112 - Huge beyond imagining

While I had been prisoner in the Marble Palace, I hadn’t thought I wanted to kill myself; in the Mezem baths afterwards, with the first katzerik in four days, the urge came hard.

It is hard to take two steps back and judge such a feeling in comparison with previous spells of it, or remember that they were solved; you know it was there before, and it passed, and the instances are points of memory in your mind. But you are still in its grip, every thought shot across with the feeling.

I was thinking to save my people an amount of money that might otherwise break them, for I could not doubt that Triadas, if not Kurkas, would be wise enough to charge no less for my ransom. I was also thinking that Triadas might realize he didn’t have all he wanted out of my mind, and all the rest was freely available to him so long as that mind existed. I was thinking as well that my mind was compromised anyway, in a way that would grow worse with time, by the grium, something which Triadas would never tell Artira while they haggled my price. No matter how I looked at it, it seemed, my life was now not an asset to my people, but a liability. A liability I could remove without much trouble.

The next day after breakfast, I went to my favourite place in the woods outside the city, taking not just Chirel but my pin-dagger out of the Weapons Trust. It would be wrong in so many ways to do it with Chirel—to sully the sword of the semanakraseyel with the blood of a semanakraseye, or any Yeoli, to make my father’s sword the killer of his child and my grandmother’s the killer of her grandchild, and so on—but of course I had to take it, so as not to draw suspicion.

By law, further building inside the Rim was prohibited, except on land already built on—one reason the centre of Arko has buildings as high as twelve floors—so that the woods remain wild, for the benefit of the citizens. That means some parts have wide and well-worn paths; but others, deeper in, are more remote. There was a glade, where a tiny stream flowed into a shallow clear pond, dotted with lilies; in the buzz of cicadas, the croaking of frogs, the trickling of the stream and the birdsong, you could forget that the biggest and most bustling city in the world was but a tenth’s run away.

It was in the seventies of etesora, a time when autumn would clearly be making itself felt in Vae Arahi, but was undetectable here. But the glade was shaded, green and cool; if you came before dawn there might be fingers of mist over the pond, until the relentless Arkan sun burned them off. Its surface was the only mirror I’d look at myself in, these days.

I didn’t now, though. I wrote a letter, for Mana to pass on to everyone else when he got home, explaining why, and sending them all my love. I folded it into my belt-pouch, as they’d likely go through it afterwards; I was going to tuck it into my shirt until it occurred to me it would end up blood-soaked, and perhaps unreadable, that way.

Then I knelt at water’s edge, drew the dagger and took it in both hands, point inward. I aimed it between the ribs toward the centre of my heart, an instant death, so long as I didn’t chicken out before it was all the way in.

I didn’t mean to hesitate, but in the moment of truth, suicide is not an easy thing, and I saw in a moment I’d have to convince myself, to will my hands to make the move. I might have to take some time; no matter, I’d take it.

I wrestled with my thoughts for a while, until I saw what I would have to do was go back into the state of the Kiss of the Lake, when I had entirely relinquished my claim on life, for the sake of my people. That, in fact, had been harder than this would be, since in the instant before you relinquish, you suffer the most abject terror, from the smothering; here there’d be just a knife, not even touching me, the instant before. But something kept whispering to me, This is not the Kiss of the Lake, no matter how much I tried to make myself deaf to it.

In all this I lost my sense of time, so I am not sure how long how I was there, before a calm Yeoli voice behind me said, “Cheng, may I ask that you not do that, until you hear me out?”

Mana would be the first to say that no one really gets hunches or inklings, that it’s just chance, and yet he told me afterwards that his itch to follow me out to the woods after we’d eaten had been so strong it had almost been like a hand pulling him.

Then when he’d been getting his sword, the Weapons Trust man had happened to say, “Your countryman was just here, not just for that elegantly-plain sword of his, but that dagger with a sliver of a blade, which he very rarely takes; wonder what he’s doing.” He knew me well enough to follow the trail of my reasoning, for why I shouldn’t do it with Chirel. He went out the Mezem gate at a dead run.

He knew me well enough also to guess I’d go to the place that seemed least like Arko in Arko, and, so I wouldn’t catch him creeping up on me by weapon-sense, left his sword hidden in the trunk of a hollow tree a little way in from the edge of the woods. I wouldn’t like to be a criminal in Arko, if Mana was the Sereniteer.

As his voice jolted me out of myself, my hands jerked the dagger back away from me. I gasped in several breaths, and realized I was dripping sweat. He came around and knelt in front of me, close enough to seize my hands, but didn’t. I wondered if it was in respect of my choice, or that he trusted his own speed, to match mine if I tried.

“So it’s over, in your mind?” he said. “We are conquered the moment they decide to try? Do you think so little of us, your people, that we are such cowards and weaklings?” I remembered, as no doubt he intended, our previous conversation. “If so—then do it, with my blessing. If you think so little of us, we don’t need you.”

“Of course I don’t,” I said. “It’s not that.”

“You still love us, then—and you would leave us? In our darkest time, you whom we need so much would walk away?”

“Mana… it’s not that either.” I found myself despairing of my ability to explain in a way he would understand.

“What is it, then? I think you owe me, and all of us, an explanation.”

Of course, I hadn’t meant to deny them one; it was in my belt-pouch. I thought of handing it to him, as that would do my thought the most justice; but I found myself shy to. Such letters are traditionally read after the death of their authors. I just told him, instead.

“Hmm,” he said, thoughtfully. “All very reasoned. And yet so often, logical excuses are what a coward speaks most loudly, so as to conceal his cowardice.”

I stared at him as if he’d slapped me across the face; it jolted me out of what was left of my reverie like a dunking in ice-cold water. I couldn’t think of a single time that anyone who knew me had called me that before.

“What, Fourth Chevenga? Did I offend you? Were those fighting words?” The trace of a grin quirked one corner of his lips, almost the same one he’d get poking a hornets’ nest with a short stick. “Maybe I should call you an idiot, too; think how it is! Here is all Yeola-e, staring down the blade of Arko, tip in our faces. And here are you, our semanakraseye, staring down a blade too. But it’s in your own kyashin hands!”

I’d almost forgotten it was there, slender and glint-edged, the point trembling. “You see relief there, don’t you?” he said. “One thrust, and you need not worry about anything; you won’t have to go through the hardship of hanging on through whatever you have to hang on through to get home, or fighting them, or tearing out your heart about what Triadas got out of you… well, who could blame you for wanting it?”

“He didn’t tell me that, in effect, I conceived the whole plan against Yeola-e for him,” I said. “But I’m sure I did, because if you were him, and had me, what else would you do?” I had never said it before, even to myself. The pain in my heart was as if the dagger was already there, but without bringing the relief of death, and it was as if there were three more daggers piercing my throat and both eyes as well.

“No one could blame you for wanting it,” he said, gently. “But the coward who breaks the unit by fleeing, and so kills everyone in it, does that because of what he wants, too, for which no one can blame him: his life. Don’t you see how we’d be left, if you did this? How broken, and doomed, we would be?”

I clenched my eyes shut, as if that could keep them from bleeding tears. I saw. The dagger shook in my hands. Huge beyond imagining, more than you can bear; now I understood Jinai’s words. It felt as if it would swallow me whole, overwhelm me beyond any hope of healing, ruin my mind in and of itself.

“Chevenga, you do need relief,” he said, so softly it was hardly more than a whisper. “You do need mercy. I know that.” He reached over the dagger in my hands, to take my face between his. “But, you’re thinking, extreme pain needs an extreme medicine, and you can only think of one. You’re forgetting all the others.” He leaned over the dagger, to kiss me as a lover kisses.

Our friendship had never been that way. We’d touched for warmth and laughs and comfort only, never sexual pleasure. I am sure he’d never touched another man for sexual pleasure either, his nature being inclined entirely towards women. But I know what he was thinking: what was needed, only another Yeoli could do, and there was no other Yeoli here.

He reached up under my hands holding the dagger with both of his, and stroked my nipples through my shirt with thumbs tender as two tongues. That undid me; my arms went loose, my hand dropping the dagger beside me, and the sobs came roaring up out of me, like a river with water over my head engulfing me. He wrapped his arms around me and held me hard, pulling my head into his neck. “I’ve got you,” he whispered. “Just let it take you.”

When I look back, it was like a fit of madness. I couldn’t think; I lost track of time again; my emotion was me and I was my emotion, as fighting had been me and I had been fighting against my Arkan escort in Roskat. But he held me through it, like a rock in an ocean driven wild by storm, and then brought me to ecstasy, as Vaneesh had. “I stand in for all your people,” he said, all through, as he slowly raised me towards it. “I am Yeola-e. We love you, and we need you, Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e. Feel it.”

In the back-arched, screaming throes of ultimate pleasure, he brought me back to my senses. I lay naked and boneless in the gentle air of the glade afterwards, and he stroked my brow, and I was myself again.

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