4 - The Kiss of the Lake

I was three when the last Enchian war ended. At five, I got to see the first foreigners I’d ever seen, a party of Enchian envoys visiting Assembly Palace. The straight hair I’d been expecting, as I knew Enchians mostly had it, but it was still amazing, hanging straight from their brows or the crowns of their heads like brown or ash-blond waterfalls. They’d move and their sheets of hair would swing like a curtain, the ends cut in lines as perfect as a curtain-hem. They wore collars that looked like they must be strangling, jewelry that had metal everywhere, glistening in the light from the skylights and chandeliers, and were wrapped in the furs of animals too small to eat. They were all men, which made me ask if there was such a thing as women in Tor Ench, setting my grandmother to laughing.

“You’ve heard they carry hidden arms?” my grandmother said, when I asked her about the little knives they all had in their sleeves, tiny straight blades with a tang of fearful bile in them, to my perception. “Your father permits it; that’s his way, to call to their honour by trusting them.” Pride thrilled through me; knowing fear, children love courage.

Growing up in the Hearthstone and Assembly Palace, I soaked in politics along with the smells of stone and papers and book-lined offices, just as a farm child soaks in weather and soil, and a weaver’s child, warp and woof. It was at six that I first became truly aware of it.

That year there was a referendum over whether to answer Lakan raids with full-on war, as they’d become so frequent. The people living there and the nationalists argued hard for chalk, naturally. One person I will not name even cited the old augury that in this century Yeola-e would break our custom of warring only to our borders or a little beyond to make up for what we’ve lost, and conquer a great nation.

When my father’s time came to speak (the semanakraseye presides in Assembly, but can take the speaking crystal him or herself only on the request of a Servant of Assembly) he spoke eloquently against anything more than equal raids, and in the end the vote went solidly charcoal. But he had to say it to the faces of the bereaved and the raped and the ruined, in the Assembly chamber gallery.

I remember asking him once about the scar that split one of his pale thick eyebrows into a fork at the end. “Someone who disagreed with my stand on something threw a rock at me a while ago,” he said. “Sometimes they forget what’s right and will hurt you for doing it.”

I learned multiplication from my grandmother the year the city of Asinanai voted to renovate its great common baths. The city council asked to allocate five-hundred ankaryel and the vote went seven-in-ten chalk, so they got three-hundred and fifty for it. I still think of the number sometimes when I step into a common bath.

I took a dutiful but distant interest. Some day, I knew, I would be semanakraseye; I would grow into it as I grew into size, in some mysterious way become filled with the sacredness I saw in my father, and all Yeola-e would love me as they did him. In the meantime, there were trees to climb, friends to wrestle with, games to play. With my present sweet and my future set, I couldn’t imagine a happier life.

Of course children are spared the harsh details. The year I was six my father did his second Kiss of the Lake.

My grandmother took me into her room to get ready. Her name, in case you don't know, is Second Naingini Shae-Arano-e, and she had been semanakraseye for thirty-nine years before retiring to give it to my father. Many still called her Nainginin, Naingini who is a mountain, making me hope that would happen with me, too.

In all that time she’d acquired many mementos, mostly gifts from envoys: a jade horse and rider from some place up the Brezhan, a gilded Arkan pen with the ink contained in its shaft, a blue feather half a man-height tall from some impossible Srian bird, a samovar from Brahvniki, a low-relief portrait of some king in alabaster. Central on her mantelpiece, on a special stand, stood the comb that had been her national retirement gift. It was made of ebony polished as smooth as glass in the shape of a tulip, and had a mother-of-pearl inlay of the Hermaphrodite, with a diamond in one of his/her eyes standing for chalk, and a black sapphire in the other for charcoal.

Up until then, I’d have given up food for a day just to touch it. That morning she casually took it off its stand and used it to comb my hair.

In the courtyard, everyone was gleaming, ringlets combed to brilliance, kilts and cloaks without a wrinkle. When my father came out, wearing a white robe and carrying the national Speaker's Crystal, everyone went silent.

When I was growing up I’d often search in my mother’s Arkan-glass mirror for his likeness, squinting sometimes to fill it in with the brush of imagination. My chin and cheekbones would eventually sharpen into similar lines, and—to my everlasting amazement, since in my inward eye his head keeps company with the mountaintops—I’d grow as tall as he was. But never did my nose come to equal his in its length and grace, and the dyes were all wrong; his hair was white-gold, the curls standing up around his head like the sun’s aureole, while mine is my mother’s black.

Now something made me look at his sword-hand, and I saw the semanakraseyeni signet was gone from his finger, leaving a pale band on the skin. I couldn’t imagine he’d been impeached, so this had to be some aspect of the rite. His hazel eyes were very still, reminding me of the ancient meditating demarchs carven in stone; but his body seemed to sing with an invisible brightness. He greeted no one and everyone stood off from him, even my other parents; making him a stranger was somehow part of the rite too.

Terera Square was jammed, every near roof fringed with people, overloaded boats nudging each other in the harbour. On the pier stood five senaheral in full scarlet robes, with things ranged out so neatly they had to be ceremonial: a spear, an unlit fire-dish on a tripod, and other things I couldn’t name. One of the monks began to sing, and everyone quieted. His voice thinned, and a second note somehow formed out of the first, soaring upward from pitch to pitch like a bird on mountain wind. He was a harmonic singer, trained to sing with two voices. I can’t remember hearing it for the first time; it is and always will be, for me, the sound of sacredness.

He stopped singing and another monk began declaiming in archaic Yeoli; not understanding, I listened to people whispering around me. “The second time is always the hardest,” someone said. “Because he knows what it will feel like.” What what would feel like? My father stepped forward, naked now; the monk raised his arms and said, “People of Yeola-e, call him out!”

My memories of his victory-parade after the war were fading, like an old dream, but I could still remember the ecstatic chanting of his name, the flower-petals filling the air, the streams of wine, the love glowing all around. This will be like that, I thought; we’ll yell his name and maybe there’ll be some boring ceremony to satisfy the monks and then everyone will break out the flasks and stop looking so sombre. So I called him that way, saying “Daddy” instead of “Tennunga,” of course.

But thirty-thousand other voices all roared out not in adoration, but in demand. Stunned, I looked across the square. It’s three times they call, of course, and for the second and third, the faces were faces no longer but stone masks carven hard and merciless; the raised fists were weapons. These were not the Yeolis I knew, but strangers possessed, not even with anger but with power, power above all feeling, above all forgiving, high and untouchable and immovable, taking every abasement as its unquestioned due. It was as if All-Spirit itself had turned against him, and was demanding some final reckoning.

I was suddenly dizzy, tears in my eyes, black rage in my heart, my legs like water as I imagined myself him. How could they so abuse him, after all he had done for them? He was semanakraseye! I grabbed my grandmother’s leg and took in a deep breath to let out a howl, and she cuffed me on the ear with the back of her hand, just hard enough to hurt a little. “Chevenga, you’re just watching it; pay attention to him, who’s doing it.”

My father stood still and alone, like a candle flame. The roaring cry that washed over the square and shook my very bones didn’t cow him at all, but seemed instead to enter and fill him, somehow fueling his shining brighter still. After the third call he went to his knees, his hand on his heart, but it wasn’t stiffly or hesitantly as if against his will, but like water, with the grace of complete consent, a submission that was pride itself. “All is as it should be,” that motion said. Every bad feeling in me snuffed out instantly. I felt touched to my very core with something more huge than all the mountains in Yeola-e, that I could not name.

He turned and stepped down the steps from the dais into the lake. The red-clad monks followed him, with the spear and a lit torch and the fire-dish, the eldest of them carrying nothing; I know now, of course, she was the Ritual Monk. When he was standing in waist-deep water, they set the fire-dish on its stand in the water before him and a little to his sword-side.

As they all placed themselves I saw him look down into the water. Now I know what he was about to do, I wonder what he saw there. The shimmering leather-and-steel wings of Shininao? A wall of blackness that he must walk through? Or, like me, a gate that he must force open, beyond which lay the bright days of his next four years of office? I never had a chance to ask him.

He knelt so the ripples lapped over his shoulders. A monk planted the butt of the spear in the mud to his shield-side, and he curled his shield-arm hard around its shaft. The fire-dish had a spar with a raised crook like a sling, I noticed, as he laid his sword-hand wrist in it. He tested his grip on the spear, shifted and set himself like a runner at the starting line. A monk put the flaming torch into his sword-hand, so it was above the fire-dish. Standing behind him, the Ritual Monk put her hands on his shoulders, then threw them upwards, symbolizing that he was free. The crowd drew its breath.

It’s always your inclination, to take in as big a lungful of air as you can, as if you were diving; but if you forbear, it’s over sooner. I did; I couldn’t help it. A pause came, in which he knelt still as stone; then he bowed his bright head into the water.

I held my breath, as everyone did, and imagined myself him, seeing the little stones in the brown mud, feeling the chill water all around me and the wood of the spear-shaft on my arm. When my lungs were straining more than I could bear, I took several long sweet breaths, and noticed others around me doing the same. He stayed under; in fact he lowered his grip on the spear to draw himself a little further down. Somehow it was that motion that made me begin to understand what they had asked him to do.

I watched with the horror of the helpless. The monk who held the spear had pushed his robe back from his arms, and they were very well-muscled, but still it began to twitch and tremble in his hands like a living thing. From a distance, it seemed, I heard my grandmother whisper, “Strength, my child, calm, my child, let it go, give in, let it go…” The people watched his throes in expectant quiet; he’d die in the cold and silence of the lake, alone among enemies. The Ritual Monk put one hand down into the water next to his head, which was muddy now over his golden locks from his struggle. For the first time in my life I heard a humming, like tiny wings, and realized it was Shininao, hovering near.

What must come came. He went still, and all the world did. His fingers going lax let the torch fall into the fire-dish, and a huge gout of flame leaped up. Now the crowd roared in triumph; now the wine and flowers came out; now, having rewarded his generosity with death, they chanted his name.

I felt tears coming, but swallowed them, remembering how he’d taken this; I wouldn’t dishonour his memory with a child’s weeping. Let them do with me what they will, I thought, shame me, drown me, whatever they want; I’ll be stone, and let them touch me as much as he did; I cared not a speck of kyash for them. My grandmother peered at me for a bit, but said nothing.

From the water they lifted a dead weight, hanging limp in their hands as they carried it back to the dais. His long arms trailed; his water-darkened hair lay pasted across his empty face. A knot of people gathered around, hiding him from me, one man kneeling fast. The crowd quieted again; then I heard a gasping cough and several quick tearing breaths with a shred of his voice in them. Shortly he was up, hands steadying him, his face flushed dark; then he grinned and waved, the signet back on his finger, and the cheering tripled.

I stood frozen, light and dark alternating in my eyes, shaking all over, not knowing what I felt, except that Shininao’s wings still hummed in my ears. The rejoicing was a thousand days journey distant; it seemed like a jest in the worst taste. Even his grin was wrong; what I wanted more than anything, I realized, was to be far away from here, hidden away in a dark and quiet place. I managed to slip away in the ruckus and pick my way out of the crowd. I ran full-tilt all the way home and hid on the top shelf of my mother’s wardrobe.

I crouched there unmoved as they called me through all the rooms and the corridors and then outside on the mountain, saying, “Chevenga! We are worried about you! We don’t know that you’re all right! Come out and let us know!” I didn’t see why I should care, or want to be with anyone. They found me, finally, by ripping apart the room. My shadow-father had his comb out and my wrist in his hand to give me the comb across my palm when my blood-father came in from the semanakraseye’s customary meditation on the mountain.

“We can’t punish him for doing something before we know why he did it,” he said. His voice had an unearthly calm. He beckoned me to sit with him, next to the fire, not looking back to see if I’d obey.

Something in me had died, it seemed. I always wanted to be near him, but now I didn’t; I wanted no one, my heart turned into a stone. Of course I obeyed anyway, though I didn’t go in under his arm when he opened it to me, but sat on the hearth not touching or looking at him. His warmth somehow seemed icy, deadly.

“You thought they were killing me, and that made you angry at them,” he said gently. “Then you saw you’d been fooled, and that made you angry at me as well.”

I stared at him, wondering how he could read my mind. Named, the feeling came roaring up, and he pulled me onto his lap as I began letting it out. “I thought you were drowning!” I screamed, battering his shoulders with my fists. “I thought you were dead!” He wrapped his big arms tenderly around me, making me feel shielded as always, and reminding me of what I thought I’d lost. I bawled wordlessly then, seizing two fistfuls of his hair in my fists and burying my face in his neck. “Shh shh, my child,” he whispered, “it’s all right, I’m here, I’m with you, I’m not dead… do I seem dead to you?”

What I knew in the depths of me, I don’t know. I recall not thinking I knew anything. But many times, on hindsight, I’ve recognized the sharpening of an emotion by foreknowledge. This one had the feel.

“You probably aren’t keen on the idea of doing it yourself,” he said, when I’d gone on long enough to wash it out and gain some calm. He wiped my tears away with a hard-skinned hand.

I remembered the stone-cruel faces. “If they want me dead, even a little bit,” I said, “why should I work for them?”

I know now how much he wanted me to have the life that meant so much to him. But he showed nothing. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to. Nothing’s graven in stone yet. All it would take is for me to recommend against your being approved and you never would be. Do you want me to do that?”

I’d sent it out in anger; now seeing the reality held before me made me look a little deeper into my heart. I’d never lived for anything else, and could imagine nothing else; without it I’d be nothing. As well I suddenly remembered the flawless grace of his giving, and how it had called to something very deep and huge in me. That’s being semanakraseye, I thought. That’s what it means. I signed charcoal.

On the hearth on the other side of him lay a long iron rod whose end disappeared into the orange coals of the fire. He must have put it in while I was having my tantrum. He studied and shifted it slightly.

“Whatever your tutors say when you throw snowballs at them, there’s a semanakraseye in there somewhere,” he said. “I’ll explain it all to you. There’s a story… do you need to visit the privy first? No? You’re sure, Chevenga? All right.”