22 - Given their lives, and the Circle School

It had bothered me, right after I’d got my wristlets, that everyone greeted me with celebratory smiles and congratulations. Didn’t they notice I was wearing a black ribbon tied around my head?

“You lived with the Shae-Tyucheral, broke bread with them, hugged them, and if I know you, had a roll in the grass with at least one of them,” my mother said, when I complained about it to her. “No one here knows them at all, so it’s natural they won’t share your grief... Ah, my child.” Her words had brought the joy I’d shared with Naina back so vividly the tears came instantly and hard.

Of course you run over a night like that in your mind a thousand times, making it go differently, as if it could. If I’d borrowed one of their swords… if I’d gone straight out the window as I should have… if I’d run around the front and taken them from behind… I must have come up with a hundred different versions. My shadow-mother sat with me one night when I felt I might not sleep. She seemed to read my mind. “There’s a saying you need to learn, love, even though you’ve heard it many times I’m sure. ‘The stroke of the past is in the past.’ You can’t go back and change it. You have to just go on.”

So I mourned, but there was more to it than that, something bothering me that I couldn’t chase down at first, so that it went on no less intense after the first blackness of mourning had eased to an easier gray. What stayed emblazoned on my mind was the words of one who had survived: Binchera, whose head-wound healed clean, if slowly. (I’ve stayed in touch with them in writing ever since, and visited a time or two.) “They’ve given their lives, all three, to make you this chance!”

I could tell myself that we were surrounded and so would have had to fight our way out anyway, or that if we had broken out and fled the Lakans might have killed some or all of us anyway. But it didn’t wash. What the three had done was throw open the door and attack, so the Lakans would all go around to the front. That I hadn’t run as I’d supposed to had turned out for the best in the end; but they’d still given their lives.

Everyone I talked about this with said the same thing. “You were not just their guest, but you are anaraseye. It was their duty to save you, and because it is a duty to all Yeola-e, it was important enough to give their lives for.” I remember Esora-e in particular saying, “Chevenga, does it bother you, that these people died so you might live? Get over it, because people will do it all your life, or at least as long as you’re semanakraseye.”

I’d long schooled myself in swallowing the words that would reveal me if I blurted them, and masking the expressions on my face that might alert anyone who followed when they showed. Now I kept my face stone while emotion spiked through my heart. I knew what was bothering me. As always, there was but one person to go to.

“It was their duty to give their lives to save yours,” my mother said, same as everyone else.

“To save what?” I said. “Seventeen years? Osilaha might have had thirty or forty, Naina and Buk, fifty.”

“That’s not the way to think of it,” she said. “They might all have died next year in a plague or a flood. They saved you knowing that you might die young in war or for some other reason; that wasn’t the point. The point was that you were alive right then, and should stay so.”

“But Mama… Esora-e said people will do this all my life, and it’s true, of course, I know. If I let them, it’s as if I am asking them. So… well, when do I stop asking? I don’t think I should wait as long as twenty-nine. Twenty-five? Twenty-seven?”

“Chevenga.” She took my shoulders in her hands. “You are thinking of it far too… mathematically. Is the number of years what determines the worth of a life? What if in one year, a person can act to save a thousand lives? What if in one moment… it has happened, think of avalanches. Or what if…” She took my face between her hands, and drew me closer. “A person has sworn to love two times as hard and do two times as much because his time is half?”

I didn’t answer this, just closed my eyes, and breathed, and took refuge in her hand stroking my hair back from my forehead. “You’re thinking of it too much too soon, as well. These things will become clearer as you get older and your understanding deepens,” she added.

“Maybe I should renew my oath, but make it three times.”

“I think,” she said tenderly, “you should be just hard enough on yourself to let you feel at peace about knowing you’ll leave us soon, but not enough to kill yourself even earlier.” I couldn’t help but crack a smile at that. “You’re going to have the find the balance, and you’re better to leave that until you’re more grown up, because a person’s judgment on that sort of thing increases a great deal between your age and his coming of age. Right now I think two times is a good enough measure.”

I went away feeling answered and therefore better, even if most of the answer was to defer any choices until later. Renewing my oath at three times was there as a possibility. But I knew this would be yet another life-long haunting. They were piling one on top of another, the implications. At seven, I had never imagined it would be like this.

†

People had first predicted I would be a general of note when I was under ten, inspired, I am sure, by the quality of the shenanigans I led my siblings and friends into. My first lessons in taking responsibility as leader I got with my shadow-father’s comb. Eventually owning up became a formality which I kept to out of honour alone. They always knew it was me.

In the School of the Sword, they taught me as much command-craft as they teach there. When it was my turn to be krachaseye in field war-games, I did well enough that the other students began electing me always. Esora-e taught me laesha and other such games, and found me better opponents once I could consistently beat him.

I had my eye, of course, on the Circle School. My ambition, which was less grandiose than it would seem without factoring in my foreknowledge, was to be the youngest ever, first to gain entrance, and then to graduate.

Yeola-e is the only large nation I know of whose students in military leadership are chosen strictly on merit. Others will say they do; but the most meritorious are selected out of some smaller portion of the populace, such as just men, or just those who can afford expensive tuition, or just the most moneyed caste, it being assumed that those excluded, being generally inferior, could never qualify anyway. But like all war-schools in Yeola-e, the Circle School is funded entirely out of the public purse, and any wristletted Yeoli may attempt to get in, no matter what sex, hometown, degree of wealth or—most importantly for my scheme—age.

The School takes in three students a year. First one must pass an examination, of general strategic and tactical knowledge, which winnows down the number of candidates to something between fifty and one-hundred. Each one must then face eight others, picked at random, one per month and four away from home, in one-day field war-games. A victory with losses under one in twenty counts for three points, a victory with greater losses than that, two points, and a battle still locked or stalemated at the end of the day, one point. When all the matches are complete, the twenty-four highest-scoring candidates come to Terera for the Annual Games by which the final selection is made, by straight elimination. The final games are given three full days, if necessary, with armies of ten-thousand per side. (That means Terera is crawling with warriors for more than a half-moon each year, for which the innkeepers and wine-sellers are thankful.)

I was thirteen, but I had my wristlets; so I marched down to the School and asked to take the exam, so as to enter next summer’s games; that way I’d still be thirteen when I got in. They looked at me oddly, but could not refuse.

I knew the moment I opened the question papers that I’d been over-confident, though; I didn’t know half of what I should, and failing, though bitter, was no great surprise. But at least it let me know how much I would have to study for next year. All four seasons I did, a general-craft book under my arm wherever I went.

In case it was assumed I meant to ease off on the training of my body to favour my mind, I reminded Azaila I did not plan to be a hill-top general. “Fighting command is a dying art in the world, but your father did it,” he said. “And one who is excellent at both fighting and commanding should do both, of course. Let’s see.” He tested me in earnest, right then, and I felt every moment that I was failing and he’d tell me to give it up. But while he did not praise me much, he said we’d go on, and it became easier.

The spring after the fall I turned fourteen, I passed the Circle School exam, close to the top of the field. Still, they were grudging. The dean, Nainara Shae-Miya, called me into her office and said, “You’re brilliant, lad, as you well know. But don’t you know you’ll be commanding, and going up against, people who were fighting at the start of the Enchian wars, people who’ve had their wristlets thirty years, people who’ve been trying to get into the School for ten?”

“If you talk me out of trying,” I said, “then for this year at least you will not be able to say with entire honesty that we are a meritocracy.”

She just shook her head, as she wrote my name on a lot and threw it into the match-making bowl. “Better pray to grow a handspan and for your voice to change in the next moon, that’s all I can say.”

Neither of these things happened. My first match, luckily, was at home, where all the warriors knew and liked me, and I knew the ground like the back of my hand; I scored a two-point win and was on top of the world, wondering why everyone seemed to think this was so hard. What was sweetest was that my opponent was thirty-six.

My second match was in Tinga-e. It was a bad omen, that when I stood to introduce myself to my warriors, someone said “You’re commanding us? Seriously? You’ve barely quit wetting the bed.” My saying who I was, and that I would command fighting, didn’t help; the same man said, “Just what we need, an anaraseye who because he’s killed five farmers thinks he’s kyashin Curlion.” I made my big mistake then, by pretending it did not touch me rather than disciplining him; while war-game discipline may not get so severe as flogging, anything shy of that is allowed. Whether it touched me was not the point; by letting him get away with saying this to me I had forsaken the respect of everyone else.

As well I had let myself get rattled at the worst possible time, just as we were about to take the field. As a good fighting-general does, I led the charge and went for the biggest warrior on the other side; you couldn’t fault me for cowardice, at least. With his wicker sword he whacked my shield out the way by plain strength, and tapped my throat. I had to spend what was left of the game lying in the mud, trying to forget I had six more to go, and saying with my crystal in my hand to whoever leaped over me, “I will get better at this, I swear.” It is possible to earn points despite getting killed out, but I did not. My opponent earned three.

“Perhaps you should be easier on yourself,” my mother suggested, “and hill-top it. I know it would feel cowardly, love, but if you think coldly of advantages and disadvantages, you’ll see it would be for the better. Mind to mind you are less mismatched than hand to hand, until you get your growth.” I spent a sleepless night turning this over in my head, until I had a decision: to command fighting when at home, and on the hill-top when away.

That worked well enough. As well, I came up with a plan for if someone disparaged my age. In Iritai, a thick-armed man asked me, “Why are you standing up there playing dress-up in your big brother’s wristlets and armour in front of us as if you’re our commander? Shouldn’t you be at home carrying firewood or learning your multiplication tables?”

I fixed him with my eyes, called him up front and centre. “So I’m a child, who weighs nothing?” I said. “Push-up position.” I was wearing the insignia; though he was a bit slow doing it, gave me a look and didn’t acknowledge properly, he went onto toes and fists. I climbed onto his back and sat cross-legged, balancing between his shoulder-blades, and said, “Fifty.”

By twenty-seven or so, he was faltering badly enough that I knew he wouldn’t be able to manage the full fifty, so I had mercy on him and commuted it to thirty. But I made him stay on toes and fists with his arms locked, told him “Don’t let me fall,” and stood on his shoulders to sort my game-warriors and do the encouragement speech, over his gasping breaths. The story must have gone around the country, because no one said anything more about my age in all my matches.

They went well enough; at the end I’d scored fourteen of a possible twenty-four points, better than half, and Nainara pointed out to me another encouraging thing: most of them I had earned towards the end of the eight matches, which showed I was learning.

But of all the candidates, I was only thirty-fourth—not good enough to get me into the Annuals. Fine, I told myself as I set my teeth to wait another year: fifteen will still be the youngest ever to enter. I will come to what pre-empted that.