68 - The black snake dancing

The fire of leaf-turning on the heights spread down into the valleys, eating down past Vae Arahi to the streets of Terera that are lined with trees, obeying the time-dictates of nature even as they stand in the places chosen by people. The town filled groaning-full with warriors, more than usual for the Annual Games, a good thirty-five thousand. They were here not just to fight in the Games, they told anyone who would list, but also to witness the first Kiss of the Lake of a semanakraseye who was so much one of them.

On the night before my birthday, I slept alone in a guest room of the Hearthstone, as is the custom, Shaina and Etana caring for Fifth. Under unfamiliar running patterns and in unfamiliar scents—beeswax is traditional in the guest rooms—I could not sleep.

Tomorrow, the moment I put on the signet, I commit a crime against the people of Yeola-e. I am trusting so much to the reading of an augur, when everyone knows they are never entirely trustworthy. I tossed, and sweated the sheets sodden, and paced when sleep seemed futile, and thought, I am torturing myself with all this shame only to satisfy myself that I am sufficiently punished for what I mean to do anyway.

Then it was fear; my doubt about whether I should be semanakraseye, the weakness of criminality, would keep me from being able to do the Kiss of the Lake. I’d leap up from the water screaming in terror and shame and anguish, confess it all then, resign and live the meager rest of my life in disgrace, fleeing from all who knew me so they wouldn’t have to see me.

I wept, I pulled my hair, I puked. I went to no one; there was no one but my mother, and I was a man now, too old for her comfort, and I knew what she would say if I asked her opinion again anyway. If anyone heard anything, they’d put it down to pre-Kiss nerves.

I keep quiet, I am approved, I visit Arko; my course was set. All three forks agreed on one thing: war with Arko. An augur isn’t that consistent with something that is not real. I must not stray from it, not now, or any other time. But sleep would close my eyes, nor take me in the darkness when I closed them by will.

Then I felt something cold and smooth and hard tenderly touched to my brow, knew I was seeing daylight through my eyelids. I opened them to see the Crystal of the Speaker, in the hand of the Keeper of the Arch-Sigil. “Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e,” she said. “Without the will of the people, what are you?” Assembly convenes before dawn on the day, to approve or disapprove; by this I knew they’d approved.

I had not known this question was in the ritual, but the answer was easy. “Nothing.”

“And with the will of the people?” The obvious answer, everything, to complete the circle of nothing-everything, was not the answer.

“Nothing,” I said, “but what they will.” She laid the crystal in my hands. I was semanakraseye; the signatures later would formalize it. But even though the Kiss of the Lake is by choice, not by law, no one would call me semanakraseye until I’d done it.

Naked in the courtyard, I found my friends and acquaintances my accusers, as I had known I would from my father’s time. To see every face so hard at once, though, brought back a child’s fear of being abandoned utterly and left bereft. “What I’ve done this time is beyond forgiveness,” I thought, as if I were ten, but with the sting of the reality of 21-1 and 21-5-7 in it. Then I found myself wondering who I, or anyone, was to hold the crystal for all Yeola-e, since the only one who could do that was my father, and he was dead.

I began breaking out in a cold sweat, which there would be no concealing. But the God-In-Myself was near, for the thought came, “You’d better be ready; your life’s two-thirds over.” I remembered Tennunga, who had died young as well. I remembered the Arkans, too. I do what I must. Almost before I knew it, the brightness I had seen in him filled me, lifting me out of myself.

One cannot in truth even fight it. I had been afraid that I might have to struggle with my pride to kneel when the people called me out; as it was, the thunder of their joined voices drew me to my knees without my own will touching it, like a river current carrying a leaf, and I felt only joy. Then my body turned, and carried me into the Lake on steps of fire.

The Kiss is a gate, the semanakraseye of old wrote; once you have opened and seen through it, you can never turn back from passing through it. Having passed through one is forever changed, for like all trials, it makes one know one’s true nature.

I understood that now, as I chose my place. Waist-deep is best, I’d been told. The fall sun had ceased to warm the water, so that it was icy on my skin. I would succeed or I would fail, and that would decide my life; though such moments had come a thousand times in the war, as they do for every warrior, this was in the presence of All-spirit, public; it would be the people I failed, not just myself.

I gripped the spear and the torch, from which a spark fell to hiss for an instant on the surface. I looked down; the ripples made gold circlets and ribbons on the brown bottom around the shadow of my head, and I heard Shininao’s wings. Death lay there, or so it would feel to my body, that housed my soul. Sacred death: acquiescence. I suddenly knew that as a child, trying this, I had not truly believed in death, only known that my time was short. Having been to war, I knew much more about death now.

The crook of the fire-dish was cold, half-clutching my sword-wrist, as I knelt; the icy water burned me up to my chin. The crowd was silent now, waiting; but they seemed very distant. The Ritual Monk’s hands on my shoulders were warm and tender, the hands of a mother; then they were gone.

I called to the God-In-Myself right away, barely after bowing my head. Like a fool, again, I’d taken a deep breath out of habit, and so made my sufferings longer. The first painful urges for air came; I put all my strength into my fingers around the spear, and thought with horror, I don’t feel the God’s hand on my back.

It’s only a child, the bitter thought came to me, who wants a voice from the sky. You are alone. If you are forced, how is it true acquiescence? My body screamed “Save me!”, used to fighting to the end, much more now.

A child is ruled by instinct, and accepts all; an adult can question. Why should I pay, I thought, for Notyere’s treason? Did he, two hundred years ago, make me untrustworthy? Yet these are childish thoughts; the sacred trust was broken; the people cannot know my heart except by what I prove. But what do I have to prove to them, that is any more than I ever had? I was breaking the law anyway. This is like training until exhaustion, or being flogged to falling; I will always fail, in the end; I know nothing, despite all I have pretended; I am nothing, so why struggle?

So the debate, that I had thought was long settled, went on in my breath-starved head. One does indeed find one’s true nature. In the end, it came down to my asking myself what my life was, and imagining what Jinai had foreseen. I came to know how much worth I put on myself, by the agony it was to cast myself away. Then the divine hand did come, pressing between my shoulder blades; the hand of a murderer, I thought, my own murderer, my God-in-myself, myself. Choice is not enough; one needs the deeper compulsion to bear this; yet I chose the compulsion. So the snake grasps its tail in its teeth.

When the moment comes in which I am truly suffocating, beginning to die, I always feel a black snake in me, coiling in a dance with the singing wind; a thing of evil, for destruction is evil, and death is the destruction of all one knows. Here I am, the God-In-Myself says, laughing; and you always thought I was so bright. I am as dark as I am light, I am of death as I am of life; the Void is nothing, as everything. If you don’t see this you are still a child, who cowers away from the full truth.

That is what a semanakraseye is, in the end; the one who faces the Void in full, light and dark, to learn what he must be for the people. It dashed 21-1 and 21-5-7 down to nothing; they didn’t matter. No lesson had taught me that; in fact all I can set down here is words, and any anaraseye reading this fools himself to think he has stumbled on the key and can seize it, or has learned anything at all. I’d been told a thousand times, as you have. I had to do it, as you will.

I remember opening my eyes as I struggled, feeling the burning water swirl but seeing only dark, and knowing my senses were fading because all my strength was in my fingers. I remember the warmth of the Ritual Monk’s hand again, clasping my mouth and nose. Then peace, and the music full of colors I knew from before, so engrossing it made me forget my name. The crash of light, noise and pain that tore it away I resented at first, and tried to fend off with my arms.

Someone’s mouth was on mine, tasting of lentils, many hands touched me, I was cold all over, something flat and hard and heavy pressed against my back. Then my ears cleared, and in the crowd-roar I heard the name I had forgotten. I was lying on the pier, the monks reviving me; the smoke-path in the sky I followed down to a great tongue of flame on the fire-dish. I had succeeded. “Can you hear me, semanakraseye?” someone was saying, though I hadn’t thought my aunt was so near. I realized he was speaking to me.

I was through the gate, that changes all. It seemed strange that my hands and body, as the monks wrapped me in towels, looked the same as they had before. My sword-hand was strangely heavy; on my third finger was the demarchic signet, put on while I was unconscious as per custom. I wanted someone, especially my mother, to hold me, my hand at least; she was not in sight, but the monks, sensing it, or knowing from before that a new semanakraseye feels like a butterfly just out of the chrysalis, handled me gently.

All across the square, hands danced in the air, streams of wine and flowers and kerchiefs flew; I raised my signetted hand to them, and the roar doubled. No more distance; I was theirs now, one with their fears, their dreams, their whims; I felt the bond, shining and steely as chains, as hands clasped mine all through Terera and up the path by the falls.

Donning the white linen robe, I went to the sacred place on Haranin for my meditation. That heightened state, like the thick of battle, doesn’t lend itself well to being remembered. It seemed all my questions were answered, and those that weren’t would be in their time, or the answer I would choose. No vision came; it seemed to me I’d had the most relevant one for myself already, at seven, and Jinai had had, through me, the most relevant one for Yeola-e. I needed mostly to gain calm, which I did. Then I went down to the Hearthstone, to brand myself. I made the first mark, as is custom, over my heart.