5 - The War of the Travesty

“In the old days,” my father told me, “demarchs could do what they liked, at least much more so than now. You always had to do as the people voted, but you could own money, or marry whom you pleased without Assembly approval, or initiate legislation yourself. No one questioned that the semanakraseye would obey the vote, because they always had.”

He shifted the long iron thing in the fire again, as if he was checking it for something. It was in some way familiar, I realized.

“But when we took up the sword, everything changed. Imagine, Chevenga, what would happen if the Enchians attacked us again, and it was not me who must decide what to do, but Assembly. They’d make a good plan, well thought out, yes? But we’d be in pieces before a tenth of it was ready. A decision from the many is most just, but from the few is…?”

“Quickest.” I knew from my little brothers and sisters; if I wanted to do effective mischief with their help, I’d learned, I had to take charge.

“Yes. That’s why we relinquish our wills to our commanders in war. And so, because the people would trust only the semanakraseye with such power, it fell to us to command. Thus we became warriors.

“So, one must be the people-wills-one, subject to all due process, but First General First as well, giving orders while others relinquish their wills to you. Years of this, and one can come to think enough of oneself that a semanakraseye’s constraints can feel…” He made the sign of being in chains.

He shifted the thing in the fire again, and I knew as surely as if he’d said it that he’d felt this way himself.

“War is a strain on the customs of the peaceful, you’ll see. Go fetch me a bowl of cool water, a linen cloth, a towel and the aloe salve on Mama’s night-table, please and thank you.”

“A long time ago, about ten generations,” he said when I’d come back with the things, “there was a semanakraseye by the name of First Notyere Shae-Arano-e. He was a great warrior and commander, and Yeola-e held off the strongest enemies during his term. But in peacetime he began to feel his leash too short. Forgetting all that he had been taught, and losing sight of All-Spirit and its meaning to a semanakraseye, he tried to free himself of it.

“His friends came to be only those who’d do what he said even if they doubted its rightness. He feasted and gave them gifts paid for with the people’s taxes—the semanakraseye could take freely out of the treasury then—wore fine clothes and jewels, and made himself as rich as any foreign king except perhaps the Imperator of Arko.

“Next he started forgetting small duties, or slightly overstepping, and those who protested he’d persuade it had been necessary, or buy off, or distract with fear-mongering talk of enemies all around, or subtly threaten. People grumbled, but forbore. Then a Servant of Assembly who often opposed him was found guilty of vandalism, and hence had to resign her position. When a similar thing happened to another detractor of Notyere’s, people grew suspicious. When enough proof was found to suspect, albeit not to charge, they began a petition to impeach him.

“From then, he took his own part in Assembly fairly openly, which, as you know, is not done. Then, seeing true danger, he hired and set loose dark-workers. The petitioners would find their papers missing or their horses stolen or a town claiming they’d already come through. Lies were spread, people even got beaten; but in the end there was a referendum, and it went strongly for impeachment.

“And everyone waited for him to stand up in Assembly as is required, say ‘The people wills,’ and step down. They couldn’t imagine otherwise; they were Yeolis. To them, anything else would be like being stabbed in the heart from within the heart. How is that possible?

“He’d had people ready, armed. He announced that he was falsely condemned and fraudulently impeached, so that justice left him no choice but to retain his position. When the Keeper of the Arch-Crystal tried to take it from him, he struck her with his wristlet.

“Do you know the notches on the doorpost of the School of the Sword, the ones that are framed? Notyere tried to take it, one of the first things; he knew the war-teachers were against him, and wanted them out of the way fast. By killing them, yes… Merasha Kaili, the war-master then, said to him, ‘A heroic last stand you want from us, Notyere, no surrender, so you can kill us without shame—well, you’ll have it, but you are our students, who held the Sword as children while we watched. We could never harm you.’ They all left their swords on their hooks and took up staves, except one who carried the Sword of Saint Mother flat on the backs of her hands, and fought their way out without spilling a drop of blood.

“Now Notyere’s sister Denaina—yes, your shadow-mother is named after her—who should have become semanakraseye on her brother’s impeachment, had slipped out a window. In Terera, she called out the people to right this travesty, which is how the war got its name. They surrounded her, linked arms and threatened a common criminal charge on anyone who tried to break through. No one dared try. But the war had begun, and these very corridors where you play naked saw Yeoli kill Yeoli.” He made the gesture of protection around us both.

My father looked into the fire, then with the cloth carefully washed a spot on his chest, next to the brand-scar he’d had as far back as I could remember, and toweled it dry thoroughly. Some final rite remained.

I tried to imagine people making war-cries and shouting death-threats to each other in the offices where I now pestered the staff, drawing Yeoli blades on each other beside these hearths and lintels whose running patterns I knew by heart, cutting each other near my grandmother’s mementos. I couldn’t. No sword-marks mar the posts of the Hearthstone Dependent; in this place where children are raised, they’d been effaced the moment there was peace.

“The war really only lasted six days. Notyere guessed wrongly that the warriors who had served under him would follow him to the extent of wading in the blood of their own. Most turned at the start, shocked and enraged. All-Spirit working in us wards off mindless loyalty and blind obedience… in the end Denaina took office, and Notyere was charged. He and all those who had been loyal to him were sentenced to exile without safe conduct.

“You know how it is, we do not believe in execution as a punishment; but what exile without safe conduct means is that a person ceases to be a Yeoli the moment he’s sentenced and is not protected on the way to the border, and so the usual legal constraints on killing him no longer apply.

“Outside the court waited those whose kin he had caused to die. Though Denaina herself came out with her arms around him, and pleaded with them to stay true to the gentle ways they had preserved at such cost by forgiving, they took him from her and killed him right on the courthouse steps.

“So ended the life of the semanakraseye who would be king. But the mind of the people was not at ease. If it could happen once, why not again? ‘What will bring the second Fire,’ they were thinking, ‘is not weapons or knowledge, but choices made in error…’ How to forestall temptation?

“What is found wanting must change. So the laws on the semanakraseye were very much tightened, and hold the same today. That’s why I, and you in your turn, Chevenga, cannot own any property, why we must beg so many things, why we cannot even openly suggest laws, why there are acts for which we would be impeached without petition, and so on.

“But not even then was the national mind at ease. Denaina did a seven-day abstinence, and when she returned among the people she understood at once. Power had corrupted Notyere, and they’d had to leave her some; she was still First General First, could still command the warriors who relinquished their will.

“So she said to those who filled Terera Square, ‘My people, I fear that what every semanakraseye since the first has feared would happen, has happened. You no longer trust me, because of my position.’ Some said chalk in agreement and others said charcoal, and so she said, ‘Even that is too many. All-Spirit must be that—all the people of Yeola-e—else it is nothing. Ask me, my people, to do that which is most hard to do, and I will do it or die trying; thus I will prove to you that I am no more and no less than your people-wills-one.’

“An uproar of debate filled the square. Because the hardest thing to do is die, of course, but they didn’t want to do that in case she succeeded, in which case they’d have lost a semanakraseye who had proven herself trustworthy. ‘If there were some way of dying without dying,’ they told her, ‘we would ask that of you.’

“So she thought for a moment, then said, ‘Call my name three times, with all the yearning for reassurance that is in you.’ They did, and she walked into the Lake and did what I did today.

“That they accepted as proof, but Denaina felt it needed renewing, so four years later she did it again. So it became custom—but it has never been law. It has never been required of us. The secret of the Kiss of the Lake, Chevenga, is not that we do it, hard though it is. Its power is that we do it by choice, that we are willing. It seems like law, by the way they call, but it’s nowhere on the books. Our love for the people alone binds us to it.

“I chose to let them command me. You may decide otherwise, that it’s too much, and they might impeach you; but they’d have to go through all the usual trouble. As always, you choose.”

That, I thought, is true giving. I understood why I’d felt what I’d felt when he’d knelt after the third call. I felt it again, something vast inside, and faintly ringing, like the harmonic singer’s voice or a deep whispered wind as if a mountain could breathe. ‘Yes, I will do it,’ I thought. ‘I want to be semanakraseye, and nothing else.’

Just about then my mother came into the room, and sat behind him. My father pulled the iron thing slightly out of the coals, and I saw its end, a symbol, glowing no less bright. I suddenly knew where I’d seen it before: on my grandmother’s mantelpiece, next to the comb. The symbol was the same hermaphroditic twined halves as they both had on their chests, her three times, him just once. I had never put those two things together in my mind. Perhaps I thought of the marks as something both of them had been born with; everything a child comes into seeing seems permanent. “We chose it all,” he said, grasping the iron firmly in two hands, tapping it against the andirons to knock off any ash, and turning the glowing end inward, fast.

Something made me look at his face as he did it. A sheen and then beads of sweat formed fast on his brow; but otherwise it was as if he was feeling nothing, his eyes and lips keeping that same soft calm. Anyone but him who claims credit for teaching me to bear pain does so in error.

To me it seemed to last a lifetime; hearing the sizzle and smelling his seared flesh made me think that must be what the Athyel of Iyesi must have smelled all too much on those nine days. Then just as suddenly his hands drew it away and placed it carefully down. He took a deep breath, and then leaned back against my mother, closing his eyes, and let us take care of him, his day’s work done.