41 - How (not) to see a psyche-healer

“You aren’t yourself. I’m sending you to the psych. No arguments.” Hurai yanked out a waxboard and began writing in his lightning-fast hand.

I said nothing; I had nothing to say but arguments, and I’d been given a direct order. Why are you doing this—because I lost it watching it happen? I hadn’t slept a solid night since, seven nights now, and had awakened everyone in the tent with screaming nightmares three times, but I hadn’t told him that. Nor had I told him I was still off my food, enough that my friends were elbowing me to eat; I kept thinking of the Lakans eating. My friends had given up trying to get me to talk about it, as I’d just kept telling them I wanted to forget it. I had just grit my teeth, thinking, ‘I’ll get over it.’ Maybe he had someone spying on me.

“If you wonder why,” he said, reading my mind, “it’s how silent you were at the command meeting this morning, staring down at your hands hollow-cheeked instead of chattering our ears off with your ideas, grinning like an idiot, as usual. You should be over this by now.” He signed the waxboard and handed it to me. “On the double.”

My whole soul feels hollow, I thought. I had been running his own arguments over in my head the whole time, especially that this was war, trying ruthlessly to convince myself.

The psyche-healer he sent me to was assigned to the darya semanakraseye (though I’d thought they were above needing that) and so her tent was fairly near. She had someone when I got there, and there was a short queue; the man sitting at the desk before her tent was her secretary. He squinted and blinked his eyes at me with a ‘could it be?’ sort of look, and then said “A…naraseye?”

“Yes,” I half-whispered, and handed him the waxboard.

“Kahara bless me!” His face lit in a gushing smile; I even saw his cheeks flush a little. “I never thought I’d actually meet you! I can’t say what a pleasure it is.”

As I’d done the things that made my name in the war, I’d been getting more and more of this. Usually I didn’t mind, and would just return the love; here and now it grated, for more than one reason.

“All right, I’ll take down your particulars—not that I have to ask most of them!—and then you’re in. Name, I know of course”—he wrote with a flourish in his record-book—“Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e. Rank, mila—”

“Seta.”

“Setakraseye, right, it just seems… town of birth, Vae Arahi of course.” I wanted to crawl under his table; everyone in the line was staring. “Date of birth, ha ha, that I don’t know, but it’s in the fall sometime, isn’t it?”

“atakina 19, 1527,” I tried to grit between my teeth without looking as if I were gritting between my teeth.

“Kahara… you’re only sixteen?”

“Yes.” I read his record-book upside-down to see what he next needed to know, as he started to say, “Only sixteen, no wonder it’s har—”

“My blood-mother is Karani Aicheresa, blood-father—”

“Seventh Tennunga Shae-Arano-e, of course!”

“Of course. Shadow-mother, Denaina Kotelai, shadow-father—”

“Esora-e Mangu! See, anaraseye, as I said, I know most. That’s it; when Mirasae, that’s the healer, is done with who she’s got right now, you’re in. Will you sit with me? I always wanted to ask you—”

“Wait, secretary—what do you mean, when she’s done with who she’s got, I’m in? I’m not going to jump the queue.” I looked at the four people already here waiting; they looked at me. “I thought I’d just be making an appointment, then coming for it.”

“Pardon me, anaraseye; I’m just following orders.” He handed the waxboard back to me. “To be seen by the psyche-healer immediately,” Hurai had written.

“Immediately is for people who are in foaming-at-the-mouth fits,” I said. “What he really meant was as soon as possible. I’m not a kyashin king and I’m not going to act like one.” The appointment book lay open next to the record book; reading upside-down, I found the next blank space. “Unless I’m in the thick of battle, I’ll come for that one.”

“Anaraseye…” I wasn’t in the mood then, but later I’d feel sorry for the secretary, caught between the rock of Hurai and the hard place of me. Two of the most bullish heads in Yeola-e, he and I have been called.

“I take that appointment or I get in the queue.” He didn’t want me there, I knew. “If you catch kyash from Hurai, blame me and I’ll back you up. You trust me on that, yes?”

“A-e kras, a-e kras,” he said, and gingerly, as if he were afraid he’d injure the paper with the quill, wrote my name in the space, then signed off Hurai’s waxboard. Running the day and sun-angle for the appointment over in my mind I took it back and got away fast.

It was for three days hence, but alas, my reprieve wasn’t that long. The day after, a runner came up to me. “Mirasae Shae-Krida had someone cancel their appointment just now, and so invites you, if you will, anaraseye.” That precious secretary had kept me very much in mind as well as dear to his heart, it seemed.

I’ve never gone to a psych and never intended to, I thought, as the secretary lifted the flap of the tent to show me in, with his big obsequious grin, and Mirasae herself—she was a middle-aged woman, with a nose that was a bit too big and a wiry mane of ash-blond hair—motioned me to a chair that was far too cushy to be in a war-camp, to my mind. At least she had the decency to offer me ezethra.

Once we’d got through the courtesies and the small-talk—thank All-Spirit she was not fawning—she fixed me with the look I’d later come to know as the I-am-listening-with-all-my-being psyche-healer look, and asked me, “Why are you here, Chevenga?”

“I was ordered.”

“I know, but why were you ordered? Perhaps I should put it this way, what’s bothering you?”

“Well…” I wrapped my hands around my tea-cup, wanting the scalding heat even though it was yet another hot day. Here it was. I set my teeth. “The ten thousand Lakans we killed… it has to do with that.” I took a sip, and swallowed.

“Ah. Well, let me tell you, before we go on, you are far from alone there. Part of why I am so booked up, for which I apologize. Just between you, me, and the gatepost, Chevenga—though maybe I’m telling you this because I know you have the circle-collars’ ear—if you’d have asked me my vote on whether we should do such a thing, it would have been a firm charcoal. Any Haian will tell you the same: inflict such a wound like that on others, we inflict a severe wound on ourselves.”

“Yes,” I said. I could say nothing else. I’d been nerving myself up to tell her how the threat had been my idea; now I thought, you’re not getting it out of me even if you apply Lakan torture.

“So how is it affecting you?” she asked.

It seeped into me through every pore of my skin while I watched; the poison crept into me, same as them, and its tendrils wrapped around my stomach; a million threads of blackness are filling me; it’s ripping up my soul. “Hurai says I wasn’t myself at a command council, that I wasn’t saying enough. But it’s war; these things happen; if I add up all the battlefields I’ve been on, I’ve seen at least that many Lakans killed before.”

“Wasn’t saying enough? Why not?”

“I guess I didn’t feel like it. Tell the truth, I myself didn’t notice I was being unusually quiet.”

“What do you feel about it—the massacre?”

“Another day, another massacre,” I said. “It’s war.” I saw a flash of my hands again, black and wet with the fires that burned in the mass of convulsing death.

“Chevenga…” She looked at me more closely, and deeply. “I think perhaps you are feeling rather more than that.”

You should apply for the psych’s perspicacity prize, I thought. “Mirasae… is it not human to feel something? Wouldn’t I be inhuman if I didn’t?” Hurai’s words echoed. Weep for them, and know what war is; weep for them, and grow up. “I know that you have to become part inhuman to be a warrior… I know you have to steel your heart. And I have. But should I lose all of it?”

“No, of course not, lad.” She patted my shoulder. “I think General Hurai is worried about you losing your edge as a warrior, that’s all.”

“I’m not going to lose my edge as a warrior. Yeola-e still needs it.” We hadn’t fought since then, but I had asked myself, and imagined it, and felt I could fight as well as ever. I would just forget everything but the battlefield when I went onto it, just as I always did.

She sat thinking for a bit, pinching her lip. “Answer me this, Chevenga,” she said, finally. “The feeling, the suffering, you have about it… is it worsening, easing, or staying the same, over the days since?”

“Easing.” With crawling slowness… it had been seven nights and the three nightmares had been in the first five, and I’d eaten a bit more this morning and yesterday, though, so this was still the truth.

“Then time will take care of it, and I wouldn’t worry.” She held out her hand for Hurai’s waxboard, which I gave her. “Tell the truth, lad, every warrior gets these things. The myth is that we’re all made of steel and boot-leather and are never fazed by anything—but it’s a myth. We are all, in the end, human. We all do our best within those bounds.” She took up her wax-awl to sign off.

“Chevenga.” Shininao’s voice, with a touch of laughter in it, is in and through and part of me. “Why do this to yourself? You took me into yourself. No matter what you thought. You left mere humanity behind then. Those deaths… I drink of them. I feed on them. And so do you.”

One of the nightmares came back to me entire, in the moment in which Mirasae scribed her name, threads of wax flying up from the wounds she cut in the board.

I am lying flat on my back, filled with fullness as after an Earthsphere-encompassing orgasm. “Like that,” Shininao whispers sibilantly. He takes each Lakan death and spreads it on me delicately, like garlic paste on bread. “I love the taste of these deaths on you.

“As long as I can eat death from you, child, I will keep you safe. I will savour you as long as you last. A dessert, your own life shall be, after a long, long time pouring death into my mouth, from your body, your will, your sex. A delicious stew of death.”

Like in my other dreams, he has no beak, but lips and tongue. He starts licking me, lapping the coating of deaths up off me like ganache, sucking them off my hands and nipples and penis and head. I am helpless not to feel pleasure. His mouth envelops my head like a warm wet pulsing cavern, and his tongue presses into my mouth as his hand usually does, tasting of all the deaths, ten thousand and uncounted more, that he has lapped up from my skin. He thrusts it down my throat and wraps it around my heart.

That was when I woke screaming, with Mana and Krero holding me down.

…Kri-da, Mirasae scratched the last of her signature. She handed the wax-board to me, and patted my shoulder again. “Go with All-Spirit, Fourth Chevenga. You do all Yeola-e proud and we all love you.”