13 – When she was twenty-nine, I’d be ash on the wind

One day after I’d turned twelve, when Artira and I got into a fight, she screamed at me, “You should be exiled without safe conduct!”

We don’t punish people by death in Yeola-e; under our law, exile without safe conduct is the severest punishment. It means you are no longer Yeoli and must leave the country forever, but you have no protection on your way to the border, so that it’s not a crime for a Yeoli to harm or even kill you.

For a moment I couldn’t breathe. Telling myself she was too young to know the full meaning of the words, I asked her why. Her delicate face under her shock of brilliant curls, Tennunga’s curls, was wrinkled up ugly in rage. “I hate you and want you gone!” When I asked her why, she said, “Everyone loves you, and no one loves me! You always do everything so well and everyone’s always talking about you and it’s always Chevenga this and Chevenga that and it makes me sick!”

“That is not true, that no one loves you,” I said, keeping the tone of reason as best I could. “The parents love all of us. All our brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts love you… I love you, Ardi.” Better to reason with her comfortingly than yell for a grown-up and be made to do chiravesa, or call her out to do it myself; I had started to avoid it when I could after seven, as there was always something missing when others imagined themselves me: that which I kept to myself. In time her tears dried, and we made peace with a hug and went our ways.

But I still felt like an anthill stirred with a stick. I couldn’t deny the Chevenga-this-and-Chevenga-that part, or that I did do everything well; like every child of the training-ground, I knew precisely where I stood in strength, quickness, aim, agility, courage, hot hands, fivestones, finger-wrestling, running, unsword, kill-sparring or any other measure that Yeoli war-students have ever contrived to compete in, and my tutors also let me know where I stood intellectually. Esora-e had made no secret of his ambition for me, and no one ridiculed it. I was even good-looking, I was told. She envies me understandably, I thought; I’m not in my rights to be angry at it. So what is it I feel?

Shame, I decided; in ignorance of the nature of the shadow I cast on others, I’d caused harm. So I made the rounds of my family and friends and the Assembly Palace staff, asking them to swear truth on my father’s wisdom-tooth, and asked what they thought of me and whether it hurt them. If you’ve heard that story, yes, it’s true.

Mostly they said things like, “You’re a fine lad, you’ll make a fine semanakraseye and warrior, of course that doesn’t hurt me, now run along. I swear it is true also that I’m busy.” Finally my mother called me to her hearth.

In my survey I’d skipped my parents and my grandmother, since they furnished such knowledge unasked, and I thought she might be wondering why. It turned out she just wanted to know why I was asking. “I’m trying to understand how my shadow falls on people,” I said.

“Ah.” She took my hands in hers. She had a long scar on one forearm that she’d got from treachery in a parley, when an Enchian had tried to strike our envoy with a hidden knife, and she’d had nothing to parry the blow with but her arm. The scar’s end moved under the fringe of her marya as she gestured. “Well, that’s something a semanakraseye must know; how to forget about his shadow.

“Chevenga, how it falls on others is as much their choice as your own. Same as in the night sky, there is only one guide-star that stays steady throughout: what you are to yourself. Don’t think of what the shadow is; think of who you are being. If you want people to think you are something, be that. Then the shadow will be the best you can make it.”

I’d been taught that before, by various adults. It’s just Artira, full of stupid envy, I thought; no one else said my shadow hurt them. On my bed, alone, I sat twisting my leather bracelet with my fingers, my heart smoldering. The world burned because of wrongful anger, I thought. Why shouldn’t Artira envy me? People do talk about me more than her, do think more of me than her; I am favoured with rare gifts, gifts that will always give me advantages, gifts of a value beyond pricing in ankaryel, gifts that I cannot lose as long as I live.

There was my answer. When she was twenty-eight I’d be twenty-nine; when she was twenty-nine I’d be ash on the wind.

I’ve always been told I’m blessed with a mind that is good at looking ahead, especially with calculating time. There’s a reason. The lintels had seemed to stop shrinking as I grew, while time flew by faster each year; I’d wake up in the death-hour thinking ‘I’ll never be man-sized if I don’t start growing faster’ and lie sweating. It had never occurred to me before that other people didn’t suffer this. Now suddenly it did.

Envy calls out envy. First it was only people older than thirty. For the number of snowballs I threw and led others to throw at them in the cold of winter, I could have been combed until the bones showed, if I’d been caught. I sneered behind my tutors’ backs at their wrinkles or paunches or sagging breasts. Not that I could do this with my grandmother; instead, when I found out by asking how old she was, I avoided her for several days, until she asked why I was angry at her, and I had to answer “There’s no reason,” and apologize. All I could think of, as I looked on her cracked ancient face was: all those years.

A few days after that Sachara played his own fatherhood, making us all roll on the ground laughing to see him moan and groan and grow pretend gray hairs at all the scrapes and escapades his kids got into, which were all the same as ours, of course. At the death-hour that night I woke up sweating. I calculated: to see a child my age I’d have to be married at seventeen. I would never see my firstborn become semanakraseye—it was already too late. Warrior, yes—but only if I married within the year.

I could not sleep until I had planned action, a habit that has stayed with me. Nyera would do this for me, I thought, if she knew. I cannot tell her why, but seeing the fervency of my courting, she’ll understand without knowing. I imagined her hazel eyes softening, her slender hand closing around mine, “Ch’eng’, you need me,” and the warm embers of friendship sparking into passion, whatever that was.

Then I thought, am I mad? I’m a boy… or boy-sized, at least. (I hadn’t really felt like a boy since seven.) My friends and I had been noticing how people a little older than us all went through the same sudden dark and baffling turn, that made them give up fivestones and House, preen their hair every spare moment, stop seeing sense about certain things and become obsessed for some incomprehensible reason with forming into pairs. Watching those we knew succumb to it one by one, without exception, we all knew this would be our fate too.

Now that I had reason that was not at all incomprehensible, I fingered between my legs, as if groping could make it big for good, and grow more black hairs than the seventeen I’d counted. She would laugh. That made me want to stay under the covers; but I was still sweating from the thought of my child. It’s a dare, I thought, as I thought frequently, that must be done.

It was Nyera I thought of because she was my closest female friend. Also, the change had happened to her; sometime when none of us had been looking she’d sprouted breasts and a thatch of red-blond curls between her legs. Crucial for my cause, her month-bleeding had started half a year before. Though formally it is for the woman to ask, everyone knows that marriages are made by two at the very least; every man knows how to place the right word or look. She was a good war-student from a good family, so Assembly had no reason not to approve her; we’d make a two now, I planned, and become a four as soon as Mana, who had already sworn to join with me, found his choice of wife. That settled, I slept.

Next day I combed my hair out much more carefully than I’d ever been known to do, and tucked the comb into my belt so it showed. Looking in my mother’s Arkan mirror, I felt I cut a very fine figure, at least if I sucked in my cheeks, held their insides between my teeth and turned my head to get the shadow from the window-light at just the right angle, so I had my father’s cheekbones, sort of. There was a man named Iri-kai in the School who wore a necklace of bright, smooth-polished stones, set in just enough metal to be daring. I needed something like that.

As anaraseye I was permitted to have money, though I never got an allowance as other kids did. But once Mana had taken pity on me and slipped me a copper bit. I bet Sachara he couldn’t beat me at naughts and crosses in ten tries, even if he went first every try; I had found an old book that showed how you can always tie if you make no mistakes. Since he’d given me bad odds, I tripled my fortune this way. After doing the same with several other of the younger citizenry of Vae Arahi, I ran down to the market square in Terera and found the jeweler who had made Irikai’s necklace. I chose one similar whose stones were mostly of reddish colours, put it on and ran back up. I was ready for when Nyera came out of training.

She was at least four fingerwidths taller than me, now, with a woman’s face to match her body, lengthened, the brows maturely thickened, the nose grown into adult elegance. As I greeted her she took off her tunic and wiped between her breasts. She sweated and smelled like an adult, too. No matter, I thought, kicking myself out of the spell—maybe I was coming into a touch of the change myself—she’s still just Nyera. Or else if age has made her into something greater than she used to be, it has done the same with me.

“That’s a handsome necklace,” she said. “You’re brave to wear it.” I had done right; I decided to wear it all the time, like a crystal.

She felt the stones, and I touched her arm. My heart was banging in my throat and temples, but I said it anyway. “It’s a brave man a brave woman wants.”

“Nothing less, Ch’eng,’” she said lightly. “No cowards for me. I bet you catch crap from your shadow-father for this.”

She hadn’t got it; I had to say more. “No cowards for me either. Nor weaklings. It’s only the strong I’d ever marry.” I looked as significantly as I could at her smooth-muscled arms.

Now she got it. Those mature brows shot up under her fringe of fore-curls, and she burst out laughing. “Why laugh?” I asked. “We are people of more sincerity, aren’t we?”

“You’re… serious… are you?”

I cast my eyes downward, as an unmarried man should know how to do, and said, “It is not for me to say more.”

“Well! I…! Ch’eng’!” She burst out laughing again. “You turkey-brain, we can’t get married!” And she said, not ‘we are children,’ no, though she was twelve too, but “You’re a child!”

I proved my maturity, I guess, by what I did next. “Oh, and you’re a grown up?” I shouted. “Let’s see about that!” She usually gave me a good fight finger-wrestling, but I had her down in an instant and as her concession demanded she swear never again call me a child. She did not, however, pop the question. Thus my first attempt to marry ended in sweat and dust.

Again I lay awake in the darkness of the death-hour. There are many fish in the sea, as the saying goes, but one cannot send one’s second hook out so soon without insulting the prospective biters both first and next. I decided to wait a month and then go after Checherao, who was a year older than me, but a boarding student, from Tinga-e. Since she’d never seen me as a drooling toddler in diapers, I reasoned, but only a student of the School of the Sword, she would be less likely to see me as a child than women from around here.

Events caught me up before the month ended. The harvest love-festival came, and as usual people came from Terera and further up the valley. After the feast and the dancing, when the bonfires were lowering and the grown-ups going off into the bushes in pairs, my friends sent to bed by their parents and mine looking for me, I found myself closely surrounded by five girls I didn’t know.

In the moonlight their skin shone pale, the curves of their hips like the moon’s itself, glowing ivory. Their breasts were high and young and pointed, except for those of the one who leaned closest; they were as round as my mother’s, the nipples big around as a thumb is long. (Perhaps you are not familiar with Yeoli customs: on the night of a love-festival, everyone goes naked.) The end of a red ringlet bobbed above them, a tuft of the same red between her thighs; in firelight it was the colour of paprika, which meant that in daylight it must be the colour of fire. She was not a day under sixteen.

I didn't need much persuasion to go with them into the woods. “You’ve never done it,” she whispered to me. “I can tell.” Her arm was already around my shoulder; now she brushed her lips against my brow. “I’ll be very gentle.” The others all slipped away laughing, saying they were called away by All-Spirit to pick flowers.

Healer is a giggling warmth, like a hug; an adventure, shyly and carefully and slowly tried, and everyone a novice, a tickling in the loins that brings a smile. She made me feel that again, but then did more, that grew it into a streak of fire in me as I had not imagined was possible. I understood then the truth of which Healer is only a pale reflection. Each moment I thought it could not possibly become better, but then it would; as well I knew I wanted, and therefore there must be, more.

At the final rise before the peak, my skin, wherever she touched it, sent colours in streams and flowerets into my inward eyes. It seemed we were running and swimming and soaring all at once, and at that highest moment my head reached the sky and my body spread out to touch the bounds of the Earthsphere; I was in All-Spirit and All-Spirit in me. I had learned long ago how a blade touches the deepest inside to bring death; now I had learned the stroke that touches the deepest inside to bring life. No wonder adults so cherished this; no wonder, the change.

On the heels of joy chased fear, even as she traced lines of ecstasy along the skin of my back and whispered, “My salamander… you belong in fire, so much fire is in you.” I was afraid I’d never feel this again, for surely such pleasure could only be had once in a lifetime; afraid I would never find anyone so beautiful again, even though now I knew all men and women had this in them. I clung harder, wanting to bury myself in her warmth and the scent of her musk that mixed with the cool tang of pine. She read my thoughts; “Don’t worry, sweetling,” she whispered. “It’s always like this, or better. Imagine it with someone you love.” It was sex between friends she’d been offering, only; her comrades were back and waiting for their turns with me.

“But I love you!” I wanted to say. “Marry me!” I didn’t; for one thing, it would sound odd to say, “I love you, em… I never got your name.” Somehow we’d forgotten formalities. I wanted to know anyway, so I asked, and will always remember: Kagratora-e Shae-Itana, of Chegra.

When I told them my name, they all froze for a moment, then one of them shrieked, “Oh my All-Spirit! Kagra, you’ve initiated the anaraseye!”

I had forgotten they were from up-valley, born and raised in a circle of farmfasts, not used to politicians and officials and people with numbered names wandering around the place brushing shoulders with real people. The other four fled with a mix of screeching and laughter, and she cursed them for babies and cowards. “Well,” I said. “We grown-ups seem to have been left alone.”

The alarm in her eyes softened into a smile, a point of moonlight shining in one eye. “So we have, anaraseye.”

“You can’t call me that, after…” I trailed off, words failing me. “It’s Chevenga.”

“Chevenga. Well… when you’re all grown up and come to Chegra to speak, I’ll call ‘Psst! Chevenga!’ from the edge of the dais, and wink at you, and with any luck you’ll blush.” We both stopped speaking then, at least with words. I will always be grateful to her, and never forget her.

After that, I renewed my marriage quest with much greater confidence. Soon I had my lines well-set. I’d drop the marriage hint first, and if she was uninterested, I’d ask her if she’d like to go up onto the mountain with me anyway, as friends.

Checharao said I was too young, but I found out later she had her eye on someone else in the same class as her who was a head taller than I (though I knew from sparring him that I could take him, as I could almost everyone up to eighteen or nineteen). She taught me many new sexual tricks, being older. My half-cousin Avorcha said “Are you crazy? We’re too little to have babies!” and on the mountain it was I who taught her, to my amazement. Terini of Checherao’s class said, “My father told me never to marry a politician,” and was delicate as a moth’s wing in lovemaking for all she was one of the best fighters in her class.

In the shrine among the standing stones, I hinted to Komona, who had lived down the corridor from us in the Hearthstone but now was apprenticed to the senaheral. She had black hair and eyes like my mother. “I can’t marry you,” she said. “My egg’s just falling, this time of the month; it wouldn’t be safe.”

My heart sank, blackness seeping into my mind. Of course this would happen. Who takes the marriage-hint of a twelve-year-old seriously? I’d hidden from myself that I’d never known anyone to marry under sixteen, least of all an anaraseye. I’d never see my children get their wristlets, die cast, gates fast and all go home. That night I cried my pillow soaking. In daytime, the feeling hardened to bitterness.

I envied the young, now, as well. They might yet die early, but they might not; they did not have the wall of certainty set before them, to cut short their dreams.

Mana, Krero, Sachara and Nyera laughed about the families they’d have. I made the dares harder, and anyone who would not follow me, I’d shame. I got us all stung by wasps, and Krero’s arm broken falling off a cliff. They chilled on me; I called them all cowards and fair-weather friends. I remember Mana asking, with his hand on my shoulder, “What’s wrong with you?” which I answered only with “Nothing, eat kyash!” which ended our talking to each other.

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12 – The Kiss of the Lake, first two times (unofficial)

Cursing that most of my life would be childhood, I laid into growing up like a starving person into a meal.

Kids do it by playing pretend first: House, Workfast, War, and the one that eventually becomes the favourite: Healer. We played Trust Me Trust You, the game where one friend dangles over the edge of a cliff (landing-height, broken-legs-height, or death-height) clasping the wrists of the other, and first the one must let go while the other hangs on, and then vice versa. Once when I was eleven or so we got hold of a skin of nakiti, the Enchian liquor. The honour and peril of the first draught fell to me, as did the honour and peril of most dares, and I made sure to keep my face entirely impassive as the full mouthful I took scorched a trail down my throat. I don’t remember much more of that day.

Nakiti enslaves, as the saying goes, but no substances so enthrall the mind as chalk and charcoal. Our second-favourite game was Assembly. In our perfect Yeola-e, no one over the age of twelve was allowed to vote, wine was never watered down for legal voters, and combing was illegal on pain of exile without safe conduct.

They impeached me one day, after Krero said, “Chevenga’s always semanakraseye. Just because he’s really going to be when he grows up… I think we should let someone else be, just for fun. Like me.” I made no protest, intrigued as we always are to be the old actor playing a new part, and see a new one play the old. I had always wanted to try my hand at farming. The next in the line of succession, Artira, who’d started to part ways with me by this time, had gone off with Iperaiga, who was a little young for politics, to torment crawdads in the stream with a stick. So I ceremonially adopted Krero as my little brother.

I argued my way out passionately of accusations of throwing dirt at Servants, picking my nose in Assembly and peeing my kilt, but finally Sachara said, “We’re the people. We don’t need him to have committed a crime; we can toss him out any time we like. Everyone who wants to get rid of Chevenga sign here, unless you don’t know how to write yet, in which case you have to make a thumb-print.” Seeing them all do this with relish, giving me the most severe looks of reproach, I knew I was doomed. It went chalk unanimously, and with the gravity it requires I said, “The people wills” and gave the rock we used as the Crystal of the Speaker to Krero.

“Now you have to kill yourself,” said Nyera.

“What?” Everyone gazed at me, intrigued. I’d never heard of such a thing.

“My mother told me that demarchs who get impeached kill themselves.”

“There isn’t a law stating that,” I said. “I’d know about it if there was!”

“I know there isn’t,” she said. “It’s because the demarch gets so sad. Aren’t you sad, Chevenga?”

Actually I was eagerly drawing straight furrows in the green meadow in my mind. Perhaps, I realized, I wasn’t playing this properly. I tried again, harder. I am impeached; I am no longer semanakraseye; the reason for my life is no more. “Yes,” I said, very quietly. “You’re right, I do want to—”

“As semanakraseye I hereby forbid Chevenga to kill himself and anyone else to say he should,” Krero pronounced, chest puffed out.

“Hey!” several of the others yelled. “You’re semanakraseye, not king!” said Handaotha. “You can’t just hereby forbid! Isn’t that right, Chevenga?”

“I am but a simple farmer now,” I said, plowing my field. “By the people’s will, hereby forbidding and all such political things are no longer my business.”

“Politics is the business of every Yeoli who truly is Yeoli!” Senala-e quoted loudly.

“As semanakraseye I hereby forbid any arguments against my orders,” Krero declared.

“It has to go through Assembly!” Sachara yelled.

“I hereby forbid Assembly!” Krero roared. You can probably gather how it went from there; in a moment they were calling him Second Notyere and in time they impeached and charged him and, though there was no precedent for it then, reinstated me. As he was arrested, he said, “I just wanted to see how far I could lead you all.”

Give them credit; he had not led them far at all. I let him lead me much further, almost to death. “You’re always demarch,” he said once, when I was eleven. “But you’ve never done the Kiss of the Lake.”

I felt blood start pounding in my temples. At heart I had known, even since I had seen my father do it, that I would be challenged, or challenge myself. During the day I could tell myself that being able to do it was in my blood since all my ancestors had succeeded; but before dawn when I lay alone at the mercy of my thoughts, the dark ones rising and opening their tendrils in my mind, I knew I had no proof I could do it.

I had been forbidden to try it by every adult to whom I’d ever mentioned wanting to. I could have told my friends that. But to my own ears it rang of excuse. Adults were always too concerned about safety, to my mind. My friends were all nudging each other and trading glances that said, “You think he will?”

I said nothing, only stripped, turned and strode towards the swimming-hole. Bursting into thrilled chatter, they followed. Originally there’d been eight; by the time we were at the water’s edge, there were at least twenty, all giggling and jumping with excitement. Everyone swore silence, of course. I made myself feel as my father had looked, the blood-song turned to stillness all through me. It came surprisingly easily. As the adults had stood back from him, the kids stood back from me.

We had to make do with a long stick for the spear, a short one for the torch and Sachara’s wrist for the crook of the fire-dish. Mana and Krero both wanted to be the Ritual Monk, which they settled by sharing the duty. We skipped the lead-up ceremony, but they called me out, putting the thunder of command into their small high voices. Remembering my father’s grace and trying to put it into every cell of my body, I went to my knees, then walked into the water.

I remember its iciness around me, lapping over my shoulders, as I knelt again. I remember the pebbles under my knees, the roughness of the spear-stick as I wrapped my arm around it, Mana’s and Krero’s hands on my shoulders, Sachara’s wrist under mine and the torch-stick in my hand. I lowered my head. It was like diving; I realized I’d taken in a deep breath without thinking. The water’s cold burned my eyes; the pebbled bottom shimmered with ripples of sun, and minnows darted, blurry brown specks among the stones. Time passed. Mana forgot he shouldn’t touch me, and I shrugged his hand off my shoulder. I began to feel strain in my lungs, but it was no worse than in a breath-holding contest.

Then came the time in which I must take a breath. It almost caught me off-guard. I pulled myself lower by the stick as my father had. My chest suddenly felt as if it were being crushed, and my legs screamed to leap up. Just above my head was air and life; all I needed to give up for it was my honour, and what was that? I thought of the children, how they would forgive me; I was only a child after all, making a game of an adult’s act. I also knew that these were thoughts that would make me fail; I pulled myself a little lower, and put all my soul into my hand on the spear; my mind would fall apart soon, I felt, and I’d fail if my intent was not in my body.

I felt it in full then, the horror of knowing I was killing myself, the sense of every cell ripped apart and filling with blackness, by my own act. I couldn’t do it—I was suddenly sure—not alone. In my mind I cried All-Spirit, help me! In the roaring in my ears, I heard the voice of the harmonic singer, wrapping me all around, making my body’s dying fall away from me. What was I worrying about? It was only death. I heard Shininao’s wings, but they were music. It seemed a hand pressed my shoulder-blades, but holding, not forcing, gentle even as I took blood-red lava down into my lungs which seemed to send out spikes splitting me into shreds. All pain suddenly ceased, and like a prince on his divan I lay back to watch colours flow like oil on water, and hear the unearthly perfect music of non-existence.

†

Next I knew I was a bellows, air blown into me by some greater force, some elder strength that held me utterly in its grasp while I lay limp as a wet kerchief. I tore my face away when I could, and light and noise came shrieking back into my head. The arms tightened around me; only by that did I know I was thrashing. I remembered where I was and why as I began vomiting and they half-raised and turned me so I wouldn’t do it on myself. It went on a long time, and I saw it was mostly water. All around were grown-ups with piercing faces, gripping hands; it was my mother’s arms holding my shoulders. All-Spirit, I thought, we’ve been caught.

Just as the semanakraseye is in the struggling stage, well before he loses consciousness, the Ritual Monk places her hand across his mouth and nose, so that he won’t draw water into his lungs or stomach. My friends and I had been ignorant of this subtlety. They had pulled me out as they’d expected to, then run screaming for help when I did not wake. In the time it had taken for them to get there I’d come within a hair’s width of death. Or imbecility; in mercy, no one told me what the likelihood of that had been until I was much older.

My parents carried me back into the Hearthstone wrapped in one of their cloaks, passing me one to another. I remember the sickening swing of their stride, and trying to bury my face in the corner of the wool while sun beat on my throbbing head. They let me yank at my forelock, but when I started rasping, “It was all my doing, no one but me, punish me and no one else,” Esora-e snapped, “Shut up, Chevenga. You’ll be punished enough, either way.”

They let me lie in bed for a while, and had Ininden the Vae Arahi Haian check me. His prescription was several medicines he gave me, for the near-drowning and the fear, and at least a day in bed. That, however, wouldn’t be my fate. My four parents took a vote, wordlessly, three of four hands turning up, chalk; only Veraha dissented.

It was my mother who told me, putting one hand on my shoulder while inwardly I begged for both her arms.

“The reason we forbade you, we didn’t tell you, because we didn’t think you’d understand,” she said. “Now you’re going to have to. You may not be able to do it when you grow up, because you did it wrongly and caused yourself pain and fear you shouldn’t have, and it’s this you’ll remember next time you try it. That might make it impossible. Unless you do something to keep the fear from being graven in… you know what you do, when a horse throws you.”

There is a state you arrive at in training when fatigue stops all thought but the limbs keep moving, driven only by the will of the teacher through his voice. All seems unreal, the lock-step-lock of movement the turning of an endless wheel; you know nothing but movement, you are nothing but movement, the mind dead and empty of all thought.

I felt that way now, as they led me back to the swimming-hole by my hands. My eyes saw the mountain-peaks above me and the grass below, but the sights held no meaning; my legs planted and carried my weight forward of a will not mine. My shadow-mother told the story with which every Yeoli’s story begins, to inspire me, I think, but I didn’t really hear it.

When I stepped into the water, with Esora-e behind me this time, I threw up again, just bile, faintly polluting its clarity. The woman I’d overheard at my father’s Kiss of the Lake had spoken true: the second time is indeed the worst. I was not afraid of dying itself, but feeling myself die, which I now knew. Looking down I saw only that terrible helplessness in the shining water, as a fighting-novice learns to see pain written on the landscape on which he trains before he learns to see strength and joy.

Forgetting that I was anything more than a frightened child, I ceased to be, and the rippling surface froze into a mountain-wall I could not pass. I stood with my arms wrapped around myself with tears streaming, inwardly pleading with my parents to have mercy on me. Veraha was looking at me with the most pity, being unused to the semanakraseyesin, and I wanted to reach out my arms to him. But the three faces that my own most truly reflected were marble-cool, waiting, and the one I reflected most truly, now dead, I knew would be the same if he were here. I was a child who had done an adult thing. Esora-e lifted his hands from his shoulders.

I can’t remember whether I took a deep breath this time either. I remember the water’s cold burning my face again, and that I didn’t open my eyes this time. But in the peace beneath the surface, somehow, the panic cleared enough to let me think. I’d been here before, I could know, and lived. I put everything into my shield-hand on the spear-stick again, making my fingers steel, and called on All-Spirit again, this time in anticipation more than panic. As the desperation and pain grew, I felt Esora-e’s hand clamp around my mouth and nose. Had I struggled upward he could not have held me by that grip; now I understood exactly what the Ritual Monk did, and didn’t do. The greater hand of the God-in-myself weighed gently on my back again, with the sound of the singing wind. I kill myself; I destroy myself; all is well. I gave myself to it, and thoughts ceased. When I awoke on the shore, no fire in my lungs and throat this time, they were all grinning. Esora-e carried me down the mountain on his shoulders.

It didn’t occur to me to wonder until many years later, when my eyes were level with his. “Where,” I asked him, “did you learn how to be the Ritual Monk?”

“I’d been wondering when you’d ask me that, lad,” he said, scratching the edge of his mustache. “Well… you don’t really think you were the first semanakraseye to try it as a child, do you? We just did our research beforehand better.” I should have known.

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11 - Chalk on the stepfather

The two points of red I knew from having felt them on my own cheeks rose on hers. My mother is a person of few words, fewer still when she is moved. Now she said only, “Why?”

All the others looked at me. I looked back at them, suddenly thinking, for one of the few times I ever had, that I’d done my share of the speaking and leading, and now someone else should take a turn.

“I don’t like him,” Naiga blurted. “He doesn’t belong here.”

“His hands smell of stone-dust,” said Artira.

“He’s fat,” said Handa. “He’s mean. He’s pom… pous.”

“He’s not as nice as Daddy.”

All excuses, most of them out-and-out lies. Yet though regret for the wrong we were doing had begun to wake in me, it was not enough to quench my anger, so I stood content to let others voice the darkness in my heart without sullying my own tongue with it.

She listened patiently until the words ran out. Bad enough that she had lost the man she loved, but to see her children’s grief come out so… I know it would have shaken me. But she said, “Let me think,” looked into the fire for a bit, and then turned to us and said, “It is unfair, isn’t it? Why should I be able to get myself another husband, when you will not be able to get another father?”

We all stood startled, to hear what we really felt put in words so much clearer than our own. It was like pushing against an opponent with all your might, only to have him give backwards completely, so that your own strength throws you over his head. The greatest warriors and sages fight that way.

Her dark eyes gazed clear and open at me, and through the exchanged look I was suddenly her, feeling her loneliness, my loneliness. The light of my life extinguished… the marching of days regardless, the turning of months, the changing of seasons; the wound in my soul scarring, crimson easing to pink and black fading to grey; food regaining taste and company pleasure. I still live, and need living love.

Chiravesa washed my soul clean as it often does. I saw the anger that had seemed as large as myself in its true size, the tantrum of a child, delicious in its purity and release, but still just a tantrum. I took a breath, wiped my eyes and turned to my siblings.

To my astonishment, their faces were still hard, unchanged as stone. I’d assumed they’d just realized what I had; how could they not? That was one of the times that taught me not to assume that others will take the same meaning from what they see. They looked at me, their eyes saying, “We voted; you’re our voice. Speak our decision.”

They were in their rights. As my aunt argued the will of the people to foreign powers whether she agreed with it or not, I must argue my sibs’ to my mother, for all the heart had gone out of me.

“We voted as we felt,” I said. She was looking into my eyes; I couldn’t tell whether she knew I was no longer speaking for myself or not. By the law of semana kra, it didn’t matter. I felt like a traitor twice over.

I found out when we talked about it years later that she had noticed. But she didn’t let on, then. She just called us all out to do chiravesa with her, to imagine ourselves in her place while she imagined herself in ours. “Chevenga,” she said to me. “You do it differently… imagine yourself him. As if, say, he had somehow known before he died that he was going to. What would you want for your wife, afterwards?” The best parents know how to make one lesson into two.

When she was about to imagining herself us, Artira blurted out, “You used to let us come into your room any time. Now we have to tap, and you always send us away.” Not quite true, not always; but true enough. My mother admitted that it was in part out of shame for letting other men be where he had been, in our sight.

If every parent had my mother’s wisdom, this would be a happier world. She didn’t even make us take the vote again in her presence, just let us go. I led the others into my room and took off my crystal again. “This vote is final,” I said. “If it goes chalk for Veraha, we’ve approved him, and no one can go back on it or be mean to him again, die cast, gates fast and all go home. All chalk, all charcoal… I see six chalks, he is approved unanimously.”

The wedding took place on the summer solstice, always considered a lucky day for a widow or widower to remarry. I remember how everything seemed charged with life: my mother’s face beneath her crown of ivy and star-flower, flushed like a girls for all she wore the black ribbon twined with the others around her neck; the ornate borders, embroidered in red, blue, purple and gold, of his wedding shirt, which men of his family had been married in for three hundred years; the way they all swore and kissed each other’s crystals and stood laughing with arms entwined as barley grains were showered on them. After the feast, the drums wove their sacred madness through ears and feet, body and soul, binding them together as one as the Hermaphrodite embodied, like the heartbeat of the world itself pulsing through its branching veins: all things that live. As we danced on the mountain, Veraha tossed me in his strong arms, and rancor and jealousy were as distant from me as death.

We tested, as children will, to see how firm a hand he had as a parent. One thing he had to resign himself to: our free passage into their room. Never again did my mother make us tap. At the beginning we tested that too, to make sure of our rights, at all hours, and so kept catching them making love. Finally once when Handa, Ardi, Iperaiga (who was little more than a toddler then) and I came in while they were, my mother said, “You want to see it, then see it!” and threw the sheets off. We all fled; we weren’t ready for that.

Veraha soon learned the old step-parent’s trick of saying, “Tell the truth: would your mother allow you to do that, if she were here?” With me, he was afraid of making some subtle but crucial mistake for which all Yeola-e would pay some day and, since my education was entirely out of his hands, he wondered if I had any use for him at all. He was frightened by me, too. I once overheard him say, “Was that child ever a child, Karani? He seems to understand things no one his age should.” She said only, “That’s just how he is.” All but one who raised me knew nothing of the thing which, to a great extent, shaped me. I can’t complain; I chose it.

So there he was, a new stepfather, too conscious of his position and stuck with one child who was inherently difficult to know how to befriend, yet who was leader of all the others. I don’t envy him. One day, I suspect when he’d been worrying about it too much, he snapped as I passed, “Fourth Chevenga, comb your hair. It’s a mess.” Considering it was usually a mess, I knew he was doing this just to show his authority. So I said lightly, “It’s no messier than yours,” which was also true, and went on without a break in stride or a glance at him.

He must have considered before coming after me, because it was a little time before he opened my door. His cheeks were flushed red. He said, in a strained soft voice, “Your mother married me, Fourth Chevenga. That makes me your father, in spirit. You have to listen to me and not answer rudely.”

I had learned how to make words cut quietly from Esora-e, and of course far too many words from both the political and legal wings of Assembly Palace. “Don’t play pretend, Veraha,” I said, hardly looking up. “You’re not my father, never were and never will be; you are here only because you were accepted. Never forget that, and don’t presume on your rights.” He gave back a pace, stunned, and I went back to my waxboard to go on with my homework, in exactly the pointed way the Assembly Palace staff would do to hint I’d been haunting their offices too long. For a time he stared, then turned and went.

I found out later to whom he spoke and what was said. My mother was out on some business; he might have been too ashamed to go to her anyway, to admit a child of ten had faced him down. But Esora-e, coming in sweaty from training, noticed his looked and badgered the truth out of him.

He was astonished, but not surprised. “Later we’ll laugh,” he said. “Now we must do right by Yeola-e. If he runs roughshod over his family now, he’ll grow up to do the same to the people. That boy has a sense of justice, but none of power—other people’s, that is.

“What you have to do, Veraha, is this. Go back to his room. Don’t talk or listen to him. Just pick him up under one arm and carry him outside. If he hits you, pin his arms; make him feel who’s stronger. Take him to the place behind the Hearthstone where the stream pools deep, toss him in, and walk away without a word.”

Veraha took the advice, to the letter. Though I’ll have it known, I didn’t hit him, I squirmed with all my strength and yelled all sorts of things. But his one stone-cutting-hardened arm was stronger than my whole body. The water was scalding-cold.

Now it was my turn to be too ashamed to admit something to my mother. I slunk into my room by climbing through the window. Before dinner I combed my hair with great deliberation right in front of him, but not knowing whose comb it had been before it had been mine, he missed the full significance and just gave me a satisfied nod. That night I lay awake conceiving all sorts of evil plots, to no end; I’d come close enough to breaking the spirit of my siblings’ and my vote.

My mother found out by overhearing Veraha and Esora-e laughing about his having done it. I don’t know what she said to Veraha, but he never upbraided me without good reason again. That night, just before my bedtime, he and I made peace. He had a bear’s embrace, that a child could lose himself in, though I wasn’t quite ready to entirely enjoy it. When we let go, he looked as if he were considering doing something, then deciding against, as he bid me good night.

It was almost fall, my eleventh birthday coming. Late at night at the new moon, a faint sound on my dresser half-woke me, but I fell asleep again. In the morning, remembering, I began to look there, excited, in the hope of finding some magical gift a being from the other world had left while I was asleep. As I woke more fully, reality impinged; I was old enough now to have learned, albeit recently, how slim the chances of this happening actually were. Being grown-up, I thought, means no longer looking for that sort of thing, in fact not needing to any more.

Swallowing my sadness, I opened the top drawer to take out a shirt, and gasped; the magical thing was there. It was the piece of malachite I’d picked out in spring when he’d taken me to the market, carven into a hexagon smooth as mirror-glass, with the profile in low-relief of my father.

I felt many things, as I held it in my hand and gazed at it. Mostly I felt its beauty. Now nearly everyone in the family has at least one such portrait, of someone they love; it’s lucky he makes them small, so that when war came they could be easily packed and carried to safety. My mother has the best one of Tennunga, of course. But I got one of the first.

Years later, when I was a man and we knew each other entirely except for my foreknowledge, we talked about it. “I finished carving your Tennunga a few days after we bought the stone,” he told me. “But I couldn’t give it to you then… I suspected you would have felt I was trying to buy into the household, like a person buying a share of a workfast. In the crassest of ways too, with the image of your father, whose place I was taking, as if I could worm my way in by pretending to give him back to you.”

“And now the truth comes clear,” I said. “You were entirely right.” We both laughed. No one understands the power of art more than an artist, I guess.

“When we made peace after I threw you in the stream, I almost gave it to you… I wanted to, badly, to win your forgiveness. But I saw that would be like saying your forgiveness could be bought, and would cheapen the carving in your eyes… was I right then, too?”

“I was a trial, I know I was,” I said, signing chalk at the same time. He just laughed, then went serious again.

“I didn’t carve it for such a small thing as to gain your love. Not that that’s a small thing… but it would have been for myself. I carved it for you to remember him by, and wanted nothing else. Only when I had made peace with you entirely, could it mean all to you that I meant it to. Before that, we both would have lost out, wouldn’t we?”

I signed chalk and kissed his hand again. Embarrassed, he tried to pull away, but I was stronger now, and yanked him into a hug.

I could have nursed resentment forever, thinking, had he not insinuated himself into the household, he would never had had the chance to do all that made me love him, so I never would have. But I chose my shadow- and blood-parents no more than I chose him. In the winds of chance blow the seeds of families; Veraha was here, so we got him, and we loved him. My mother eventually had three children by him, Makaina in 1537, Ilaches in ’39 and Masarao in ’41.

When my grandmother found out the fully story, she took me aside and asked what the most important lesson for me in all this was. “That you should always be loving? That you should never be mean, no matter what you feel? That you can’t bring back people who’ve died?”

She kept signing charcoal and pursing her lips and saying, “Obvious, obvious, open your eyes, if you haven’t got that by now… don’t you remember what you’re going to be when you grow up?” I started to get it then.

My father had spoken of it, once when he’d taken me up on the mountain. “Know the written law… and the unwritten. You can find yourself holding power that comes not of position, but of others’ love or admiration or fear or ignorance. I have a feeling you’re going to come into a lot of this, Chevenga. It’s full of allure.”

As always, he was right. I’d come into it with Veraha, and my siblings, and in grief and anger I’d abused it. I never forgot.

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10 - Charcoal on the stepfather

All my life my mother had let us come and go freely in her bedchamber. But one day about three years after my father’s death, going there with an armful of fresh cedar branches to give to her, I found myself rebuffed. There was a man inside whose voice I didn’t know.

I told myself there was nothing wrong. I was ten, old enough to understand that, alone in her bed, she was lonely. Yet anger filled me. My father had died. I had known there would be grief, walked through its long dark passage with her, felt its purity like a knife-edge. I could not conceive that it could be sullied this way, that in her chamber and her bed and her heart, he was replaceable.

Esora-e and Denaina had long agreed to accept her choice. She took visits from many men at first. I noticed only one thing they all had in common: none were blond.

She would call in one of us to send for the all the others who were old enough to be introduced to him, and it was always, “First the eldest, Fourth Chevenga.” I remember their big hands clasping mine, some steely, some more fishy, some callus-crusted, some hurting as they clenched, nervous or wanting too much to impress, perhaps.

She never openly asked me what I thought of whom. But I noticed her gazing at my face as I met them; she had to think of us too. I soon learned that if I let a certain look cross my face during the pleasantries, he wouldn’t get past the ivy-carven lintel.

That gave me the chill of hardness again, as when I’d first heard my father was dead and felt nothing. Too much power too soon, a child feels like a weight. But this time it awoke a dark pleasure in me too. Though I banished none that I didn’t genuinely dislike, and she might have disliked them too for all I knew, I could laugh to myself that I ruled their fates. Not a true cure to my pain—there could be none but time—but relief of a kind.

Then one day I thought, ‘I’m not alone in this.’ My sibs and I had whispered about it. I thought of the class of children who’d been the ancestors of all Yeola-e. My sibs and I were free Yeolis, entitled to gather, and to vote.

All my sibs who were six or better I had sneak into my room at night. That was Artira, Senala-e, Naiga, Lanai and Handaotha. I sat them all in a proper circle, unfastened my crystal and said, “A very serious matter has arisen, that touches every one of us.” Some might say I’d sat in the Assembly gallery a few too many times.

Once I’d framed the issue, they all began talking at once, and it took much naked-handed use of authority to get them using the speaker’s crystal properly. “Shadow-mama is lonely since Daddy got ’sassinated, she needs another Daddy.” -- “I don’t want another shadow-Daddy, blood-Daddy combs me enough.” -- “But they need a fourth to take care of all us, ’cause all us are so many.” -- “But what if he’s mean?” -- “I didn’t like the last one, his smile was like the taste of the throw-up you make when you’ve eaten too many raisins.” -- “Shewenga, do we have to take whoever she wants?”

I grabbed the crystal. “No!” Satisfaction rang through me. “Remember the saying? The people wills. If we take a vote, she has to listen.”

Doubts and possibilities both filled their small features, which echoed in so many different mixes those of our four parents. “Can we vote out all the rules?” Sena said hopefully.

I grabbed the crystal again. So often, politics requires walking a fine line. “No. Because the rules were made for everyone. If you could steal anyone’s things they could steal yours, if we could kill each other there’d soon be no one left, and if no one said please and thank you we’d all be mad at each other all the time for being rude. Grown-ups aren’t complete fools.

“But this is about love, and grown-ups can be complete fools about that.” (I’d heard this from a grown-up.) “Besides, she’s choosing our fourth parent. She has to listen to us.”

Then little Handaotha burst out, “Shadow-mama shouldn’t marry anybody! It’s not fair, Daddy losing his wife to someone else just because he’s dead!” So good young children are, at speaking bluntly the unspoken thoughts of adults, or older children. We all fell silent.

That was where, had I been a wise person, I’d have gently said what should be said: we couldn’t bring him back to life. Should she be alone for the rest of hers because of that? Probably I was the only one old enough to say this. But, I admit to my shame, it stayed frozen behind the wall of my teeth. Handaotha had spoken my heart.

More words were spoken that I regret hearing, let alone allowing to go unchallenged, and I am sure my sibs don’t want their childhood folly laid out in ink. It lost order, for I neglected my presiding duties, and we somehow fell into fighting over who had made off with the best stone in whose collection, with Handa off in a corner crying and Artira comforting her while sending me vicious looks, Lanai and Naiga close to blows and Sena waving the crystal and trying valiantly to take my place as the voice of reason.

Still I kept my silence, feeling I was darkness as much as being in it. ‘Why should I call order?’ I was thinking. ‘This chaos suits me; it suits the world, that burned in the Fire; it suits children who have no sense, mothers who let strangers lie where fathers should, fathers who get stabbed in the back. What does he care whether I call order, when he is nothing, like the smoke of a candle blown out?”

Sena whipped my crystal into my hands, crying, “You make them shut up, you’re supposed to!” It hurt so I slapped her backhanded across the face, and she flew at me, her eyes, Esora-e’s grey, turned murderous. That started Lanai and Naiga in earnest, and my desk got heaved over, ink spilling over a sheepskin and centuries-old books flung like trash. Next thing I knew I was being hauled up by a very big thumb and forefinger on my ear. Esora-e held me that way in one hand and Sena in the other, while Denaina similarly held Lanai and Naiga.

“I’m sorry, shadow-parents,” I said. I had to think fast. “We all are. We were playing a part out of the Deliverance of the Tinga-enil, see, and, well, it’s not a real scene out of the play but one we made up where the champion meets up with these two Enchian travelers, a warrior and a healer, and the champion is wounded so he needs the healer and the warrior falls in love with the champion and the champion is in a hurry and wants to get up to fight for the people but the healer is trying to keep him down and we all started taking our parts too seriously and—”

Esora-e cut me off with a chop of his hand. “Enough… I get the idea. Do you know you woke up the little ones? And ruined a sheepskin?” I gripped my forelock in shame and so did everyone else. “I started it,” I said, holding out my hand. “Comb me.” I was still enough myself to do that. Yet I felt a dark smugness too, for putting one over on them.

“You are the one who should be most aware of what you do and where you are,” he said to me. “But the rest of you are not much less to blame. Think on Chevenga’s pain and your part in it. Next time it will be all of you.” He took a firm grip on my wrist. “Your comb, Fourth Chevenga.”

I stared at him, and he at me. I only had one comb.

“Would he not have done this, lad?” A whisper of dark unfurling wings seemed to touch the air in the room, as I drew my father’s ivory comb out slowly from the pocket inside my shirt, over my heart. I offered it to him handle-first, like a weapon.

He always combed me hard, even for a defiant look. I heard wind whistle through the tines, and felt the blow burn right to my bones. But the true pain came when he laid the comb in my stricken hand to crown his point. I think Handa saw, as small children feel feelings without understanding them, for she started crying hard.

All would have been different if my mother had been there. She’d have seen through me in a moment, got the truth out of me and settled it all with her quiet warm sense, without combing anyone. I knew that even as I lay scheming, the poison in me distilled bitterer still. She wasn’t there because she was in Terera with some man.

I gathered my sibs in a cedar stand on Hetharin the next day. It was winter, the snow up to our chests off the paths, good for keeping a debate short. When she chose a man, we decided, we’d line up before her and show her our vote on him. Disingenuous, yes, the question of whether she should marry at all hidden within the question of whom. Not honest, I knew. But I’d conceived it.

As winter eased, one man began to stick and the others to fade. He was Veraha Shae-Aniya, a stone-carver from Thara-e who’d found good work in Terera. I was softer on him than most because on meeting me he’d touched my cheek with one flat wide finger and said, “When you grow up, you’ll have Tennunga’s cheekbones, exact.” My eyes must have said, ‘How would you know?’ because he grinned uneasily at me and said, “Well, I never got a commission to carve him, true. But I wanted to, so I did many sketches and one low-relief just for myself.”

Now he was in her room often. Once I walked in and found them resting, her head on his shoulder, her coal-black ringlets spread in a fan across his muscular chest. He was more rounded than my father, with red-brown hair and beard.

Once when it was warm enough for the walk to be pleasant, he invited me to go to the market in Terera with him. Me alone; I didn’t need a day of deep thought to guess why. I dressed as I would any day, no extra adornments. As we headed down he offered me his hand as was civil. I took it as was also civil, my small fingers buried in his big ones. He smelled of stone-dust and polishing oil and faint sweat. He was well-versed in my childish accomplishments, my mother obviously having coached him well. Fear sprang from his every pore.

So I gave him one-word answers, looked mostly away, and even let him keep calling me ‘Anaraseye,’ though my position had to be worsening his nervousness. Who is a child, I thought, to put an adult at ease? I felt him struggle between speaking to me as to a child and as to a person on who judgment his fate depended, and I basked in the chill glow of my power.

He took me to the stone-sellers, of course, and taught me all the names of the different colours of them. “My favourite is a silken white marble, pure as milk, that comes from a place called Krera, which is now in the empire of Arko. There’s a whole mountain made of it there, and it works like the Hermaphrodite’s hair in your hands… em, pardon the expression. Which do you like the most, Anaraseye?”

I knew nothing of carving, but a warm green stone with a grain that reminded me of the curving lines waves leave on a sandy lake-shore caught my eye, and I pointed to it.

“Malachite,” he said. “The sea of the Earthsphere’s tears, frozen to bear witness.” Only an artist would talk like that, I thought snottily. He picked up the stone, turned it over in his fingers, then counted out coins from his pouch.

So he think he’ll buy me, I thought, anger welling. But instead of giving it to me with a gushing smile as I expected, he tucked it away in his satchel. In the days following, I’d forget about it entirely.

As we climbed back up beside the falls, he sucked in his cheek, which was ruddy in faint spots, and bit its inside, which I’d come to know meant he was searching for words. I wasn’t about to help him. “Well, it’s been a good day, hasn’t it, anaraseye?” he said finally. I signed a wan chalk. “I’ve enjoyed myself, and I think you have too, so I hope we are friends. Are we that? Maybe we be that?” A clever start, however awkwardly delivered; I could hardly say no.

“I suppose so,” I answered, but that sounded rude to my own ears, so I added, “Yes, we are.” With a big smile he took my hands—I liked his touch, in spite of myself—and said, “May we always be.”

I hope I never have a child like myself. That night I called council.

“All-Spirit be witness to this vote of free Yeolis,” I invoked, then stabbed out my hand. I wish I could say none of them waited to see which way it was turned before they put out their own.

What excuse could I make? The evil in me was formless, as such evils are, rising from a chaos of emotions not thought out. But it had form enough to direct my hand to a simple motion. As monarchy has its danger, so does demarchy, the danger of any power: that, as poorly conceived as the opinions of its wielder may be, he still wields it.

So I signed charcoal, and everyone else did also, and we marched into her room. It was only by luck Veraha wasn’t there. I shiver, imagining myself her, facing a phalanx of my own precious children, standing still and straight as warriors, their snub-nosed faces grave as news of death, their six tiny hands turned irrevocably down.

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9 - Telling my mother

I don’t believe such a claim could ever actually be proven. The world is too big. Nevertheless, Esora-e set himself to the task of making me it. Azaila was never party to this, nor any other war-teachers, but if Esora-e took me off for extra work, that was his business.

It was hard. The first few days he made me do so much I got dizzy and sick. There were other privations, such as letting me serve myself from the common pot then pulling away half, for several days running, or making me go without water for a day, to teach me how to override the body’s wants and thus be free of them. Once he locked me in a cellar chamber of the Hearthstone that was pitch-dark and soundless, with only a blanket and a flask of water, for three days; that was to get used to what was in my own mind.

Yet he never did anything without a reason that inspired me. He taught me pride in doing, or enduring, what I had thought was impossible. He never let me forget he loved me. He never let up on me and allowed it to be too easy, and, on my honour, neither did I. It should be understood, my shadow-father was one of those people who speak gravely of the hardship of war, how we only do it out of necessity, how it is sacred and so forth, but one can tell enjoys both the act and the thought of being a warrior.

To this day I question his choosing an ambition for me, and at times I have resented it. But I cannot say, had he asked my consent, that I wouldn’t have agreed at least to aspire to be the best in Yeola-e. In the end more good has come out of it than bad. I’d be dead several times over if not for that hard training.

†

The mourning custom in Yeola-e is, for those very close, to take off the black head-ribbon a year after at the latest. My mother kept hers on until the very day. I’d decided I should tell her of my foreknowledge a little while after she took it off, so I waited perhaps a month.

Now I have children of my own, I know how it was for her, and I feel for her, faced with an eight-year-old wanting to talk about some serious matter, thinking it was about a scrap with a friend or the loss of some precious toy, and instead hearing him say what I did.

Hand in hand, we went out into the garden, for privacy, because I’d told her it was a secret. She sat down; I didn’t want to, so I stayed standing. “Something happened the day Daddy got killed,” I said. “I’m going to die when I’m still young, too.” In the way of women, she was strong, showing nothing more than a tensing and a stunned silence.

“How do you know?” she said finally, and I explained, about seeing the black-haired corpse I knew was mine through her hand, and his age, and how I’d known in my heart.

“I knew I was seeing into the future… twenty-two years from now, since thirty minus eight is twenty-two. I just thought, since you’re my mama, you ought to know.” She didn’t disbelieve. It had the ring of truth to her. I’d be a warrior-demarch, just as Tennunga had been. Only in Haiu Menshir is life less harsh. All I’d got was a glimpse into the normal tragedy of life that people usually hide from ourselves so as to maintain happiness.

She opened her arms to me, though I wasn’t sure why. To see one’s children die is the normal order of life inverted, of course, but I was too young to understand that yet. I suddenly felt I’d done something wrong after all, telling her, and upsetting her.

“I know what I have to do,” I said quickly, throwing my arms around her. “I already realized, and I swore an oath: I’m going to do two times as many things and love everyone two times as hard as everyone else.” I didn’t even have a choice in war-training; Esora-e already had me practicing with double-weight swords and staves and tunics when the other students didn’t have to.

“Chevenga…” She looked at me piercingly, suddenly. “That was more than a year ago. Why didn’t you tell me then?”

“You were grieving for Daddy. I didn’t want to make you sadder.”

Her eyes widened a little. “You… you didn’t tell me today because you wanted comfort… you told me because you thought I should know.”

“Yes. One day in twenty-two years, you’ll get a horrible feeling like you did before Daddy died. But you’ll know why, you’ll know it’s going to be me, so it won’t be so bad.”

Her eyes closed for a moment, a bit like someone who is being stabbed but is resolved to keep her silence. I shouldn’t have said that, I thought.. But finally she said, through set teeth, “Yes. It’s easier to take that which is expected. And now you’ve told me you will have someone to come to, when it troubles you.” I didn’t see why it would, but I also knew she was a grown-up, who’d been through life, and so knew much better than me what going through life would be for me.

She picked up her crystal between thumb and forefinger, and took my face between her hands, her fingers twining in the curls on the sides of my head, the kindest feeling, as always. “You swore an oath; I will too. I will love you twice as much, All-Spirit be witness and second Fire come if I forswear.”

“You can love me twice as much? But you love me so much already!”

That made her smile, and pull me into a proper hug. “My precious child! I have a goal I’ve set for myself then, just as you have.”

“You don’t have to do anything, mama. I can bear it.” When I think about it, in my piping eight-year-voice it must have had the same tone as, “I can reach that shelf now,” or “I can multiply up to fifteen.”

“I will nonetheless.” She smoothed my forelock from my brow, and pressed her lips to my face. “My child of pure steel! What a life lies before you… Chevenga, have you told anyone else?” I signed charcoal. “All right… you are going to have to choose who and when to tell, if anyone else, or ever. Just remember this: once out, it can’t be called back. Consider the implications very carefully when that choice comes, both for your own sake and for others. And if you’re not sure, you know you can come to me.”

About five years later I would realize what she must have been thinking. An anaraseye doesn’t just become semanakraseye; you have to be approved by Assembly. Would the people want another one who’d last only ten years and then leave them in grief like a sword-stroke in the heart? Yet if I went on with the semanakraseye’s education and being dedicated to it, I might be a good enough one to be worth it. I wasn’t old enough to make that choice well yet. If it came out it might be taken away from me before I was.

I promised I’d do as she said. We went back to her room. That night she let me stay up past my bedtime, and I fell asleep under her wicker chair, now that I was too big to curl there, with her hand ceaselessly caressing my hair.

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8 - The greatest warrior

The next day I was back in training again. We had kraiya-long wooden sticks, and I was swinging mine absently, waiting for Esora-e to call us into line, when the whim struck me to aim it at Nyera’s head, the closest target at hand, for a joke. To my horror, she did not duck, but stood dead-still like one blind. I was not quick enough at that age to check its flight, and so for an instant had to helplessly watch what my hands did, the knobbed end streaking in, a hand-width, two finger-widths, one finger-width, away from her blond ringlets—then hitting with a thwack that hummed through my fingers.

She stumbled one step, then turned around, her face first pop-eyed with surprise, then black with rage. To her credit, she dropped her stick and came after me with her hands. Being angry while I was bewildered, she was on top of me in no time and grinding my face in the dirt when Esora-e lifted her off me.

He got an earful of truth without asking. “He hit me with his stick! From behind!” “I didn’t mean to hit her, she didn’t duck!” “I was facing the other way!” “So you should have ducked anyway!” “How could I!? You snuck up on me!” “I wasn’t sneaking, you knew I was there, you’re just trying to get me into trouble!” “I am not! Master, he’s lying! I wasn’t looking and he knows it!” “You still should have ducked!” And so on.

To my surprise, since in my mind I was entirely innocent, Esora-e was looking darkest at me. By this time all the children in the ground had gathered around, standing on tiptoe to see over each other’s heads. “Fourth Chevenga,” he said finally, “I’d like you to demonstrate what you think Nyera should have done.” He picked up my stick, and handed it to her. “Turn around.” I did. It was a pleasure to turn my back on her.

It was pleasure she planned to have, too. No one relishes revenge so much as a child granted permission to take it. I wasn’t sure how she was going to get it, though; she brought the stick around whistling, and I ducked just as Esora-e had asked.

Silence fell. “Again,” he said. This time Nyera aimed from the other side. I did the same. The other children stared as if they were seeing magic. Why is this such a big thing to them? “Again.” This time she did a down-stroke and I side-stepped. “No fair!!” she screamed.

He had Nyera give me the stick then, much to her disappointment, and tied his spare sweat-rag around my eyes, making sure not a single crack of light could get through. As always, in training, he was wearing his sword; now I felt him draw it, and kneel down in front of me to match my height. Slowly at first, he ran me through the Eight Blocks. I’d only ever practiced them with my hands before, but of course I’d seen them done with swords, so it was easy enough to extrapolate. I heard him spit, before he checked my blindfold, then tied another rag over it. The second time he went faster. By this time the children were all yelling with delight, cheering me on, and I was enjoying myself. “Try harder, shadow-father,” I teased him. Instead he banged his sword into its scabbard, ordered Urakaila to watch us, and leapt up from his knees straight into a dead run, his footfalls thumping towards the door of the School of the Sword.

“How are you doing that?” Mana said to me.

I yanked off the rags. “Doing what?”

“The blocks, without being able to see!”

I didn’t know how to explain; I’d never had to and never thought I would. “It’s… it’s… it’s the feel without touch. Like when you watch a fight with your eyes shut.” He just stared at me. “You’re all staring at me with your mouths flapping,” I said. “Why?” It took them some time to get it through my skull that none of the rest of them could do this, not even Urakaila; if they could not see or touch a weapon, they didn’t know where it was. That filled me with horror, and then awe for their courage; how could they even consider becoming warriors, so handicapped? Then my shadow-father came back with Azaila, who was the war-teacher of all the war-teachers, and a good half of the other war-teachers.

He got me to do it again, and when he pulled the blindfold off, the younger teachers, grown-ups all, sweaty with the exertion he’d drawn them away from, were staring at me no less astonished then the children had.

From then on I was Azaila’s, and only Azaila’s, student, at least formally.

After training was done, Esora-e took me back into the room where the Sword hung.

“You thought everyone had weapon-sense like yours, didn’t you?” he said. I signed chalk. I had been thinking; this explained the strange apparent blindnesses afflicting other people that I had always noticed. His eyes were bright as if he’d just been fighting, his cheeks flushed. “Azaila does; that’s why it must be him who teaches you. So do some of the other teachers. But they’ve trained fifty years for it. You were born with it. Do you know what that means?”

I found myself afraid to know, my heart drifting back to the edge of the cliff. I signed charcoal. He took my face between his hands again.

“If you always work as hard as you can in training, always do your best—which you always have so far—you, Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e, could be the greatest warrior in the world.”

I stood silent. I didn’t know what to say. His face split into a wide grin, and he touseled my hair. “Aren’t you glad you chose to stay with it?”

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7 - Life itself sang to me

The people of Yeola-e feel the semanakraseye as a part of themselves living; if he dies, they feel a part of themselves die.

The runners of the Workfast Proclamatory, who'd take the news to the rest of Yeola-e, were gone even before I saw his corpse, and Assembly went back into session at once, with my Aunt Tyeraha taking up the crystal as regent semanakraseye. In Tiryina there was almost war; some of the darya semanakraseyeni, the Demarchic Guard, who were close to him were posted there, and had to be held back from attacking the nearest Enchian village by others.

In the cities, the people wrapped their heads in black, closed the markets and workfasts, wept in the streets, did the feeling-dances of anger and of grief. And everyone, at first, clamored for war, saying that this, if anything, was an attack. We are not used to assassinations, unlike Lakans or Arkans, who barely look up from their fields if a politician gets knifed.

His funeral was held the next evening. For the day he had lain in flowers for the people to see, one by one, as he had liked to do in life. It took the whole day for all who came to pass. It was my grandmother who touched the torch to his pyre, seeing him out of this world as she had seen him into it. The ashes were gone in half a day, given to farmers, a pinch apiece, for scattering over their fields, so as to lend his strong life-force to their earth.

My family went the next three days being entirely cared for, as per custom. Then came my aunt’s Kiss of the Lake, so I got to see it again.

Enjaliansi, King of Tor Ench, swore the highest oaths that the assassin had acted alone and unknown to him, and investigated for us. There were no answers to be got out of the man; after using his one surprise-stroke on my father he’d had to do what murderers are not used to, look into a warrior’s face rather than her back. My mother killed him with her knife. I remembered the blood on her shirt.

The murderer had done it to avenge an elder brother my father had killed with his own hand in the war, and lacking the courage for open challenge, had nursed his anger over years into peacetime. For something any warrior would do in war; it was the worst kind of madness, chosen.

I think he might also have wanted to make a name for himself in history. If it was to burn himself a fiery place in our memory forever, he certainly succeeded. He twists his knife in my own heart whenever there is something I would have done for, or shown, my father. This is why I do not give his name. I won’t help preserve it.

To show goodwill, King Enjaliansi had the man’s wife, children and remaining brothers all beheaded. Goodwill, he said in answer to my aunt’s remonstrations, cannot be conveyed in half-measures. At least it meant he wished peace. After many bitter debates, which hurt the heart to hear, the war vote went a strong charcoal.

Three of my father’s wisdom teeth went to my remaining parents, and the fourth to me. That was his known wish. That he had never written a will didn’t matter, of course, since, being semanakraseye, he had nothing to bequeath. His ivory comb had been, in name, my mother’s. She gave it to me.

I started to understand life would never be the same. Grief aged, darkening like meat; I began to wish back the day he had died when it had been possible to pretend he hadn’t, when life had been recently-enough disturbed to still resemble the innocent time before. In the morning when I should have seen him kiss my other parents goodbye for the day, in Assembly where he should be holding the crystal and saying, “Order, sib Servants!”, just before sundown when he and I should be chasing the last edge of the day up the mountain together, I felt him killed again, killed and killed, the truth of it ground into me like the sword-stroke practiced a thousand times.

Of course I had my own reason for wanting time to slow down. I was measuring it. I had made an estimate for myself of thirty, the number I have always gone by. Thirty years, for a seven-year-old, is a long time; it would have been much worse to learn, I think, at twenty-five. But I was suddenly aware that days added up to moons, and moons to years, something I had never given a thought to before. I was never again scolded for dawdling. People say it is my nature to hurry; I suppose it is now, again, like the sword-stroke practiced a thousand times.

None of the thought-out reasons for keeping my foreknowledge to myself entered my head then. I said nothing, and it would be common knowledge if not for this, only because I felt everyone had enough to bear right now. I remember thinking, “It would just make Mama even sadder. Let it wait. It’s not like it’s going to go away.”

I went back to training after the three full-mourning days were over. Esora-e and Urakaila, one of the other teachers, sword-sparred to inspire us as they often did. Always before it had given me joy; now I found myself thinking, ‘What are they doing?’ Then when it came time to wrestle, it was, ‘What am I doing?’ I was with Mana first, and he kept beating me, miming breaking my neck or crushing my throat with the usual glee; but each time I got him into a position where he was at my mercy, he would somehow squirm loose, my hands losing their strength when it came time to finish him. Against Sachara and Krero and Nyera it was exactly the same. I felt Esora-e’s eyes on me.

This was something to deal with, I saw, and to decide on. What worried me most was that I might be a coward at heart, my father’s death having brought it out in me. Simple to remedy: I would climb Haranin to the edge of the highest cliff I knew the way to, search my heart, and, if I did see I was indeed a coward, throw myself off. Yeola-e never needs a coward for a semanakraseye.

Before I could slip away, though, Esora-e stopped me at the gate of the School of the Sword, led me into the antechamber where the Sword of Saint Mother—the one she gave to the first Yeolis from her own hand—hangs, and sat me down with him before it. A year before, when I’d entered the School for the first time, and wrapped my hand round the grip of the Sword as is traditional for new students, I’d also lifted it, which had created a big stir. I remembered the sound of the chains from which it hung, like a brook’s trickling. Yet now this beautiful thing had a stain on it. What was bothering me came to me in a flash: what I was learning to do in this place was what had been done to my father.

I thought of my bright promise, the polished wristlets I would get on my graduation, the triumphal parades I would lead through the town as I had seen my father do, flowers and streams of wine raining on me, and Chirel, forged in the perfect curve which, extended, would form the circle of rya-kya, nothing/everything—all these things I’d looked forward to making my life about. All lies, this beauty—all a mask worn by death. My body suddenly didn’t seem my own, going hot and cold by turns. It, and my soul, were being shaped into those of a killer; the joy of training itself was a betrayal. Even my name, which means “lion’s heart,” was a thing of war, and it was my only name. I wanted to scream for mama, or flee into some dark warm cave where no one would ever see me again, like the one I’d crept out of not so long ago. Or leap off the cliff.

Esora-e put two very gentle hands on my shoulders. “Chevenga, tell me what’s in your heart.”

“I never want to be a warrior.” With my eyes buried in my hands, I could not see his expression, but I heard a long deep breath, a readying one like before a fight.

“Well… it took courage even to say that.” He was worried about the same thing, that I was in truth a coward. “Look at me, my child, and tell me why.”

I looked him in the eyes. “I never want to kill anyone.”

His mustache twitched. I thought of how he liked to show off his scars, and tell what happened to the warriors who’d given them to him; how he talked of “full-splitting the child-rapers” and seeing their blood fountain, laughing, while my mothers both pursed their lips. I thought of my blood-father; I’d picked a flower on the mountain, and he’d said, “You’ve killed it. Up here where summer is so short and so it takes so long for them to grow back… well, there are many more. But never forget what you are doing. That’s the hardest thing, in war: never forgetting what you are doing.” He understands best, I thought, as always. Understood; now he is picked.

“Anyone?” said my shadow-father. “Even if he is trying to kill you?” He spoke the name of my father’s murderer, which I never write so that it will be forgotten. “What he did was twice wrong: murder, and for mindless hate. We kill for the same reason Saint Mother gave us the Sword: life, and only in fair fights within our borders. Play that out in your mind, lad; you have before.”

I did as he asked, imagining, as a child will, the enemy as a monster. I parried the blows in my mind as always, but when the time came to strike him dead, my hand in my imagination went weak as it had in real life in the class. “I couldn’t win,” I said. “I should not be there.”

“Play it properly. He will kill you, if you don’t kill him. You know that.”

This time I made the enemy truly dangerous, awakening my own fear, and it went as it always had before; any feeling for him was gone from my heart. But afterwards as he lay dead, he turned from a monster back into a man, and I saw him on a pyre like my father’s, heard his wife and his small children weeping, and felt remorse to my bones. But the next enemy was coming, and the next… I would never tire, for that would be choosing death, but keep going, kill, regret, kill, regret, all my life. With any luck I’d die before it drove me mad. Never imagine children cannot see their future.

In this tangle there had to be a thread of pure rightness somewhere. I thought furiously, my hands curled into fists, until I found it, shining with truth’s magnificence. “There shouldn’t be any wars!”

I thought his face would light up with inspiration, as my heart had. Instead he laughed bitterly, and pulled a lock of my hair. “Nothing truer! Yet those pesky foreigners keep attacking us. You’d think they’d never heard the wisdom of the great sage Chevenga.”

I’d thought it was brilliant; certainly not deserving of mockery. As always, anger made me stubborn. “When I’m semanakraseye, I’ll end it. There won’t be any more wars. That’s what Saint Mother really wanted.”

His dark brows went up under his fore-curls, which had no grey in them then. “You will? By not being a warrior? You’ll go visit King Astyardk in Laka and charm him into stopping his thugs from raiding our farmfasts? When King Enjaliansi of Tor Ench lays claim to our port towns because they were inside the old empire a thousand years ago, you’ll say, ‘You can’t have them, but I don’t like killing people, so let’s not have a war, all right?’ You’ll sweet-talk the herd-raiders: ‘I’m not a warrior, so will you dear fellows kindly stop absconding with our sheep’?”

“I’ll make them listen,” I said, stabbing three fingers of my sword-hand into the stone floor as I’d seen Servants do on their desks when making a strong point. “Like when two of us quarrel and Mama makes us do chiravesa, imagine being the other, I’ll say ‘You be me and I’ll be you.’”

“So that you will gain understanding of why they abscond with our sheep, and they, why we’d like to keep them?” He laughed again. “Don’t look at me like that, Fourth Chevenga. It’s not you I’m making fun of, it’s your age. You’ve spoken and I’ve listened; now I’ll speak and you listen.” He took my face between his weapon-callused hands, his eyes turning the grey of storms.

“You think there is always a parent standing over people who are arguing. But with you and some greedy tyrant, there will be none. This is foreigners we speak of, ‘those who will not listen to your words of justice and sense.’ She was right; they came. And they still come.

“While you were showing off your naivete you were also insulting your ancestors. You think you were the first ever to think of making peace? But it cannot be done without a sheathed sword at one’s side, to show the other he’s best off being reasonable. Otherwise what he will demand, ultimately, is all our land and all of us as slaves. All-Spirit, why am I saying this? You know your history, at least the shape of it… you’re just saying you don’t want to kill. You’d leave it to others.

“Well, all right, no one has to do everything; we serve each other best by giving each other our greatest gifts. True?” Knowing what this was leading up to, I didn’t answer. “Of course. And what are you better at, than fighting?” He was right; I was good at my book studies, but a semanakraseye is not an advocate or an academic. I was competent enough at playing the harp and flute and making things with my hands; I had no other uncommon gifts to offer. Then something came to me: “Making friends.” I had succeeded in befriending anyone I’d wanted to, as long as I could remember.

He waved it off. “You can’t make friends with foreigners. Oh, they might fake it; then when you are fooled, thinking what great friends they are, they’ll stab you, and Yeola-e, in the back. Of the other skills, from which come callings, you are best at fighting—deny it?”

I signed charcoal but said, “I have a calling: I’m going to be semanakraseye.”

“Ah, well, yes,” he said, “I was coming to that. Tell me, will you send out others to do what you yourself would not?” It fell to us to command; thus we became warriors. My blood-father’s words; I felt weak and sick.

Plenty of semanakraseyel, in fact, have not been warriors, including my aunt, who served as regent after my blood-father was killed. The old age of kraiyal-semanakraseyel, warrior-demarchs, ended with Notyere’s starting the War of the Travesty to make himself king, after which it was made illegal for a semanakraseye to fight for a century and a half. It will likely never again be compulsory. But my grandmother and blood-father had both done it, and I had always intended to.

“Imagine, the Enchians invade, and you send out an army to die on Yeoli furrows while you sit safe in Assembly Palace. The numbers are even, but we lose and ten thousand die. Those who are left bind up their wounds and wonder what went wrong, how it could have been different. ‘I know one thing,’ one will say. ‘Fourth Chevenga would have been a great warrior had he not quit his training, because he didn’t want to kill anyone. With another First General First as good as Tennunga, think how the battle would have gone.’ Another will say, ‘My father got killed by an Enchian too, and I didn’t quit my training.’ All down the line they’ll curse you, and why not? You’ll have denied them your greatest gift.

“Think of those who rightfully envy you! ‘I wish I had the strength and quickness he was born with; I’d have a better chance of living, and Yeola-e a better chance of winning. And he’s the semanakraseye…! If he doesn’t give his best, why should anyone?’ ”

I threw my hand up between his to grab my forelock, tears burning in my eyes and sickness in my guts.

“You were bred to be a warrior, Chevenga. Your blood-parents—too gentle, he was, and she is, they wouldn’t tell you that. He and his blood-mother before him married warriors so that their children would be better warriors. Why do you think the Shae-Arano-el still do the stream-test, and the old way? You will win the tournaments and gain the promotions and be loved by all who fight under you, not by chance. All their choices led up to you. And you would throw it away—what do you think your blood-father would think if he knew?”

I didn’t answer. I was thinking only of the cliff, and how free I would feel with the wind rushing through my hair, faster and faster, knowing the answer to all dilemmas was an instant away.

“Chevenga, we are all bound to duty. Should you turn from yours, you’ll be proven a coward, for all you are fearless of death; a coward is, after all, one ruled by fear of what he must do. In the end, my son and Tennunga’s, I don’t think you are. Grief will turn anyone’s head for a time. But in the end, it lies with you to prove it. Whatever hinders you, you’ll have to conquer, or fail entirely. Think about it.” He got up and walked away, leaving me alone with the Sword.

As I climbed Haranin, his words rang in my ears, but the words of the dead spoke truer to my heart. Unwaveringly, my father had said, “As always, you choose.”

I had sometimes thought they were harsh words; now I knew they were the ultimate tenderness. Everyone loved me; only he had understood me. Now I knew fully how alone I was, with him gone.

The wind sang through the crags, growing cool; clouds covered the sun and the many-hued striations in the rock turned dull. Past the tall pines and then the stunted ones I picked my way up. On the edge I sat, dangling my legs, the shining scythe that was Terera Lake, and the anthill that was the town below, paled by distance.

I felt my limbs whose strength showed when I wrestled, my hands that were faster than anyone else’s at hot hands and five stones; tightening my arms I took my weight onto them, while a hawk flying far above the green forest below hung tiny as a dust-speck between my feet. I flexed my muscles, which I had always, wrongly, thought were mine. Esora-e was right; he’d only adhered to what I’d already been taught. But my blood-father was right too. Even in the time of our greatest helpless, our path always has a fork.

As always, I would choose; go on with my training, or leap. My life was bound to the semanakraseyesin, and the semanakraseyesin, at least for me, to the sword; but I was not necessarily bound to life—less so, now, than most. I shifted forward a little, so my hips were just on the edge. Had the right wind blown then, my story would have been this short. None did, but for a moment I leaned, and thought I was gone.

There was a rushing like a waterfall through my ears. The ground was suddenly tenuous under me, as if the nothingness beyond its edge somehow made all solids near it dubious. The wind filled with song, the notes of the harmonic singer, one the dark and steady tone like a stone flute’s, the other soaring high and bitter and wild like the wind itself. Bound to one core like those of a jewel, facets of my life flashed in my mind: my turquoise, blue and purple cloak, the height of the mountain racing all through my legs after a fast climb, the oyster of the chicken in honey sauce, Assembly Hall with its sacred solemnity, the thousand fascinations of the marketplace, the wildness of the grown-ups dancing at the love-feast, the swelling of pride as I found I could do something I had not been able to do before. From the green land close to me, all the things and people I knew called me to return to them; from the land blued by distance, all those I did not know yet called me to wait for them, their voice the breath of All-spirit, their collective name Yeola-e. The song ran through my head: “Do we defend it grimly, like a miser his gold? No; stiffness is the way of death. We choose; always, we choose. Do we subsist and grasp? No; for goods are not happiness. We celebrate life, and live a celebration.” Life itself sang to me, roared and turned silvery in my heart, and my tears were like those we weep hearing music too beautiful to bear.

When the wind’s voice faded to a whisper again, I lay flat on the rock and wept. For my blood-father, the first tears I shed that were for his loss, not my own. For myself, fated to lose life too soon. For all people who ever died, whom I imagined in their terrible number, more multifarious than any currently-living crowd could be, doing and using things that were incomprehensible to us now, a thousand peoples who had died as one with their devices and arts and knowledge beyond imagining in the Fire, never properly mourned because not enough were left to mourn them. I wept for the cow slaughtered, the starflower picked. I wept for all that must die: all that lived.

In the story of the Fire as my grandmother had told it to me, power had been in the hands of kings so that people could do little, but everyone had known it was coming. I asked her, “What did they do?”

“No one knows it all, but you can imagine. Some excised any thought of it from their heads and lived as if there were no threat. Some lived like warriors, fast and reckless and with no thought for tomorrow, since there’d be no tomorrow. Some went insane, turning frozen or berserk; some withered inwardly and died in spirit, then in body. Some prepared for it, building strongholds deep in the land, and ended up yearning for it to come just to end their fear. Some debated and protested bravely in the attempt to stop it. Some prayed, and trusted in gods to prevent it. Some resigned themselves to it, and some hoped beyond hope it would not happen.”

“But they all died,” I said. “So, in the end, what they did didn’t matter.”

“No,” she said. “But while they lived, it did.”

I made the first of my personal laws then. I had, I guessed, about half the time I might have otherwise expected, so in that time I should do two times as many things as others, and love people two times as hard, to make up for it. I think of it in the childish wording to this day.

I got up from the edge of the cliff and went back down to the School. The Sword hung black between walls of plain white, unadorned, ungraven. We do not surround our sigil of war with scenes of glorious battles or splendid triumphs, of the nobility of war nor even the drama. The Sword hangs plain, neither celebrated or despised, neither reproaching nor praising, neither dark nor light, but equal parts of each, entwined with and contained by the other. The pain is there, and the joy; the loss and the win. “Never forget what you are doing,” my blood-father had said. He’d never said either, “Do it” or “Don’t do it.” I had not known the dark half; then when I’d learned it, I had forgotten the light. Now I saw both.

I curled my fingers around the grip of the Sword. ‘Esora-e wants me to fight because it’s what he wants,’ I thought, ‘not because he sees this. He doesn’t. Well, I see it, so I’ll fight for it, nothing else, and if he doesn’t like it, too bad, but I bet he won’t notice.’ Once again the Sword rose in my hand, a little bit more easily.

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