172 - The inside of my own skull

Once when Alchaen and I were speaking, or should I say, he was speaking and I was half-speaking, of the surgery, I found myself distracted, my eye drawn to one thing. On a shelf near the bed stood a glass jar of liquid with a pinkish-beige and knobbly mass, about the size of an eye, suspended in it. I was never squeamish, but this somehow turned my stomach. I asked him what it was. “Your mind seeks out the strands,” he said, smiling. “We brought it here, because you took comfort from seeing it was no longer in you. The grium sefalian.”

All I had time to do was think, so big, then it was out the door, while he dashed after me, worried. Behind a bush I heaved up everything I had eaten that day, and perhaps a few before.

That made me feel better, though; reminding myself that it was indeed out of me, I went back in, rinsed out my mouth and took a good look, turning the jar in my fingers. How had it not affected me more? But in my hands it was defeated, dead; on my shelf it was not a haunt but a trophy. I still have it, and bring it out every now and then when I think someone needs to see it for some reason.

The surgery itself was something I thought I would never remember, assuming that I’d been unconscious at the time, but once Alchaen said, “Something you said while Kaninden was operating on you,” and I didn’t hear the rest of the sentence. “Oh yes,” he said, when I’d conveyed to him the question, ‘I was awake?’ “You had to be, so that she could ask you what thoughts came into your mind when she touched… em, I think I should explain the whole thing.”

To my amazement, most of it eventually came back to me, no doubt because it was one of the less unpleasant experiences I had while healing.

The room, to my great surprise, has walls and roof entirely of Arkan glass. Above all, a Haian surgeon wants to see very well what she’s doing. Sunlight is not enough; there is also a device of several mirrors that direct the rays so that they shine from several angles onto the part of the patient being operated on—though not brightly enough to burn.

Kaninden, who made a specialty of surgery inside the skull, usually liked the patient to be in restraints, his head clamped absolutely still, but the feeling of Alchaen and the other healers was that for me that would be too much like being on the Mahid table again. So instead, Alchaen put me into trance, and gave me a command to stay entirely still throughout, which worked well enough.

Kaninden cut back a flap of my skin (they’d already shaved my head entire), and several healers held my head while she cut a circle into the bone, aching slow, with an obsidian knife. There is no other way to get an object so large out from inside a person’s skull. I remember how I felt the scraping, right into my teeth.

Alchaen had also given me the command to regain speech, so when they had the piece free, I said, “May I see the inside of it?”

“Ehh…” Kaninden seemed a little discomfited. “Why?”

“So I can tell everyone I’ve seen the inside of my own skull,” I said. “How many people can say that?” There was a healer holding the pulse-point on my wrist; only when he acceded would Kaninden show the piece to me, pinkish and bloody.

Then I ceased feeling anything, even as I knew Kaninden was poking about my brain with some sort of instrument. They’d needled me to keep me from feeling any pain while they cut, but I had still felt the cutting; now I felt nothing. “There are none of those kinds of nerve inside the brain,” she explained, when I asked. It stood to reason: we have nerves to give warning, and if something gets inside the skull, other than a Haian surgeon’s instruments, there’s generally no point in warning.

“Now we are going to use the”—here she used a Haian word—“to find the grium. You will have sensations, perhaps memories, or thoughts that don’t follow from what you were already thinking; I want you to tell me what they are, and I also want you to tell me if you get sensations like what you know of the grium.”

The Haian word, I learned later, is iliraen. I did not know that the same force that makes a sting and a spark if you shuffle over a rug and then kiss someone is what runs along the nerves and in the brain, until Kaninden told me. Nor did I know that you can get enough of it out of a lemon with copper and zinc rods stuck into it, joined by wire to some sort of device to control the amount, and then to a rod, to make a person remember something from childhood if you touch it to his brain. These were things I would never have believed, except that they were happening on Haiu Menshir.

I was lying on a table in a room of glass with four or five masked healers touching me—but then I was running up the side of Hetharin with Mana, no older than seven or eight; then I was smelling a whiff of cedar branches; then I saw a flash of the breastplate of the youth in front of me as we marched to Laka. “Chivinga, it’s startling, I know,” Kaninden said, bringing me dizzyingly back to Haiu Menshir. “But you must tell me.”

There was a trick to being in two places at once, so as to keep speaking, but in time I got it. It was about three aer, as Haians measure time, which I know as half of a good night’s sleep for me, before she was satisfied she’d got all of the grium. She could tell, by feel and by what I said, where it was. I did indeed feel the sense of the grium again, some of the time, to my horror. It was hard enough work for me that they kept toweling sweat off my face, and the memories cease almost from the moment she said, “Relax, Chivinga. Your part is done.”

When I woke up, my mind was so scrambled I didn’t know the hand lying in front of my face was mine at first, even after the fingers moved, which I must have done. I had forgotten the simplest things, such as how to count backwards from ten. “This always happens,” Kaninden told me, seeing fear on my face. “It will all come back to you as the wound heals.” That proved true, and in time I got back the clarity I’d had before the grium.

†

I was just beginning to speak when Alchaen sat me down in a clearing near the beach, with the look on his face he got when he was about to tell me something severe. “You are ready to know,” he said. “Have you noticed the scar on your testicles?” I hadn’t; now I found it, a tiny knot of hardness in the skin near the roots of them. “Let me say first, we have someone who can cure it, though you likely think that is not possible,” he said, very gently. “They gelded you.”

“It’s all right, it’s all right…” I felt his hands on my shoulders, and his voice crashed into my mind through darkness. I’d gone faint for a bit. Probably every man has thought about it, I imagine, and told himself that if somehow it did happen, or if he proved unable to father children, that he could make peace with it; it was another thing again to be told right out it was done. Almost without willing it, I counted my children in my head: Fifth, Kima, Niku’s child—three, if they all still lived. More than my share, some might say; being semanakraseye, I live a different life than most Yeolis, who by law may not have more than two apiece unless there is plague or war. But most Yeolis, if they lose one, can have another. “It’s curable, the way they did it, as I told you,” he said, insistently. “It’s all right.”

Since the rule was not to leave a mark on me, Kurkas hadn’t had them taken right off, but instead he’d had the Mahid poke something like a pin-dagger through the skin, and make a mess of the tubes inside. He didn’t tell me then, but they’d tested, acquiring some of it when I’d healed enough from the head surgery to have wet dreams. How they could tell that a drop had fathering-power in it, I have no idea, but they could, and I was indeed gelded.

The healer who would cure me was actually not a Haian, but a half-Zak from Brahvniki, with a name that sounded vaguely familiar: Piatsri. Perhaps there’d been a Piatsri among Ivahn’s staff when I’d visited, I thought.

This Piatsri had the gift of seeing inside another person’s body, and moving minute things by will. It would not hurt, Alchaen reassured me. I signed a double-chalk like two knives, wanting to say, “I don’t care if it hurts as badly as having them slashed up again ten times over—just do it.”

The worst you could say was that there was warmth almost to the point of discomfort, and then itching, and even so, they had another Haian there holding my shoulder while Piatsri laid hands on me to do his work. He seemed to suffer worse than me, as those with manrauq do from using it; a Haian apprentice mopped his brow and fed him some greenish-coloured tonic immediately after each time. I remembered how Svetkabras had aged twenty years in one in the Mezem. I hoped we were paying Piatsri well.

Once, when he’d recovered enough afterwards to speak again, he said to me, almost in passing, “I have an old friend who knew you in the Mezem; she’s been writing about you in her letters lately.” She? “Alas, I’m forbidden to write her that you are here; we can’t tell anyone. Well… she more than knew you.” He smiled. “Let’s just say, she has the living proof that you had your fertility then…”

That’s where I knew the name from. Niku had mentioned that when she’d been free, she had often written a Brahvnikian on Haiu Menshir, who she’d met as a girl while caring for her mother there: Piatsri.

“Shchevenga,” he said, “are you all right?”

I wasn’t. Claws of emotion were leaving streaks of fire across my soul. That was one of the first times a misconception Kurkas had burned into my mind came roaring back. I remembered what I had forgotten: that I knew they were both dead.

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