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.