169 - The table in the oubliette

I am standing in the silence of night, beside a great circular pool whose bank rotates with time, like the Earthsphere. Distant on the opposite bank is the black silhouette of a cloaked woman, standing still as a stele, but moving as the bank moves; I see her black head creep across the face of a blade-silver moon. I know her name is Vora, “scythe.” Like the marker of any clock, she frightens me, but she is far away.

I busy myself with administrative tasks: going over Assembly and Committee-of-Assembly orders, assigning bureaucrats, writing reports. Somehow the monotony of this becomes engrossing, changing the unbroken thread of time into a shuffle of moments.

Then suddenly I feel a presence at my shoulder, like a breath of wind so slight it is barely felt. Vora is beside me, close enough to touch me, if she willed, her face like living white stone in the darkness. Panic seizes me, by the throat and stomach; I realize how much time has crept by, wasted on trifling things I could have delegated, that much of my life gone without my living it. I want to leap up and move, strike myself, speak my repentance, beg my life back; but time has no more soul to answer than a river, flowing one way only. It has only more of itself to rush by mindlessly while I waste it begging, gone forever. Vora waits.

†

I swim in an impossibly warm sea. Emerald, sapphire and ruby fish swim over stony fingers of fire-orange, pink, gold that reach up from the bottom as I float over. The fish then turn to words; I dive to chase them with my hands, and they flit out of reach with a thrash of the tiny letters that are their bodies.

My senses take in. Swishing and clacking, as if of long, dry reedy tongues, but far above me. Distant rushing thunder, but too steady for thunder; sun, white hot, hotter than sun is, on my skin. Sky, blue, brilliant; against it, an impossible tree, its trunk smooth and brown as a mamoka’s trunk, a single burst of branches flaring out from the top, each shaped like a single great leaf longer than a man, but formed of green spear-heads spaced as perfectly as banisters on a bridge. The sun flickers blinding between them as they move in the wind. A hand, which I know by its touch is a Haian’s, lies on my brow.

Such a beautiful place my dreaming mind has brought me to, so creative and free in its wanderings. Such gentleness, I have inwardly escaped to. The Haian is no longer touching me, but doing some paperwork; I hear the scratch of his pen. He is middle-aged, his long black hair streaked with grey, the wrinkles around his mouth and eyes bearing a kindly shape, as those of Haians tend to. He is not wearing the typical Haian robe, black with the two white stripes, but a sleeveless shirt of some gossamer beige fabric. I raise my head. I am on a beach wider than any beach can be, made of impossible white sand, fine as flour. At its edge laps a brilliant turquoise sea; the steady thunder, I realize, is far-off surf. The air is both sweet and salty, beautiful to breathe after the pit-stink of Arko.

I feel the freedom of almost-nakedness, wearing only a loin-cloth, a black arm-ring, my crystal and father’s wisdom-tooth, and a leaf-green ribbon tied around my sword-hand wrist. My hair feels oddly short; running my hand through it I find it has been cropped severely but evenly. Has this barbarian without caste somehow been de-elevated, in a dream?

The Haian looks at me. By the look in his eyes, I am very familiar to him, but showing a new facet of myself, in some way, that intrigues him. “Chivinga,” he says, in that delicate accent, making me realize that for all I like Anhunem, I miss Persahis desperately. Luck-spirits of dreamworld, may I see him before I wake? Better still, may I never wake, into that scratched and ribboned and memento’ed little room with the bars on the windows and the two Mahid kits floating still as death outside the bolted door? Please, can there be another world and another place for me, in dreaming at least?

I have never seen this Haian before, but somehow I have a name for him: Alchaen. My imagination has some craft, coming up with a name so realistically Haian-sounding; maybe I should take up writing stories. I sit up, and find one thing unpleasant, one flaw in the perfect scenario of this fantasy: my body is weak, and feels delicate. I feel out of training as if I’ve been wounded; sure enough, I find a scar I don’t remember getting, that by its deep pinkness and tenderness, I got three or four months ago, on the left side of my chest, about a half-handspan below heart-height. Too real; can we make that go away? I wish to no avail. Still, it’s a small complaint.

“How are you?” the Haian asks.

“Wonderful,” I say. “I want to stay here forever. Can that be arranged?”

His eyes flicker with just a touch of startlement, as if I’ve done something odd, before they go impassive-kind again, healer-style, and he smiles. “Stay here forever? You have a home to return to.”

“Oh, I know,” I say. “But that’s after I wake up. Isn’t time elastic in dreams, so it can stretch to an infinity within a moment? Or can it be, at least, if I am firm enough in choosing that?”

“Certainly,” he says, “if you were dreaming. You are not.”

I laugh. “Don’t tell me that! It will fling me out of it. You think I want to open my eyes to that ceiling again?”

“I assure you, Chivinga, you won’t. Do you know where we are?”

“What it is called, I have no idea. I know its essence—beauty and peace beyond plausibility—and that’s all that matters.”

“We are on Haiu Menshir. Do you remember first meeting me?”

“Look, Haian,” I say. “You claim I am not dreaming; but you are within my dream, but a figment of my own imagination, and so could say anything, especially if it pleases me. You’re not talking me into anything that is so unbelievable it breaks the spell and sends me back to Arko. I like it here.”

He laughed, a gentle rippling. “I understand your concern,” he said. “The truth, you know in your heart; so let it come to you in its own time. Let me suggest that you act on the assumption that this is reality, rather than dream, until it is proven otherwise. What harm can any act of yours do, if you are merely in a dream?”

Eminently fair and sensible, I had to admit. Why not play it, like chiravesa? “Haiu Menshir?” I said. “How did I get here? And no, I don’t remember first meeting you, if it’s not now… I hope you’ll forgive me.”

“My name is Alchaen of Berit,” he said. “Nothing to forgive, Chivinga. We are on the grounds of the House of Integrity of the University of Haiuroru. How you got here, as best I understand, was that you somehow made your way from Arko to Tenaspur, from where you came by ship to here.”

“Tenaspur? You’re straining my credulity, dream-Haian. It’s much shorter via Fispur.”

“I am only citing the captain of the ship that brought you,” he said. “She said that when they took you on, you were half-starved and exhausted and had manacle-sores on your wrists and ankles, as well as the cuts and scratches someone gets running through wilderness.”

I suddenly itched to get up, so I did. It was far too hard and took far too long. I have to work myself back into shape, I thought. Yet if I’m dreaming… no, I should anyway, in case I find myself facing dream-enemies. He carefully ordered his papers and slid them into a portfolio, so as to get up with me. If this were real, I asked myself, what would I most want to know? “How long… what’s the date?”

“By your own calendar—I’ve kept it, knowing you would ask”—he thumbed through his papers, found one. “Verekina 17, 1550.”

My heart was suddenly pounding. “Verekina 17? All-Spirit, it’s spring? Oh kyash, kyash, kyash…” The snow was melting fast out of the passes of Yeola-e, opening them; in the plains it was very close to fighting-season, if it wasn’t already. I’m acting very much as if this is real and not a dream, I thought. If it is… I’m out of Arko.

I’m out of Arko I’m out of Arko I’m out of Arko I’m out of Arko… My hand went to my head, the place under which the thing they’d put into me that would kill me was growing. “The grium sefalian…?”

“It’s been removed. As soon as you were sufficiently healed from the lung-wound, you underwent the surgery. You were able to express to us, your choice.”

Now my breaths began coming hard, with shock, bringing a faint twinge of pain from between my ribs, under the scar. For months I’d been measuring, asking myself ‘How is my mind?’ and feeling the answer; I’d pretended to myself not to the feel the deterioration, but I had felt it. A confusion, a dullness, an inability to keep track of things, forgetting my thought mid-sentence, seeing things out of the corners of my eyes… it had all grown gradually worse, in Arko. I could easily know it had been there now, because it was gone. My mind was as it had been before: clear.

I sank to my knees, tears weakening me. He took my hand and guided it to my head; under my scalp my fingers felt a circular ridge on my skull. “That’s where she cut through the bone,” he said, steadying me by my shoulders. His touch was as familiar as if I’d felt it innumerable times. “All-Spirit, All-Spirit, All-Spirit,” I whispered through my tears. “How do I thank her—whoever she is? How do I thank Haiu Menshir? Where do I start?”

“We are but doing our work,” he said. “But I will make sure you meet Kaninden—that is the surgeon’s name.”

I leapt to my feet, my mind, so beautifully clear and fast again, filling with calculations. I was free to seek alliances. Brahvniki, Tardengk, Curlionaiz… Niah-lur-ana. I counted off days in my head. Half a year of fighting season left even in the heights; plenty of time to win back ground, and then winter would be on our side. First thing was to let home know I was here. “The Yeoli ambassador in Haiuroru,” I said, “is it still Denaina Shae-Sara? Which way is it to the city?” She’d have pigeons that homed to Vae Arahi.

“Chivinga…” He laid his hands on my arms, tenderly. A sudden anger came up, making me want to fling him off; only his being a Haian stopped me. “You aren’t well enough, yet.”

“What are you talking about? My chest’s healed, my head’s healed, I’m walking and talking, am I not?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then tell me which way to the city. I don’t have to be dressed.”

He looked flummoxed, as if I’d never spoken this way in all the time he’d known me. What was I doing for all that time? “Chivinga… it’s not that, it’s this.” He touched the green ribbon around my wrist with two brown fingers. “I mentioned that you are in the House of Integrity… maybe you don’t know what that means…?”

“I don’t care what it means. I have my duty to do and nothing is more important.”

He seized my shoulders, fixed my eyes with his, and said, “Remember the table, Chivinga.”

He is a Haian. I must not strike him, fling him to the ground, even raise my voice more than I have. I was suddenly tingling and bristling all over, and a kind of darkness impinged on my mind, like smoke. “What table?”

“The table in the oubliette.”

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