178 - He has his own madness about me

I tell it all out of order. I am making a mess of this, as my mind was a mess back then. Perhaps that gives the story greater verisimilitude. I went on working with Rona, if what we did could be called work, my assignment there to make it become less grim and serious and more purely joy, and with Lakrisi, my assignment there to just to succeed, at least for now. With him also I had the assignment I’d secretly given myself, to learn to give myself entirely into his hands. (Such lovemaking was entirely foreign to Rona’s nature—she would have thought it perverse—so I could not ask her.)

I understood a line of Jinai Oru’s reading, when I had been nineteen: “the black lightning bolt that never goes away.” It was a crack in the ceiling of the oubliette, that I looked at all too much when I was shackled to the table. I wrote the sentence you just read, but I could not speak it unbroken, even today.

I had thought I knew what “pain, huge beyond imagining” meant while I was in the Mezem. I had not. Now I did. Arko lay like a huge weight across my spirit, having stolen two of my few grown-up years. I was twenty-two and a half.

The faculties return. The questions you must ask come up as they come up. I realized that my knowledge of the war had never been better than piecemeal, gleaned from the Pages, which could not be trusted, and what new Yeoli ring-fighters told the rest of us as they came in. Now it was all almost half a year out of date.

Of course what my people here knew would be out of date too—except that they must be writing home. Where had my mind been, that I didn’t even know that? I called in Krero. “If you are the best person, give me the… fullest report you can, or if not, tell me… who is.”

“Emm… Chevenga…” How in the Garden Orbicular can you be surprised I’m asking for this? “We, em… I think I should speak to your healer, first.”

It was like a sword through the guts. “It’s that bad.”

“No, no, Cheng, that’s not what I mean at all! I just mean… we should check with your healer… the incompetence thing, you know what I mean?” His face had a cornered look. “I’ll send someone for him.”

“Fine, but… first, will you please alleviate my worst worry… for me, just so it will quit haunting me? Tell me we… have not made a… final surrender.”

It was only an instant before he said, “No! All-Spirit, no, we have not done that.” But that instant stretched long as centuries, enough for sweat to break out cold all over me.

“All right, good. Thanks.” By will I slowed down my breathing. He patted me on the shoulder and said “Wait here, Cheng,” as if I had somewhere to go.

Alchaen went into my parents’ leaf-house with Krero, so they’d be out of my hearing. They discussed it for long enough that I had to get up and pace. What is it? ‘Can he take this, can he bear that?’ It doesn’t kyashin matter what I can bear to hear, when my people have had to bear suffering it. I was sick of being a mental invalid.

But someone made my case, for when Krero, Sachara, my mother and my shadow-father all came in, they had a map. “Alchaen said we should get the worst out of the way first,” Krero said. “Sit down, love,” my mother told me. I did. “Take a deep breath.” I did. “They’ve taken Vae Arahi.”

I choked off the cry, but not until it was half out of me, so they all heard. It was like a sword through the guts again, except this time it wasn’t pulled out. The faces of hundreds of people I knew, the sight of Assembly Palace and the Hearthstone and the School of the Sword all flashed through my mind.

“They didn’t sack,” Sach said, quickly. “And we packed up the entire government, lock, stock and barrel—people, papers, the talismans, everything—and got it out before they got there. The whole town and half of Terera, all those who aren’t warriors, helped… that’s why no surrender. Artira is still acting semanakraseye, make no mistake.”

“Cheng, look.” Krero laid out the map on my bed, making me quit clenching my forelock and open my eyes. The rest of it wasn’t that far off what I had expected. They occupied the central plains more or less entire, as well as the port towns. Leyere was the only sizable city still free.

“Renaina Chaer has warriors, maybe three or four thousand, in the southern mountains, that she’s split up to do raids, but that’s less helpful now than when the Arkans had big enough armies in the towns there to need supply lines; they just have garrisons and are eating locally while the main army winters in Tinga-e. Emao-e and Hurai have an army of about seven thousand in Ossotyeya, where they wintered. The Arkan general, Triadas, has fifteen-thousand penning them in.

“But that’s all they’ve done, since last fall, and we’re well into fighting season now. Everyone’s been waiting to see when they’d besiege Leyere, or go after the Ossotyeya army. But they’ve been throwing less into fighting on the edges than building in the middle. Roads, bridges, dams, walls around cities, all sorts of things, with ankaryel they’ve stolen from us, and enslaving Yeolis to do the work, of course.”

Because fighting what is left of us doesn’t really matter, any more. It was textbook Arkan strategy. Of course Triadas would do it well. “I forgot to say,” he added, “they’re putting up a wall around Vae Arahi.” I clenched my eyes shut again for a bit, and he stroked my shoulder.

When I could, I said, “Triadas probably planned… to ask for Leyere and that army in return for me.” I saw Krero and Esora-e swap a glance that clearly said, ‘So much for sparing him the thought.’ “Now they know I’m here… kyash, I’m an idiot… I’ve never even asked Alchaen how much longer… I’m going to be here.” He’d said he’d wait a little way away outside; I called him in. I can talk, if not perfectly, I’m thinking more clearly, we’ve hunted down all the lies, I’ve trained myself back to decent form…

“Were it up to me,” Alchaen said, “I’d say another half-year—”

“Another half-year!?” My voice went up to a bit of a shriek on ‘year.’ “Alchaen, you must be kidding—that takes us out of fighting season completely! I thought you said I was healing faster than you expected!” I sprang up and paced, having to move.

“Chivinga… that was before I knew all I do now. You know how severe it was. To heal completely takes time; there’s no way around it.”

“Heal completely? I don’t need to heal completely—not every last little quirk or twinge or shiver. I just need to heal enough to run a war! Look at it that way, Alchaen, and estimate again.”

“Chivinga, running a war, you will be under the most severe strain, fighting, planning, carrying so much responsibility, you have to—”

“I’ll be under far worse strain being stuck here while the Arkans slaughter the last of my warriors and chain the last of my people!” My parents and my two heart’s brothers, bless them, all looked knowingly at Alchaen and signed chalk. “Not to mention the danger I am in, and I am, here… kyash… I have to speak to Dinerer.” Unless I were recaptured, Triadas would decide to finish us by force, despite the textbook; I saw it clear as day.

“You can’t, Chivinga, you’re—”

“In-kevyalin-competent, kyash on it, kyash on it… Sach!” I switched to Yeoli. “Go send someone to Denaina, get her here, right now.” Another nuance I had learned, as my mind had risen out of the muck, was that while Krero was my guard captain, Denaina, as the highest-ranking official here, was my guardian, as far as the Haians were concerned. If I couldn’t do it one way, I’d do it another. “A-e kras’,” he said, unthinking, and went at a dash.

“Alchaen,” I said, “what can I do to speed it up? Two times working with you per day instead of one would cut it in half, right? Leave off the sexual healing, for all I love Lakrisi and Rona, and just work on the mental? Just try harder, be stronger, will myself calm better…?”

“That was pretty smoothly spoken,” Esora-e said, the way he’d once praised me for a well-done sword-stroke. “Best I’ve heard so far.”

“Chivinga, it doesn’t work that way… there’s a certain pace these things take, just by the nature of the mind and the vital force.”

I said no more, resorting just to pacing and breathing, until Denaina arrived. Alchaen’s calm face betrayed a flash of worry, to see her. “No one’s told me what the Council of Elders’ final decree was,” I said to her in Yeoli. “I think it would have been part of Krero’s report, if they were calling all healers out of Yeola-e; but what about Arko?”

“You’re right, semanakraseye,” she said. I didn’t tell her to call me Chevenga; the formality I wanted right now. While an Arkan wall was going up around Vae Arahi, and perhaps there were Mahid there—the thought was like the touch of a brand on my heart—I wanted to hear myself called semanakraseye. “All they did to us was a formal censure and warning. Arko… it wasn’t so simple. What she didn’t tell you is that they were already thinking of calling healers out of Arko, for something else, something to do with Kurkas’s personal physician; they haven’t heard from him in far too long. But the Elders are calling healers out of the City alone, not the whole Empire… because if they do that, then they have no more hold over Kurkas, if you see what I mean.”

Of course I see what you mean, I’m crazy, not stupid... I told myself she was probably thinking of my age. “Kyash… that’s the sort of thing that will set Kurkas off, not restrain him… I have some knowledge of the man; you know he used to invite me for dinner?” I switched to Enchian. “They’re going to be back with more, since six weren’t enough. A shipload for all we know—Alchaen, you know this, but Dinerer does not: Kurkas is…” Of course my tongue locked up. “He… has his own… madness… about me. He’d stop… at nothing. I’ve got to get off… Haiu Menshir before… they have time… to arrange it.”

Would it not have been worse for my case, I’d have banged my head against the wall-post, when Denaina said, soothingly, “They’d never attack Haiu Menshir full-on, semanakraseye… All-Spirit, you’ve been through a lot.” Still I managed, using every grain of persuasion in me, enough that I worked up a sweat, to talk Alchaen down to two moons.

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