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

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.

--

Read More......

209 - The kriffiyah

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.

--

Read More......

208 - I do not deserve to live

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My friends of the beyond-the-sword community:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Signed in my own blood,

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

First Curlion.

†

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

Read More......

207 - To have your gift for a tenth

Chevenga’s opponents urge voting with mind, not heart

Anasenga Karetai, Terera Pages : atakina 90 Ye. 1556

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

†

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

Read More......

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

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.)





--

Read More......