20 - Manacles with invisible chains

My advice for anyone very young going up against someone full-grown—aside from the obvious, never, ever, ever even think of doing it if you have the slightest bit of choice—is that you can count on your opponent to think your skill is typical of your age until you prove otherwise, if you can. That’s all I will say.

With the Lakans’ torches gone, there was darkness but for the faint redness of the coals of the fire; even that they’d broken up. The slowing beat of my heart filled my ears; there was breathing full of death-bubbling too, from near the door. As I tried to light a candle, the tinderbox trembled madly in my hands. I felt tired to breaking again, and realized it was fear.

The smell was like that of an abattoir, but with vomit and excrement on top, and burning; hearing crackling on the roof I thought almost lazily, ‘We have to get out of here.’ The candle-flame lengthened and brightened. Rigratora-e and Binchera came into the room, clinging together. All was chaos, cupboards open, chairs smashed, ashes strewn across the floor. I wanted a blade in my hand, and to my surprise, since raiders generally seize up all steel they can find, I found the sword I’d used; they hadn’t wanted to take one that had so much of the blood of their own on it. The bodies by the door lay where they had fallen, each with its seeping blackness: three Lakans, and Bukini.

He was alive, lying on the threshold, clutching his chest with both hands; the bubbling was through the blood, and I knew from my lessons that his lung must be pierced. I’d been taught what to do with someone wounded: get him to safety, stay with and reassure him. Rigra had her hands full with Binchera’s head-wound. “They’ll be here soon, Buk, with a healer,” I said. “Hang on.” I took him under the armpits and dragged him out into the yard, well away from the house. Faintly I saw Osilaha and Naina, lying still, as I passed them; then I didn’t know whether to leave Buk to check them; I was in the situation I’d heard about, where there are more people desperately needing tending than there are people capable of giving it. But Binchera said, “I’ll hold it myself, love, you check them.” On the roof, the flame from two torches came together and roared upwards, stronger.

Bukini’s hand gripped mine, weak as a child’s. “You mad kyashin kid,” he mouthed. “We had saved you. Even if you can fight; why risk? Anaraseye… Why didn’t you run like you’re supposed to?”

“I couldn’t,” I said. I wasn’t about to say, “Your mother was being raped.” The words exhausted him; his breaths were growing slower and weaker with each one. I hadn’t seen this enough yet to know it was futile to hope the healer would get here soon, so I did. He was shivering, and I had nothing to cover him with, and knew I shouldn’t run back into the house for sheepskins. He mouthed, “Mama… grandma?”

“They’ll be all right.” Somehow, he managed a smile. Rigra knelt on his other side, took off the marya to wrap him in it, and lifted his head onto her knee. With one hand she caressed his hair; the other she pressed over his right ear. They whispered to each other, things I heard but will not write, being their business only. He looked at me one last time, and whispered so faintly I had to put my ear almost to his lips, “Chevenga, you’re going to be a great semanakraseye. I wish I could have seen it. Good luck.”

The last breath was long and slow, as it always is, consuming the last strength, and then he sank into that utter stillness that I remembered in my father. She drew her hand away from his ear, stood up and went to Binchera, and they both began keening.

I took up the sword again and stood up, and found myself suddenly dizzy and sick, my head full of a skittery whirring sound, mixed with the growing roar of the fire and the grief-cries. I did unthinkingly what my training had ground into me; took a fast deep hard breath and went into stance. I realized: the whirring was the wings of Shininao, as He took his fill of souls here, three of them my month-kin, and five of them given to Him by me. Flashes of doing it came back to me, including feeling the black joy Esora-e had told me I would feel and I had sworn I would never feel.

I wanted to throw up, but held it down, having been taught that a true warrior can enjoy dinner downwind from yesterday’s battlefield in high summer. The end of the Lakan sword that I held throat-height wavered; I tightened my grip, then loosened it, to no avail. All of me was trembling, worse now; I felt as if I might fall. But warriors stand steady. “I never want to kill anyone,” I had once said. I hadn’t even known what it was like.

We live our first nine moons in a warm enwrapping cave, all our needs granted completely and freely, embraced without end by our mother’s flesh. Then, for all it hurts, for all it dooms us, we are thrust out naked into blinding winter, to face the world with nothing but what is in us, to feel the pain, to undergo the trials, to work for what we once got free, to open our eyes, and know.

I felt that way again. I may be forgiven, I hope, for doing what the newborn baby does. It has its comforts: the memory of the freedom to yell and thrash unfettered by thoughts of danger or pride; the sense that gentle arms will soon enwrap you, a tender breast press to your lips and sweet warm nourishment fill you; the pure pleasure of hurling emotion out of one’s heart, like a singer. I clenched my eyes shut, and so thrust the fire and the smell and the blood and the wings of Shininao away; I threw back my head and poured out my soul up into the night.

So there I was, in fighting stance with a Lakan sword en garde, blood-covered from head to toe except where my tears carved out clear streaks on my cheeks, before a house entirely covered in flames now and its two adult survivors grieving, and bawling for my Mama. Thus the warriors of Krisae found me.

The four remaining Shae-Tyucheral were taken in by kin on another farm near Krisae, and I stayed with them too, but the local watch chief camped fifty full-geared warriors around the house while waiting for word back from Vae Arahi. By the time it came, ordering me home, it would pretty much be time for me to go home anyway.

I thought I’d seen the last of my five Lakans; I found otherwise the morning after. Krisae’s war-teacher, Makahira Anahira, sent for seven other students, all sixteen and newly-wristletted, and me, at dawn. He took us to a small and private courtyard deeper in the school, where we found the five corpses laid out naked.

Some Yeolis, on their deathbeds, will consent to aid healers, or warriors, in their anatomy lessons, by giving their bodies to us to study before going to the pyre. But far from everyone will do it, especially for warriors, so that in times of war—or border raids—we will seize our opportunities. Lakans, Enchians and Arkans alike all call it defilement of the dead; our answer is that the body is nothing once the soul has left it, and they do have the choice to quit attacking us.

Usually people who don’t have their wristlets yet don’t do this. All my anatomy, so far, I’d learned from books, examining, and feeling what can be felt through the skin. Makahira had decided that having killed them made me warrior enough.

Now my stomach and my eyes made their arguments that I was not, nausea and tears hitting me both at once. Makahira just said, “There’s a bucket beyond that door. Go puke, feel good about puking, and come back right away.” I did, and returned with just tears. The other students were confused. “But Chevenga,” one of them said, “you’ve already got the job off to a fine start!”

We examined their wounds first. Makahira had me give my account of what effects the man had showed after each one, as best I'd seen, and then he explained to us why he had. On every one, I had opened either a carotid artery (the one that runs from heart to brain) or a femoral one (heart to leg), vessels which release a fatal amount of blood very fast, which was why they’d all weakened so immediately. “You weren’t just working from your lessons,” Makahira told me. “You are such a natural warrior, you use what you know by feel of yourself, instinctively. In other words, for example, your body knows how much blood goes from your own heart to your own leg, and where it flows, and so your sword-hand, being part of your body, knows to hit an enemy there. Same as your weapon-sense, most people have to train years for this.”

He let me pause in my account whenever my throat closed with weeping, which grew less frequent as we went, but he did not let me stop. At one point he asked me, “Do you understand your own feeling?” and I had to answer with the charcoal-sign. I could not believe I was mourning them, and yet remembering the horror didn’t seem to warrant tears. He said, “We’ll speak later.”

When he started us dissecting, at least it wasn’t just me; two or three of the others had to run for the bucket, too. We spent all day at it; in warm weather, one does not want to work with corpses much longer than that. In time they stopped being people to me, and became only their organs, bones, blood vessels, muscles, which was called what, which was where and connected to what, and what effect it would have if struck.

We bound some of them upright to practice aiming thrusts, dissecting afterwards to see how close we’d come to where we’d intended. We also practiced straight cutting across bone, and I didn’t do so well at that, not yet having grown into my strength; everyone managed to sever a limb in one blow at some point except for me. “Chevenga, you make it easy to forget, but you’re still a child,” he said, as I stood cloaked in self-reproach. “In three years, you’ll do it without trouble; in seven, one-handed. In the meantime... well, I don’t need to tell you to know, and fight within, your limitations; you already do.” I didn’t think of it until years later, but my style of fighting, and in fact of general-craft, with its habit of always throwing my greatest strength against the other’s greatest weakness, grew out of doing so much fighting before I had a man’s muscle.

We cremated what was left of the Lakans in a clearing in the wood outside the village, with a proper ritual. (Makahira had forbidden disrespect towards them, even so much as a smirk, on pain of flogging.) Then we all bathed as we had never bathed in our lives. Watching flames enwreathe bones I found myself weeping again, and Makahira sent the other students all to the far side of the fire.

“Little one.” He drew me into his arms and kissed me on top of the head, as if he were my father. “Precious son, heart’s delight.” Being treated like a small child opened the floodgates entirely; I bawled on his lap as if I were, while he stroked my hair and called me pet names until I was spent. Then he said, “Is it any clearer, what you feel?”

I signed chalk, though I could not put words to it. He did it for me, while in the heart of the fire a glowing skull collapsed into embers, sending up a wave of sparks. “It’s your nature to see things much sooner than you really should, to have a clearer view of the future than most. You are weeping for what this presages, how much more of this there will be in your life.”

†

When I got home I was called in before Assembly, to give my account under oath, which was how an accurate version of it came to spread over Yeola-e. They voted that I should be chastised in a way that my parents saw fit, and they voted me a fairly severe combing. It was Veraha who did it, not Esora-e as usual. “I will not comb my child for a hero’s act,” he said.

Three days later, Azaila called me into the inner chamber of the School of the Sword after training. We knelt facing each other. As usual when he did this, I felt honoured to the point of ill-ease, wondering what I’d done. “From your new knowledge, tell me,” he said. “What do the wristlets signify?”

As always with his questions, there was no easy answer. His pale old green-gold eyes, in the nest of calm wrinkles that was his face, were cool and silent as ponds, no clues to be found there. “Don’t answer what you think I would approve of,” he said, as if reading my mind, as he often did. “Answer what you know in your heart.”

I didn’t answer what I wanted to: the wristlets signify those who didn’t come from Krisae fast enough. Answers I thought he would approve of came to mind, things he’d said himself, quotes from Saint Mother. What, I thought, do I know in my heart? My heart is in mourning. Finally I said, “They signify those who have to use the sword, for the sake of those who can’t.”

“True,” he said. “But is that all you know in your heart?” All-spirit, I thought, must I say the rest of it, to my war-teacher? I had learned from years of such conversations, Azaila never accepted less. I thought of Makahira, and of cutting into a Lakan to more closely examine a cut in him I had already made. “Those who must do terrible things,” I finally answered, my voice coming out weaker than it should. “Things that no one should ever have to do.”

Saint Mother, no, I thought. Let me flee from here, let me keel over and die, rather than let happen what’s happening. I didn’t just know it in my heart, but in my bones, and it was making my eyes fill with tears. I, who was three years away from being a warrior, who’d been driven to the point of fainting, strained to the point of agony, made to taste dust sparring people better than me, left to face my fear alone in darkness, all of it dry-eyed, was weeping, in front of Azaila.

“Good,” he said. “Put out your arms.” While I knelt speechless and frozen, he said the traditional words, “You have chosen to attain this for the people of Yeola-e, and you have attained it,” and drew a pair of wristlets out from his tunic.

Gleaming new, they were wrought of steel ridged in the snake-and-leaf pattern of the School, but with the Shae-Arano-e sigil on them as well. Their leather linings gripped my skin like hands, becoming part of me as he clasped them on my wrists, like anything we wear.

Yet in all their beauty, which part of me saw too large and vivid as through water, they mattered nothing. All my training had led to this day, which I’d thought, as I’d enviously watched sixteen-year-olds receive their wristlets, would be the day of ultimate joy, as perfect as a dream; but it was a day like any other. None of it mattered, I saw, not the portentous words or the banners that usually flew or the symbols on thte wristlets—only the knowledge, which they showed to others I now had, of the terrible things I must do. Wristlets are manacles with invisible chains.

“Oh we’ll do it again,” he was saying. “Your family, the government people, all of Vae Arahi will demand it, so I’ll give them to you again with a proper audience, whenever it’s scheduled. But the real moment needed to be with just the two of us; I think you understand why.” I signed chalk.

Esora-e was waiting outside in the corridor, with Denaina, who also taught at the School. He hoisted me up over his head and carried me that way all the way through the school, laughing and whooping. “Ha-hah! Didn’t I tell you, didn’t I tell everyone? Look, everyone, see my son, the warrior!” I said nothing, thinking You don’t care if people die, as long as I’m the greatest at killing. “Many years ago you chose this,” he said on the way back to the Hearthstone, when I wouldn’t smile with him. “Now you are what you chose. No more, no less. Accept yourself as you are.”

When I went into my room I froze again, mid-step. This is something that is done without ceremonial in the Hearthstone; it was mine to carry now, and so simply ought to be here. Lying on its ebony stand on my plain oak dresser, its impeccable curve as familiar and close as my hand but strange and ancient as the moon, lay Chirel.

I stood staring at it for a long time. So long I yearned for you, I thought. So long I remembered your brightness in my father’s hand, in the cheers and flower-petals and streams of wine. How tiny I was! They said I could not bear you until I knew the price of it; sure enough, now I know it, here you are. The price is using you.

I was not the boy who’d gone up Haranin worried he was a coward; I had taken the stance of receiving a weapon, without thinking. As Esora-e had said, I was what I had chosen. I stood clear in mind and body, in the breath of centuries, hearing the wind and the harmonic singer again. In chambers like this, I saw, perhaps this very one, sometimes, my father and his mother and warriors before them for fifteen centuries stood feeling this too.

The dark leather of the scabbard shone faintly in the light of my lamp. As I took it up in my hands, I felt as well as saw the vastness of the curve, that came from it being the perfect segment of a huge circle. I wondered childishly if it accepted me, then remembered Yeola’s words, this is nothing but a piece of steel, without a living hand wielding it. I took the two ends of the belt to sling it on, and a soft clunk made me flinch right to my innards. The tip of Chirel’s scabbard had struck the floor.

It had come to no harm, I reminded myself. I'd test it much harder, starting tomorrow. But the bitter truth sank in as I tightened the belt around my waist; the tip was still on the floor. All-Spirit, I cried inwardly, my suffering will never end. I was too short to wear it.

I forbade myself to yank on my forelock, and took a deep breath. Tomorrow I must train, and full warriors always bring their family’s own true steel. The general’s tenet came to me: there is always a solution. When I’d taken enough deep breaths to think clearly, I unbuckled it and then buckled it again, over my shoulder.

Of course that doesn’t work with a scabbard made to be hip-slung; unless you have a scabbard that is open for part of its length on the sharp side, you can’t draw from the shoulder. But Azaila would know I’d found the solution. I’d have to put in an order to Aigra Workfast Military for a proper shoulder-scabbard. It also meant I’d have to forget the hip-draw I’d practiced every day for five years and start all over, practicing the shoulder-draw more times than I cared to think about, but there was no way around that.

Eventually, of course, I did grow tall enough to change back. I just never bothered. A draw is a draw, by which I mean, speed of draw comes from practice, not the location of the sword. As well, the shoulder-draw very easily becomes a very powerful down-cut, aided by the pull of the Earthsphere, and two-handed if you want—try bringing the shield-hand into the first move from a hip-draw—and I came to like having the possibility of it as my first stroke. I’ve worn my kraiya on my shoulder ever since.