72 - A child till I die

My last clear sight was Ethras’s face, blank even now, tipping and falling away; I’d struck off his head right off the draw. The world turned into a blood-haze.

I’d always fought with open eyes and calm before; I’d never gone berserk in my life. Now I heard nothing but my own unbroken war-howl, felt nothing but Chirel in my hand flying; my mind didn’t even know when my horse threw me or I leapt off him, whichever I did, though my body must have. I didn’t think, “I will take as many as I can with me”; there was nothing so coherent in my mind. All around me was death-fighting, inside me was death-fighting, I was death-fighting, made only of blood and steel and movement; I knew no other existence, never had and never would; life was death and death life, so if they killed me I wouldn’t notice, being still in my own element.

Yet somehow, clear above the din as a thrush’s song against the roar of mountain wind, I recall my sister screaming “Cheng!”, and a guard I’d only come to know on this journey lying on the poured stone of the Arkan road, his hand clutched to his sword-side ear and blood pouring from his mouth. My rage was like a dream; to leave it was to wake.

Then the next head before me, which I raised Chirel to cleave in two, was a woman’s with brown hair and black eyes. She threw up her arms and cried in Yeoli, “Stop! No one’s fighting you now!”

I looked all around. The Arkans were gone, dead or fleeing; the rebels had charged in to my defense. Now they were aiding the Yeoli and Roskati fallen, finishing and plundering Arkans, seizing milling horses. The sweet scent of the Roskati forest was corrupted now, with wound smells. Both her hands clasped my sword-hand, while I stared, still mind-numbed; she wore a battered leather kilt with a cloth of sky-blue, and I remember thinking, sacred Roskati patterns. “Can you hear me, Chevenga?” she said gently. “It’s over.” Stand down, stand down. It was hearing my name that brought me back to myself, more than anything, reminding me I was human, with ties to other humans. I fumbled for the rag in my pouch, dried off Chirel and sheathed it.

Kyash… it didn’t take long for Jinai’s reading to start playing out, I thought. We’re not even six days from the border. With my body still, my mind had begun moving, albeit slowly; I was dead tired, I realized. I heard Mirko’s voice, shouting orders in Roskati. “Come with us,” the woman said. “We must go.” My feet would not move, rooted as trees; not one Yeoli, other than me, was standing, but I heard the voices of at least three. “Che…veng… a…” Another guard I’d just come to know, her voice rattling with blood. She’d confided to me that she was with child. “Where… are… you…?” My eyes found Naiga, lying so still it could mean only death, but not Sena or Mana.

Two big hands clamped my shoulders; after looking into my eyes, Mirko shook me, with respect in his touch, but hard. Hooves clattered away; he was splitting his people apart, to make it harder for the Arkans to track me. “Come to your senses, semanakraseye, lad. The straw-hairs who got away will fetch more, they won’t be long, we must get into the woods. Your people all took it in the heart or lungs, and only a Haian can heal lung-wounds, and we can’t go to the Haian, that’ll be the first place the straw-hairs look. You have to leave them or else they’ll have guarded you for nothing.” His hand pulled me.

“Cheng.” Mana; I had not seen him because he was half under an Arkan. I wrenched free, fell to my knees beside him, took his head in my hands. “He’s right… they were all kyashin assassins, they only didn’t get you because of your weapon-sense. Go. Try to carry me, and you’ll be carrying just my meat in not long… I can feel it.” Mirko patted my shoulder, then pulled again, gently. “Go, heart’s brother. Tell my family I love them. Go, for Yeola-e.”

“I love you, Mana.” That was all I could say. I got up, and followed where Mirko led.

We were five, including Mirko and Vaneesh, for so the woman was called. Dog-tired as I was, I put all my thought into running. He followed no path, seeking ground no horse could go; we crossed several swamps on fallen logs, and more than once dashed through the shallows along the path of a stream, to obscure our scent-trail.

Here and there were ruins of old farms, a house fallen to a heap, a broken stone fence overrun with brambles. Then we came into forest and slowed to a walk. The boles of the oaks were wide as houses, the mat of green leaves above so thick they cut off the sun as darkly as a roof, so I could not know even what direction we took. There was no underbrush at all, just a bare brown thatch that thumped ringing under your feet. You could see clear for a long way around; now and then I saw a herd of boar in the distance, or a family of deer, the fawns with spots, leaping gracefully away.

The light began to fail, and Mirko lit a torch; as full darkness blacker than black fell, it began to rain, the first sign a distant pattering on leaves high as a cliff above, then eventually fat drops leaking through to us. Still Mirko knew his way, saying now and then, “Keep heart, we’re close.” Finally he halted, and made a call like a nightingale’s three times. From somewhere ahead came the hoot of an owl. “We’re here.” A little further on was a campfire, and then several more, with tents pitched among the great trees. I heard a horse whicker, the rasp of stone on steel, the buzz of talk; in the firelight I saw rope ladders dangling, and looking up found houses built in the branches. “Until we win back our lands,” he said, “this is home.”

Vaneesh pulled the cloak of my hood up over my head and forward so my face would be obscured in shadow. “Keep the signet hidden,” she whispered. “No one here would betray you willingly; but Arkans have a drug that makes people tell the truth. No one will ask.” It was as she said; everyone hailed Mirko, and showed respect to her as if she were a sage or priestess, but seemed not to see me.

The rain had not reached this far. We joined a fire, and they ate; for the first time I saw the Roskati custom of offering the first bite to one’s neighbor. That required that I eat one mouthful; but though I’d had nothing since morning and the pork was good, “the best meat, from close to the bone,” as Vaneesh said, all food and drink tasted foul to me, and I could only get down a little.

“Food you can do without for a day or two,” she said, lifting my own water-skin. “Water, no; you won’t sleep well, or be able to move as fast tomorrow. Here… for your people, drink.” For my people, I could get it down.

We’d come in late; others were turning in. “I think you need some of this, too,” Mirko said, and offered me from a skin he was carrying. “For your people, lad.” It was some kind of Roskati liquor, hot as nakiti but darker-tasting. I took a bigger draught than I meant to; on an empty stomach, I felt it in a moment. The last of the Roskati but Mirko and Vaneesh turned in.

“All this time, you haven’t said a word, and you need to,” Mirko said. “We’re friends—you picked up where Tyeraha and Tennunga left off, and we are grateful—so we swear we will repeat nothing. Let out your heart, lad.” Anger struck like lightning across the white blankness that was my mind; I fixed him with a fight-stare, and said, “Call me lad one more time and I’ll kill you.”

Mirko’s hand went to his hilt unthinking, the reflex of a rebel; Vaneesh clasped my hands, and said, “Semanakraseye, he’s saying it only in affection. Shall we call you strictly by name?” To Mirko she said something in Roskati, which is kin to Yeoli, with some loan-words; I heard the word “deranged.”

Mirko’s eyes softened a little, but he said, “You might remember who saved your life.”

“Yes, by name.” My voice sounded like that of a dead man’s, if he could have one, broken with his last struggle. “I am sorry, Mirko. Forgive me.” He signed chalk, and I kissed his hand and pressed it to my brow. Then my heart seized me.

They let me heap dirt on my head, but held me from beating it on the ground. I screamed for a while, with a lot of words, a mix of the names of the dead and curses against myself, for having been born to live a life of nothing but making mistakes. When I paused, they’d get me going again by asking me to tell them about the dead, or how I would break it to my family.

I’d be remembered as the worst fool in Yeoli history as long as it was read, I remember railing, from my journey of peace I’d bring home the news that war was certain; if they were wise they’d impeach me, and, my obligations done, I would leap off a cliff. The secret darknesses of the heart I was showing got deep enough for Mirko and Vaneesh to both swear silence second Fire come without my asking it. I remember all but tearing off the signet, crying, “Don’t believe I am a man, it’s all sham, all fake, I’ve been lying since I was twelve; I’m a child, nothing but a child, weak and stupid and throwing tantrums, I’ll always be a child till I die!” From my pouch, I again drew Kurkas’s sealed and ribbanded certificate of safe-conduct, the gold glittering in the dying firelight, and thought, even as I poured out my soul, perhaps Jinai’s reading and everything since is all a bad dream, and I’ll wake up in a moment. It’s unbearable, so it cannot be real.

They kept me going until it burned itself out, and then, just as an exhausted body can move better for tension being gone, my mind finally could think for the exhaustion of emotion.

There is the pain beyond bearing, the price I am paying—though nineteen others have paid so much more—to ensure the Arkans will not take us by surprise. No one will question that they mean to make war when they tried to assassinate me, and everyone will agree that we must prepare. It was tempting, in fact, to attack first.

But all I needed to think about now was getting home. Vaneesh made me drink a full pitcher of water, and showed me up to a tree-house with an empty bed.