmm. That doesn’t sound like peace to me. It seems more like a fragile mutual non-aggression treaty.”

“Mer... you’ve landed on the sorest point I have... from a thousand man-heights. I’m afraid of apologizing because it feels like I’d be agreeing with him. And that’s crazy.”

“Agreeing with him? But apologizing isn’t about what he has said or done or thinks, it’s about what you did.”

“I’d be apologizing for defending myself, Mer. That cuts.” I twitch a bit because I’m getting kicked a couple of times from the inside. Or maybe pummeled.

“I guess you’re stuck with it then. As long as you’re happy, and those you love are, too.”

Piat, there’s got to be a school for talking like that. I wonder if it’s in Vae Arahi. I looked across at the cool pool where the kids were jumping in from the edges and splashing.

“Not happy, Mer. I...” The tears welled up. Damn the pregnancy. “I can swallow a lot for the kids to be happy, including my own happiness when it comes to some people. I should apologize to the man.”

She laid her hand on mine, gently. “You think you could make it sincere? There’s no point in doing it if not; he’ll just see through it.”

“As sincere as I can, to a man who doesn’t see me as any more than a baboon. Though my behind isn’t as red.”

“A baboon? But you sparred him. That part of him, at least, can’t see you that way.”

“I suppose. He’s never shown any signs of that kind of respect. The thing I’m totally sincere about is that I didn’t want him dead and don’t now. And I’m... impressed with him taking back all the shit he heaped on Ch… Virani-e... He’s stronger than he thinks.”

“Have you ever told him you’re impressed by that?”

“Never.”

“Have you ever told him you sincerely don’t want him dead?”

“No. You don’t tell someone who’s tried to seriously kill you kak like that.”

“Niku... the Lakans were trying to seriously kill us in the Lakan war. Then they were our allies against the Arkans. And Chevenga decorated them when they deserved it as much as he did his own. Old enemies can make peace and become friends.”

“So... I have to forgive him for wanting me dead.”

“Niku... just start with telling him what you just told me. You don’t want him dead. That’s something that people like to know, you know.”

“Given that it’s the thing sticking in my craw, I get it. I can tell him that and mean every word.”

“Of course... hmm... maybe I’m not thinking here. You tell him, ‘I don’t want you dead,’ and he might turn around and say, ‘Well, that’s nice to hear from family.’ I’m not sure I wouldn’t say that if I were him.”

I sighed and sank my head under and blew some bubbles before coming up again. “Well the mutual non-aggression treaty is going to have to be good enough then.”

“Niku... you were saying you appreciated what he’s doing for Ch… Virani-e, right?”

“Yes.”

“Have you ever told him that?”

“Hmm. When I look at the great cracks opening up in him... with his dad too... I can like him... He’s become a better person. There are all kinds of things I never saw in him before. But when he looks at me, he closes up like a giant clam.”

“Of course he does. He doesn’t know that you don’t want him dead. I guess it would be good to tell him that, even if he answers sarcastically... hey, he might not.”

“And if I’m ready for a sarcastic remark, I won’t prick and get mad. I’ll just be able to sign chalk and agree with him.”

“Niku... if he were to say it’s not right to go that long with family not telling them you don’t want them dead... he’d have a point. And you not telling him that you appreciate what he did for Chevenga, that’s you being a giant clam. You see what I mean?”

I had to go under again. Did she not see that it worked both ways? “It’s either he’s right and I’m wrong, or I’m right and he’s wrong,” I said when I came back up. “And one of us ends up feeling we should be dead. I don’t appreciate being told that the only way to make peace is to admit I was wrong and should have let him just kill me.”

She looks at me kind of pop-eyed. “Who said that?”

Oh kak, I think, she thinks I’m saying she did. “Ummm. No one. I think I just figured out why I’m so mad about it.” That’s why, I think they’re thinking I should have let him kill me. Not… something… I want to keep thinking. I had to talk to Surya about this, I knew, Piatsri.

“If no one said that... where did it come from? Niku... you can both be partly wrong and partly right. So come clean on your wrong, and maybe he’ll come clean on his.”

“I feel as though if I do that... I’m not just losing... but... handing him the knife and saying ‘Finish what you wanted.’”

“He’s not going to do that! Niku, if you pull this off, both you and he, and everyone else, will win. Because peace is victory for both sides. If you do it and he doesn’t come through with his end... then you’ll have proved yourself better in everyone’s eyes… then you get the victory.”

I took a deep breath. And another. I was starting to feel a little nauseated so I pulled myself out of the hot water, leaving only my legs in. “You’re right. I’ve got to do it sometime. Not immediately. I have to think this through. But I do have to set things straight, with him.”

“Niku, it’s like this. If two people each wait for the other to make the first peace-move, it never happens. It takes one. It can never be both until it is one. Because it’s never going to be both at the same time.”

“Mer. You can stop trying to persuade me now. I did say I’d do it.”

“I don’t mean to hurt your pride, Niku.”

“I know, Mer. I know. I’m defending something that doesn’t need.” I want to change the subject now. “How are your parents dealing with Kyirya’s new lover?”

“Well.” She pursed her lips. “There’s another case where I’m trying to talk someone into... doing what you have to do to make peace. It’s the same situation, really. But it might just take time.”

More later, Piatsri. Child needs chasing. At least with the ones within, I always know where they are.

199 - How to defend yourself the asa kraiya way

2010-01-06T19:40:00.006-05:00

One time I did speak with Surya, I told him, “I really don’t know who in the Garden Orbicular I am.”

“You don’t need to know who you are,” he said. “You need to choose who you are.”

As always, you choose. Of course. May I be forgiven the weakness, right now, of being annoyed by that?

“We do it every moment; with every action and every word, we make ourselves,” he said. “Who is Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e, or Chan Virani-e Shae-Arano-e, in the past, but what he has done? Who is he in the present and the future, other than what he is doing and will do—which, of course, is totally his choice? We make ourselves in the eyes of others, and from how they reflect that back to us, we are made in our own eyes. The only difference with you now is that you’ll be aware that you’re doing it.”

I had to roll that around in my mind for three days or so, to really see it. I’d led the liberation of Yeola-e and allowed the sack of Arko; these events and my name would be conjoined so long as they and it were remembered, both by me and everyone else. Thus I was the liberation of Yeola-e and the sack of Arko.

But what would I be from now on?

Two-thirds or so into the moon, the question started to look less like a black abyss, and more like an opening vista of possibilities.

There was a lot of nausea. I had forgotten that. I can’t say how many times I puked remembering something I’d done. But it eased. The fire of horror and remorse didn’t cease—Iyinisa told me it might never, entirely—but it became more distant.

There is an exercise ground on the ila asa kraiya, and though I had no idea what they actually did there, I stayed away at first. I’d go to flab if I did this all month, I knew—whatever my heart felt, my muscles were aching from idleness the third day—but I couldn’t imagine a training ground that wouldn’t remind me of war. If I did push-ups, what was it for, but strengthening my arms to wield weapons? If I practiced forms, what was it for, but to polish my fighting skill?

Everyone had told me to do as I was inclined, to stay in bed if I really wanted to, and not worry about my fitness; I’d be able to get it back later, same as if I were wounded, which I had plenty of experience in, except this time there would be no wound dragging on me. During the time I was wondering why I walked except to strengthen my legs for fighting, I did stay in bed; as the white heat of emotion faded to a duller red-orange, boredom drove me out, and I explored the island, sometimes with Iyinisa or another asakraiyaseye showing me, sometimes by myself, reminding myself that legs could be for other things, such as conveying the eyes and head to places they’d never seen or known.

When I finally did go to the exercise-ground, on the thirteenth day or so, I left in an instant; what call asakraiyaseyel had to practice with true steel I wasn’t sure, but some of them were doing it. Warriors weren’t allowed here, but swords were? When I asked Iyinisa, she just said, “A sword in the hand of an asakraiyaseye is a different thing.” Maybe I’m just too simple-minded for this, I thought.

Foolish though it will seem, some childish part of me had thought that the ceremony would somehow magically make me understand how to defend myself in the asa kraiya way. Alas, it hadn’t. When I imagined it, I had no idea. It would be the usual feeling-impossible-at-every-step grind that is war-training during its worst days, I suspected.

Just as I was thinking I was perhaps almost ready to consider undertaking it, maybe, Azaila came to my room, and said, “It’s time for you to learn this.”

He had me meditate with him first, to calm the emotion. Then he asked me, “What exactly stopped you from hitting Younger Riji?”

I had not thought back to that since I’d been on the island. Now I remembered how my arm had seemed to stop itself. And then my fatal solicitousness for the kid’s life had been rendered moot in one perfect heart-stroke by Kyirya. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Try harder. What was in the feeling?” They all conspire with each other, I thought, my healers, my teachers.

I tried harder. When I did, it came together, that night, and what I felt now. “It was too horrific for me to do,” I said. “Azaila… the thoughts I am thinking now…” More of my lake of tears came. I knew he wanted to hear those thoughts. “Why… why do we even make these instruments of steel, and sharpen them to the point where they can sever a falling hair without slowing down its fall, with the intent of turning them against other people… using them to destroy the internal workings of the human body so that they cease working… Azaila, All-Spirit help me, I am so asa kraiya that it makes me sick to remember any of it, or imagine anyone else doing it, or to think that I even held such a thing… incredible, isn’t it?”

“What does it matter, if you destroy the internal workings of the human body? Especially that of another who wants to do the same to you?”

I was shaking and wanting to throw up, now. Why do I have to explain? You must understand this! Why do you make me say it? I don’t even know how to word it! All I could come out with, in the end, was, “He’s a human being! He’s a human being, same as me!” It didn’t begin to explain, and sounded intolerably lame to my own ears..

“Good,” he said. “Here what you need to understand.” They were definitely conspiring. “Not only why you won’t any more, but why you did. Everything went as it should, Chevenga. It was all necessary. What you feel now, you see the beginnings of it in your past, don’t you, if you look back? Close your eyes.”

In the Mezem—I had begun to go asa kraiya even before the Arkans had invaded—no, further. In the Lakan war… no. I had begun to go asa kraiya as a child. I remembered the conversation on the mountainside with Esora-e. The one that has always come and gone in my memory, that is. It had stayed in my memory, I realized, ever since Esora-e had given his blessing to my going asa kraiya.

“I am sure Iyinisa has told you this, or you’ve read it, or both, but it bears repeating. The big secret of asa kraiya is this… we give it the special name, and we sequester ourselves, and we have our ways and our histories and our fellowship as if it’s some esoteric thing, some exalted state. But the fact is, as every asakraiyaseye knows, asa kraiya is the true natural state of humanity. War-training takes us away from that, makes us inhuman, so naturally we fight it, which is in part why war-training is so hard. Gentle and sensitive spirit that you are, Chevenga, you fought it harder than most, and sought a greater punishment than most for acceding to it.”

“Azaila… I am so far away from anything that can be called gentle and sensitive…!”

“Hasn’t Surya said anything about how accurate your impression of yourself is?”

You think a thousand things about yourself that are wrong. He’d underestimated, really. “Point well-taken,” I conceded. “He keeps trying to convince me I’m a healer, though, which is madness, as I see clearly every time I’m in the presence of Kaninjer.”

I hadn’t known, incidentally, how much I would miss my Haian’s checking me morning and night, the feel of his warm fingers on my wrist as he felt my pulses, his bustling solicitousness, the way he could be utterly immovable in that quiet, gentle voice. The routine had become part of how I defined my day, how I measured time; I felt oddly naked without. But one must have wielded the sword to be beyond it, so Haians are not allowed on the island except for emergencies, and he’d pronounced me well enough to do without him for a month so long as I did not ignore any symptoms that came up, which he made me swear to.

He knew also that there is a Yeoli healer in the maesa asa kraiya, who trained for several years on Haiu Menshir after he hung up his sword. Tyaicha Shae-Krisa (yes, he is a distant relative of Inatalla) examined me once at the start and a few times more, that was all. I had a strong constitution and was quite healthy for someone who’d been so hacked up, he told me—no news there—and I was now going through the usual sword-pulled-out-of-me crap, which he’d seen a thousand times before, and was just a matter of endurance until it eased. “You’ll probably be laid up some of the time you’re here, while your life-force finds it bearings again,” he said. “But that’s all right. That’s what the maesa asa kraiya is for.”

Now Azaila said, “Surya is right,” a truism if I ever heard one. “A person can be as good a healer as he was a warrior.”

“Oh right—where’s your full-to-bursting practice, then?”

He just laughed. “There are different ways to be a healer.” I thought of him grinding my face in the dirt during the invasion of Arko, and saw his point. “Your way is very clear to me, even if it isn’t to you. That’ll change, as you give yourself permission to see it yourself. Just to irritate you, Chevenga, I’ll give you a hint: you were a warrior on a scale that touched the whole world.” I wanted to chase him out of my room flinging things at him. At least he’d admitted he was irritating me.

“Look, my teacher, the night I fought Younger Riji, I felt defenseless,” I said. “I now feel about a hundred times as defenseless as I did then. And it’s been a while since anyone tried to kill me; we’re about due. Will you please hurry up and make me into a wizard like yourself before the brown stains in my, and Krero’s, under-cloths become permanent?”

“Sure,” he said, laughing again. “Or at least you will make yourself one, the moment you get it. You’re a step ahead of most in understanding what victory is… at least I think you still are; define it for me.”

“Causing the enemy to lose the will or ability to fight me,” I said. “Either by incapacitating him physically, incapacitating him emotionally, or causing him to make a reasoned choice not to. Or”—I almost forgot—“arranging things so that he has either no will or no ability to fight me in the first place.” I felt about ten again.

“A good warrior and general’s definition,” he said. What other kind is there? “So the question of defending oneself asa kraiya is—what?”

“How to do that without causing harm… or without even threatening it, since you can’t cause it.”

“Ehh, you’re still thinking like a warrior, but you’re pointed in more or less the right direction,” he said cheerily. “Well, there you are. That’s all you need to figure out.”

“Thank you so much, revered master,” I said. “That clears it right up.”

He let out a cackling laugh. “Have I ever told you that teaching you is unending delight? You’re always so much fun. All right, go back a step and take them one by one, the ways of causing the other to lose his will or ability to fight you.”

“Incapacitating him physically is out the window.” He gave me his “you’re idiotically wrong” grin, and I remembered what Surya had done to me, the night I’d dreamed of fighting my Arkan escort in Roskat. I’d definitely been physically incapacitated, but not harmed. Or was it emotionally? That can take all the strength out of the body too, and I’d felt plenty afraid as I’d lain there unable even to get up on my elbows. “All right then—incapacitating him physically in any way I know how to do is out the window. Emotionally too, since it’s always with fear of same. I guess I’m going to have to convince them to make a reasoned choice every time… talk them out of it. Those who have no ears for my words of justice and sense, sure.”

“You feel frustrated for the usual reason,” he said. “Limiting yourself. To words… to convincing—”

“What else is there for me, now?”

“You’re sweating the technique too much, Chevenga. Think more of the result. What do you have to do?”

“Well you’re the one who asked me to take two steps back and look at the ways one by one!”

“Of course; that was to point out the futility of thinking of it that way.” May I be released from the inhibitions of asa kraiya long enough, I asked some mythical power that an athye may not ask, to strangle my war-master?

“Cause the enemy to lose the will or ability to fight me.” I swallowed the urge to add, “magically.”

“Right.” We stared at each other for a time; no words came to my mind but, How!? and he’d told me I was sweating the technique too much. “Fourth Chevenga Shae—Virani-e, I should say…! The answer is right in what we were talking about earlier. Why don’t you see it?”

For all I felt like utter crap, I got up and paced anyway, wanting to throw up. Legs can be for that too. Famed the world over for all I had done, vanquisher of Riji Kli-fas and Kallijas Itrean, conqueror of Arko, I now knew less than nothing. Make no mistake, going asa kraiya rips you back down right to the ground.

I ran back over our talk in my mind, straining to see clues. Why I could not hit Riji, him being human like me, me being gentle and sensitive (ha!), asa kraiya being the natural state… I saw about as much as a blind man in the deepest crack of a cave at midnight.

“Let me ask you this,” he said. “Riji was already victorious over you before you even closed, whether he, or you, knew it or not. True?”

“True.” Asa kraiya and vomiting-averse to it or not, I still felt the sting on my pride. “I had no will—or ability, for that matter, or so it felt—to—ohhhh, I get it! I have to make everyone who attacks me go asa kraiya, right then and there! Well, kyash, no problem!”

“Exactly,” he said, with his most satisfied grin, as if I hadn’t been being sarcastic in the slightest.

198 - The scream of a soul ripped away

2010-01-05T22:53:00.002-05:00

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.