2 - On the stream-test

[Editor’s note: It is with Chevenga’s permission that we publish his original account of his stream-testing, and defense of the practice.]

You might say my life truly begun on my father's death; but I'll go back to the beginning as most would consider it. I was born on atakina 19, 1547. Two days afterwards, my parents carried me up Hetharin, with the two monks of Senahera to bear witness.

It was a fall day like ones I remember: the land lies sweet as after the act of love, the scent of ripened crops fills the mountain air, and in the sun the lowland trees at the peak of their fall turning seem on fire. Along the path that follows the melt-water stream from Hetharin, that always runs ice-cold from the glacier above, they climbed with me to the naked heights, to where the air carries so little life one must breathe hard to draw it in, and nothing grows but lichen and flowers smaller than a fingernail. It seems a place little worth the climb, until you turn around.

Assembly Palace and the Hearthstone Dependent lie as small as two lidless jewel-boxes, pale and shining in the sun, far below. Vae Arahi is a handful of square stones strewn in a circle, the School of the Sword a gold tinderbox across the way. Beyond the lip of the valley mouth Terera Lake shows plainly its shape, that of a wide scythe, with the city Terera piled about its tip. Only the mountain’s siblings remain large, Haranin across the valley of Vae Arahi, Saherahin to its north, Perin north of Hetharin. Beyond them stand the white-helmeted peaks no one sees who doesn’t make this climb, the shoulders of the nearer ones forest-green, the farther ones deep steel blue, and so on, fading into distance until they drop from the rim of this facet of the Earthsphere. Here one sees, clear as a stroke to the heart, the smallness of oneself alone, and indeed all things human, and the greatness of that which is greater than us, and all things as one.

There is no praying to Gods for athyel. We cannot receive comfort from a voice in the sky. It was for my parents then as it would be for me twenty years later, with my own child. If we yearn to ask the age-old Yeoli question, “Would Yeola have taken me in?” the answer will never come to us on the wind. Unless we feel our worth in our hearts, we are without it.

So it was for my parents, blood and shadow; they must stand aside helpless, the curse and duty of all parents who still do this. My strength unaided would decide it. I had had my fair preparation, a nine-moon stay without cares in my blood-mother’s womb, a birth without trouble and two days of having all four of them doting on me; now I must make good my claim to go on, alone. The Senaheral both placed their feet astride the stream, marking out a length of water, the one with the sand-timer readied to turn it, and they and my parents sang the song. My mother knelt beside it, unwrapped me from my wool blanket and my diaper, and laid me in, and the monk started the sand-timer running.

We are called barbarian for this, often by people who keep slaves and maintain tyrants, who practice human sacrifice or sport-killing, or whose custom is to cut off the tenderest part a girl-child has, thinking that for a woman to have sexual pleasure is evil. Perhaps my reader is of such a people and takes offense; then, like two youngsters caught rolling in the dirt, we must do chiravesa, each try taking the part of the other.

So, I am a Lakan: these Yeolis with their baby-killing, doomed—for what god would take into his hand a people who scorn paying the sacred blood-price, yet freeze to death infants without dedicating so much as a finger-bone to the Divine Ones? Such impiety is what brought down the Fire…

I am an Arkan: without Gods, giving their heirs to the whims of chance, as if chance has better judgment than a good sensible father…! All Yeolis are milksops to their hairy-chested wives, without the testicular fortitude to purify them properly so as to ensure the stability of society and the possibility at least of entry into Celestialis after death…

Having envisioned myself you, if you are Lakan or Arkan, I am in my rights to ask you to return the favour. Having so done we will both see truth: that barbarity is in the heart of the beholder as beauty is in the eye. Who am I to call you barbarian, or you to call me? If there is some race on the Earthsphere perfect by all standards, let them call the rest of us barbarian.

The custom of the stream-test is to be judged by its justice. It is true that many other Yeoli families have given it up, since we increased enough not to interbreed long ago, and life got easier. But I was born to serve my people; should we not take customary pains at least to give them good?

It was just to me too, to whom trials harder than most Yeolis’ likely awaited. If I were too weak, why let my failure or my death wait till I was old enough to understand what failure and death are? This way is quick; the child dies unknowing; the parents are freed to try again and so the demarch can be better assured of worthy heirs.

Most unjust are those who say my parents could not have loved me to have done such a thing. Their hearts lay in the ice-water with me, nameless though I was. I know from standing there myself. It was worst for my blood-mother, since she’d carried me; at one point, I’ve learned, she reached to snatch me out when I looked at her, and my two fathers had to seize her. How else can it be? But they must think of others besides themselves.

I’ve been told I’d think differently if I could remember the sight of them, standing still with calm faces while my flesh shrank and my breathing weakened, while the life in me, so new, first felt itself flagging, and the air shimmered with the steel wings of Shininao, waiting to draw out my soul once it came loose. Perhaps a child is one who has not yet learned to see beyond himself, and so the world was nothing but pain and terror to me then, and forgetting is merciful in leaving me unmarked. As a man, now, I don’t let the thought stain my belief. Besides, I had reason to trust my parents. They had loved me all my life.

These are only words. I would prove more taking my own child there in my arms. As we are grateful so may we be thanked.

In my own turn, as I would so many times later, I fought without speculating. Afterwards they lifted me out limp and blue, warmed me in their arms and their maryal and carried me back down to the Hearthstone. When my heart didn’t cease and I turned from blue back to pink, they voted on my name, sharing one crystal by their hearth, and making the chalk and charcoal hand-signs.

The decision was not unanimous, but three-to-one, and as such votes are secret, I don’t know who the dissenter was. It was a war-like time, with Tor Ench and Laka both threatening us, and they were all four warriors, as my mother had not yet laid down her sword. I guess also they sensed something about me. Only three demarchs have had the name previously, and none since the War of the Travesty, two hundred years ago; it was considered too rife with the sound of war and grandeur, invoking the animal believed, even before the Fire, to be the monarch of animals, and her fighting spirit. It has a tinge of human domination too, being descended in meaning from the name of the king who so expanded Iyesi a millennium ago and whom the Enchians still worship, First Curlion, who was himself named after warrior kings from earlier still. In a more archaic Yeoli, “che” means heart and “i-veng,” lion. Thus I became Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e.

Thus they cast their dice, and, for good or ill, I grew into the cast. I have been everything and nothing, torn down to the blood-drop, raised to the heavens. I am athye but to some have been God, have been guided by Gods and have yearned a thousand times, the Gods know, to have my prayers answered. I have been both the living hand and the dead steel itself, in the hands of my people. I have felt the call both of Curlion and of Saint Mother, and patterned my life accordingly. We seize life and life seizes us, at once, like dancers.

Like all athyel, I had nothing to judge myself by, ultimately, but the heart’s own measure, “Is it kind or cruel?” If you intend to judge me, I beg nothing more than the usual observance of chiravesa. Dead as I am now, I cannot be with you, but I need not; you have my whole life-story in your hands, sworn on the Oath of the Scrivener to be true and complete. You will know me, and so can imagine being me, better by reading this than anyone did, probably, in life, even those closest.