82 - What would it be to take my own?

Niku walked me down to Assembly Palace, as someone must. I carried a vial of calming essence in another pocket. I took five doses just as I was coming up to the Committee room door. Why care who saw? No secrets.

As in Assembly, though, the formality was a comfort, as was the austerely-elegant oak lining the room, and the matching massive table, both rebuilt and polished to gleaming in precisely the same six-century-old style in which they had been originally wrought. The room even smelled the same as it had when I’d been growing up, and then a new semanakraseye. These things were a constant reminder, from all around me, that what I was doing here was for the people and thus sacred.

I felt as a balm also the tone in which Assembly committees generally conduct their business: reasoned, measured, smoothly articulate from long practice, sometimes painstakingly procedural, and with everyone treating everyone else with the sort of old-fashioned unfailing gentility that comes of them knowing every word will be noted and then scribed into classic Yeoli for all to read. Even snideness is delivered with an understated elegance.

They did as I had expected, asking me to summarize every incident, then examining each one in detail. As I unfolded the list, I wondered if they’d be impressed that I’d taken the trouble to write it, or struck that I could not recount it all by memory. I couldn’t know.

Having it stood me in good stead, though, my own black writing on white paper giving me something to tether my mind to while it flailed, wanting to fly out the window or melt and soak through the cracks between the tiles of the floor, or at the very least forget parts. I ended up thankful even that Surya had had me number it; two or three times the Committee, usually Miniya Shae-Sima, caught me skipping lines.

I wept, of course; I couldn’t even get through the short account of the first time, when I’d gone up on the mountain at seven after the talk with Esora-e, thinking to throw myself off if I were a coward, without tears. They, especially Kuraila, kept telling me to be easy on myself, not feel ashamed, let it out and so forth, which helped.

Their exact wording was “times you felt inclined to kill yourself,” which, blessing of blessings, got me off mentioning either the official or not-so-official times I’d done the Kiss of the Lake, at least at first. It didn’t, however, spare me from having to tell about going up on the mountain after I’d learned about the Statute semanakraseyeni sections 21-1 and 21-5-7. Linasika, of course, seized on that, asking me whether he’d heard it right that I’d known then that I was legally required to reveal my secret to Assembly. I told him the truth, that I was not sure and had chosen, on my mother’s advice, to hold off deciding. When he pressed me, Lanai saved me by steering us back on topic.

Of course it came up again, when I told them about lying down in the stream after Komona left me, at fifteen, since part of my despair had been from thinking Assembly would never approve me if they knew, but Lanai headed Linasika off again.

The wording “feel inclined” also meant I should not include the lung-wound in Arko, since I hadn’t felt inclined. “I think you have missed one, Fourth Chevenga,” Linasika said, then accused me of leaving it out falsely. He disbelieved me when I said I’d had no intent that I knew, enough to threaten me with truth-drug, which everyone else protested. I saw annoyance at him on several faces, and the others were more gentle to me for a time afterwards. Keep it up, my friend, I thought.

I got through the list with many more doses of calming essence and a few more bouts of tears, and then we took the first rest-break. Living by “no secrets,” of course, means being given thoughts inconceivable to you before, because they come from other minds . Recalling what you’ve known only in pieces as a whole also allows other people to reflect on it as a whole. If one of them is a healer, all the better.

“There is one clear pattern I notice here,” Kuraila said when we came back from the break. “The incidents became more serious as you got older. At seven, you just had thoughts; thirteen, fifteen and twenty, you changed your mind each time; the three from twenty-one to twenty six were all such that you would indeed have died if you hadn’t been prevented; with the incident in training, you were wounded so severely you were almost killed.”

I, of course, had not noticed this. All I could think was, when you grow up, life gets more serious. She, in the way of psyche-healers, came up with reasons that made more sense. As I came closer to the age by which I expected to be dead anyway, I would be giving up fewer years, she pointed out; as well my responsibilities had increased with my age, and I’d often been driven by the sense I’d somehow failed or erred in them. It did not escape her eagle eye also that all the true attempts had been after I’d been tortured in Arko. All-Spirit, I thought, am I going to find out in time that everyone knows me better than I know myself?

Then Miniya stepped onto the ground I had never dared, asking me what the common thread in all of them was.

Common thread? I poked at the memories with my mind like a sore tooth with one’s tongue. Death sits on my shoulder anyway, and always has. My own, and others’ at my hand from before my voice stopped being a piping child’s. It was easy for me and became easier as I worked my way up the ranks, from killing tens to hundreds to thousands and then hundreds of thousands. What would it be to take my own?

I said, “I have always felt close to death; never afraid of it. Thoughts of it… come easily to me, maybe more so than most.” Of course Miniya asked me why. “My habitual answer to that would always have been, ‘I’m going to die before thirty.’ Shininao sits on my shoulder; I always felt so.” But I was under oath, and so I told them about not being able to say “I deserve to live” when Surya had me in the truth-hold. Why can’t you just ask him?

”Would it be fair,” Miniya asked me, “to say that you value your life little?”

In those times, I valued my life none at all. I saw it as a scrap on the wind… “It would have been fair to say that before I started seeing Surya,” I said. Perhaps partly out of wanting to duck the question, I think on retrospect, I spoke about fighting, and about how you can’t worry about your own life when you do or else your mind will freeze and you’ll get killed, and how if that is madness, all warriors have it.

Attempted duckings of questions can turn out revealing more, in the presence of someone sharp. “If I may intercede,” Kuraila said, glancing through the notes she’d taken, “I notice none of these times were during war. Between times you were fighting, yes, and one, the most famous one, almost the moment the war ended.”

I stood stunned for a moment, before acknowledging that this was true. Knowing they’d ask why, I threw out what came to mind. “I imagine I am close to death there already, and so feel no need to be closer.” I almost heard Surya say Mm-hmm in my mind.

“Or else you value your life more, there; might there be truth to that?” Kuraila said. The other people on the Committee never objected when she interceded, and in fact often gave their questioning time to her, for good reason. She’d now scored the heart-thrust once again; I signed chalk.

When I think back, every time I tried or felt or was inclined, it seemed utterly natural to me, inevitable, the only correct thing; my body and mind were in utter agreement, at least up to a point. But in war—I imagined myself in the chakrachaseye’s tent in a war-camp, and suicide was a thousand ways wrong and a thousand day’s journey away.

“I am most needed there,” I said. “When I imagine… it would have been a disaster for Yeola-e. Not so much in the Lakan War, before I was chakrachaseye, but in the Arkan war—utter disaster. For which I would never have been forgiven, I think, understandably.”

Kuraila began scrawling fast on her noteboard, as if she’d been struck by something, but didn’t say it.

“Further questions with respect to the summary?” Lanai asked around the table, meaning to finish this phase. Miniya signed.

“I hope you will forgive me for this, Chevenga, but as I am sitting beside you I have been unable to help glances at your notes, and thus could not avoid noticing that, some of the times we’ve pointed out to you that you had missed some numbers, you did not read the line you’d passed over, but rather altered the number of the next as if that line did not exist.” Linasika took in a sharp breath. “I do not doubt for a moment that there is a good and legitimate reason for this, but I ask you to share with us what it is.”

Kyash… what did I have to do, hide the list in my hands? At least I could easily answer the truth. “I was asked by the Committee to recount the times in my life that I felt inclined to kill myself,” I said. “The incidents to which you refer are not ones in which I did.”

“Ah. Then… if you will forgive me for asking… are they somehow similar to suicide, or feeling inclined to it? No, cancel that question, answer this one: are they somehow relevant to your mental state?”

That was it; I wouldn’t be spared after all. I spoke and signed chalk (you can’t just sign but must speak, as all words are being scribed), and he said, “I ask you to recount them.”

“Well…” Why doesn’t Assembly Palace have secret passages like the Marble Palace, that I could just vanish into rather than revealing I have the Kiss of the Lake on a suicide list? “Before I do, I want to reiterate very strongly that these were not times in which I felt inclined to kill myself, or had any of the related thoughts and feelings, but undertook it as the most sacred rite. It is on my list because it is a… chiravesa of suicide.”

“You are referring,” Miniya said amazed, “to the Kiss of the Lake?” I said and signed chalk, feeling myself go hot on two points on my cheeks. “But…” His eyes flicked down to the list and back up to mine. “You are referring… only to the Kiss of the Lake?” I said and signed chalk again. “But you’ve done it twice—once at the outset of your term of office, and then again when you rejoined the army in Ossotyeya… but it’s five items on your list you omitted.” Were you a Niah wing-scout in a past life? “Will you explain?”

“Two of the five are the times you mention,” I said. “The other three were times that I rehearsed it in private.”

“Rehearsed it in private?” They all stared at me. “To the full extent?”

“Yes,” I said. “Each time I wanted to know whether I’d be able to do it when I must, so it had to be to the full extent.”

Miniya had been dark-haired before he’d gone to salt and pepper, and his eyebrows were still mostly black; now they drew down hard in perplexity. “Three times, you did this? When?”

“Twice before I became semanakraseye and once after—it was on Haiu Menshir, before I came home from Arko.”

“If I may intercede,” said Linasika, “I’m getting again that feeling I so often get with you, that I am so raw to and that is such a curse, Fourth Chevenga: that you’re hiding something. What is it?”

I felt the points come up much hotter, and thus much redder, on my cheeks. “I… I am embarrassed by this.” That is not answering his question, and I am under oath. “I… I am not telling you what age I was, the times before I was semanakraseye.”

“Well, then, tell us!”

“I was eleven. Both times; they were in quick succession.” Esora-e… I hope you will forgive me. They’d have the whole story out of me, if not now, later.

Kusiya stared at me, his kindly old man’s features stretched in a gape, his dark grey eyes white all around. He was so gob-smacked he didn’t even say ‘If I may intercede.’ “Chevenga, did I understand that right? You are telling us you did the Kiss of the Lake when you were eleven? Twice?” I spoke and signed chalk as I must.

“But our tradition is and has always been that a semanakraseye should not have to do it more than three times. You saw your grandmother’s brand-scars, that they were never more than three! Three times is sufficient proof that a semanakraseye can be trusted to enact the will of the people even unto death, for anyone in their right mind. Now we find out you’ve done it five times, in your few years, and two of them as a child!” He stood up hard, and grabbed his crystal in his fist. “I swear, second Fire come, if I find out that you plan to… are you planning to do it again?”

“Yes, of course,” I said. “I’m overdue; I only put it off because I was so pressed for time in Arko. I mean to do it next spring, since the end of my medical leave will fall in winter.”

“Right, then,” he snapped, “I have found out that you plan to do it again. So I tell you, on my crystal, second Fire come, I am going to propose a resolution to Assembly not to request that you not do it again, as I don’t think that will be strong enough, stubborn soul that you are, but bar you from doing it again. Legally.”

I froze all over, my eyes locked in his. “I’d chalk that,” said Darosera. “I too,” said Chanae, and two or three others signed agreement.





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81 - The universal commonality

“Here is what you need to understand,” said Surya, his arm across my back. “It is something to change, of course; but it’s nothing to be harsh on yourself for. I’ve spoken before of the”—here he said two Haian words—“have I not? Or maybe you’ve forgotten. It means ‘the universal commonality,’ which is to say, we are all the same, or more exactly, anyone exposed to the same circumstances will react the same way. For your purposes, it means, anyone who went through the same things you have would have the same intermittent yearning for death.

“You might say it’s not so simple; that if people didn’t vary, the Haians wouldn’t have so many medicines, and that’s true. But the precise truth of it is that the more extreme the circumstance, the more universally common the reaction, or as the ancient sage of healing wrote, the stronger the disease, the more the patient manifests it rather than himself.

“Consider a slap across the face. To one person it might be a heartfelt humiliation; to another a laughing matter. You might smile into the slapper’s face and say, ‘Feh; try harder’; you might slap him back; you might burst into tears and cry ‘Why?’

“Now consider a sword through the guts. No matter how tough you are, you’re going to go down, and you’re going to be in agony, and you’re going to want a healer desperately and immediately, and you’re going dread the triage verdict, terrified that the healer will declare you uncurable and leave you to die. It’s the same for anyone. Alchaen knew how to heal you of being tortured by his experience; what he saw in you was the same as everyone else he’s healed of torture, which was why he sometimes seemed like a mind-reader, because torture is extreme.

“The corollary is that there is a reason for everything. Right now you are looking at yourself and thinking I am so fikked in the head, the unspoken premise being ‘by comparison with everyone else,’ because you look around and most people you know haven’t tried to kill themselves once, let alone three times. Yes?” I weakly signed chalk. “But wherever there is such an apparent difference, there is simply a lack of explanation. They have not done the same as you because they have not had the same things driving them to it.

“So don’t condemn yourself for it, Chevenga. That’s the whole problem, that you condemn yourself far too easily. That’s what you have to get out of the habit of doing.”

I remember this all well enough to cite him, it seems, though I didn’t think I was truly listening. I spoke my thought. “I’m not so worried about condemning myself right now, so much as the Committee condemning me. How will they not say, when they hear this, ‘He is so fikked in the head?’, then write that in their report, from whence it will become history?”

“Now you’re doing what people always do: expecting others to think the same way you do,” he said. “You condemn yourself so you expect them to condemn you. But it’s explicit in their mandate that they must look for and understand causes; ‘to investigate the circumstances of the semanakraseye and his state of mind,’ it reads, so it’s right there, ‘circumstances.’

“If they do their work well—and remember, they plan to speak to every healer who has helped you that they can get their hands on, and causes are our stock-in-trade—the causes will come very clear to them. They will understand exactly why you have acted as you have, probably faster and better than you will, since they aren’t afflicted with the same blindnesses you have about it.”

“Right,” I said feebly. “I feel so much better now.”

He stifled a grin. “You’ve been hiding it from others as well as yourself,” he said, with a sidelong auric glance or two. “Everyone knows about you jumping out of the Marble Palace window after the sack; but no one that you leapt off the ship after you were impeached, or that you considered it so seriously as a child and a youth. No one knows the extent.”

I had raised my head; now I laid it back down on my arm again. I felt strengthless. “Well,” I said, “they find out all of it, starting today.”

He patted my shoulder. “No more secrets. There never really are, anyway, Chevenga. I know that goes very much against the grain for you in particular to think, but remember how many people have said they saw signs, or weren’t surprised, or that this explains so much about you. Further into the healing, you’ll see that more clearly too, and why it’s true.”

“Maybe I should just have Linasika truth-drug-scrape me, as he wants to,” I said. “Get everything all reamed out of me in one great mother of all reamings.”

I was half-joking, but he said, “Perhaps there’s a little wishful thinking in there; if you have honesty forced upon you, you avoid the difficulty of choosing it. But to be honest freely, and have your people witness you doing so, is best for you and them both.”

“Of course,” I spat. “As if I have any choice.”

The list, which was scrawled in my usual fast Athali, lay on the drink-table before me. Surya tapped it with his fingernail, making a ticking through the paper. “Most important is that you are honest with yourself. Don’t lose this, that’s an order. It links you to yourself. Do you feel that?”

I did. It was a kind of awful straining inside, a painful pressure distinctive to me, that could only be stamped with the name Fourth Chevenga, and that from now on I would wear in sight of all the world, like the dagger-tattoo on the cheek of a convicted Thanish murderer. And yet I felt the feeling, that is very hard to describe, of being more strongly linked to myself too, a kind of mix of relief and inspiration. “A-e kras.” I tucked the list into my inner shirt pocket.

His eyes flicked to the place where I had it, and then to my aura, and got a quizzical look. “Chevenga, may I read it?”

No secrets; what ones did I have from him anyway? “If you can read Athali,” I said. “My Athali… it’s famed for its illegibility.”

“I can’t read Athali at all; will you read it to me?” Of course he saw the bolt of fear. This Committee questioning was going to be a world of joy. “It will be good for you,” he said. “Reading it to me first will make it easier to recount it to them.”

I did. As if I were being tortured, my mind went far away as I did, so I felt unreal, my voice not mine.

“It’s not complete,” he said, peering at my aura again, mostly around my face and neck. “But what I see doesn’t have a look of your having forgotten—aigh…!”

He so rarely even raised his voice, let alone yelped, it made me jump. “Surya? Are you all right?” I confess a certain satisfaction in seeing him discomfited, though. It was so rare.

“It’s… the Kiss of the Lake,” he said. “That’s… you…” He took a deep breath, and I felt my smugness dissolve in the face of my own surge of horror.

“The Kiss of the Lake? That’s not suicide, Surya! You’re telling me it looks the same in my aura? It can’t!”

Just as Komona had, he pulled himself together fast, much faster than I could, by use of his discipline. “But when you do it, it feels like… you tell me, Chevenga. How does it feel?”

I took a deep breath, almost without willing it, which reminded me how, each time, I’d made the mistake of doing exactly that, so the agony of not breathing lasted longer. “Like… yes, like killing yourself. You have to—” My throat closed, cutting off the words, and my eyes were pouring tears almost before I knew it.

What is this madness? I thought; the emotion had torn up through me out of nowhere. I accepted it, I did as a child, I am due—overdue—to do the third, All-Spirit, I can’t let myself be ruined for it! I told myself deep breath, even as he was saying it. “Whatever you do, keep your breath flowing; don’t hold it,” he said, laying a hand on my back; he would do that sometimes, so the feel of it would be a reminder to keep breathing deep. “Go on; you have to…?”

“You have to throw yourself away,” I whispered, stammering through the tears. “You have to say to yourself, ‘I die,’ and renounce all claim to life.”

“Then it should be on the list.” I heard horror in his voice, that the Committee would learn it. In his time in Arko, he had not ceased being Yeoli. That was why he’d cried out.

“But I didn’t choose it; it’s required!” I saw the falseness in that the moment it came out of my mouth, and heard my father’s voice in my ear clear as if he’d been there. Its power is that we do it by choice. Our love for the people alone binds us to it. “Required by my love for Yeola-e, I mean… it was not from wanting to destroy myself, not pain or self-condemnation or to protect the world from me or any of that suicidal kyash!” My hands were in my hair, I realized, pulling it.

“The idea of listing the instances is not only that they are evidence of what caused them, but that each one has left its mark on you, also,” he said. “The Kiss of the Lake did. Deny it?” I signed charcoal, clenching my eyes shut. The cliff tempted me again, when I thought, I have to tell the Committee this. “Chevenga…” He gazed for a time at my aura, with something I’d never seen before in his green-grey eyes when he did it: disbelief. “How old were you when you did it the first time?”

“How old was I? Surya, I followed a regency, it’s always the same—twenty.”

He took a deep breath, and chopped his hand charcoal. “No secrets, no secrets, Fourth Chevenga. You haven’t forgotten, I can see that in your aura. You aren’t a liar by nature. It’s fragmentary again, make the pieces one, make yourself whole. The official times and the secret times were both the Kiss of the Lake. In both, you told yourself, ‘I die.’”

Prickles went down me all over as I saw what he meant. I would have to tell the Committee. I could not speak. “No secrets,” he said, his voice hard. “Say how old you were. That’s an order.”

“A-e… kras…” It took some time to get it out, even so. He waited in resolute silence, that for me was full of the wings of darkness, beating around my head. “Eleven.”

“Add it to the list,” he said in the command-voice that brooks no protest. “However many times it was, and the age you were, for every one. Right now.” He held out the pen to me. Mindless, gone far away, I obeyed, and tucked the list back into my shirt. It was time to go down to Assembly Palace. I walked on legs of wood, feeling shattered.





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80 - in which I make a list

Excerpt from the proceedings of the Assembly of Yeola-e, free discussion of matters to be raised by Servants, etesora 29 Y. 1556.

Kusiya Aranin, Servant of Terera South: I raise a matter relating to my membership in the Chevengani Mental State Assessment Committee, and would like to propose a resolution that requires the assent of the full Assembly of Yeola-e rather than merely the Committee.

Given our mandate, we are asking of Chevenga, and those others near him who can shed light on the subject of our investigation, to reveal in great detail and leaving out no aspect, the most sensitive events and matters that are personal to him. Now I hasten to add that at no time has Chevenga himself ever expressed objection to what we’ve asked, or protested that he should not have to answer any of our questions; he has consented unfailingly to reveal what I have to admit myself would make me cringe to reveal, were I him. His reason he states very simply as the tenet sacred to him, “the people wills.”

But I wonder if the people need and do truly will the excruciating degree of openness we have so far forced him into, the laying open of every word of the most private matters to public scrutiny. I know what we are mandated to do, and I know also that he is semanakraseye and so his life belongs, in effect, to the people of Yeola-e; and yet to some part of my own sensibility it seems inappropriately prurient to let the world, in effect, invade his very mind. I wonder if we overstep the bounds of natural human respect here, in our assiduousness.

Now I do not propose, of course, that the Committee cease work, nor that its report be anything but fully detailed; what I wonder if Assembly will allow is that the Committee proceedings, the everyday recording by scribe of its questionings and deliberations, be placed under general confidence as a matter of course. I know there is no precedent for this other than cases concerning matters of war, but I wonder if we may make an exception here just as a matter of kindness and mercy to one who is undergoing an ordeal, to make that ordeal less painful.

I propose therefore the resolution that Assembly so direct the Committee.

Adakri: Discussion: Servant of Michalere.

Linasika Aramichiya: As Assembly knows, I serve on the same Committee as the esteemed Servant of Terera South. I oppose his resolution on the basis of the principle, which Yeola-e has long held sacred in its public dealings, of openness. Should we start hiding things, in time we will become no better than Arko, where, as Chevenga himself once noted, no one even knew what the names of the ministers responsible for major government departments were, let alone their mandates, intentions and so forth. In secrecy lives darkness, and in darkness evil, being unchecked by the light of scrutiny, can grow. I have never made it secret that I feel that too much has been hidden from us all along in regard to the very subject of our investigation, our semanakraseye, and that it has been the very greatest relief, and raised my hopes for the continued good fortune of Yeola-e, that the Committee was struck and mandated to do its work fully publicly as committees of Assembly traditionally do.

That is the principled basis of my opposition to the resolution; I add also a reiteration of what the Servant of Terera South noted, that the semanakraseye himself has never expressed any objection to being asked any question that we have asked him, however delicate the topic for him, in the full knowledge that every answer will be made fully public. In fact he was asked at the outset why he’d made no effort to legally resist the inquiry of the Committee, and he answered “The people wills,” as the Servant noted, and said also that the approach that Yeola-e makes to such matters, an open and public investigation, is not only traditional but the best course in his own mind, for which I commend him. If Chevenga were here he would recuse himself from this discussion, of course, but were we able to read his mind, I think we would see that he himself would oppose the resolution…

...Adakri: Out of two-hundred and thirty seven Servants today present, I have counted and doubly-counted: ninety-four chalks, one-hundred and nine charcoals, and fourteen abstentions; by that vote the resolution that we direct the Chevengani Mental State Assessment Committee to keep its proceedings under general confidence is defeated by a majority, thank you all.

†

I slept two beads in Surya’s healing room; when I woke and took my leave, he gave me a last order; that I should come in for talk healing early next morning. Were we going daily now? I said “A-e kras” and was there on time, though.

“That which is most overwhelming and frightening,” said Surya, “we remember in bits and scraps, each separated from the others by our refusal to recognize that they are, and mean, the same thing.”

“If we remember it at all,” I said. I was thinking of being tortured in Arko, most of which I could not remember, mercifully. What I could remember of it was indeed fragmentary; I couldn’t even arrange them in the line of time. Of course I’d given up trying years before; my feeling now was that the best measure for it was not to think about it at all.

Of course I was going to have to. In my own first questioning by the Committee, they’d let me know they planned to delve into the Arkan torture, since they’d interpreted their mandate broadly and so would look into everything even distantly concerning my mental state. I had told them I had no leftover troubles other than a worse aversion to vein-needles than most people have and my tongue sometimes locking when I spoke about it (of course my tongue obliged nicely by demonstrating, right then), but I got the distinct feeling they didn’t believe me. They planned to ask Alchaen to come before them, and even toyed with the idea of asking Amitzas, before quailing.

In a sense they didn’t need him, as they had his file, which detailed in his careful, precise, Mahid-schooled hand everything that had been done to me. I had never read it and never intended to, but they were bound to, of course, by their mandate.

I tell out of order, jumping ahead; I’ll come back. The two of their number they chose to do it were Chanae and Kuraila, then Omonae Shae-Lemana, Servant of Thara-e-Tinanga-e, who was Kuraila’s replacement when she had to leave the Committee, which I will get to. All three were so shaken just by reading the first page, that they all took Haian remedies; to get through it, they themselves sought out the help of yet another psyche-healer, even though Kuraila is one herself and Omonae in training to become one.

When they summarized it to the entire Committee, they made sure everyone had calming essence, and had two psyche-healers and a senahera elder, no less, on hand. The first thing they did afterward was call me in informally, not to ask me questions but, as they themselves confessed, to reassure themselves that I was still alive and my mind in one piece, insofar as it was, as only a visit in the flesh would allow. There was one member of the Committee who shall remain nameless who was affected as much and deeply by the file as to need a psyche-healer for another half-year afterwards, I learned.

“If we remember it at all, yes,” Surya said. “So it is a method of healing to gather all the fragments together in your mind, see their similarity and see their number, and accept that they are all of a piece. It’s another meaning of the word ‘integrity,’ as in ‘House of Integrity.’”

“Yes,” I said. “What are you leading up to here, Surya?”

“Well… let me ask this. Do you think of yourself as inclined to suicide?”

“Well… I’ve had turns, but always for good reason,” I said. “Hasn’t everyone?”

“Mm-hmm,” he said thoughtfully. “Have you ever made a full accounting, all at once, in your mind, of all the times you’ve either considered it, almost tried it, or tried it in earnest?”

I couldn’t answer, my tongue locked entirely. Prickles spread down my arms and legs, so hard in my hands and feet they hurt.

“What I’m leading up to here is to point out to you that you remember, and consider, the subject fragmentarily only. You’ve written a memoir of your life, in great detail, recounting each of those times you had a turn, as you put it… but if I were to ask you how many times you have tried in earnest to kill yourself, and how many times you’ve just had a strong enough urge to act, even if you then forestalled it, could you tell me?”

I felt sick, my mouth going dry. He was right; I had never made an accounting and so could not put numbers to these things. My mind shied away even from the thought of making such an accounting. I had recounted each time in my memoir, yes, but with everything that had happened between, between; piecemeal, in other words, which was, of course, his point.

Sometimes an aura-seeing healer is a mercy, as when you need not answer his question, as you know he is seeing the answer in and around you. “So… next step in my healing,” I said, when I could form words. “I guess I am ready for this, or you wouldn’t raise it.”

“Ehh, that’s not why, actually,” he said, looking as he rarely did: a touch uncomfortable. “It’s that when you go before the Committee later today, that’s what they are going to ask you about. They mentioned it as I was leaving.”

That was my first true and hard lesson in the fact that, while Surya, with his effortlessly seeing of my aura, would wait until he was certain I was ready for a step before he made me take it, the Committee went by its own schedule. I took it with the room spinning end over end and my stomach doing likewise, the only scrap of solidity in the world his hand on my arm.

“Deep breath, make the white line,” Surya intoned. I did, clutching the arms of the chair as with claws, my mouth gone dust-dry. With shreds of calm came tendrils of anticipation. Of course I knew how it would go; they’d first ask me to recount in summary every instance, then go through them one by one in detail. I would be lying if I said I didn’t consider that it might be easier to make the one last attempt that would be successful rather than undergo this. Several very familiar cliffs on Haranin and Hetharin came vividly to mind, with their heights so great the carpet of treetops below was blue. What stopped that thought, more than anything else, was knowing that if I did it, I’d be remembered eternally as a coward.

“I… I guess… I can’t expect them ever to question me on anything easy, given their mandate,” I said, my voice coming out very weak.

“Here’s what I suggest you do in preparation,” he said. “Make a list.” The room spun end over end anew. “Pardon me, I should say, I do not suggest. I order.”

It took me about a bead and half, nine-tenths of the time spent breathing deeply and making the white line while he held my head front and back in his hands, but I did it: a neatly-written, numbered list with each incident summarized in a single line. So, if the Committee asked, I would be able to tell them that in my life I’d made three full attempts, two almost-attempts in which I’d changed my mind, seriously considered it twice more, been prevented somewhere between three and five times by the Arkan amnesiac drug when it was my full intent, taken an almost-mortal wound by a momentary compulsion rather than by intention, and thought yearningly of death, as I just had, more times than I could count and therefore list.

“So now you’ve done that,” Surya said, “I ask again. Do you think of yourself as inclined to suicide?”

I laid my head on my forearm, closing my eyes. My mind filled with the imagining of a yawning height below me and the bliss of falling into it, the wind in my hair, knowing an end to all my troubles awaited, after a flash of extreme pain that would be but momentary, below. I guess I have to sign chalk, I thought. It wasn’t as if he too wasn’t seeing it, at the same time as I was, in my aura. I signed chalk.

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79 - [June 30] My odds

Lanai Kesila (presiding): We are joined in our gathering by Surya Chaelaecha of Kabiri, healer, and healer to Chevenga: welcome, Surya, we thank you for your willingness to be here.

Surya: Thank you, sib Committee members.

La: Now, Surya, first, we ask you to read and witness this: we asked Chevenga to commit to writing, so we would have a signed and written record, his permission to you to waive healer’s confidentiality concerning him and his state of mind…


Surya: On an average person, I can see their aura two paces out. The innermost aura is a beautiful jewel-blue colour on a healthy person; the second-most has different colours depending on the feelings; the third is golden, the fourth blue again, the fifth different colours depending on feelings, the sixth golden again. I also see the energy-lines within the physical body, and the vortices, which are each a different colour, as in a rainbow, and the lines that connect the person with other people…


Kurai: Surya, I would like to ask you a question to which I know the answer myself, but I ask on behalf of those, and I know they are many, who find it baffling. Why can’t Chevenga, now that he is aware that what he thought was foreknowledge was not, simply decide that he’s going to live a long life, barring unforeseen circumstances, like anyone else? Why is it that he is still in any danger, when he knows the truth? Why can’t he just see the obvious, that he deserves to live as much as anyone else, and just throw off the delusion?

Su: You do the work of the Committee well in asking that question, sib Kuraila, given that it stands for the people of Yeola-e, who I know must wonder the same thing. In fact he wonders himself… or more exactly, several times he’s thought he was cured of it, and expressed relief that his struggle is over, when in fact it wasn’t.

A belief that we have held since young childhood is simply hard to reverse, because we have lived with it so long. It has become what we know and, in our perception, all that we know. The difficulty is not that Chevenga doesn’t want to be in the state of mind of believing he can and ought to live long; it’s that he can’t even imagine that state, he’s been so long in the other, and lived it so intensely.

Let me use this analogy; say you find out in your late twenties that what you were taught about your family was all, for reason of someone wanting to hide something, untrue, and your mother is in fact your aunt. You now know she is your aunt, and you can’t deny it. But when you open your mouth to address her, what will come out is “Mama.” When you look at her, at heart you will not be able to see her as anything but mother. How easy will it be to change that? Most people in that situation would simply go on calling her “Mama,” just in respect of their own habit, even though it is a lie. To their heart it can never be anything but truth.

Now I know how it is for those who are baffled. You have your own habit of thinking, and it is that you deserve as long as life as anyone else; that is natural, and you’ve always had it, and so it seems self-evident and obvious to you that it should apply to everyone. And so you can’t understand why Chevenga does not see the same for himself.

What you need to understand is that for him, “I will and ought to die before thirty” is no less ingrained in and instinctive to him than your own view to you.

You also need to understand that part of why you’d like to shake him and say “Wake up and just decide!” comes from your own emotion. Yes, it is horrifying, and potentially tragic, that he carries this. Yes, you want to seize him, save him, shake sense into him, out of love for him, because otherwise we might lose him. And so you are predisposed to think of it as possible that he could just decide, because that would lift him out of the danger you fear. But your emotion makes no difference to whether it is possible or not. A harsh thing, but true.

Yes, in that sense, Chevenga lives in a strange world, that defies belief because belief in it is very unpleasant. But it is real…


Linasika Aramichiya: Surya, is Chevenga insane?

Su: Insane is a word that has many meanings for those you represent, and I want to make sure you aren’t asking with one meaning in mind only to have me answer with another, and therefore, in effect, inaccurately. If you give me your definition of it, I will tell you whether he matches it.

Li: … On reflection, you are right; it does have many meanings. I suppose I ask with this meaning in mind: is he unable, in some way, to perceive accurately, to see truth, of some sort.

Su: Yes, but that’s true of all of us. We all have our delusions, our blindnesses, our prejudices, our stubbornnesses that keep us from seeing entirely accurately what is before us (assent). If by ‘insane’ you mean something untypical of the run of humanity, you’ll have to refine your definition.

Li: All right, then, does he have delusions, or blindnesses, or stubbornnesses of mind, to a degree that is untypical?

Su: Yes, in one regard, but before you claim to others that I have said, therefore, that he is insane, you have to tell me how untypical a person’s delusions must be to qualify as insane in your mind, and I can tell you whether he matches that.

Li: How do I quantify untypicality?

Su: I don’t know, but you must in your mind somewhere, since you ask your question with an unspoken premise, which is your own notion of what degree of untypicality would constitute insanity, and what would not.

Darosera Kinisil: I’d like to submit that this line of questioning is useless and therefore an unnecessary expenditure of our time. To my mind, at no point in our report will we say “Chevenga is insane,” or “Chevenga is not insane,” since, as Surya noted, the word is far too subject to misunderstanding; instead we will distill the details of what we learn in our investigation into a clear exposition of his precise mental state, describing the specifics of whatever is untypical, from which the reader may draw their own conclusions as to his sanity. I propose we continue in that vein.

Lanai: I concur and ask Servant Linasika to continue with that in mind, unless he objects and asks a vote…


Kuraila Shae-Linao: Now you were asked in Assembly, but I want to ask again for our own records, so that they will be complete: he is fighting against something in him that draws him towards death, so that if he wins he will live and if he loses he will die. What do you think are his odds?

Surya: Before I answer this, may I ask: the record that is being kept here, is it for all to see? Including him?

Kurai: Yes. Why; is there something you would tell us that you feel is best he not know?

Su: Yes, and I think that might come up more than once.

Kurai: The procedure then is to seek the Committee’s approval to testify in confidence.

Su: I’d like to do so, then, however it’s done.

La: You’ve just done so. That our subsequent questioning of Surya, until further notice, be conducted in confidence, all chalk, all charcoal, carried unanimously, thank you. Scribe, put down your pen.

†

I had my next visit with him the day after he’d been before them. “I have to say, I’ve never had an experience quite like that before,” he said, as I stripped to get on the table.

“Are you sure you’ve never been in politics?” I asked him. “You bested Linasika with an effortlessness that was a delight to see.”

He snorted. “He was playing with falsehood, and I wouldn’t let him, that’s all. I guess I should expect you to read every word of the proceedings.”

“Of course. In my trade we call this due diligence. You have no secrets now, either. Well, almost… in Assembly you said my odds were good, but you were vague about it. You must have told them something different in the Committee, since you told them in confidence, and I’m going to guess, since you’re not a liar, that you were less vague. So why don’t you want me to know that?”

“If you remember what I said in Assembly,” he answered, “perhaps you remember what you said too: ‘I just do the work, take the steps and don’t worry about the odds’? Was that just bravado?”

I took a deep breath. “I guess… that was easy to say, when you had been vague. I thought it was because you couldn’t be more certain; finding out now that you are—as I notice you have not denied it—is giving me a hunger to know.”

He slipped his fingers under my neck to touch the nape, and suddenly I was having to breathe deeply and slowly by sheer will. “A hunger to know?” he said. “To do what with the knowledge? To either take reassurance or strengthen resolve, I assume. But…” He brushed his finger against the sword, sending me gasping like a feather-touch on a naked nerve. “Which way?”

I clenched my eyes shut, as the feel of the sword let me know that I didn’t know. Part of me would take reassurance, part of me would strengthen its resolve, either way. But I wasn’t sure which way the Assembly in me would lean. “My patient,” he said to me gently, laying one hand on my forehead, “just as you aren’t qualified to make your life-and-death choices, you aren’t qualified to know your odds.”

He ran a glance over my aura, and said, “You’ve forgotten that; not gone backwards, but, shall we say, got out of practice. It’s natural, when you had so much else to do, while you were in Arko; now you don’t, and you need to renew. Everything, even the slightest thing, that inclines you against proceeding is natural; it happens with everyone. Complacency; distractions in reminiscing; the sense that there is not enough time; the feeling you are being selfish by giving so much time to yourself; the sense that the latest step means it’s over; being lax with the rules… as subtle and devious as your own mind is in strategy, Chevenga, the death in you is, as well, since it borrows your thought.”

“Can you see in my aura I had my hands on the bar and Niku took hers off?” I said, remembering his words the very first time, you can hide nothing from me. “But she was right there, and suicide on a double-wing is murder as well, which was why she trusted me.”

“I know. But there is a second importance to the rules, beyond prevention; it’s to keep yourself mindful that you’ve relinquished your will.”

I closed my eyes in shame, and took a deep breath. The lung-wound panged. “The thing I am most inclined to be least mindful of, willful soul that I am.”

He took hold of my manhood, as I had realized a moment ago there would be no escaping. “It’s not about whether you are willful or not. It’s as I say; all these things are natural, and happen every time to everyone. When you are on the edge of what you can bear, it’s the same as being on the edge of what you can do in training; if you want to stay there, you have to be at it constantly. You’re rusty at this, that’s all. Interesting, how harshly your judgment always lands on yourself when I call you on something… isn’t it?”

“Consider me ashamed of my shame,” I said, which made him laugh.

“Something else; you’ve got into the habit of feeling that wound as the sigil of the death-in-you. Because it was a wound of the type that most people think as unquestionably mortal, you are in a sense letting yourself feel killed by it… pinned to death by it.” I signed chalk; once again he’d put words to a feeling I’d had so all-encompassingly I hadn’t known I’d had it. “Here’s what you need to understand: it didn’t kill you. And it won’t. It means nothing, except whatever kyash you load into it in your mind; in and of itself it means nothing, healed as it is, except a slight loss of your wind. Take that in.”

I did for a while, as he stood in silence, his hand resting on my shoulder. “So I renew,” I said, taking my crystal in my hand. I had taken off the semanakraseyeni signet, since I was on leave; the ring of skin that had been under it was still delicate. “What would you do to live?” he asked. It seemed we were re-enacting that first visit.

“Anything. Short of a crime. I will do anything you say, second Fire come if I lie.” That was not quite enough; he made me relinquish in the strong way as he had the first time, and had me cry “I want to live!” and fly on the wings of it in my ecstasy again. Afterwards I wept, though I wasn’t sure why, and lay spent and dedicated. My life was this now, and nothing else.

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78 - [June 29] Not a life peaceful enough

Then it turned into a pursed-lipped smile. “Fourth Chevenga. You’re incorrigible.”

“What? I… Komona, no! I don’t mean that!” I got up and paced a bit down the shade-dappled sacred path, mostly to get further away from her, just to prove the point. “You’ll never touch me again, of course not, I’d never dream otherwise, that’s not my meaning. I just think you do wrong to yourself, condemning yourself never to have another man because you said no to me.”

“It wasn’t because I said no to you—at least it wasn’t just that.”

“What was it, then?

“It was a matter of where I put my attention.”

“Komona… no one else may know how passionate you truly are, but I do. Is it the way of All-Spirit, to cut that off for life? I know nothing of spirituality, next to you, but that seems unlikely to me.”

She cast her eyes downward, thoughtfully, then raised them again to meet mine. I had never forgotten, how beautiful they were. “If All-spirit offered me... such a marriage, and I did not have the strength to bear the pain that came with it, then... I should give all my attention to All-spirit. So I thought.”

“Then it was because of me.” A tendril of sickness reached up through me. I’d always suspected; it was another thing again to hear it from her.

“But it was my choice, love! Don’t blame yourself.” Love—why, love, must you use that word?

“I like to think that those whose lives my own life has brushed up against were the better for it… or at least not harmed,” I said.

“An odd thing for a warrior to say.”

“I’m too odd for a warrior and so I’m going asa kraiya.”

“I have not been harmed, Chevenga. Celibacy has its own intense pleasures.”

“Mm-hmm… Have you talked to the esegradaiseye about this?” I had never met the eldest elder of the Vae Arahi Senaheral, but I had heard much about her.

“She tells me it will come clear when I am ready for it to. To me it seems clear already.”

“May I show you something? You remember what I looked like before.” I took off my shirt. I didn’t need to strip more to show her well enough.

Her breath hissed in, gasping. “So many scars, Chevenga,” she shakily whispered. “So much pain.” Her sympathy I felt as keenly as if she’d touched me.

“You were one of the very few people I’ve told about not wanting, when I was a child, to kill anyone when I grew up,” I said. “Since then, every fight I’ve fought, however much I loved it, was against my own conscience. So I punished myself for it. All this is that. So I have learned, at Surya’s hands.” I looked her in the eyes. “Now you are doing the same with this oath.”

“It’s hardly the same!”

“Not the same mode; but the same inclination. You disagree? Fine; Surya could see the truth in a moment. I dare you to ask him.”

Now there was a trace of anger in her raven brows, and then almost instantly it was gone, calmed by deft application, no doubt, of her Senahera training. She poked my bare shoulder with a disapproving finger, the faintest smile quirking her lips. “Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e. There you are, thoroughly married and with a thousand lovers, and look at what you’re doing.”

“No! Curse it, Komona, I just wanted to show you, how harsh we can be to ourselves...” I threw the shirt back on and did up the clasps all the way to my throat.

“Oh, come on. Anyone sees all those scars, what are they going to have the urge to do?”

“There are four urges I’ve seen. Jump my bones as you’re saying, run for a Haian, throw up or weep. Occasionally I’ve seen someone get all four at once. So, I cannot predict certainly.”

“And yet, if someone was in the bushes spying on us, you know full well what they’d think: ‘There’s Chevenga trying to talk Komona out of her oath of celibacy. Is nothing sacred? Making love to his entire army was not enough.’” She succeeded at her aim, making me laugh.

†

“It’s just as well,” she said. “There hasn’t been another man I wanted.”

“I don’t want to hear that. I don’t want to know that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“How would you even know, when there isn’t another man you’ve tried? All-Spirit, I wasn’t even a man.”

“Yes, you were. You were a man when you should still have been half-child. And you honoured me, trusting me enough to tell me the reason. I am the kind who can only love one at a time, and I still love you.”

“Komona!” I leapt up from the bench again, as if I could walk away, as if it were honourable to show her my back. I still love you, too. The cruelest thing I could say; I kept it behind my teeth, true though it was. “I wish you had never met me. You would be so much happier.”

“I think I would still be senahera, in which case my path would be essentially the same, or at least converging on the same place.”

“It was bad enough when I had you convinced it was true.”

She did not need to ask what I meant. She thought for a while, pressing her hands together before her as she did while thinking. “I’m sorry for misleading you, Komona, though I did not intend to,” I added, making the sign of shame.

“I was angry when I found out,” she said finally. “I’d be lying to say I wasn’t. At you; at myself for being too cowardly, for not believing that things would turn out for the best in the end anyway… for not seeing the signs, which were all over you, on retrospect. I’d accept your apology except that I don’t know that you should, when you were telling me what you were certain was truth.”

“You should have sent me a long ranting letter in red ink. I wouldn’t have minded.”

Blessing of blessings, she laughed. “I thought about it. But I soon saw I didn’t need to. I saw that everything was still unfolding as it should.”

“Aiigh!” I couldn’t help it. It tore out of me. “That’s what Surya says all the time!”

“Of course he does.”

“I’m lying stuck all the kyashin way through the lung with a sword and it’s ‘Everything’s going as it should!’”

“The esegradaseye says it to me a lot, too. That is all we all need to learn, she says. That and nothing else.”

“The whole kyashin world knows my secret and what a mess of a kyash-pile my mind is, ‘Everything’s going as it should!’” She let out that long rippling laugh, that I felt all over my skin and between my legs. “A committee is struck to peck through my emotional entrails, Linasika signs up for it, ‘Everything’s going as it should!’ He starts saying I committed a crime by not revealing it before I became semanakraseye, which would be fine except that it’s true, and: ‘Everything's going as it should! No, really, Chevenga! Why can’t you see, everything is going as it should!?’ And who am I to disagree with him? What do I know? I’m not exactly enlightened.”

“You are, more than you think. Of course much of enlightenment is how much you think you are.”

This was far too deep for me. “Right. While I’m thinking of it, I forgot to mention: you’re on their questioning list.”

“Wha—the Committee?” Suddenly she looked a lot less sage and philosophical.

“Yes. I’ve been reading their proceedings, and you’re there. Because I told you, I imagine.”

I saw on her face again, her drawing on her training to gather herself. “Well, I will just answer with the truth,” she said.

“That will be your duty.”

“And being here in the Shrine is going to help you a lot, soon, I think. Has Surya sent you here much yet, and I’ve just missed your visits?”

“No, but you’re right, I’m sure he will. What’s been most laughable is him telling me I’m a healer… I know what you’re thinking, love. ‘A whaaaat?’”

Kyash, I thought. Old habit, it slipped out, love, I’m sorry.

“No, you do not know what I’m thinking,” she said. “What I am actually thinking is, he’s right.”

“All-Spirit! You too, infected with madness!”

“Chevenga… you think you’ve changed, or you are changing, but in truth you are not. You’ve always been the same, and always will be. You’ve just carried delusions... rather extensive ones, in fact. Deny it?”

I took a deep breath, and signed charcoal. “But come on. A healer? Surya is a healer. Kaninjer of Berit is a healer. I am a killer with occasional good intentions.”

“Who is going asa kraiya, for some reason. It’s as I say: in our true selves, we never change. You loved me at least in part because I am senahera, and you were drawn to that. We both know that.”

I opened my mouth and what came out was not what I intended to. “I still love you.”

To the cruelest thing I could have said, while I stood wanting a blade through my heart, she answered with the most merciful. “I know, Chevenga.”

We held each other, pressed our faces together, and she ran her hand through my lengthening hair. Of course I wept, wetting her cheek as well as my own; of course she stayed dry-eyed. “It wasn’t meant to be. I was right; I could not bear to live in your world. Look where you’ve gone, all you’ve done, dancing with death, so that only others who did understood you.”

But you do more than they; when I go asa kraiya, come and live with me, I thought, but did not let pass my lips. “It was not a life peaceful enough for you, Komona. You could not have done what you wanted.”

“It was not a life peaceful enough for you either; you did not do what you wanted. Now you know.” I just signed chalk, silently. “I felt an inkling when we were together, then became certain of it once I learned in my training to trust my inklings more,” she said. “But I am not your aura-seer, I could not tell you. Well, I guess no one could have, then.”

I signed chalk and said, “Not a chance. You know how it would have gone; I put on the black robe with the white stripes, and then it’s ‘The So-and-So’ians are on the border’ and I’m tearing it off and grabbing Chirel. I knew Arko was coming, and I knew my duty. Then I had habit, so I had to have the sword a hair away from my throat before I would listen. Which is like me, isn’t it?”

“Wait, wait—now there’s another thing I never understood, why you had a name for being cocky when you would pile so much earth on your own head all the time—but wait,” she said. “You knew Arko was coming, you knew your duty, and you did it. So everything was going as it should, yes? And now that that duty is no longer needed, and the sword a hair away from your throat, you are listening. Is not everything still going as it should? And was all along?”

She could ever defeat me in debate.





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