6 - Tennunga's assassination in context

I cannot remember meeting Mana-lai Chereda; he seemed born my friend, since we’d been born thirteen days apart and our parents had put us together as babies. When I was seven, he, Nyera Harayel, Krero Saranyera, Sachara Shae-Shaila and I were a tight clique. Loosed at the end of one day in the spring of that year, we five and Artira, the one sib of mine big enough to join us, ran up to our secret fortress on the mountain.

A pall had fallen over my family in the past two days. My mother, as I knew by eavesdropping, had been struck with a terrible foreboding. It is the nature of her gift that she often feels this without knowing why; her child dying in the stream she’d guessed by the timing of the feeling. Now no stream-tests were imminent, no one was ill, the country was not at war, so she could not know what was coming, whether earthquake or accident or something else, only that it would come without any other warning.

The only measures that brought her any relief were forbidding us all to do anything risky, and carrying a knife, so that whenever she hugged me I felt it, that little sliver like fear in the midst of her love, its hilt, ready to hand, like a knot against my ribs. It was only on the condition that we climb no rocks or trees that she let us go up the mountain. Seeing her face, I swore on my crystal for all of us. She was wearing her white linen tunic with the tricolor border that day, turquoise, deep leaf green and orange twined in vines. I remember it like yesterday.

It was the sort of spring day where the scent in the air signals the coming of summer, calling children outdoors as strongly as musk calls the deer. The streams suddenly run wild and muddy, the air carries sound again, and on every hillock and bank life unfurls in a thousand shapes and colours under the bright sun. The world is set free once more, and no one feels freer than the young. But when we were about halfway up, and I had long forgotten that there could be darkness or danger in the world, we heard hooves thumping on the path behind us, and our names shouted through the trees.

It was my shadow-mother. She was in full armour, and on her face was what I knew right away was the look of the battlefield, though I’d never seen it before. She snatched up Artira and me, commanded the others to run straight back to the Hearthstone, hiding if they heard anyone in the woods, and spurred her horse to a gallop down the mountain while we clung.

The courtyard was in turmoil, people running around with weapons as if the Enchians were storming the Hearthstone, others screaming the names of their kin, others just standing dazed, or gripping each other by the shoulders. My shadow-mother put us down and galloped out again. Artira began to cry, and I consoled her, kissing her hair, which was my father’s gold spun finer, though I felt like crying myself. All I could think of was that whatever Mama had feared had happened.

My shadow-father Esora-e came staggering through the gate, unarmoured but armed. He had dirt in his black hair, and more caked in a crust on his face and moustache, except where tears had washed clean trails through it. “All-Spirit, you have no mercy!” he howled, and flung his sword, that had been in his family for three centuries, down on the flagstones with a clash. That started everyone else yelling, and Artira clung harder to me. Then he saw us, and weeping to All-Spirit-in-Him to give him guidance, he came to us.

I think he decided Artira was too young to understand, because he left her in the care of my aunt Minina, while he picked me up in trembling arms, and carried me up to their room. We sat by the window which overlooks the first gentle slope of Hetharin. I can see now why he told me then, if I imagine myself him looking into those eyes, Karani’s eyes, Tennunga’s too, and yet with that part that is from none of us. He had to tell me. I’d always wanted to know everything that was happening around me as soon as I could.

That morning I had put a fistful of yellow lupines in my vase, and the room was full of their fragrance. To this day I never have lupines in a vase near me. Smelling them indoors brings that day back to me, in full, unfailingly.

"Chevenga," he said, “Your blood-father is dead.”

There is a moment of numbness that comes right after the worst news, I have learned. You might think ‘Oh’ and nothing else, or else see the outward significances of the event without emotion; it occurred to me, for instance, that now I would become semanakraseye as soon as I was twenty. I felt suddenly older and more grown up, a feeling such as the steel man of the ancient legends must have had when he first saw the missiles of his enemies bounce off his naked chest—but cold, like donning armour without ever having seen a battle.

Yet while Esora-e told me what had happened, I wondered such things as why Daddy himself wasn’t, since he’d been there and therefore could tell it best. Knowledge has layers; I knew, for instance, what a butterfly cut was from seeing it done on the ground, and I could imitate the motion using a stick for a sword. But I did not know how to do it. In the same sense, I knew my father was dead, and yet he was a great warrior, and young; immortal, in other words. He would always be with me, strong and wise and golden-haired; whatever they’ve always had, and needed, seems eternal to children.

“A heart-stab,” Esora-e was saying. “The quickest, easiest way… he’d hardly have felt anything, he wouldn’t have had time. One stroke, aiming’s easy from behind where he can take his time… one of those little Enchian blades, made just for that… they make them by the thousands there. Experts they are, masters! They couldn’t kill him any other way.”

My shadow-father raised his hands and cursed all dark-work, calling on Saint Mother, All-Spirit, my father’s soul, and Shininao, in whose beak he was now clutched, to loose their ill-wish on every murderer, until words failed him and he laid his head down on the window-ledge and howled as I had never seen an adult do. Though I was weeping myself, I put my arms around him and kissed his soiled hair, to comfort him; I remember I got grit in my teeth. Panting, he sprang up and grasped my hand, and led me at run down to the courtyard. “I wish we could spare you this, Chevenga,” he said hoarsely as we went. “But an Enchian backstabber decided otherwise.” By the south wall of the courtyard there was a linden tree, in the shade of which we would customarily lay our dead.

The silence reminded me of when he’d been underwater, last year. But this did not end. Servants of Assembly just out of session and staff who had been working late still wore their white-bordered kerchiefs; the masons who had been repairing the portico rail stood with their hands empty, tools strewn at their feet. The warriors returned one by one, clasping forelocks. All the cooks stood in a row, some of their hands spotted with bits of vegetable. No one wept; this was still shock, not yet sunk into belief.

The rest of that day, how I went to his corpse thinking he wasn't dead, put my hand in his blood, and saw my own corpse through my mother's hand, though I didn't know it until later in her room when I looked into her mirrror, you know already.