73 - Heights and depths

When I woke it was still dark; I almost reached over to where Mana should be lying near me, then remembered. Tears came too fast and hard to stop. Then a warm finger touched my shoulder, and Vaneesh said my name, close by my ear. She slipped her arms around me, skilled in gentleness, and drew my head onto her shoulder and its hearth-heat. I buried my face in her neck, sobbing. “The Goddess has three forms,” she whispered, “all of which I can be, when they are needed. You need the Mother; perhaps the Lover, too.” It came to me then she was naked.

I untangled myself from her, and turned away, though I hadn’t touched anyone that way for months, and my body cried out. “You feel stained with death, so you shrink from life,” she said, stroking my side under the woollen blanket with a touch as tender as breath. “But the only answer to death is life. You will die too, in your time; life spares no one. But now you live, whatever you deserve, and that is immaterial. There is more to do, your people still need you; who are you, to judge yourself?

“Your body knows that, Chevenga, and is wiser than you right now, so I speak to you through it. They died to save you: tell me, do you think they’d have you suffer your life now, or celebrate it?” Her hand slipped delicately between my legs.

For a time I just let her caress me, which she did patiently, turning my grief-moans gradually into pleasure-moans. Though it felt to some part of me like surrendering up what shred of decency I had left in me, I turned over to face her, and she kissed me deeply, lying me flat on my back. “Let your body lead,” she whispered, and wrapped my manhood in her mouth, as if to say, I will draw all the pain out of you.

Though we’d been strangers yesterday, it felt as if she loved me with all her soul and always had. “Let go the last of the self-recrimination in pure pain, with the ecstasy,” she drew her mouth off me to whisper, then took me back in again. I thought no more, just let myself be feeling and voice only, as I had let myself be feeling and movement only when I’d fought the Arkans. I felt as if I were shattering, and my limbs would fly outward like spears, when I came. Afterwards I felt empty and clean and clear.

She was right: life was greater than nineteen deaths, and I was still needed; in the face of it I saw my emotion dashed down for all it was, emotion, felt the ecstasy of life and the breath of the God-In-Me. That, I saw, was her mastery and her power, the nature of the God-In-Her; her people cherished her hugely, I’d seen in everything they’d said to her, and I’d also understood the Arkans feared her no less. No wonder. I wept again, but with grief pure of self-hate. I had chosen what was best by augury; my guard had volunteered knowing they risked dying, for Yeola-e or for me.

My troubles were nothing, anyway, to hers. The priestesshood was in her family, passed down through the female line; at eight she’d seen the secret temple where she’d lived burned down by Arkans, and her mother raped and killed before her eyes. Yet she’d felt the vocation all the more strongly, and now lived entirely underground. She’d conceived five times; two had been stillborn, one had died of a wasting sickness, one had been caught by Arkans and taken away in chains to no one knew where, and the last was a boy, who she was training as a priest in case she never bore a girl. Yet even after all this, and with her people suffering in slavery, she was filled with such love.

We talked until exhaustion took us. When I woke next it was late in the day; they’d let me sleep as long as I would, and Vaneesh was up. I bathed, ate and turned myself out as well as I could.

To Mirko’s mind, I was better off travelling home through the woods, with just two people who knew them well, rather than with a large escort, which would be slower, more easily noticed, and quite likely outnumbered anyway, if we ran into Arkans. I agreed.

He’d picked his two already; they did not know my name, he told me, but only had orders to guide me to the border. Embracing farewell, we wished each other luck, and said, “I hope to see you again, in better circumstances.” For him, I knew that meant as king of free Roskat; how far off that might be now, no one could know. Arko is likely to march through your land, on its way to mine, I thought. Probably he was hoping they’d thin themselves against us. I thought of planning with him, but I had a feeling that for now I’d lost his respect and he would see no merit in my ideas. All the time I’d been in his company, he had kindly refrained from saying, “I told you so.”

I hugged Vaneesh too, as only two people who have given themselves to each other can hug, and set off with my two guides, who gave me the names Nikroda and Ishulta. Nikroda spoke Enchian.

Such a blessing to my spirits it was, at the time, thinking all I had to do before I got home was walk and mourn.

On the second night, Nikroda woke me, crying “Ishulta! It’s his watch, but he’s gone!” We lit torches, but there was no sign save broken underbrush a little away from the fire. “He must have gone to piss too cursed far away,” Nikroda said, “and an animal got him.”

“So quietly?” I said. “I sleep light, and I heard nothing. He must have called to us.”

“The leopards that live here know how to snap a man’s neck silently,” he said, “so his fellows don’t kill them.” In the morning we found blood, and followed the trail, but it went back the way we’d come, and we’d likely find only a corpse. Nikroda knelt to do some Roskati ritual; then we went on.

Suddenly he cursed, and broke into a run. “I heard a dog bark,” he hissed through his teeth. “We must get to the stream.” Not knowing what else to do, though I had heard nothing, I dashed after him. We came to a long downslope, which appeared to fall off at the bottom, but since he didn’t slacken his speed, neither did I. Suddenly, to my astonishment, he flung himself into the air; the hill fell away beneath my feet, steep and muddy. A rope hung in the clearing, like those which children set up beside lakes, to make swinging dives; he caught it, and swung away, while I hurtled down. I kept my feet, sliding, but could not stop; at the bottom where I thought I’d be safe the ground seized me, up to the waist; then to my horror I felt it drawing me down.

He swung back and alighted nimbly on the bank, looking at me with no surprise at all on his face, only reckoning. Knowledge hit me darkly: I’m betrayed again. “A good place,” he said. “We get Arkans to chase us here.” He sat down on the grassy slope, breathless; it had been a hard run.

I just said, “Nikroda, why?”

“I’ve figured out who you are,” he said. “I know my history. My grandmother taught me. She saw all her family burned in their house, do you know that? When Fifth Inatanao could have saved Roskat, with a thousand more warriors. She, I understand, was your great-grandmother.”

I felt my jaw drop, as with a will of its own. I knew my history, too. “She sent as many as she could—do you think we had no battles of our own? She was semanakraseye; she had to think of her own people.” Truths fell into place; he knew who I was, had heard the tales, and so was too cowardly to attack me; perhaps he even knew I had weapon-sense, else he’d have tried to slit my throat in my sleep. He had a studiousness about him.

“As do you,” he said. “You’d sell Roskat to save Yeola-e in a heartbeat; I know that. The people wills, isn’t that the saying? At least now a Roskati will have got something from a Yeoli.”

“You mean the reward the Arkans give you when you bring them my corpse.” My only chance of life, it seemed, lay in changing his mind somehow, so I should beg, or promise him a greater reward, not insult him; but my heart, still laid open by the Arkans’ back-stabbing, seized my tongue. “What always hides like a rat under the indignation of the traitor: greed. You’ll have got something from another Roskati too; what’s a fair price to your mind for killing Ishulta? A horse, a new barn, another strip of land?” Probably he’d used a Roskati snap-rope, breaking Ishulta’s neck; he had one. No wonder I’d heard nothing.

“I hardly knew him,” he said, shrugging, as if that excused anything.

The mud was up to my chest now; having been taught that very slow swimming was the way to last longest in quicksand, I did so, aiming for the nearest knoll of grass. He sprang up frowning, loosening his sword in its scabbard. My arms were mired; he’d stick me like a trussed pig. I stayed where I was, where he couldn’t reach me, and felt the cold mud creep up over my shoulders. It smelled like swamp, with meat-rot as well; I remembered what he’d said about leading Arkans here.

“Arkans killed your grandmother’s family,’ I said. “They threw the torches. Now you’d take their money, for my life.”

He shrugged again. “They were enemies. You’d expect it of them. They’re to be used; their gold’s still gold. You claim to be friends.” Yawning in a self-satisfied way, just to hurt me, he said, “I suppose I shall have to fetch them. They aren’t following us; did you really think I heard a dog? I don’t think Yeola-e will miss you, anyway, you’ve swallowed every hook, just like you did with Kurkas.”

That stab went home, and I had no more words. Nor was the look on my face, as I swallowed tears for pride alone and therefore not well, was the path unconceived to his mercy; he only laughed at me. This does not fit with Jinai’s third fork; but any time, something can intercede that changes the future. I began truly thinking of my life as finished then, and resigning myself to that. All my training, striving, expectations, I thought, to make me this: a corpse to be sold to Arkans to fatten a Roskati traitor. I thought of my family, my parents, my new wife and husband; Fifth, and the one to come; my people, at war with Arko.

The mud touched my chin; then my foot found something hard.

I did not want to know what it was; I could know whether it would hold my weight if I put all on it. But if I tried, I saw, found it good and stopped sinking, Nikroda would devise some way to make sure I was dead before he went, stoning me or neaping dirt on my head. The only course came to me: to go under bending my leg beneath me, hold my breath and pray he left before I smothered; then put my weight on the foothold, and pray it bore me.

So I called him a coward, a traitor and a few other things, seeing no harm either way in satisfying myself, and just before the mud flowed in over my face, took three great breaths and then the deepest lungful of air I could. I thrashed and heaved, to make it look good; it was not hard to do with sincerity, once my eyes were covered; quicksand becomes darkness then, pressing cold and heavy on the skin, seeming to search with wet fingers every fingerwidth of one’s head and body for deadly entrance. I pity those who have suffered this without hope; but I knew it would be worse for me if my foothold failed, having harbored hope.