34 - Chiravesa

The next few days as I was healing, I thought of Elera far too much. It made something inside me curl black like burning paper, taste of poison, chafe worse than I could understand. If skill and fame and position are what he aspires to, I thought, he has every reason to envy me. It isn’t that he’ll outlive me; I’ve outgrown that… I think. I feel it with no one else. Why does it haunt me so? My flogging-pain told me just to hate him, that it was as simple as an honest soul’s distaste for a petty, vicious one; for a time I indulged myself in contempt. But I am adult enough, I told myself, to see he is human and Yeoli, not so different from me.

I tried being him, and found so much pain I cringed away. Then my heart went out to him. But it left me where I had started. I could not fight him: that would help nothing. I could not comfort him in his shame: my comfort would be scalding oil to him. Yet I could not forget him; I could never forget him. An ancient thought twinged: how many other people do I so touch? There was nothing I could do to make peace with him, but one.

Realizing, I understood my heart. He hated me for my capability. To end that I would have to diminish it. Envy sends the knife I carry to cut out the imperfections in me twisting into the good, asks me to blacken my heart, dull my mind, slow my hand. It turns you against yourself.

I sprang up. By the woodpile was an axe; I snatched it up and went to look for him among the tents. “Elera?” said some warrior, gleefully, when I asked her where he was. “Good, you’ve found something to punish him for already! His face needs rubbing in it.” I went the way she pointed. It was evening. He was at a small fire, surrounded by his friends.

Through a field-hedge I heard some of their conversation. “We’ll elect you deka, at least. In a while, when this is all forgotten. One foul-up doesn’t cancel two years of good command, to my mind.” The reply was in Elera’s voice. “No. I couldn’t stand it either way, serving under him, after this. I’m transferring, and if he doesn’t approve it, I’ll go over his shit-eating head… Of course he’s their little darling too. He goes to command councils, did you know that? At his age.” I backtracked silently, then approached again, rustling grass, snapping twigs. They went quiet, looking to see who was coming, then quieter still when they saw.

Never before had I been fixed by so many eyes with a glare, except on the battlefield. Most thought I’d come to rub salt in his wounds; but two faces bore the same cold shape, alien as a moonscape, that I knew from his. Whether he had infected them with envy, or they him, or it was a matter of like to like, I couldn’t know, and didn’t really matter. For a moment, again, I wondered if I was in the wrong. But I said what I’d intended. “Elera. I wish to speak with you, alone.”

He could not refuse, lest I command it, nor plead flogging-pain, while I stood before him. Slowly he rose. I saw his eyes flick puzzled, to the axe in my hand. It was too late and dark for wood-cutting.

I brought him to a copse by the edge of the camp that had been left standing to serve as a small shrine, and the clearing within it, hidden by trees. I gave the axe to him handle-first, unclasped my sword-wristlet and laid my forearm across a fallen tree.

“Go ahead,” I said. “We can say we were here chopping wood, and it was an accident.” He stared at me, his eyes hidden in shadow, the stare apparent only by the stillness of his body. “Isn’t this what you want? One chop, and you need never be bothered by my skill again.” I offered him my dagger. “Or is it my judgment? Take out my eyes then. My courage? Take a slice from my stomach. My weapon-sense? I’m not sure where that is in me, but if you dig around you’re bound to get it sooner or later. Well? You want to be free of whatever you envy in me, don’t you, so you can think clearly?”

He whirled, and flung the axe into the ground, where it stuck. “You overrated stripling! Don’t play teacher with me! You could never understand, in a thousand years.”

“That’s a call to chiravesa if ever I heard one.” I rose and stood where he had, unfastening the setakraseyeni collar from my neck. To imagine I had got my stroke and flogging from a general instead of him was not hard.

Yet the act was difficult in itself. I was out of practice; like a clam’s shell grown around me were the hard habits of war. Fighting, one clings to oneself with all one’s might; it goes against the grain, to dissolve oneself the way one must for this. I was too young yet for the warrior’s lesson in that.

“What I feel you could never understand, in a thousand years. How could you? Look at you, a warrior at thirteen, Tennunga’s son, carrying Chirel—how could you know what it is to be ordinary? Everything was made easy for you; how could you know what it is to have to work for anything, to strain every moment against the bounds within you, knowing the ones you yearn to cross most you only will in your dreams, because chance fashioned you mediocre? Then to see some slight-built boy dance across them with ease … and know it will be him who lives your dreams, not you. He will command the army, not you; he will do the great deeds, not you; he will get carried through the streets of Terera, showered with wine and flowers—not you! It is his name the people will sigh and the warriors chant in love, never yours; I can hear it now, ‘Chevenga, Chevenga!’ where once I heard ‘Elera, Elera!’ Of him the songs will be sung and the tomes written long after his death, never of you! You will just be an arrow in his quiver, forgotten the moment you die.

“And now Fourth Chevenga is under me. He says nothing; he doesn’t have to; his presence is enough. The general’s apprentice, watching my every move for flaws, waiting for his chance to catch me off-guard and make his name correcting me. … Is it any surprise it happened, when it was always on my mind, and he wished it so dearly? How could I think?

“So—I am flung into the dust: caught, corrected, struck the stroke of shame and flogged by the General First, impeached, a common footsoldier when I was a setakraseye . . . what am I? What am I now?” I touched the plain collar of my mail-shirt, and felt tears on my cheeks. This was the pain I had turned from, toying with playing him at the fire. The last cruel cut came to me, full of bitter symmetry. “And who, who in the great Earthsphere, have they elected to take my place?”

I looked at him. He was gazing at me stunned; it was too dark to see tears. He sank to the log then, burying his face in his hands, and I heard a sob.

For a long time I sat beside him, not knowing whether he would want my hand on his shoulder or not; in the end I chose to err on the side of comradeship, and put it there. He did not move, nor show any sign of feeling it. “Who could you ever have envied?” he said. Not about to say, “Everyone over thirty,” I did not answer, and he said, “It’s none of my business, never mind. I suppose I must be you now. So many times I have imagined I were Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e. Always wrongly.”

“It’s all right, I’ll let you off, you don’t have to.” He lacked, and I could not give him, the one piece of knowledge that would make it true. “I said it all when I gave you the axe. May I tell you a story, instead?”

He signed chalk, drying his eyes, and I sat down next to him, both of us starting to lean our backs against the log and deciding not to almost as one, which made us share a shy laugh. I wished I had a wine-skin to pass him; later.

Like a warrior recounting old battles, I told him of how I had not wanted to be one at all at first, of Esora-e choosing to make me the greatest in the world without asking my choice, of my quarrels with him, of the worst trials of my training, of all the tribulations that which he envied me for had brought me. Soon he began recalling his own training, and a tyrannical teacher he’d once had, and we ended up laughing together.

Finally we were friends and clasped hands on it. Though he doubted he would cease envying me he swore not to hold it against me. We forgave each other for everything and gingerly embraced, and he invited me to his fire. The looks on the faces of his friends were a delight, when he introduced them to me with his arm over my shoulders.