179 - You know who you really are

I wanted Chirel. I wanted to see it, weapon-sense it, touch it, wear it, hold it in my hand. I had never been defeated with Chirel; that feeling of victory must still be on it, and that might help return me to myself. I was not alone in needing the feel of victory. All Yeola-e did.

It was an easy matter, when the precedent of twenty shortswords was already set, and I could tell Alchaen honestly what I felt; he could attach a note saying it was needful for my healing. When they brought it, I knelt as I had before Azaila in the School of the Sword, and laid it across my knees, still in the scabbard, just to be with it. Then I drew it, just to see the shine of the steel and that delicate killing curve.

Feh, I thought. I’m fooling no one. The piece of steel is as it has been for centuries; it’s the living hand that’s the weak point. The sword unchanged doesn’t prove I am. “You want to spar us with that, Cheng?” Krero, with Sachara and Esora-e and a few others. “You need to.”

We went to a clearing in the woods away from any other eyes, like thieves. They were at a disadvantage with short blades, which we evened up by my giving up my shield, or by going clean blade versus two blades. “What you need more than anything else is to be pushed to your limit,” my shadow-father said. “So we’re going to do that. No arguments.”

They sparred me all afternoon, allowing me only enough time between each bout for a few breaths and a swallow of water. Sometimes they came at me two or three on one, or I had allies—Esora-e said I’d known nothing but duels for too long—but everyone else got to rest. By the time the shadows were growing slanted and he called a halt, I felt as if my whole body had turned to water, and the world was swimming in a haze around me. Sweat soaked the sand of the clearing like dew, and I would ache for three days.

“Too much lying on the beach,” my shadow-father said. “We have to get you back into real shape. But… I was afraid to find you’d gotten worse, and you’ve gotten better. All-Spirit, have you gotten better.” Duels only, perhaps, but I’d learned tricks in the Mezem that neither classic Yeoli or classic Arkan warriors would dream of.

They were right; it was exactly what I needed. I was one with Chirel again, as if it were part of me, joined to my hand.

But the fall of Vae Arahi haunted me, more than I wanted to let it. In the Mezem, I’d been able to keep part of my heart safe at home, by looking up into the sky and seeing the same stars, by seeing the shrine in my mind as I meditated, by reminding myself that my family and friends were all there, living their lives as ever. That had kept me as sane as it had. Now it was gone. With Arko in my home, walling it off from the people, making them suffer who knew what—I knew my parents and guards were keeping scores of terrible stories from me—and polluting it with the presence of Mahid or who knew what else, it was as if I didn’t have a home, my feet cut out from under me.

That night, I dreamed I was alone in the sea, clinging to a bit of smashed ship, with no land in sight, only an empty horizon every direction, the wind and waves blowing me where they willed. I woke up at the death-hour, in crushing despair. Go home and save Yeola-e, not talking or thinking straight, with an army of seven thousand? I must be mad… well, no argument there. I am not that brilliant a commander; no one is. I am a grain of sand, against a mountain. There is not enough of me; there is not enough of Yeola-e. I gave myself to tears, then long full-throated sobs; why not? Everyone here was inured to that sort of thing from me; some wore ear-plugs, I’d learned, to sleep.

I was lying on the leaf-floor, my face in the sand I’d tracked in. I felt a hand on my back, my mother’s. I choked off my own cry. “Chevenga,” she said. “Tell me when you can hear me.”

I gave it time, waiting until the tears stopped flowing of their own accord rather than trying to master them, thinking of Alchaen saying “Let it out.” She waited patiently, her hand lying softly on me. I pulled myself up and wiped my face and got up onto the bed, and she sat beside me. She handed me the cup of water on the night-table; I drank and handed it back.

“Everything depends on you,” she said softly.

“I know,” I said.

“Not only that you are alive, but that you believe in yourself.”

My eyes flinched shut of their own accord. “I know.”

Silence hung between us for a moment. She took my hand and caressed it almost absently while she thought, just like when I’d been a child. “I knew those weren’t just the tears from some evil Kurkas did to you,” she said finally. “They sounded different.”

“Mama… he broke me. He destroyed me! I don’t know whether I can think as well as I did before—I can’t even tell! I can’t talk… I don’t even know if I can fight. That was just sparring, yesterday; I don’t know what will happen to me, on the field, against Arkans.” Fresh tears came. I jumped up to pace. She stood up with me.

“He didn’t break you, else you wouldn’t be here. You got out of chains, and that transport-carriage, somehow. And fought on an island on the way here, we were told.”

“That doesn’t mean I can be a competent chakrachaseye! Or a miracle-worker! That’s what it’s going to take!”

“Chevenga, answer me. What is the difference between the brave and the cowardly?”

The thoughts they choose to think, is the answer, of course. “Mama, my thoughts are shredded! You know what they did to me, how they ruined my mind; I can’t control my thoughts any more!”

“Chevenga. That—‘I can’t control my thoughts any more’—is a thought you are choosing to think.” I took a deep breath. “We are the people of choice, my child. You know now, perhaps better than any of the rest of us, what that means, having lived all that time among people who are not. How do we remain so? By remembering that we do choose—always. Including our thoughts.

“Your morale is low—understandably. You have been through things more terrible than most people can imagine, and it left you badly hurt. But it’s only the pain and the fear left over from that, Chevenga, leaving you with low morale. It’s not you.”

She took my face between her hands. “It’s chaff, love. More delusions, from those who filled you with delusions. In your heart you know who you really are, and what you are really capable of. Stop thinking anything else. The child I bore can save Yeola-e.”

I looked into her eyes as she looked into mine, unwavering. Her eyes had been the source of mine, identical in line and colour. I had come out of her. I looked for myself in her, and she had me to give back to me. I stood taking it in for a while, breathing deeply, then closed my eyes and took sustenance just from her hands on my face, her thumbs slightly caressing the tops of my cheekbones.

“Feh,” she said softly. “Tell the truth, all it would take to bring your confidence back entire is one battle. Even a skirmish. You’d just start giving orders; you wouldn’t worry about whether you could do it because you wouldn’t have time between giving orders, we’d thrash them handily, and then you’d look up blinking and say, ‘I guess I can do it.’ Alas, we can’t arrange such a thing on Haiu Menshir.”

“And the trouble I’d be in with Dinerer would not be worth it anyway,” I said. The residues of despair were still in me, like ache from an injury—so much ache from soul-injuries I had these days—but they were just the residues, distant and bearable. The full-bore feeling was gone. I took her hands and turned them around to kiss the backs of them. “Thank you, mama. You are my strength.”

“Only when you forget your own, Chevenga. Remember it, now.” She stroked my hair, which had grown long enough to do this now, though not quite into a proper forelock, back from my brow. “Something else you forget… you weren’t ready to see this until now; wait while I get it.” She went, and came back with a leather folder, which she opened carefully under the light of my lamp. In it, among papers of hers, was a page with my writing on it. It was my notes from Jinai’s reading, when I’d been nineteen. I read, stunned.

A huge thing with metal and wood pieces that’s alive, it’s moving all over in rhythm and making huge thumping clanging noises—

The Great Press.

…and I’m thinking I mean you’re thinking it’s a blessing to all the world—and the wing thing, that too, same—

The moyawa. I had remembered the words while I’d been in the Mezem, but it was something else again to see them, written in 1547, before I’d even decided to go to Arko.

…a crowd of blondies, Arkans yelling your name, acclaiming you, you are speaking to them. [How old am l?] Twenty-seven—Arko-ness is twined with the whole rest of your life.

“Maybe I will be fighting them the rest of my life,” I said. “A life well-spent, if so. So long as they’re out of Yeola-e by the end of it.”

“Better than the other two forks, in which you were killed, nearly two years ago. You would have been too young. You needed seasoning, and you needed to learn about Arkans, about how to fight them, to win.”

“I learned more than you know, probably,” I said. “I did nothing in my spare time in the Mezem but read everything about how they fight that I could get my hands on.”

“So how well do you know it?” I saw the beginning of a smile at the corner of her lips.

“In the book sense, which was all I could learn, of course—inside-out, upside-down and backwards.”

The smile grew a touch. “Of course you do. May I ask, how’s your morale, Chevenga?”

I breathed and let it out in a long sigh, that had only a bit of shuddering in it. “Better. Thanks, mama.”

Her smile grew to its full size, shining. She took my face again and pulled me down to plant a kiss between my eyebrows.

“That’s who you really are.”

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