173 - The empathy of memory

“Schevenga… what is it? It’s all right, Shchevenga, Alschaen! Alschaen!” The Haian came in, and got me sitting on the bed. Of course I could not tell them why I’d frozen and turned white. “I mentioned a friend of mine, a Niah woman, who he was lovers with in the Mezem,” Piatsri told Alchaen. “She has a child by him. I just said she had written to me about him.”

Alchaen took my hands, in his expert way. “Deep breath, Chivinga. You cannot know the truth of this, without calm.” When, between his help and the shreds of my will that I could find, the emotion had eased, he said, “Tell me what went wrong.”

I got out just one word, which was enough. “Dead…”

“You are thinking she is dead?” Alchaen said, in that overly-even tone that psyche-healers use. I signed chalk.

“No, she isn’t!” Piatsri said, with a touch of protest. “I got a letter from her just a few days ago! We’re talking about Niku aht Tanra, right? Called Wahunai? Has to be—no other woman was in the Mezem.”

“Chivinga, would you know her handwriting?” I signed chalk. Now and then, in the Mezem, we’d slipped notes under each other’s doors. “Piatsri, may he see the letter?”

The Brahvnikian was hesitant for a moment—Niku had told me they’d been pen-friends from her mid-teens, sharing every thought—but then agreed, and went to fetch it.

“Part of what they did to torture you was tell you falsehoods that would cause you pain,” Alchaen said to me. “You remember that Yeola-e has not been entirely defeated, don’t you?” I signed chalk again. What was in my mind and what he told me had warred against each other until he’d got Denaina to confirm the truth; even so I wasn’t entirely certain, and would not be until my family and the guard arrived. I chalked in part to humour him.

“Cast your mind back to the day of your fiftieth fight,” Alchaen said. “Did you think she was dead then?” I signed charcoal, feeling reasonably certain. She flew out. She was never brought back—I’d remember that—nor did I hear of her death from anyone, or read it in the Pages… “So you know you acquired the idea during the time you were being tortured. You absolutely cannot trust it.” I closed my eyes and lay back on the bed.

Piatsri was back soon. My eyes did not lie to me; it was her writing. He pointed out the start of a passage to me.

Piat, the baby is beautiful and a joy... she is so bright of spirit and smiles and smiles... she gurgles and coos at me and seldom cries. She loves the feather hangers and bubbles at them... Her eyes are darkening and they will be like her father’s. I will look in them and see him in her, every day of her life, whatever has become of him... I still have part of him here in the baby’s eyes. I laugh with her and try not to cry at the same time when she nurses. I don’t want to lay my worries on her tiny head…

I could not read more, for my eyes blurring with tears, and had to put my head back again, even as my heart leapt and danced. “Tell him more,” Alchaen said to Piatsri, laying his hand on my shoulder. “Where is Niku? What’s happened with her in the last few months? How is she doing?”

“She’s home, on Niah-lur-ana. She had the baby… oh, it must be a little more than three moons ago now. I know she’s been in some sort of argument with other people there, about some political thing, but she won’t say what it is. Some private Niah matter. I thought at first she was in trouble for not killing herself rather than be captured—you know how they have that—but the way she writes about it, I think it’s bigger than that.”

Allying with Yeola-e and revealing the wing! Her words, in the darkness on the grass-faib field as I held the moyawa on my shoulders, came back to me. “I will fight for you; but I am a good fighter. And I will have the Wasteega Foa”—the Niah oracle—“on my side… ‘It is time to come out,’ Lord Friend told me.”

He pointed to another passage. I feel in my heart that Chevenga is still alive. I have no other news but just my hope. My prayers must be hammering on the Gods’ ears, and if I could find Lord Friend to wrestle with for his life, I would, but my dreams are empty of the Gods and the wind is empty of their words.

I shook tears out of my eyes and smacked the letter down on my night-table. He’d brought it in a flat polished wooden case that, when he opened it on his lap, proved to be a desk-in-a-box, with pen, paper, a well of ink built-in, and various compartments. Without asking, I snatched up the pen and one sheet of paper and began scrawling. You’ll understand, Piatsri. You are forbidden to tell anyone I’m here; I’m not. I had it written in a tenth. Alchaen raised no objection. Denaina… I wouldn’t give the choice. “You…” I said, “know how… to send… to her… how… long…?”

“Yes. It’s an odd thing… she told me long ago to take my letters to her to a Niah man who lives in the Sailortown part of Haiuroru port, in the evening. I’ll get a reply back, sometimes, the next morning. Even as close as Niah-lur-ana is to here, I have no idea how they do it.”

Ha! I know how they do it.

He folded my letter carefully into a compartment, gently extricated his pen from my hand and neatly closed it all up.

I did indeed receive an answer the next morning. She had give our daughter the perfect name for the child of two slaves: the Niah word for “freedom,” which is vriah. She wanted desperately to be with me, but could not. “Now that I know for certain you are alive, omores,” she wrote, “I have to tell them that it is certain again that a foreigner knows our secret, and that will stir it all up again.”

I wrote back to her offering to come to the island and speak to her people, once I was healed. If I can ever speak well again… Alchaen reassured me I would, kept reminding me of how far I’d gotten already, from entirely mute to halting.

It was like a miracle, writing daily across sea. We made our plans. Her people agreed to invite me and hear me out, so the discussion was deferred until then, but in the meantime she would quietly consolidate her friendships—crucial, when her life might depend on it—and secretly find those A-niah who were willing to go to Yeola-e as an elite unit of flyer-teachers. In the meantime, I would heal.

†

I had thought I’d be nothing but overjoyed when my parents and the other Yeolis arrived.

Alchaen spoke to them at length before he let us meet, telling them what had passed, how different I was from what they knew, and all the ways to be careful with me. Their faces were still all shocked at the sight of mine. As well as having the new scars, they told me later, I looked ten years older.

The axe of madness fell when I saw my mother’s face. The world froze, then turned black and icy; I was done with healing and there was nothing left to do but die. By my memories, so long ago now—the knife in her hand, the darkening scarlet on her tricolor shirt—she had killed my father.

I fell to my knees, half-fainting, then got up and ran, planning to find a way to kill myself. Alchaen raised the House alarm and the strong-arms came; I would not strike them, since they were Haians, so they seized me and pinned me to the bed. Niku had spoken of A-niah captives biting through their own tongues so as to bleed to death while in bonds, so I tried it. The pain was welcome, the iron tang of my blood no different than anyone else’s I’d tasted; I breathed some in and choked. Voices rose, a hand laid a sharp-smelling cloth over my face, and the world spun away like a leaf falling.

When I woke up, my mouth was full of linen; I was not restrained, but knew by the heaviness of my limbs that I was drugged. I could do nothing but weep. Alchaen questioned me, having me answer by hand, not much different from how we spoke usually anyway. I feel for him, trying to calm and reassure my parents while he himself had no idea why I’d done this.

“There were other lies they instilled into you,” he said, once he’d got the reason out of me in his skillful way. “Chivinga, how could you do this to yourself without finding out whether this was one or not?”

He had to take me into trance and find out the reason from the fly on the wall. It was that I didn’t merely believe it, but, as far as I could tell, remembered it. “They tortured you into fashioning, by your imagination, a falsehood in the guise of a memory,” he told me. “Yes, it’s possible. I have seen other cases.” But no amount of telling me that seemed to touch it, so he prescribed encahun nenanhanun, which means “empathy of memory” in Haian. It means the conveying of one person’s memories into another person’s mind. A Yeoli might call it the ultimate and perfect chiravesa.

The procedure requires three gifted Haians: two telepaths to make the bond and an empath to sense whether matters are getting too far out of hand, as they often do. More specialists, I thought helplessly, wondering how much of a bill the treasury of Yeola-e, which must be flat broke, was running up for putting all the bits of me back together.

The idea frightened both my mother and me—since I could not bear to be with her, Alchaen spoke to us separately—but we both agreed nonetheless. “Your relationship with her is very important to you,” he told me. “So it’s best that you know the truth absolutely beyond a doubt. It is best for her, too.”

It was done at night, in a room lit by one small lamp only; darkness was most peaceful and blank, and therefore best, they told me. The reading and sending telepaths sat together, almost embracing; to their shield-side they positioned my mother, and to their sword-side, me, while the empath, whose name was Megidan, sat facing them, where she could reach us both with her hands. They all handled me as if I were a glass statue cracked almost through. Megidan explained everything to both of us very carefully, and more than once. The way of breaking the bond, she explained three times; I need only let go her hand.

In the silence of trance, I felt fingers on my temple, the sending telepath’s, a touch as gentle as feathers. Then Megidan guided my mother to relive that day, and my mind was suddenly stabbed full of brightness, as strong as my own thoughts but coming through my shield-side temple from those fingers. It was sunlight, greenness, the smell of cedars; above their highest branches, the peak of Haranin against a blue sky. I am home, walking, a warm arm around my waist, a strong hard man’s body in my own arm: my husband, my love, my Tennunga.

He smiles, his cheeks flushed a sweet pink between sun-gold curls; we were just play-sparring. We kiss; in that, I can forget the sound of the wings of Shininao, and that I am carrying a knife in Vae Arahi, that something terrible I cannot name awaits us, like enemies in ambush. I fight it off, as I’ve had to constantly these past few days, to be happy with him.

We walk silently past the rock. A thrashing jolt all through him—his face frozen in the ultimate shock—something on his chest, the steel tip of a knife, reddened from inside him, through his heart, the other behind him, Enchian—the eyes I love look at me in immeasurable anguish, and turn to glass—

I tore my hand out of Megidan’s, and heard the echo of my own scream. My mother had lived this, probably a thousand times, before time in its mercy had made it cease haunting her; for me it had been the first, and it was etched on my memory forever, now. In time, I came to understand that Alchaen had made a careful calculation: the cost to me of having the memory was worth the benefit of regaining love for my mother. But no one should ever have to make such a choice. All the blame lay with Kurkas Aan.

It had been strange even to see my father from a grown-up’s height. Now I would have to heal from seeing death-shock on his face, and his eyes setting before he even fell.

But the lie was slain. My mother and I flung ourselves into each other’s arms, and the abyss between us was gone as if it had never been.

The next morning when she came to see me, I was so startled I jumped a little. She’d cut her hair to a warrior cut; it made her look uncannily like me, in female form. “I am going to cease being asa kraiya, for now, to fight the Arkans,” she said. “Long in the tooth or not—stop looking so worried, my child, I do plan to train first. But I can’t bear not to fight them, when they have done what they have done to you.”

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