15 - The Boy with Eyes in the Back of his Head

Our custom of the month away, in case you do not know, sends a child, anaraseye or senahera apprentice, to live with a family or workfast other than their own, away from their hometown, to learn how other people live.

All told, I was sent twenty times over five years, starting when I was ten, to serve as the apprentices’ apprentice in one form or another. The joys and the drudgery are to be shared by all, as the saying goes, and Ascendants, since their adulthood is spent in office, have all their drudgery in childhood. No one knew that most of my life would be childhood. But I loved my months away, in truth.

Esora-e wanted my first to be on a border, preferably a border where there might be raids. My aunt and other parents felt otherwise, and sent me to a blacksmith’s in Thara-e. The apprentice’s lot is having to do all the work too simple for his parents; I, being his apprentice, had to do all the work too simple for him.

People at the Hearthstone who, having never done such work in their lives, glorify it, had scared me into worrying that I might not be strong enough. But the bellows-pole moved when I pushed it, like the sword of Saint Mother. On the first day, I carried wood and water and the occasional piece of metal until I felt I would drop, and on the second did the same amount of work and didn’t feel I would drop. I began to learn pride in this sort of endurance, which feels different from that of a warrior. The dark shop with its tools and scraps and half-formed objects hung on the walls or piled on the floor was full of the secrets of how things were made.

I stayed a month at a money-bank in Tinga-e, where my arithmetic was tested all day and forever found too slow. I herded sheep in the foothills of the New Mountains, running barefoot over the limestone-flagged ground until my feet were hard as horn. I served in a shrine once a year, mostly sweeping, sometimes copying books that needed less skill, or standing all afternoon in meditation, watching the carving of a stele.

I was a month on a warship patrolling the coast near the Enchian border, doing all the same drills as the warriors, and rowing with them too. My father had taken a month run on a merchanter as well, all over the Miyatara, but it was decided between my parents, my aunt and my grandmother that that was too dangerous now. There have always been, and will always be, pirates; but these days the ships of Arko, which had long kept the seas mostly clear of such, now and then seized ships themselves, for no reason but to steal everything and everyone on them.

“They’re old for an empire now, and declining, for all they are young for a people,” my grandmother explained. “They always believed right lay with the sword, so now they think it’s their due to be as rich as they can get, no matter how. They can only do that sort of thing so long; it rots a people from the inside, even if they appear outwardly strong, and weakens them, like a tree that you find is hollow when the wind pushes it over.”

Best of all, I was given what every child must yearn for one time or another: a month traveling with the Sinere Circus.

What I did at first, and thought I’d be doing all month, was shoveling up what the horses and lions and monkeys let drop. At least I got to see the show every time. Then I and several of the circus kids, seizing a moment of idleness by hiding from the adults, were playing knife-games, with me teaching them sword-moves, when I told them about my weapon-sense.

“You mean you can tell where a sword or spear is without seeing it?” said the most skeptical of all, the illusionist’s daughter, of course. Proof was in order, so I had them blindfold me and come at me with knives.

“All-Spirit bless us all!” the animal master’s son, the oldest among us, exclaimed, when I’d proved it. I thought he was thinking what most people thought when they saw it: it boded well for Yeola-e’s future. That was one reason I liked to show people. “Chevenga!” he said. “You could do such a great act!” The others all chimed in, signing chalk.

There is an old rumour in parts of southern Yeola-e that All-Seeing Rao, the Boy With Eyes in the Back of His Head, was actually me. I conceal the truth no longer. I would rather have gone by my real name, and without the disguise, but the circus elders would not let me, worried that it would be said that the gravity of my position had been compromised if it came out.

I wore a fire-red wig with ringlets down to my waist—they’d paint my eyebrows red to match—a kilt painted with dragons and flames, and false wristlets, may Esora-e someday forgive me, with gold sequins.

In the act, one of the circus hands would blindfold me, and lead me to the edge of the ring, for people in the first row of the audience to test that I was truly blindfolded. While the ringmaster pattered on about my ability and how it showed up in my family only once every twenty generations and it had been discovered when I caught an arrow in my teeth as a baby, the circus hand would produce a knife, and have me point where it was, follow it with my arm and so forth.

Then, just as the ringmaster was predicting how great a warrior All-seeing Rao would be when he grew up, to all Yeola-e’s benefit, a savage war-cry would come from under the stands. One of the acrobats who was war-trained, costumed in full gear either as an Enchian, Lakan or Arkan, whomever was hated most where we were playing, would come charging out roaring that I must be slain before I could become the scourge of Tor Ench, Laka or Arko.

First he’d throw his spear and I’d dodge it by a hair’s width. Then he’d draw his sword and chase me around the ring until I tripped and sprawled in the dust (usually this would draw screams from the crowd). Ducking, dodging, twisting, staggering up and leaping, I’d avoid all his blows, all the while yelling for someone to throw me a sword, which of course they’d loudly debate, feigning worry that it would kill me if it came point-first, while I loudly reassured them I’d catch it just fine whatever way it came, and I would soon be skewered anyway if they didn’t, so could they please hurry up?

Finally they would, I’d catch it, and then the acrobat and I would go at it stage-style, wide-open and furious and with all sorts of spectacular dives and leaps and somersaults, clashing our swords together hard to make the crowd know they were real steel (though all the edges were blunt). Finally I’d unsword him, which neither he or I really had to fake, and I’d hold my sword to his throat and he’d surrender. Then, with a flourish, I would take off the blindfold, to an invariably deafening roar from the crowd.

The people ate it up. They’d throw me flowers and scarves and ankaryel, so that when I went home I’d be disgracefully rich, and would have to spread it far and wide fast among my friends before my parents found out. The day I had to leave, the chief elder, Aguro Sinere, said, cursing and flinging out his arms as circus people tend to, “Why, oh why, must you be Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e? With the amount of money we’d pay you to stay, we could keep you, if you were anyone else in all Yeola-e!”

When my parents asked me how it had gone and what I had learned, I just said it had gone well and I heard learned much. But I had made one mistake: let the ringmaster tell the crowd the truth of where I was being trained, the School of the Sword. In one town, a general had come to the show, and she sent Azaila a letter commending him for the excellent training of “the boy some eleven or twelve years of age with long flame-red hair, who as a performer with the Sinere Circus demonstrated extraordinary weapon-sense.”

Azaila just thought it was funny, I found out later. My shadow-father called me into his room. “Tell me the person who wrote this letter has her schools mixed up and writes of some other boy,” he said, “and I’ll believe you and never say another word.”

He truly wanted me to do that, I saw. I could not. It didn’t even take any debate within myself. I drew straight and took a deep breath and said, “She doesn’t have her schools mixed up, shadow-father.”

For a little while he sat frozen, the one strand of his peaked forelock that shook when he was angry beginning to. Then he sprang up and seized me by the hair on either side of my face.

“Is this Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e? Is this the child we chose to give such a name, our first, our anaraseye, my heart’s brother’s oldest child who he loved with all his heart until the day he died—did this come from him, and us? This creature of wood, who appreciates nothing given to him, to whom the feelings of others are nothing, whose deviousness for new ways to spit on everything and everyone that made him knows no bounds?”

After a lot of thought in my youth, I eventually came to understand Esora-e. He believed the path to something great was long and therefore must necessarily be narrow. That was how he had been raised, and he was trying to form me into something greater than himself, so my path should be even narrower than his had been, he felt. I also know that he felt any lightheartedness about warriorhood was mockery and therefore contempt for it.

Part of me wanted to weep; another part wanted to passionately argue my case as if in front of a judge, “Who have I harmed?” But most of me, I found, was angry.

From somewhere in me came a courage that I had grown into without knowing it. Perhaps it was from being Rao, who had no duties, no lessons, no foreknowledge. I fixed my glare on Esora-e like a warrior and said, “Let go.” He did, and stepped back, drawing breath to speak. I drew my father’s ivory comb out of my belt to tidy my hair where he’d mussed it, looking at him pointedly; let that remind him whose child I was. Then it was as if he and I both realized at once what I’d done, and stood together absolutely still, even our breaths frozen in our lungs.

Then his face went inhuman with rage, my whole world was for a moment nothing but fast movement and pain and his strength, and next thing I knew the stone of the hearth was pressing into my cheekbone and eyebrow, his one hand like steel clamped on the back of my neck and the other pinning my wrist behind my back. I tried to move, and he gave the wrist a slight twist, sending pain in streaks through my shoulder. “Lie still and make no sound, Fourth Chevenga,” he said, in a quivering whisper. “I’m afraid what I might do if you make me angrier.” I obeyed.

The anger and fear were all gone, snuffed like a candle, in the knowledge of what I had done. He was my shadow-father and had been my war-teacher, and I was all of twelve, but when I’d commanded, he’d obeyed. For one unthinking moment I’d had him in my hand as a commander has a warrior who has relinquished his will.

No wonder he’s so angry, I thought. There was silence, but for his ragged breathing and a hiss out of the fire. He took a long slow breath, and shifted his hands without loosening them. For a time there were only the fire-sounds again, and I watched the flames dance over the coals sideways, and even found my mind wandering, to a point of law I was studying, a shirt I’d seen in the market, where Mana and Krero might be right now. It was one of those times when the person who can do something doesn’t quite know what to do, and the person who can’t just has to wait. Finally, suddenly, he let go. On the floor lay the comb; I slipped it into my belt again.

“I hope I didn’t hurt you,” he said briskly.

“No, you didn’t, shadow-father.” I wouldn’t have admitted it if he had.

“Good.” Then began the harangue.

I won’t detail it. My anger came roaring back, drawing me into the debate I hadn’t intended to have with him. I called him a tyrant; he said my father would have been angry, I said he’d have laughed, and then we were arguing over who had known him better. I haven’t the stomach to write it out. There’s yet another disadvantage of being dead; anyone can say what they like about what you would have thought, and you aren’t there to set it straight. I hate to imagine what words will be put in my mouth when I’m gone.

Finally he said, “Enough,” seized my wrist and drew his own comb. “You don’t need to hold me,” I said. He let go, testing my word. I found it easier than I’d thought I would, not to whip my hand out of the way, even though the edges of some of the tines, on the fifth or sixth stroke, drew blood, at which he stopped. He held out his hand for me to kiss in gratitude, which I did, and sent me out.

There was a niche between my bed and the corner of my room, which I liked to curl up into when I needed to comfort myself. I drew the shutters this time.

It’s like when we voted on Veraha, I thought: it’s the power of the law unwritten in me. More words of my father’s came back. “Never seek it,” he’d said, “for that is the way of Notyere. Yet don’t fear it in yourself either, for there’s no good in that. Don’t think how to use it before it comes, however good your cause, for that is seeking it. Only see it, and use it for the good of Yeola-e.” At the time, I’d understood perhaps one word in ten. Now I understood it all.