171 - Sense in the whirlwind

He remembered doing this already, of course. Who could know, how many times? For me it was the first, so I clung hard to him, pouring tears silently onto his neck, while he held me patiently. Was I imagining it, or was he bonier, as if he hadn’t been getting enough to eat? Or just more rawhide, from fighting? I drew back to look at his face. His eyes were more careworn, even smiling, that was certain. Every Yeoli’s must be.

It was good just to see him well. That would not be the case with everyone I knew. Among the warriors, a majority of them must be gone. “Krero…”

He was patient, in a well-practiced way. “Easy, Cheng,” he said. “You do best when you’re relaxed. Lean on me.”

“Sa… chara…” I managed to whisper.

“You want to know how he is? Well, I don’t know… let’s find out. Hey, Sach! How are you!?”

My other heart’s brother was guarding another leaf-built house; he came trotting up, though with a distinct limp he hadn’t had before. I flung myself into his arms tearfully too. “All-Spirit,” he said. “Each time you do this, Cheng, it makes me want to cry like the first time, too.”

Where’s my mother? Where’s my shadow-father? We were in a cluster of five of these leaf-houses, a tiny Yeoli village in the midst of the green beauty of Haiu Menshir. Someone came out of one of them: my little sister Sishana. Not so little; she’d grown a hand-span. “Sish!” I called. “Whe—” Kyash. The inward swearing on being unable to get out a whole word seemed wearingly familiar, too. I knew that house was where my parents were, so I went to it. “Ma... ma?”

I couldn’t help a gasp when I saw her. Her hair was cut into a warrior-cut, as I had never seen it, that I could remember. It made her look uncannily like me, in female form.

“Hello, love.” She held out her arms, and I flung myself into them. You are changed; all Yeolis are changed; Mama, I am changed so much... It was strange even to have the memory of being who I had been in the Mezem, in her presence. I killed eight Yeolis. Just as well I couldn’t say that. Even if this last, worst torture hadn’t happened, I’d never be the same.

But her touch, the warmth of her body, those things that were all-encompassing safety and life to the infant in me, were the same, as if the world hadn’t changed. I felt brought back to myself, as if part of me that had been cut off, the whole time I’d been in Arko was now rejoined. “Take a deep breath, Chevenga,” she said gently. “The words will come. I’ll wait for them.”

I have tears. Lots of those, right now. I took a deep breath; obedience to your mother can come from such a primal and easy place. She patted my back as if I were a baby on her shoulder again. I will say the most important thing, if it kills me. “I... love... you.”

Her arms tightened, with more strength than I remembered. Has she been training? “I love you too, my lion-cub. You’re getting better. It’s all right, love.”

“Kari, is it Chevenga? I’ll help you...” Esora-e’s voice; he came out the branch-framed door. He looked precisely the same, tough as old boot-leather, but, at the same time, like a stranger, for the length of time since I’d last seen him. “Do you need to be held, lad? I can carry you if you need.” I just stretched my hands towards him from my mother’s back. He put his arms around me more gently than I remembered him ever touching me, as if I were glass. They took me between them, and I laid my head on her shoulder and closed my eyes and let out my heart in tears. Sish piled in, too.

Here is safety; here is sanity. I just took it in, like a person dying of thirst draws in water. So familiar, and yet so strange, for those two years away, and for all the changes.

What happened? How is Yeola-e, how is Vae Arahi, tell me everything, leave nothing out; but of course they already had. As if he could read my mind, Alchaen said, “Don’t worry, Chivinga. What is missing will come back.”

“Whe... when?” They all laughed, fondly, as if at a familiar quirk. Even insane, I thought, I am in a hurry.

“When you are able to assimilate it,” he said. “The mind has a capacity to protect itself. That’s why you have forgotten so much; the mind will divide itself into parts, to protect some of itself.” I remembered splitting apart from myself while Klajen first and then any number of Mahid had tortured me, and how it had helped.

“You’ll be fine, love,” my mother said. “You listen. You breathe. It will all help.”

They loosened their arms on me, as if in respect for my independence. I seized them back, not so independent quite yet; that I could do. They closed in again, as if to say, as long as you want, whatever you need. “You may ask whenever you wish,” Alchaen said. “We are always here, Chivinga. Always. You let go now, you may hold on any time again.” I signed chalk. That I could do, too.

When I could bring myself to let go, I went around and hugged everyone, going to the guards if they wouldn’t leave their posts. To a person, they acted as if this had happened several times before. Then Alchaen took me into the house that he told me was mine. It felt so.

Inside there were two small beds and a writing-desk, with pen and ink and a few papers on it. I saw my own writing. On a night-table by the bed I knew was mine was a jug and a cup and a comb; there was a small clothes-chest, but I knew that I needed little in the way of clothes in this place. No wonder Haians want to wear long robes elsewhere in the world, I thought. They’d freeze otherwise. A breeze that had somehow made its way through the trees from the sea sent a set of wind-chimes, made of shell, to tinkling. The sound was so familiar I hardly heard it. It all had the feel of having been home for three months, as it had been.

†

I will never known all that Kurkas had done, or did himself, to me in that moon, though others do. There is a full account in a file, but I will never read it. I learned some from mentions, from what my people around me seem to know, some from answers Alchaen gave in the rare times I asked.

Drugs, of course since it was Arko: Accedence many times, Mahid’s Obedience, more truth-drug, All-Spirit knows what else. Smothering, rape, humiliation of a hundred kinds; these are only words, yet though I can write them, if you asked me, I would not be able to say them smoothly, even now. The first rule had been that I must be left with no visible marks; but then Kurkas had been unable to resist doing something that left slight ones.

They scraped me at least once more, so Kurkas knew of my foreknowledge, and the moyawa, if he believed it. What they got out of me they used against me by convincing me of lies: that Niku and the child were dead, that Yeola-e was defeated and all the circle-stones smashed and the Sword of Saint Mother melted down, my children all killed, my family all rendered barren, and plenty more that I don’t remember.

“He hated you and feared you,” Alchaen told me. “He could not know the true meaning of what he did, since he has never felt it. Yet you know all these things, and still cry, Why? For you there can be no answer that is enough, no reason that justifies to your heart what you have suffered, for all it might explain to your mind. You will have to accept that.”

Now my healing was my work, half a day, every day. It was as bitter and painstakingly slow as war-training, and in many ways harder. I was torn asunder a thousand ways; madness has as many branches as a tree. But, I learned, so does sanity; in a thousand ways I was healing. As the body will at least attempt to heal itself without even a healer’s help, so will the mind; as Haians say, that is the work of the vital force. But I was lucky as well to be aided by one so good. Like a war-teacher, seeming to read my mind often in the same way, saying “Follow the threads, Chivinga,” Alchaen led me along the black twisting path.

Like a fight, or a long-lasting pain, I don’t remember it well. Some of what I will describe came after this last awakening; some came from before, since it did return to me. I’m not even sure which is which, so I cannot put it in proper order. Alchaen made notes, but them too I will never read.

At the outset, he’d learned he could enable me to speak by putting me in trance, to question the deeper layers on my memory, not unlike truth-drug. There he found an even and patient voice claiming to have been a fly on the wall while it all happened, who thus knew all that had happened to this other person, Chevenga, and could describe it dispassionately. The fly even knew what I could and could not bear to remember when I woke. “No, no, don’t tell him that, he’ll jump in the fire-coral,” the fly said once to Alchaen; I happened to spot it in his notes, in Enchian, once when I peeked. Madness is devious, no less devious than the mind in which it lives; but so is healing.

Alchaen was sense in the whirlwind, routine in the confused aimlessness, steadying arms in the terror. He made me, and had trained everyone else to make me, take care of my looks in the morning, train, eat when I was hungry, swim when I was hot, nap when I was tired, however strong my own urge was to ignore my inclination. He filled the missing pieces; to my every question he had, or was, the answer, even if that was only his calm. He taught me to speak again, like a child, from nothing.

He set me laws to adhere to. Don’t fight what I felt, but let it take and pass through me, he told me; hearing this, I thought immediately of what Iska had told me to do the night before my fight against Riji Kli-fas. Tell him what I felt so I need never face it alone; distinguish myself from my madness; be patient, be patient, always be patient. (Not that that was different from what I’d been told all my life.)

He forbade me ever to curse or hurt myself, even as little as a smack on my own forehead or calling myself an idiot even if I was being one. “You are hurt enough already,” he would say. “You feel as if you are weak, childish, stupid, cowardly, but you are none of these things. The feeling comes both from the torturers setting out to convince you of them, and the residue of the suffering itself.”

Always, look at my heart with the eyes of a scholar, question all I felt, ask why with everything. I had never done that before, always knowing, or thinking I knew, what I felt, and putting it aside by will if I had to. Now that ability was gone; terror or sickness or pain or rage or all at once would seize and toss me at their leisure like sea-waves a leaf, and most of the time I had no idea why.

I had to build up entire my understanding of myself again. I went slowly, painfully, having to learn many things several times over, same as I’d had to awaken to myself several times. It is for that reason, I now understand, that the mad are so engrossed in themselves; it is a matter of necessity.

Yet in the end, I think, I came out with a better mind: certainly wiser and broader than before, which, I felt, would be an aid in the war. I also was stronger, in knowing what I could survive. To understand madness is to understand sanity.

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