23 - The path unconceived

My training got harder again. Esora-e sent me into a cave with only a trickle of water, having the entrance blocked off with rocks; I had to move them away faster than the other students could place them to escape, else, he assured me, I would die. Caught half-way between my half-child’s imagination and regard for orders telling me it was absolutely real, and my logical mind not wanting to find out for sure whether it was, I worked unceasingly. It took three days.

The high beam at the School is the height of a tall man and wide as his foot; my feet soon knew it like hands, and my body knew the ground underneath just as well. By my fourteenth birthday, once I’d learned how to fall off the beam every possible way without letting my sword touch anyone or anything, I began sparring on it, with Chirel. The whip of winter was in the air when they first made me spar and role-play tactics at the same time. Azaila would conceive some battle, sometimes one of the many he had been in, sometimes made up entirely, and we’d play it out, I commanding the Yeolis and he inventing the counter-moves of the enemy. He was brilliant at plausible battlefield mishaps. Nor did he stop if I fell off, as I learned the first time I did from him yelling, as if he were one or more of my warriors, “Chevenga! Chevenga!? Where is he, where’s the semanakraseye?” I soon learned to land springing back up.

One day after winter solstice, doing this with Esora-e as my sparring-partner, I fell badly, landing full on my sword-arm. I heard a cracking sound, then felt a gushing as if all my blood were pouring out, though I saw none. I began the usual leap, lifting the sword, and pain the like of which I had never known in my life put me back on my knees.

I grabbed the sword with my shield-hand, laid it across my thighs as I would normally never do, and tried to feel my wrist through my sleeve; when I touched it the felling snow went black and then grey, with pain, and I started to feel cold all over. I had at least one broken bone. All the while I was expecting warm arms across my back, leading me to a hearth and a healer.

“Chevenga!” Azaila yelled. “Where in kyash is he?” The sense of it came cold to me; in battle you can break your arm or get hurt equally badly a thousand other ways, but the battle doesn’t suddenly stop for it.

I looked up, taking a deep breath. The beam seemed high as a mountain. But you can’t waste time wondering whether you’ll succeed; better just to try, and find out for sure. Walling off the pain in my mind, I sheathed the sword, which hard to do with my shield-arm, and staggered up, jumped and hooked my one good arm around the beam and swung my legs up, trying to remember through the hammering of pain what had been happening in the battle. For a moment I must cling with my legs while I got the good arm wrapped over the beam, trying not to jar the bad; then I pulled myself up, and drew with my shield-hand, just in time to parry.

Fighting entails a thousand jolts. I had never noticed before. As well, my wristlet seemed to tighten on my sword-arm as it swelled, like a torturer’s vice. Azaila said things that reminded me where we were, which seemed almost too merciful, except that in a real battle, of course, I’d have a view. I must keep my voice steady as I called out my orders, tears straining in my throat along with the sourness and watering that heralds vomiting, and the shivers got worse.

Do not think of pain, I commanded myself. Think of the battle, of the strokes, not of nausea, of dizziness. … My sight, full of Esora-e and his fight-stare, misted around the edges as if seen through a window frosted with ice. Think not of training, but of battle. … I would be of steel, of rock, no pain would touch me; I drove it out, while the voices and clanging of our swords came to me muffled one moment and clear beyond bearing the next. When my shadow-father’s sword quavered in my weapon-sense, burning and smudging in turns, and I started making mistakes in the orders, I knew I’d lose the battle if I kept going, and maybe even pass out.

Yet I couldn’t stop, because that would be breaking play for no good reason, and cowardice; nor must I let myself fall again, in case I landed on the same arm. I had gained the impossible crossroads.

There is always a way; so I’d been taught. If the east-west road is blocked both ways, the warrior jumps north; if it is on the ground, he jumps up. He takes the way that is beyond his normal thinking, outside the rules: the path unconceived, we call it. Remembering this made me see it, obvious once I did.

“Second!” My call sounded like a frog’s croak, but was heard.

“Here, kras,” Azaila answered in that role.

“Take command, I am too hurt to do more.”

“A-e kras,” he acknowledged. “Don’t worry, we’ll win still. Litter, here! End play.”

I felt a hand grip my good forearm, then an arm my waist, and Esora-e’s voice close to my ear said, “Lean on me, my son.” But I didn’t, and got down myself; I’d got up that way. He started giving me the drops of whack-weed, each rejoining me to the earth as pain tried to make me float off it.

The outer bone of my forearm and some of the small bones in the wrist were broken. Worried that I’d lose the use of my sword-hand, they took me to Ensahis, the Haian known as the best locally for bone-breaks, in Terera. Instead of just setting and casting it, she decided that, to be certain I’d lose no function, it needed surgery. Of course I consented, as did all my parents. That meant having the blood-needle stuck in my other hand, being rendered properly senseless with Haian knock-out drug, waking up what seemed like a moment later in a bed in the infirmary of Terera, and having the arm casted when the swelling went down, all of which, as you can imagine, made me feel delightfully important.

†

For all I could take any of them sparring, I was too boyish for the girls in my war-class. I wasn’t a fast grower; at fourteen I looked fourteen, short, rawboned, and not even thinking of beard, though the hair between my legs was coming in thicker, and, being black, showed up well.

I didn’t play only with girls, my nature being one to see male beauty as well. Krero and I were on fire for each other for a while, before several quarrels that came almost to blows proved to us we’d do better going back to being just friends. All the while Mana, to whom I was sworn already, stood patiently by.

Nyera stood apart from all the games and secrets and matchmaking. At first I thought it was because we’d had a quarrel; she’d said something about me no longer being a child after I’d got my wristlets, and my head still being too much an upturned anthill to think sense, I had answered something about killing being her only measure of adulthood. Now she was almost shy of me, which seemed ridiculous, when we’d been friends so long. I’m still amazed I was so much a child as not to see the real reason.

I was three days in the infirmary, too muddled with pain-juice to do schoolwork on the first, writing with my shield-hand the rest of the time. (My shield-hand writing is better than most people’s, since those two moons in the cast.) On my first evening back home she came to visit me.

“Nyera! What a surprise!” I meant nothing reproachful, but she looked hurt, and a touch angry. “A pleasant surprise, I mean,” I said quickly.

“I know I’ve been distant… Fine. I’m here.”

“Yes, you are, and I’m glad, and that’s all I meant.”

For a tense moment, we were both silent. I had been intending to recount the whole story of how I’d got the broken arm only when she asked; maybe I should just tell it now, I thought. But she drew in her breath.

“All I meant when I said you are no longer a child is that you…” She took another breath, a courage-gathering breath, it looked like. “You are so much a man.”

Our eyes caught, and I finally got it.

I won’t go on too long. Everyone knows youthful love, including how it can wax overly eloquent. The feeling like the other is the entire world, the constant clinging to each other, the weeping for having to part each night, the solemn eternal oaths, the silly jokes made into treasures, the daydreaming of the other’s touch and smell until the tutor raps us on the knuckles with the pen; we all go through it to learn.

My shadow-father gave me grief for being too young, but not that much; knowing her as a war-student, he felt her suitable for me to breed with. Almost fifteen, I finally shot up so that I could look Krero in the eyes, and my voice changed, breaking sometimes in the middle of words, to Nyera’s utterly clear laugh.

One moon grew into two, then half a year, and we had not tired of each other. I knew better than to make a marriage hint this time; age had brought wisdom. But it seemed inevitable, and I began planning in my mind. There were the parents to be informed—well, asked, actually at this age—Senahera services to be requested, invitations made, the announcement; it must all be done properly, given my position. I wondered happily how many children we could get before I died.

That thought made all thought die in my mind, and everything go cold, even right next to my stone-stove. In the haze of love and pleasure, I had forgotten about that.

How could I claim to love her, and not tell her? I remembered how I’d played it out in my mind. It had been easy, abstract, without a real person at stake.

I have to tell her, and swear her to silence. It was the only thing to do, what I had already decided, in effect, to do. Yet just imagining her before me, and me opening my mouth to say it, put me in a cold sweat and made me sick.

For eight years, now I had been schooling myself in secrecy: to bite back my thoughts whenever someone said something that awakened it so nothing showed on my face, to see the fatal slip of the tongue before it came, until I knew all the possible ones as naturally and unthinkingly as I knew my letters. Now, trying to make my lips say it aloud even just alone in my room, I found them sealed, like a sliding window left closed for eight years.

And her; I imagined her, my beautiful Nyera-cha, her face shocked, then horror slowly sinking as the future played out in her mind. Would she be happier not knowing, I thought, like my mother? Perhaps it is only selfishness that makes me want to tell, I thought, my integrity truly conceit; I’ve lied to everyone else so far. If I cease lying to her, why not to them? Remembering my mother’s caution to consider before I told anyone, I played it at all out in the light of greater experience.

Their faces: Mana, Krero, Sachara, with narrow half childish brows peaked. Artira, faced instead of with the chance of succeeding to the demarchy, the certainty. Naiga, who calls me “biggest brother.” The people: my people, all knowing when they will lose me. Naingini, possibly outliving me.

For a time they’ll pity me; then someone will say, “Wait! Why are we all weeping—who says this is inevitable?” Probably Esora-e. People think augury is as good for prevention as for prediction, so everyone will try to protect me. I will end up fortressed in some tower, or at the very least, constantly watched. Despite the fact that people in every story who try to defy death prophecy always fail by some slip impossible to foresee, I will never convince those who love me it cannot be done; they are too brave and hopeful, and think I’m too young to truly understand. They will just try to convince me I’m wrong, and if I argue long enough they’ll think I’ve gone mad and bind me to a bed. One way or the other, a prisoner. That part was the same. So were 21-1 and 21-5-7, of course.

I felt a call, from all the cliffs of Hetharin, strong enough that I went up. Jump and solve it. Standing on a dolomite edge, the land below distant enough to be turquoise under the overcast sky, I thought, I’m fifteen, it’s half over; why do I cling so hard to another miserable fifteen? I will feel only the wind of the fall, and then this little scrap of life everyone sets such store by will be shown at its true worth.

But I remembered my wristlets, reminders that a purpose can be accomplished even in a moment of life; then my older oath, to love twice as much; this would hardly be that. Finally, it came to me how absurd it would be to die so as to save the world from my death.

We’d been together for close to a year when she mentioned it, almost in passing, “when we’re married and have kids.” Not only I, but she, saw it as inevitable, so much so that it almost passed without my noticing. I steeled my face against the betraying expression, for what I hoped would be the last time.

The next day after training, I swore Nyera to silence on the sword of Saint Mother, asked her to come with me up on to the mountain, and haltingly, with sweat dripping down my face, began to tell her.

She reached to touch my cheek with her fingertips, comfort I ached for in every trembling sinew; but I drew back. I was afraid of her letting go of me when I told her; better she not touch me at all. After eight years of silence, the words came out rusty and broken. We’ve talked marriage now. I have to tell you. My future… when I was seven, when my father was killed… I saw…

It was seeing so many oddities of mine explained all at once, I think, that made her believe me. That’s why you hurry, why you want to marry so soon, why you would go quiet sometimes when we played House, why when we threw snowballs you’d aim for older people, why you’re getting Chinisa to teach you shorthand already… While she sat silent I looked at the grass between my crossed legs, the stunted mountain stuff with tiny blades like claws, brown with the cold of coming winter, a twisted white stem like waxed string with a dead floweret. I can see it clear as yesterday. Nyera suddenly leapt up and ran away down the slope.