74 - Property of little value

My Kiss of the Lake training stood me in good stead. Still, he stayed a cursed long time after I stopped moving; I was close to truly panicking, and thrashing, which would have ruined everything, when I felt his sword in its hip-scabbard turn and go. It took every shred of my will not to spring upwards, but straighten my leg slowly.

Chance was merciful. The thing stood firm.

Once my head was out, I wiped my lips and gasped for air, then wiped my eyes. A double arms length of quicksand still lay on every side of me; so I struck out for the grass again, with a slug-slow breaststroke, not knowing what else to do. I sank again, but my hand found a root, and I pulled myself out onto the bank that way.

For a time I lay with my heart racing, and tears washing the grime off my face again. Then I shook it off, and thought. If I went eastward, steering by the sun and the streams, which I knew ran north-northeast here, into the Ereala, I would come to Yeola-e. The Arkans, once they raked the pit and found no dead Chevenga (let them find their own instead, and Nikroda get what he deserved), would track me with horses and dogs, like a runaway slave; so I should make it as difficult as I could for them.

Where the forest was thick enough to travel through the branches like a tree-ape, I did, and used the stream trick at every opportunity. I ate lightly from my pack and from berry bushes, expecting to take longer than I would have with guides. It was utter wilderness, reminding me at every moment I had no real clue where I was.

Best that no people saw me, though, in Arkan territory; for all the mud and dirt and ashes on me from living like an animal, I was still dressed like a semanakraseye on a state visit, in a silk satin shirt, demarchic signet and the collar with the steel circles, as well as my wristlets and Chirel.

Being alone, I could not escape my own thoughts, but also had no one to impress, so when a memory came and grief stabbed, I just wept as I walked. Over and over, I composed in my mind what I would say to my people. We cannot doubt that they are coming; we must find some way to attack them first without breaking our own sacred covenant of defense only. Through the Roskati, perhaps, by lending them much greater aid? By making treaties with our neighbours—most of whom had proof I’d been betrayed in the copies of Kurkas’s safe conduct? Now my spirits were better, I saw there were many possible ways. I could think uninterrupted while I walked.

The next day I came to a cluster of houses made of bark and sticks, such as Roskati would never build. The people I saw, faintly though the trees, wore skins and shell-beads, and bore spears and arrows with stone heads. I went far around, staying well away; people that backward might know nothing of the world outside, and think of someone from it as inhuman and thus nothing more than goods, or even food, for all I knew.

A little beyond that, I came to a stream whose bottom was covered with strands of some kind of white water-vine and whose water looked clear and good. I knelt for a drink.

The plants that grow in that stream, I have never seen anywhere else, in any country or climate, and no scholar knowing botany I have asked has ever heard of them. I think they were the spawn of some Fire-altered seed, or the work of some mad clan of plant breeders, long dead, one would hope. I drew up the first double handful of water, and drank; then when I dipped my hands again, I felt them seized as if by living wooden cords. The vines were a trap, like the leaves of a fly-catching plant, alerted by my hands’ first presence.

I tried to tear free with speed first, too late, then main strength; the roots were well-grown into the rocks, and held as strong as shackles. I thought of biting myself loose, but then my head and neck would be seized and I’d be strangled and drowned in a moment. This plant’s usual way of nourishing itself came to me then; any animal that drank here would be killed so. Yet I wondered why I saw no bones. There was no way of reaching a knife, or Chirel; kicking at the vines would get my ankles caught.

I ran back over my luck. Betrayed by Arkans, saved by Roskati, betrayed by one Roskati, saved by some dead Arkan’s bones, only to die of thirst with my hands in clear fresh water, killed and eaten by a cursed plant; I almost wept, and almost laughed.

Then it occurred to me I could call for help. These people might sell me, eat me, immolate me for some skin-wearing god, or free me; better the risk than certain death here. So I called.

They came. The moment they saw me, they started a high wordless ululation, that in a moment was echoing from other throats all around in the forest. A crowd ringed me. No one moved to aid me; but they might be waiting for someone more qualified. Trying to raise my voice over their tuneless song, I cried, “Do you speak Enchian? Yeoli? Lakan? Arkan?” None answered; and though their faces all gazed at me full of seriousness, the note, I noticed, had more of a festive tone than one of alarm. It was hard to tell; they did not seem even to have expressions I could recognize.

I knew my dice had rolled bad when four young men came to me, uncoiling ropes. One of them took me in a stranglehold, two more took one of my arms each and the other persuaded the plants to release me by dropping thick fresh chunks of meat all around my hands; the tendrils seemed more drawn by bleeding flesh than unskinned. I tried to wrench loose and draw Chirel—which I was surprised they hadn’t unslung from my shoulder—but savages are invariably strong, and they bound my wrists behind my back. Well-rewarded the stream-weed was, perhaps as well as Nikroda would have been, though in its own way, for capturing me.

They plundered me of my pack, my pouch, which had only Kurkas’s safe conduct and some other papers in it, my boots and all the cloth on me, which they cut off me with obsidian knives, even though none of them was wearing anything made of cloth—so that I imagine the demarchic shirt ended up being used in some atavistic ceremony. They left everything else including Chirel and my wristlets, seeming to have no use for metal, or a crystal; same as Lakans, they seemed spooked by my father’s wisdom tooth.

Then they poked and squeezed my body all over with quick rough hands, weighed my privates in their fingers, made me open my mouth so they could peer at my teeth. It was as if the past three years had fallen away and I was back in Klajen’s possession; if I’d closed my eyes, they could have been Lakans. At least it let me know their intentions for me.

There are cracks in the walls for captives, I reminded myself, trying not to remember my last words with the person whose words these were. But this was different; while more young men of the primitives led me back west, through land sickeningly familiar, I played it out in my mind.

Would Mirko, though I was sure he had no pigeons homing to anywhere in Yeola-e, send a runner to the border with word of what had happened and that they should expect me? I should have asked it, I realized; but likely he would anyway. Then Artira, as acting semanakraseye, would write him back saying I had not appeared, and he would spare the strength he could to search for me.

I would be long gone from here, I realized, by then; those who catch slaves both want money as soon as they can get it, and know that the closer a slave is to where he was captured, the more likely he is to escape or be rescued. We were keeping a fast pace. Not only that, but there would be Arkans searching for me, once they did not find me dead in the quicksand as Nikroda would promise them; they probably already were. They would turn towards Yeola-e, knowing I would head there; luckily my captors seemed to steer us further south.

They kept my arms bound tightly and my ankles hobbled, and a rope around my neck that they never for a moment let go of, as far as I could tell, even when I slept. They could tell I was a fighter.

Once when we were on an Arkan road, one of them froze and hissed the others still, then they hustled me fast into the underbrush. A party of ten Arkans on horseback came clip-clopping by. I thought of calling to them; if they weren’t aware that Kurkas’s order for me was assassination (no doubt only very few knew that), perhaps they’d rescue and free me, or at least in the fight between them and the savages I might be able to slip away in the confusion and get my hands loose by rubbing the ropes against a sharp rock. But one of the savages guessed I might call, and clamped one hand over my mouth and nose and the other around my throat, cutting off my breath two ways. They were anything if not assiduous.

They took me to an Arkan town I had not passed through. So they did deal with the outside, after all, which must be keeping them in ignorance of the worth of metal. I wasn’t about to enlighten them.

No one recognized me or anything about me, even as blond-haired men who had the hardened faces of slave-dealers fingered the signet and the brand-scar, still new enough to be pink. I was pulled up onto a stone block on the ground, and realized from the one man pattering and the rest signaling that I was being auctioned off, rather than turned in to anyone official. (I couldn’t understand a word, but I think the intonation of an auction is the same everywhere on the Earthsphere.)

Most of the dealers had looked with great interest at Chirel, which was still on my shoulder just as I’d slung it the morning I’d been captured, drawing it, testing the edge, examining the blade and grip and guard, but then always sheathing it again and leaving it on me, by which I understood it would be sold together with me.

Some of them spoke to me in bad Enchian, asking how long I’d been a warrior, how much I’d fought and how often I’d been decorated, to which I kept a stony silence as if I didn’t understand. Do they want me as a captive warrior in some campaign, the other side of the Empire? I wondered, hopefully; to fight I’d have to be unbound, and once that happened, there’d be a thousand ways of escape. That will show you how laughably innocent I was, of Arko.

The bidding over me, and Chirel, was lively, even contentious. The winner was a man who I only ever knew as Daisas.

The Arkan way of breaking new slaves is very different from the Lakan. He hacked off my hair, which I expected, but then, right there in the open, uncaring if the whole town saw, he flung me down face-first onto the ground, and while his apprentice pinned my neck with his foot so my face was in the dust, raped me. I remembered the Lakan and Rigratora-e; that was how it looked, I thought; this is how it feels.

Like most Arkan slavers, he got a surge in the groin the moment he laid his hands on a slave’s chain; by the time I was down he was like an animal in rut, and jabbed into me, panting and moaning with joy, the moans growing all the more joyful from my flinching and then my trembling. No one around seemed the slightest bit taken aback; most turned their eyes to the next person on the block, and those few who watched him did absently, by which I understood it was customary.

It was harder to bear silently than a flogging. The physical pain is less, but the shock stabs to the heart. “Get used to it,” Daisas said to me, in rough-cut Enchian, between thrusts. “You are a slave of Arko now... and always will be... for you were born to be... as are all barbarians... To serve Arko... will be your life... for all else is death.” It reminded me of Jinai saying Arko-ness would be entwined with the rest of my life. I suffered his ecstasy at a great distance.

Daisas had a mule and just the one apprentice, a sullen-faced boy of fourteen or fifteen, so I thought escape might be easy. But of course he’d bought me as a fighter; he had a stake in thinking me feisty. He put me in an Arkan slave-collar, one of those with the screws that can be tightened against the windpipe, the throat-arteries, and the nerves on the side of the neck, whichever the slaver chooses. He never whipped me when I resisted somehow, just tightened the collar until I was choking or dazed or my skull screaming with pain, a punishment almost worse, for it brings home one’s helplessness so hard.

I tried feigning stunned or exhausted, stumbling and going glassy-eyed and so forth as we marched, to get him to loosen it, but he had seen all that a thousand times.

At night he consummated the bond, as Arkans call it, often. They have particular ways of breaking Yeolis; what they do with one’s crystal doesn’t bear writing down. He ground my face in the dirt, made me eat it and breathe it. Sometimes he forced me to climax, at the same time as causing me pain somehow; I had not known this was possible, and the first time was a shock beyond description, a thousand times worse than what I’d suffered being put to stud in Laka.

There is a word, fikken, that only the Arkan language has, that I could not have conceived before I went there; it means both love-making and its rotten shadow, rape, as well as to harm in an unspecific sense; both pain and pleasure. Though I was yet to learn the word, Daisas taught me the meaning: pleasure for one, pain for the other. Arkans are right, to consider it obscene. The dull-eyed boy would watch with satisfaction; sometime along that trail of agony, I realized it was because my presence kept Daisas off him.

What was almost the worst torture was still wearing my wristlets on my bound wrists, and having Chirel so close while I was so helpless. He took it off my shoulder and would sling it with the packs on the donkey when we were traveling. A thousand motions of it in my hand I remembered, and a thousand more I imagined, as I walked, seeing it bobbing on the donkey’s back, feeling it in weapon-sense, tasting its feel. But it was as far away as the moon, that humanity set only one small step on, once, before the Fire.

All through this, I still wore the demarchic signet. When Daisas asked me what it was, I said the sigil of my family, so that when he took a mind to make use of it in breaking me, he wounded me worse than he knew. He pulled it from my finger and slid it onto his own, then held it before my face as he fikked me, and said, “This is yours... so now it’s mine... because you are mine... And one day... all Yeola-e will be ours... to serve Arko... and I’ll sell off all your family... yes, your little child... and your granny too.”

Afterwards, when he’d put it back on my finger, I knelt in the firelight, thinking. I was long past tears; my eyes were deserts these days. He was right; on my finger, it was still not mine. It was Yeola-e’s; on my finger, it could only be defiled. The best thing to do came to me.

I remembered Saint Mother’s words, about the sacred sword: “This is nothing but a piece of steel, without a living hand to wield it.” The signet was the same; its meaning didn’t reside in in the nephrite it was made of, but in Yeola-e, in Assembly, in the vote, in thought and choice, and in me, but only while I had been semanakraseye. Here, now, I was not; I had left that life behind, at least for a time, and must accept that.

I had learned by then I was being taken to the City Itself; it seemed I would visit after all. There, where someone might know it, the signet would be nothing but a liability.

Even so, it took a long time of meditating to make myself do what I must. Part of my heart at least felt I was throwing myself and all my hopes away too. It was hard to get enough leverage with my hands bound, as well; all the force had to come out of my wrist.

Somewhere in the forested hills of northern Aijia, as Arkans call the province, there is a shallow marshy pond, at the bottom of which lies the semanakraseyeni signet of Yeola-e, worn by my father and grandmother and great-grandmother and so on, five hundred years back. Daisas punished me, though not severely by his standards, when he noticed it was gone. I had thrown away a piece of his property, but one of little value.

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73 - Heights and depths

When I woke it was still dark; I almost reached over to where Mana should be lying near me, then remembered. Tears came too fast and hard to stop. Then a warm finger touched my shoulder, and Vaneesh said my name, close by my ear. She slipped her arms around me, skilled in gentleness, and drew my head onto her shoulder and its hearth-heat. I buried my face in her neck, sobbing. “The Goddess has three forms,” she whispered, “all of which I can be, when they are needed. You need the Mother; perhaps the Lover, too.” It came to me then she was naked.

I untangled myself from her, and turned away, though I hadn’t touched anyone that way for months, and my body cried out. “You feel stained with death, so you shrink from life,” she said, stroking my side under the woollen blanket with a touch as tender as breath. “But the only answer to death is life. You will die too, in your time; life spares no one. But now you live, whatever you deserve, and that is immaterial. There is more to do, your people still need you; who are you, to judge yourself?

“Your body knows that, Chevenga, and is wiser than you right now, so I speak to you through it. They died to save you: tell me, do you think they’d have you suffer your life now, or celebrate it?” Her hand slipped delicately between my legs.

For a time I just let her caress me, which she did patiently, turning my grief-moans gradually into pleasure-moans. Though it felt to some part of me like surrendering up what shred of decency I had left in me, I turned over to face her, and she kissed me deeply, lying me flat on my back. “Let your body lead,” she whispered, and wrapped my manhood in her mouth, as if to say, I will draw all the pain out of you.

Though we’d been strangers yesterday, it felt as if she loved me with all her soul and always had. “Let go the last of the self-recrimination in pure pain, with the ecstasy,” she drew her mouth off me to whisper, then took me back in again. I thought no more, just let myself be feeling and voice only, as I had let myself be feeling and movement only when I’d fought the Arkans. I felt as if I were shattering, and my limbs would fly outward like spears, when I came. Afterwards I felt empty and clean and clear.

She was right: life was greater than nineteen deaths, and I was still needed; in the face of it I saw my emotion dashed down for all it was, emotion, felt the ecstasy of life and the breath of the God-In-Me. That, I saw, was her mastery and her power, the nature of the God-In-Her; her people cherished her hugely, I’d seen in everything they’d said to her, and I’d also understood the Arkans feared her no less. No wonder. I wept again, but with grief pure of self-hate. I had chosen what was best by augury; my guard had volunteered knowing they risked dying, for Yeola-e or for me.

My troubles were nothing, anyway, to hers. The priestesshood was in her family, passed down through the female line; at eight she’d seen the secret temple where she’d lived burned down by Arkans, and her mother raped and killed before her eyes. Yet she’d felt the vocation all the more strongly, and now lived entirely underground. She’d conceived five times; two had been stillborn, one had died of a wasting sickness, one had been caught by Arkans and taken away in chains to no one knew where, and the last was a boy, who she was training as a priest in case she never bore a girl. Yet even after all this, and with her people suffering in slavery, she was filled with such love.

We talked until exhaustion took us. When I woke next it was late in the day; they’d let me sleep as long as I would, and Vaneesh was up. I bathed, ate and turned myself out as well as I could.

To Mirko’s mind, I was better off travelling home through the woods, with just two people who knew them well, rather than with a large escort, which would be slower, more easily noticed, and quite likely outnumbered anyway, if we ran into Arkans. I agreed.

He’d picked his two already; they did not know my name, he told me, but only had orders to guide me to the border. Embracing farewell, we wished each other luck, and said, “I hope to see you again, in better circumstances.” For him, I knew that meant as king of free Roskat; how far off that might be now, no one could know. Arko is likely to march through your land, on its way to mine, I thought. Probably he was hoping they’d thin themselves against us. I thought of planning with him, but I had a feeling that for now I’d lost his respect and he would see no merit in my ideas. All the time I’d been in his company, he had kindly refrained from saying, “I told you so.”

I hugged Vaneesh too, as only two people who have given themselves to each other can hug, and set off with my two guides, who gave me the names Nikroda and Ishulta. Nikroda spoke Enchian.

Such a blessing to my spirits it was, at the time, thinking all I had to do before I got home was walk and mourn.

On the second night, Nikroda woke me, crying “Ishulta! It’s his watch, but he’s gone!” We lit torches, but there was no sign save broken underbrush a little away from the fire. “He must have gone to piss too cursed far away,” Nikroda said, “and an animal got him.”

“So quietly?” I said. “I sleep light, and I heard nothing. He must have called to us.”

“The leopards that live here know how to snap a man’s neck silently,” he said, “so his fellows don’t kill them.” In the morning we found blood, and followed the trail, but it went back the way we’d come, and we’d likely find only a corpse. Nikroda knelt to do some Roskati ritual; then we went on.

Suddenly he cursed, and broke into a run. “I heard a dog bark,” he hissed through his teeth. “We must get to the stream.” Not knowing what else to do, though I had heard nothing, I dashed after him. We came to a long downslope, which appeared to fall off at the bottom, but since he didn’t slacken his speed, neither did I. Suddenly, to my astonishment, he flung himself into the air; the hill fell away beneath my feet, steep and muddy. A rope hung in the clearing, like those which children set up beside lakes, to make swinging dives; he caught it, and swung away, while I hurtled down. I kept my feet, sliding, but could not stop; at the bottom where I thought I’d be safe the ground seized me, up to the waist; then to my horror I felt it drawing me down.

He swung back and alighted nimbly on the bank, looking at me with no surprise at all on his face, only reckoning. Knowledge hit me darkly: I’m betrayed again. “A good place,” he said. “We get Arkans to chase us here.” He sat down on the grassy slope, breathless; it had been a hard run.

I just said, “Nikroda, why?”

“I’ve figured out who you are,” he said. “I know my history. My grandmother taught me. She saw all her family burned in their house, do you know that? When Fifth Inatanao could have saved Roskat, with a thousand more warriors. She, I understand, was your great-grandmother.”

I felt my jaw drop, as with a will of its own. I knew my history, too. “She sent as many as she could—do you think we had no battles of our own? She was semanakraseye; she had to think of her own people.” Truths fell into place; he knew who I was, had heard the tales, and so was too cowardly to attack me; perhaps he even knew I had weapon-sense, else he’d have tried to slit my throat in my sleep. He had a studiousness about him.

“As do you,” he said. “You’d sell Roskat to save Yeola-e in a heartbeat; I know that. The people wills, isn’t that the saying? At least now a Roskati will have got something from a Yeoli.”

“You mean the reward the Arkans give you when you bring them my corpse.” My only chance of life, it seemed, lay in changing his mind somehow, so I should beg, or promise him a greater reward, not insult him; but my heart, still laid open by the Arkans’ back-stabbing, seized my tongue. “What always hides like a rat under the indignation of the traitor: greed. You’ll have got something from another Roskati too; what’s a fair price to your mind for killing Ishulta? A horse, a new barn, another strip of land?” Probably he’d used a Roskati snap-rope, breaking Ishulta’s neck; he had one. No wonder I’d heard nothing.

“I hardly knew him,” he said, shrugging, as if that excused anything.

The mud was up to my chest now; having been taught that very slow swimming was the way to last longest in quicksand, I did so, aiming for the nearest knoll of grass. He sprang up frowning, loosening his sword in its scabbard. My arms were mired; he’d stick me like a trussed pig. I stayed where I was, where he couldn’t reach me, and felt the cold mud creep up over my shoulders. It smelled like swamp, with meat-rot as well; I remembered what he’d said about leading Arkans here.

“Arkans killed your grandmother’s family,’ I said. “They threw the torches. Now you’d take their money, for my life.”

He shrugged again. “They were enemies. You’d expect it of them. They’re to be used; their gold’s still gold. You claim to be friends.” Yawning in a self-satisfied way, just to hurt me, he said, “I suppose I shall have to fetch them. They aren’t following us; did you really think I heard a dog? I don’t think Yeola-e will miss you, anyway, you’ve swallowed every hook, just like you did with Kurkas.”

That stab went home, and I had no more words. Nor was the look on my face, as I swallowed tears for pride alone and therefore not well, was the path unconceived to his mercy; he only laughed at me. This does not fit with Jinai’s third fork; but any time, something can intercede that changes the future. I began truly thinking of my life as finished then, and resigning myself to that. All my training, striving, expectations, I thought, to make me this: a corpse to be sold to Arkans to fatten a Roskati traitor. I thought of my family, my parents, my new wife and husband; Fifth, and the one to come; my people, at war with Arko.

The mud touched my chin; then my foot found something hard.

I did not want to know what it was; I could know whether it would hold my weight if I put all on it. But if I tried, I saw, found it good and stopped sinking, Nikroda would devise some way to make sure I was dead before he went, stoning me or neaping dirt on my head. The only course came to me: to go under bending my leg beneath me, hold my breath and pray he left before I smothered; then put my weight on the foothold, and pray it bore me.

So I called him a coward, a traitor and a few other things, seeing no harm either way in satisfying myself, and just before the mud flowed in over my face, took three great breaths and then the deepest lungful of air I could. I thrashed and heaved, to make it look good; it was not hard to do with sincerity, once my eyes were covered; quicksand becomes darkness then, pressing cold and heavy on the skin, seeming to search with wet fingers every fingerwidth of one’s head and body for deadly entrance. I pity those who have suffered this without hope; but I knew it would be worse for me if my foothold failed, having harbored hope.

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72 - A child till I die

My last clear sight was Ethras’s face, blank even now, tipping and falling away; I’d struck off his head right off the draw. The world turned into a blood-haze.

I’d always fought with open eyes and calm before; I’d never gone berserk in my life. Now I heard nothing but my own unbroken war-howl, felt nothing but Chirel in my hand flying; my mind didn’t even know when my horse threw me or I leapt off him, whichever I did, though my body must have. I didn’t think, “I will take as many as I can with me”; there was nothing so coherent in my mind. All around me was death-fighting, inside me was death-fighting, I was death-fighting, made only of blood and steel and movement; I knew no other existence, never had and never would; life was death and death life, so if they killed me I wouldn’t notice, being still in my own element.

Yet somehow, clear above the din as a thrush’s song against the roar of mountain wind, I recall my sister screaming “Cheng!”, and a guard I’d only come to know on this journey lying on the poured stone of the Arkan road, his hand clutched to his sword-side ear and blood pouring from his mouth. My rage was like a dream; to leave it was to wake.

Then the next head before me, which I raised Chirel to cleave in two, was a woman’s with brown hair and black eyes. She threw up her arms and cried in Yeoli, “Stop! No one’s fighting you now!”

I looked all around. The Arkans were gone, dead or fleeing; the rebels had charged in to my defense. Now they were aiding the Yeoli and Roskati fallen, finishing and plundering Arkans, seizing milling horses. The sweet scent of the Roskati forest was corrupted now, with wound smells. Both her hands clasped my sword-hand, while I stared, still mind-numbed; she wore a battered leather kilt with a cloth of sky-blue, and I remember thinking, sacred Roskati patterns. “Can you hear me, Chevenga?” she said gently. “It’s over.” Stand down, stand down. It was hearing my name that brought me back to myself, more than anything, reminding me I was human, with ties to other humans. I fumbled for the rag in my pouch, dried off Chirel and sheathed it.

Kyash… it didn’t take long for Jinai’s reading to start playing out, I thought. We’re not even six days from the border. With my body still, my mind had begun moving, albeit slowly; I was dead tired, I realized. I heard Mirko’s voice, shouting orders in Roskati. “Come with us,” the woman said. “We must go.” My feet would not move, rooted as trees; not one Yeoli, other than me, was standing, but I heard the voices of at least three. “Che…veng… a…” Another guard I’d just come to know, her voice rattling with blood. She’d confided to me that she was with child. “Where… are… you…?” My eyes found Naiga, lying so still it could mean only death, but not Sena or Mana.

Two big hands clamped my shoulders; after looking into my eyes, Mirko shook me, with respect in his touch, but hard. Hooves clattered away; he was splitting his people apart, to make it harder for the Arkans to track me. “Come to your senses, semanakraseye, lad. The straw-hairs who got away will fetch more, they won’t be long, we must get into the woods. Your people all took it in the heart or lungs, and only a Haian can heal lung-wounds, and we can’t go to the Haian, that’ll be the first place the straw-hairs look. You have to leave them or else they’ll have guarded you for nothing.” His hand pulled me.

“Cheng.” Mana; I had not seen him because he was half under an Arkan. I wrenched free, fell to my knees beside him, took his head in my hands. “He’s right… they were all kyashin assassins, they only didn’t get you because of your weapon-sense. Go. Try to carry me, and you’ll be carrying just my meat in not long… I can feel it.” Mirko patted my shoulder, then pulled again, gently. “Go, heart’s brother. Tell my family I love them. Go, for Yeola-e.”

“I love you, Mana.” That was all I could say. I got up, and followed where Mirko led.

We were five, including Mirko and Vaneesh, for so the woman was called. Dog-tired as I was, I put all my thought into running. He followed no path, seeking ground no horse could go; we crossed several swamps on fallen logs, and more than once dashed through the shallows along the path of a stream, to obscure our scent-trail.

Here and there were ruins of old farms, a house fallen to a heap, a broken stone fence overrun with brambles. Then we came into forest and slowed to a walk. The boles of the oaks were wide as houses, the mat of green leaves above so thick they cut off the sun as darkly as a roof, so I could not know even what direction we took. There was no underbrush at all, just a bare brown thatch that thumped ringing under your feet. You could see clear for a long way around; now and then I saw a herd of boar in the distance, or a family of deer, the fawns with spots, leaping gracefully away.

The light began to fail, and Mirko lit a torch; as full darkness blacker than black fell, it began to rain, the first sign a distant pattering on leaves high as a cliff above, then eventually fat drops leaking through to us. Still Mirko knew his way, saying now and then, “Keep heart, we’re close.” Finally he halted, and made a call like a nightingale’s three times. From somewhere ahead came the hoot of an owl. “We’re here.” A little further on was a campfire, and then several more, with tents pitched among the great trees. I heard a horse whicker, the rasp of stone on steel, the buzz of talk; in the firelight I saw rope ladders dangling, and looking up found houses built in the branches. “Until we win back our lands,” he said, “this is home.”

Vaneesh pulled the cloak of my hood up over my head and forward so my face would be obscured in shadow. “Keep the signet hidden,” she whispered. “No one here would betray you willingly; but Arkans have a drug that makes people tell the truth. No one will ask.” It was as she said; everyone hailed Mirko, and showed respect to her as if she were a sage or priestess, but seemed not to see me.

The rain had not reached this far. We joined a fire, and they ate; for the first time I saw the Roskati custom of offering the first bite to one’s neighbor. That required that I eat one mouthful; but though I’d had nothing since morning and the pork was good, “the best meat, from close to the bone,” as Vaneesh said, all food and drink tasted foul to me, and I could only get down a little.

“Food you can do without for a day or two,” she said, lifting my own water-skin. “Water, no; you won’t sleep well, or be able to move as fast tomorrow. Here… for your people, drink.” For my people, I could get it down.

We’d come in late; others were turning in. “I think you need some of this, too,” Mirko said, and offered me from a skin he was carrying. “For your people, lad.” It was some kind of Roskati liquor, hot as nakiti but darker-tasting. I took a bigger draught than I meant to; on an empty stomach, I felt it in a moment. The last of the Roskati but Mirko and Vaneesh turned in.

“All this time, you haven’t said a word, and you need to,” Mirko said. “We’re friends—you picked up where Tyeraha and Tennunga left off, and we are grateful—so we swear we will repeat nothing. Let out your heart, lad.” Anger struck like lightning across the white blankness that was my mind; I fixed him with a fight-stare, and said, “Call me lad one more time and I’ll kill you.”

Mirko’s hand went to his hilt unthinking, the reflex of a rebel; Vaneesh clasped my hands, and said, “Semanakraseye, he’s saying it only in affection. Shall we call you strictly by name?” To Mirko she said something in Roskati, which is kin to Yeoli, with some loan-words; I heard the word “deranged.”

Mirko’s eyes softened a little, but he said, “You might remember who saved your life.”

“Yes, by name.” My voice sounded like that of a dead man’s, if he could have one, broken with his last struggle. “I am sorry, Mirko. Forgive me.” He signed chalk, and I kissed his hand and pressed it to my brow. Then my heart seized me.

They let me heap dirt on my head, but held me from beating it on the ground. I screamed for a while, with a lot of words, a mix of the names of the dead and curses against myself, for having been born to live a life of nothing but making mistakes. When I paused, they’d get me going again by asking me to tell them about the dead, or how I would break it to my family.

I’d be remembered as the worst fool in Yeoli history as long as it was read, I remember railing, from my journey of peace I’d bring home the news that war was certain; if they were wise they’d impeach me, and, my obligations done, I would leap off a cliff. The secret darknesses of the heart I was showing got deep enough for Mirko and Vaneesh to both swear silence second Fire come without my asking it. I remember all but tearing off the signet, crying, “Don’t believe I am a man, it’s all sham, all fake, I’ve been lying since I was twelve; I’m a child, nothing but a child, weak and stupid and throwing tantrums, I’ll always be a child till I die!” From my pouch, I again drew Kurkas’s sealed and ribbanded certificate of safe-conduct, the gold glittering in the dying firelight, and thought, even as I poured out my soul, perhaps Jinai’s reading and everything since is all a bad dream, and I’ll wake up in a moment. It’s unbearable, so it cannot be real.

They kept me going until it burned itself out, and then, just as an exhausted body can move better for tension being gone, my mind finally could think for the exhaustion of emotion.

There is the pain beyond bearing, the price I am paying—though nineteen others have paid so much more—to ensure the Arkans will not take us by surprise. No one will question that they mean to make war when they tried to assassinate me, and everyone will agree that we must prepare. It was tempting, in fact, to attack first.

But all I needed to think about now was getting home. Vaneesh made me drink a full pitcher of water, and showed me up to a tree-house with an empty bed.

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71 - First impressions of Arko

Next morning in a freshening late spring dawn, we set off to Arko, all of us wearing the peace-sigil around our necks.

Where the road crosses the border and turns to poured stone, and the eagle of Arko on an open gate faces the pass under the stone circle, we found my Arkan escort in their scarlet armor waiting. They were truly an honor guard, all wearing the same breastplates and mantles of, All-spirit help us, purple, their horses all the great pure white Arkan strain. The eagle standard they carried was gold-leafed. I put approval on my face, taking it as homage. When the formal greetings were done, I heard one Arkan who was looking at me whisper to another, who snickered; but I was above noticing.

The leader, who looked about thirty-five, gave his name as Ethras Innen, Aitzas; that and the length of his hair, which hung in a braid down to his waist, told me he was of the noble caste; the rest, whose blond braids fell no lower than their hearts, were solas, warriors. All had chins shaven as smooth as boys, as if there were a regulation. No wonder Arkans so love uniformity, I thought, looking into that row of blue eyes; they are born with it.

Though no one wore a helmet, they all had on their gauntlets; when they didn’t, as we learned camping with them that night, they wore gloves, even around the cook-fire, and even so would hide their hands behind shields or under mantles.

Thinking Lakans were shy about their bodies, I’d known nothing. We never saw a single Arkan bathe, though they did every day; they’d creep off one at a time, not even letting each other see, as if being clean were a crime. Once, just to see what would happen, I invited Ethras to swim in a lake with me. He informed me that in Arko, decent people do not swim, having baths. Interesting to know, if one ever fought with one near deep water.

Every day at noon, a bell tolls in every village in the empire. When my escort heard it they would pull up their horses as one, dismount, bow their heads and toucn their gauntleted hands to their hands, palms up and cupped.

They would chant a prayer together, and stand for a time in silence; then Ethras would bark a command, they’d mount up, and we’d go on. “Noon observance,” was all he said, when I asked, not hiding my fascination; I knew next to nothing of Arkan religion. But since it seemed to make him uneasy, I left off.

He spoke Enchian in the stiff, pinched Aitzas accent, and styled me “Amaesti,” apparently unable to say semanakraseye if his life depended on it. He was too solemn a person, too, his eyes expressionless whatever they looked at, and making him laugh was impossible. I noticed the rest stood off, from him and four or five others of similar manner.

A year later, I would know the signs, as I knew my own face in the mirror. But I’d hardly met Arkans yet.

On the fifth day, we rode through the town of Roskat. This was only a recently civilized province, Ethras told me, and there were still bandits at large; yet we should be safe, being too many and well-equipped for them to take on. I knew history from my side; by civilized province, I knew, he meant conquered nation, by bandits, rebels. There is much Yeoli blood in Roskat, and they have always considered themselves our kin in spirit; seventy years ago when they fell it was in spite of our aid, and I suspected it might be a bone of contention with Kurkas that we still harbored their “bandits,” at times, though we did our best to do it on the sly.

The town of Roskat had the miserable look of a spirited people yoked; anyone with dark hair had a long face, and shackle and whip-scars were common. In the town square, three naked Roskati corpses hung on poles, their severed heads laid at their feet, and no one near looking shocked, as if it were common. Whether the people feared for me or envied my freedom when their eyes caught mine, I could not tell.

Half a day past the town, we rounded a corner to find the road blocked by twenty Roskati warriors on horseback. They wore headbands and arm-ribbons of green and gold, the colours of free Roskat. That and their weapons proved them rebels, for Arkan law forbade Roskati to bear arms; but their spears were all up and swords scabbarded. Their leader, a stocky dark-blond man who looked a careworn forty, began speaking as soon as we reined in our horses, calling in Yeoli, “Semanakraseye! Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e! Hear me!” while his eyes ran over us searching. He found the demarchic shirt, and his eyes fixed on me.

Ethras’s voice, closer to me, drowned him out. He spoke Arkan, in an imperious and threatening tone; again I wished I’d learned the language. “Excuse me,” I said in Enchian when he paused. “It is me he addresses, Escort Captain. They’ve offered us no threat, but only want to speak; even if he is a bandit, where I come from the accused are permitted their say. I will hear, and judge. There’s no danger; they’re half our number.”

“They’re not to be heard, but chased down and beheaded!” he snapped.

“Very well,” I said, “I’ll listen, then you can send for someone to chase them down and behead them, since your assignment is escorting me.” At a loss for words, he stared at me, his face more impassive, if that was possible, than ever.

“I’m Fourth Chevenga,” I said to the Roskati, in Yeoli again. “Who are you, and what do you wish to tell me?”

“My name is Mirko of Roskat.” The First General First of the rebels; while we never openly sent him letters, I had dealt with him indirectly. The Arkans all stiffened even stiffer than they usual were at the name. He pitched his voice for all of us to hear.

“Your people have always been friends to mine, semanakraseye. Let us be friends to you then, and warn you: Kurkas”—he spat in the dirt beside his horse— “will betray you the moment he sees advantage. He has us, a hundred times.”

“Whatever the cutthroat says,” Ethras said icily, “he lies. They undermine peace everywhere. He seeks to embarrass you, Amaesti.”

I drew the certificate from my pouch, read it all out and held it up for all to see. “You mean to say, Mirko, that this means nothing?”

He spat again. “Forgive my rudeness, semanakraseye, but what means an oath, to a snake? He plans to betray you. It’s bad form to stop you this way, I know, and would be bad form for you to turn around; but I fear for your life. If they object—they are half our number.”

“Amaesti, listening will do nothing to recommend you to the Imperator, nor aid the cause of peace,” Ethras said, his voice cold as snow.

I looked at him hard. “Are you threatening me, Escort Captain? If their words are wind, why do you fear my hearing them?” He drew his head back and high, raising the nose, in a way I had come to know as Arkan; then looked away, his blue eyes seeming settled. Mirko’s were more honest.

“If the Imperator does not mean to betray you, semanakraseye,” he said, “why does he send born and bred assassins to escort you? You don’t know the signs of the Mahid, the Imperator’s black dogs, but we do. We’ve suffered their work long enough. There are several among them; the commander is one. Have you noticed, they never smile?”

“Cheng,” said Mana, behind me. “I don’t like—” Then his voice was lost, in my own. Whatever Ethras was, he had hands like lightning; his dagger was out and would have been in my back in the flash of a thought, except for weapon-sense. I think, as several other people afterwards suggested, that he did know Yeoli, and understood all we said.

In the memory, my shout of “Chen!” seemed to last an eternity, going on and on like the squeal of an ungreased cartwheel. His act had been a signal, too; all the other Arkans had picked a Yeoli, and done the same. I heard their massed death-cries through mine.

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70 - I believe in you

As soon as the passes were open, I set off on my state visits. The Enchians, Lakans, Schvait and Brahvnikians all treated me properly and far too well for a semanakraseye as foreigners invariably do, with lavish meals and gifts and so forth.

I thanked Astalaz for freeing my son, and his mouth gradually gaped more and more open as I recounted how Tanazha had approached me, what she and I had said to each other, and how Fifth was now my heir. In the Lakan mind, of course, he was tainted for life with having been born a slave and of a slave, and thus unfit to be a head of state, whatever natural ability he had or however he was raised.

Meanwhile, I’d sent a letter to Kurkas. An answer came within three-quarters of a moon, good time from the City Itself, in a packet of silk with the sun-clasping Arkan eagle all over it. I had not thought such curlicues possible on stationery, nor gold ink.

He would be delighted to meet me, he wrote, welcoming me with all proper honors to the Marble Palace. As I had asked, there were five copies of his oath of safe-conduct, in Arkan and Enchian. My request had been something of a test; if he’d shown displeasure at my suspicion, I would not have gone.

I kept one to carry, put one in the archive, and sent the other three to Astalaz, Kranaj and Ivahn; let them be witness, if—when—something went amiss.

I’d thought I’d go by ship, but Kurkas promised me overland would not be much slower, and wrote that he’d have a twenty-man escort waiting for me at the border of Roskat, a number I was welcome to match with mine; in the orderly Empire, he assured me, that should be defense enough. Arko’s roads are famous, of course, built smooth, wide and ever-lasting from one end of the empire to the other. He wants to show them off, I thought, to let me see how fast his armies could get to our border, if ordered. Well, no knowledge hurts.

The hardest thing was picking my escort. I told myself that every warrior in Yeola-e was in danger, if Jinai had seen true. My escort might be safer than those we left behind, for all I knew.

Senala-e and Naiga were the only sibs of mine who wanted to go who I thought were old enough, the rest calling me a flaming hypocrite. I felt I should exclude any of the Elite because it was a peace mission; that should have eliminated Krero, Sachara and Mana all, but Mana insisted on coming, saying I owed him for the marriage, with which I could not argue. The rest I drew from those of the Demarchic Guard who volunteered. I took nineteen in all, to remind Kurkas that I could be counted as a warrior; no Arkan Imperator had fought with his own hands for better than two hundred years.

The night before we left, after we had all the little ones kissed and settled in bed, my closest family and friends gathered in my parents’ parlour with a flask of wine. “To a safe and fruitful state visit,” they toasted. I tried not to share any sadly knowing glances with my mother, lest someone else notice.

“I will toast to your safety,” Esora-e said, making sure everyone heard him, when he was enough into his cups to lose any shyness. “But I’m not going to pretend I am not still against this, Fourth Chevenga.”

I have information you don’t; why don’t you just trust it’s something like that? “I know, shadow-father,” I said, “but it will be for the best. I know it in my heart.”

“We’ve never had reason not to trust him, love,” my mother said to him, gently.

“Oh, I know, I know… You are wise for your years, for all I’ve said, lad; this is why I can’t understand why you’re doing this bone-headed thing.”

“Shadow-father,” I said, “will you quit acting like you have to start planning my funeral?” That got a laugh, as I’d hoped. “It’s not going to be for a while yet.”

Esora-e got up, and caught me in a hard hug. “Yes, I am scared for you, shadow-son,” he whispered in my ear. “The idea of losing you…” His arms tightened, and I knew my father was in his mind. There was nothing to do but comfort him.

Since I would be leaving early in the morning, we all turned in before very late. As I took up Fifth, fast asleep, from my mother’s bed, she caught my eye. I want to talk to you so badly; I want to be with someone else who knows. It must have shown on my face, for she said, “I’ll walk you back to your room, love.” It felt like weakness to accept her touch, but she put her arm around me too firmly to refuse.

I laid Fifth in my bed and kissed him. He groaned slightly, smacked his lips, and then sighed back deeper into sleep as I stroked his hair. How big will you be, precious one, when I see you again? I’d said goodbye to him already; he probably wouldn’t be awake in time in the morning to see me off.

My parlour was a bit of a mess, my shirts and kilts strewn here and there, my home-desk messy with papers. I bustled around for a bit, picking up, and lit some incense. When I was done, I found myself facing her, and we both stood in silence for a moment, eyes locked.

“Chevenga.” The lowest curl of my forelock was almost in one eye; she feather-touched it to between them. “If I could fill you up with my love before you go into this, I would.”

“Mama…” I caught her hand and kissed it. “You are filling me up with your love. You have all my life. You’ve had more of a hand than anyone else in making me. I just… I guess I just wanted to be with the one person who knows.”

We stood for a moment again with a silence between us so full it shimmered in the air.

“You are a strong enough person to make the hard choices, love, and as much as my heart cries out that I don’t want you hurt, you’re a warrior.”

“Hard choices?” I shrugged. “The other two forks were both unthinkable. But not only do you have to trust my strength; I do. And so does Yeola-e, however much no one knows it yet. They’re not going to kill me in Arko, if there’s truth in the reading. Or at least it’s likely they won’t.” The word of an augurer is true, I’d been taught, but never certain.

“If reports come of your death I won’t believe them.” Yet they may be true… She was always more certain than I. “Kurkas might seize you and tell us you are dead.”

“If he seizes me, he’ll offer me for ransom. If that happens—kyash, I should have planned for this earlier!—if he does, what Tyeraha, sorry, Artira should do is stall… stall for all she’s worth, to give me a chance to escape on my own.”

“Or send Ikal.”

“Yes, that too, but stall nonetheless. Can you tell her… no, I’ll put it in writing.” I wrote the note fast in Athali, sealed it with the signet and gave it to her.

“I hope I never need give it to Ardi, but I’ll keep it safe for if I do.”

“Mama…” Let us live in the truth, a wiser voice whispered to me. “You probably will have to give it to her.”

“I know.”

I took a deep breath, forcing the quivers out of it. “I am not sure which is worse, not knowing the future, or knowing a scrap of it,” I said. “Then again, maybe knowing all of it exact would be the worst of all.”

As she tucked the letter in her shirt, with the tenderness you’d expect for something going from one child of hers to another, we wordlessly gazed at each other again.

It’s a child who, in the face of danger or challenge, needs a parent to say, “You can do it; I believe in you.” So I should not ask her; but I was still close enough to childhood that it seized me, making me feel that yawning need. I said nothing; but of course, even though I had not been a boy who had needed that a lot, she could read it on my face.

“My child,” she said. “If I could choose the one person who would be the best in all Yeola-e to do this, it would be you. And I think I would think that even if I were not your mother. There is a reason you have the knowledge no one else does; you sought it, because you could bear it. And you knew in your heart you could make the correct choice from it.” My tongue locked, no words coming to me. She laid her hand on my cheek. “You can do it, Chevenga. I believe in you.”

I closed my eyes and let it echo through me for a bit, drawing nurturance as well from the tenderness of her palm and fingers. She straightened my forelock again, with a touch barely harder than a breath.

“Of course, if war is happening here while I’m stuck there,” I said, “I’ll be ripping my hair out about not being here. But then I have to trust you too. My people are not weaklings.”

“No. We aren’t.”

“It will all turn out well in the end… so the third fork seemed. In that sense, none of us have anything to fear.”

“We’ll know what we don’t know now. Foresight always makes far less sense than hindsight.”

“And, knowing how these things go, maybe I’ll be glad I didn’t know what I was in for, as I might have chickened out, so it’s just as well.” I managed a grin with this, for her, and she gave me one back.

“I love you, my strong son.”

“I love you, too, my wise mother.”

We wrapped our arms around each other, and clung, hard, eyes closed. In her touch, I felt her intention, “I want to heal you, in advance, of everything you’ll suffer.” I was intending the same. Remember this when you are in the depth of darkness. Take strength from it. We stayed there a long time.

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69 - The tyrant's machine-monster

I felt as if I knew nothing, so I decided to start tentatively. After a day or two I began to feel I was still myself, remembered my training, and settled into it.

I appointed myself First General First, but asked Assembly to discuss and approve it, though I was not required to by any tradition (and semanakraseyel after me might resent that I’d set the precedent). I wanted to be very solid in the position, for what was coming.

The worst reservations were that I had not completed my Circle School training; part of it is to study and practice naval warfare in Selina, and I hadn’t had time yet. I promised I would when I next had the chance.

They also took the sensible step of asking Emao-e whether I’d be good at it as she was; if there was anyone who would not be biased in my favour, it would be her, since she’d be losing the position. She answered that it was not a fair comparison, since I was a fighting general and she preferred the hill-top, but I was capable enough that she would be happy fighting under my command, and Yeola-e would not be in any more danger than it would with her in the position.

So I started wearing the circles of the chakrachaseye, and my friendships changed, as couldn’t be helped. I felt it when I did my first inspection wearing them, and saw my old clique standing stiff as if I were my father. The bureaucrats who’d scatted me away from their desks all my life now came respectfully when I called, and I stopped hearing the office gossip.

Aside from family and the best friends, the closest to me now were Chinisa, who had been my father’s secretary as well as my aunt’s, and could organize a semanakraseye’s life in her sleep, the five high ministers, who had all been experts before I was born, those Servants who made it a point to fraternize with me, and the three demarchic scribes of the Workfast Proclamatory, doing their work of tripping me up as best they could. I made all those I could persuade call me by name.

Only Mana thought me unchanged, and so did not himself change. Great ability lifts one apart from others, he had always said, so that one needs an earthbound friend, and he would be mine. He was right in the need, but wrong in the cause, because I never told him. Had I, he would not have believed that I had foreknowledge.

Mana was an athye’s athye, one who credited nothing that could not be shown him. Speak of the Hermaphrodite or the Twin Hawks as anything but metaphors, or claim to have powers that could not be immediately tested, and he’d grow an uneasy grin like a foreigner’s in the heart of Yeola-e, make some deflating joke or argue that it could have been chance or power of will. The God-In-Him, to his mind, was a perfect sword-stroke or a flawless Enchian conjugation.

The good of that for me was that with him I could live as I had before seven. He was my strongest tie to the innocence I’d had then; I could forget in his laughter, as in good wine. Call it avoidance; but we all get drunk now and then.

As a semanakraseye should, I undertook to learn what spirit my taking the office was being greeted in, partly by walking incognito in Terera Square. With many it had a shade of a new love affair; they were besotted with me, for reasons that my mind had names for but my heart could only feel bewildered by. Worse, because of my name as a warrior, people hoped for peace for a long time, which made me want to weep.

The semanakraseyesin became my day-in-day-out life. There were Lakan border matters to clear up with Astalaz, which went well. Just as the first snow fell on Vae Arahi, there was an earthquake in Enthira; my first news of it came when I reached for a paper that had fallen under my desk, and was lurched almost out of my chair, then saw the tea in my cup quivering even though nothing moving had been near it. That night I lay sleepless waiting to see if a runner would come, and from where, until she did. The town was all but razed, and in the end four hundred people died. I went there with two hundred of the darya semanakraseyeni, and pulled the living and the dead from under their fallen houses for three unbroken days.

The rest of it was sorting out what Tyeraha had handed to me, and learning those things no training but only the work itself can teach. I went to the same fate my father had before me: sitting in the demarchic chair in Assembly while knowing I was the youngest here by far. Once they knew me beyond formality all the Servants started calling me “lad.” Of course people tested me, as children do a stepfather, but I showed firmness when I had to, and got a name for cutting to the heart of matters.

Shaina, Etana and I settled in to a good bond, all-encompassing between the two of them, light and friendly for me, and full, naturally, of political shoptalk.

Fifth Chevenga haunted the Hearthstone, though people said he was more shy than I had been. Though some still frowned on how I’d got him, no one could deny he was full-blood Yeoli, and mine. It helped that he was quick. When people not related to him noticed it, I knew it was true and not just fatherly pride biasing my judgment. At two he spoke in full sentences, or more often in questions, gaining a perfect Vae Arahi accent, and he missed nothing. Of course his little hands were into everything. My grandmother minded him in the day, as she had me.

About two months past the winter solstice, Shaina conceived, and I began the joyful desperate wait for my second child. Having a boy I hoped for a girl, of course, and all the signs, the feathers laid over the womb and my mother’s hunch and even something Jinai Oru tossed off in passing in a reading for someone else, predicted one. The drawback was, since I lay with Shaina only for conception, by our agreement I was out of her bed for two years at the very least.

There are needs permitted to a youthful anaraseye or warrior in the field that a semanakraseye, especially married, is expected to have mastered, for all his body might tell him that that was only yesterday. To borrow the Lakan idiom, I practiced my sword-grip a lot. As well I threw myself harder into my work, and raising Fifth; I moved his crib into my Hearthstone office, and began staying there late into the night.

Mana and Kunarda both got accepted into the Elite Demarchic Guard. Krero continued rising in the ranks in the greater Guard, making setakraseye; Sachara kept up his training but studied Iyesian classics, with the aim of teaching. Nyera bought into a weaving workfast in Thara-e and moved there, much to the grief of the rest of us. All but Krero courted, and took falls; none married.

When one has a name as a warrior, one also gets a name for being warlike; those to whom war is alien or inimical, to whom I looked frightening with all my muscles and scars, will think such things, and make them part of the common opinion, and I didn’t want that. So I took some politician’s measures; I let the back of my hair grow past my shoulders and the forelock fall to a peak between my eyebrows, wore loose long sleeves, and mentioned often how well war teaches the necessity of peace. Having Fifth in tow so much helped. The talk lessened.

In the spring, I spoke my plans to make state visits to Kranaj, Astalaz, Ivahn and Bitha Szten, head of the largest clan of the Schvait Confederation, which is as close as the Schvait have to a head of state. It is traditional but not necessary, several argued, worried that as a new and young semanakraseye I might appear to them to be running to them as if to appease, and thus weaken us. I wanted to say, “Me? The one who’s been called cocky all his life?”

Krero, bless him, said, “I understand, Cheng: a state visit is almost the only thing you can do without the people’s orders, so, you being you, you’ve got to.” When I showed my annoyance, he asked if I’d got so uppity I couldn’t take a joke. My only thought was, as a person does better with friends, so does a nation. History, I think, has proved me right.

I also spoke my plans in Assembly to make a state visit to Arko.

In the break afterwards, a hand caught my shoulder as I left the Assembly chamber and spun me around so hard I went into stance. “You headstrong little fool—are you mad?” Esora-e exerted political influence as subtly as he had parental. While I stood open-mouthed in shock, he went on. “Can’t you see? Those blond child-rapers, every one of them, their oath isn’t worth a rhetorician’s fart, they’d cut your throat or sell you in an eye-blink, and then we’re stuck without you!”

I lifted my sword-hand, and looked at my third finger, feeling my cheeks turning to flame. It is there, is it not, I asked myself; yes, I see the bright hard white, I feel the weight, it’s familiar, I did the Kiss of the Lake; I am indeed a semanakraseye, not a ten-year-old. “You see this?” I said, holding the signet on my curled fist under his nose. “Do you know what it means? It means I need listen to you no more than I need listen to the other two thousand thousand people in Yeola-e. So get in line.” I turned and walked away, leaving his mouth flapping.

Every time he brought it up again, even if more politely, I said, “Chinisa has my appointment book.” Even now, I was thinking, he doesn’t respect me; at least now I have the power to teach him to.

My grandmother said that though Kurkas had always been high-handed, he’d never broken an oath of safe-conduct that she knew of; still, she doubted it would make any difference. “If you must go,” she told me, “make very sure it doesn’t seem you’ve come begging, or we’ll end up being slapped with either tribute or war; if he doesn’t spy weakness his ears in the walls will. But don’t tempt him into treachery with anger, either; make him see the steel in your spine without ever letting the diplomat slip. You know the rule: high stakes, no mistakes.”

But Assembly had enough to say that it lasted for more than a day. That night I read my notes from Jinai’s reading another hundred times, perhaps, straining to glean every slight clue out of the words that I could for as clear and complete a sight of the future as I could, while Fifth smacked his lips and murmured in his sleep beside me. I was going to Arko; Jinai was certain. Yet if I did not write and send the letter, I would not be invited. Would I be called there later, of necessity? Arko-ness was twined with the rest of my life, he’d said; what did that mean?

The whole shape of it was what I had already seen and could not deny: whatever I went through would pay for greater good in the end. In the ancient tale, when the tyrant’s machine-monster, big as the world, finds the warriors, obligation forbids them to flee, but holding their ground against it will be death. So they fly into its face, and because to its builders that was the path unconceived, they win. I had to do this.

And Arko was coming, soon, whatever we did; I’d shied from it, but now I was semanakraseye it made even more sense, everything falling into place like a latch dropping. Whatever my people thought, the time was right, Yeola-e weakened by war and plague and with a new and very young leader.

And I could tell no one, not my grandmother, not my shadow-father, not the other generals, not Assembly, else they’d never allow me to go into the machine-monster’s face, the only way to save Yeola-e from Arko.

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68 - The black snake dancing

The fire of leaf-turning on the heights spread down into the valleys, eating down past Vae Arahi to the streets of Terera that are lined with trees, obeying the time-dictates of nature even as they stand in the places chosen by people. The town filled groaning-full with warriors, more than usual for the Annual Games, a good thirty-five thousand. They were here not just to fight in the Games, they told anyone who would list, but also to witness the first Kiss of the Lake of a semanakraseye who was so much one of them.

On the night before my birthday, I slept alone in a guest room of the Hearthstone, as is the custom, Shaina and Etana caring for Fifth. Under unfamiliar running patterns and in unfamiliar scents—beeswax is traditional in the guest rooms—I could not sleep.

Tomorrow, the moment I put on the signet, I commit a crime against the people of Yeola-e. I am trusting so much to the reading of an augur, when everyone knows they are never entirely trustworthy. I tossed, and sweated the sheets sodden, and paced when sleep seemed futile, and thought, I am torturing myself with all this shame only to satisfy myself that I am sufficiently punished for what I mean to do anyway.

Then it was fear; my doubt about whether I should be semanakraseye, the weakness of criminality, would keep me from being able to do the Kiss of the Lake. I’d leap up from the water screaming in terror and shame and anguish, confess it all then, resign and live the meager rest of my life in disgrace, fleeing from all who knew me so they wouldn’t have to see me.

I wept, I pulled my hair, I puked. I went to no one; there was no one but my mother, and I was a man now, too old for her comfort, and I knew what she would say if I asked her opinion again anyway. If anyone heard anything, they’d put it down to pre-Kiss nerves.

I keep quiet, I am approved, I visit Arko; my course was set. All three forks agreed on one thing: war with Arko. An augur isn’t that consistent with something that is not real. I must not stray from it, not now, or any other time. But sleep would close my eyes, nor take me in the darkness when I closed them by will.

Then I felt something cold and smooth and hard tenderly touched to my brow, knew I was seeing daylight through my eyelids. I opened them to see the Crystal of the Speaker, in the hand of the Keeper of the Arch-Sigil. “Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e,” she said. “Without the will of the people, what are you?” Assembly convenes before dawn on the day, to approve or disapprove; by this I knew they’d approved.

I had not known this question was in the ritual, but the answer was easy. “Nothing.”

“And with the will of the people?” The obvious answer, everything, to complete the circle of nothing-everything, was not the answer.

“Nothing,” I said, “but what they will.” She laid the crystal in my hands. I was semanakraseye; the signatures later would formalize it. But even though the Kiss of the Lake is by choice, not by law, no one would call me semanakraseye until I’d done it.

Naked in the courtyard, I found my friends and acquaintances my accusers, as I had known I would from my father’s time. To see every face so hard at once, though, brought back a child’s fear of being abandoned utterly and left bereft. “What I’ve done this time is beyond forgiveness,” I thought, as if I were ten, but with the sting of the reality of 21-1 and 21-5-7 in it. Then I found myself wondering who I, or anyone, was to hold the crystal for all Yeola-e, since the only one who could do that was my father, and he was dead.

I began breaking out in a cold sweat, which there would be no concealing. But the God-In-Myself was near, for the thought came, “You’d better be ready; your life’s two-thirds over.” I remembered Tennunga, who had died young as well. I remembered the Arkans, too. I do what I must. Almost before I knew it, the brightness I had seen in him filled me, lifting me out of myself.

One cannot in truth even fight it. I had been afraid that I might have to struggle with my pride to kneel when the people called me out; as it was, the thunder of their joined voices drew me to my knees without my own will touching it, like a river current carrying a leaf, and I felt only joy. Then my body turned, and carried me into the Lake on steps of fire.

The Kiss is a gate, the semanakraseye of old wrote; once you have opened and seen through it, you can never turn back from passing through it. Having passed through one is forever changed, for like all trials, it makes one know one’s true nature.

I understood that now, as I chose my place. Waist-deep is best, I’d been told. The fall sun had ceased to warm the water, so that it was icy on my skin. I would succeed or I would fail, and that would decide my life; though such moments had come a thousand times in the war, as they do for every warrior, this was in the presence of All-spirit, public; it would be the people I failed, not just myself.

I gripped the spear and the torch, from which a spark fell to hiss for an instant on the surface. I looked down; the ripples made gold circlets and ribbons on the brown bottom around the shadow of my head, and I heard Shininao’s wings. Death lay there, or so it would feel to my body, that housed my soul. Sacred death: acquiescence. I suddenly knew that as a child, trying this, I had not truly believed in death, only known that my time was short. Having been to war, I knew much more about death now.

The crook of the fire-dish was cold, half-clutching my sword-wrist, as I knelt; the icy water burned me up to my chin. The crowd was silent now, waiting; but they seemed very distant. The Ritual Monk’s hands on my shoulders were warm and tender, the hands of a mother; then they were gone.

I called to the God-In-Myself right away, barely after bowing my head. Like a fool, again, I’d taken a deep breath out of habit, and so made my sufferings longer. The first painful urges for air came; I put all my strength into my fingers around the spear, and thought with horror, I don’t feel the God’s hand on my back.

It’s only a child, the bitter thought came to me, who wants a voice from the sky. You are alone. If you are forced, how is it true acquiescence? My body screamed “Save me!”, used to fighting to the end, much more now.

A child is ruled by instinct, and accepts all; an adult can question. Why should I pay, I thought, for Notyere’s treason? Did he, two hundred years ago, make me untrustworthy? Yet these are childish thoughts; the sacred trust was broken; the people cannot know my heart except by what I prove. But what do I have to prove to them, that is any more than I ever had? I was breaking the law anyway. This is like training until exhaustion, or being flogged to falling; I will always fail, in the end; I know nothing, despite all I have pretended; I am nothing, so why struggle?

So the debate, that I had thought was long settled, went on in my breath-starved head. One does indeed find one’s true nature. In the end, it came down to my asking myself what my life was, and imagining what Jinai had foreseen. I came to know how much worth I put on myself, by the agony it was to cast myself away. Then the divine hand did come, pressing between my shoulder blades; the hand of a murderer, I thought, my own murderer, my God-in-myself, myself. Choice is not enough; one needs the deeper compulsion to bear this; yet I chose the compulsion. So the snake grasps its tail in its teeth.

When the moment comes in which I am truly suffocating, beginning to die, I always feel a black snake in me, coiling in a dance with the singing wind; a thing of evil, for destruction is evil, and death is the destruction of all one knows. Here I am, the God-In-Myself says, laughing; and you always thought I was so bright. I am as dark as I am light, I am of death as I am of life; the Void is nothing, as everything. If you don’t see this you are still a child, who cowers away from the full truth.

That is what a semanakraseye is, in the end; the one who faces the Void in full, light and dark, to learn what he must be for the people. It dashed 21-1 and 21-5-7 down to nothing; they didn’t matter. No lesson had taught me that; in fact all I can set down here is words, and any anaraseye reading this fools himself to think he has stumbled on the key and can seize it, or has learned anything at all. I’d been told a thousand times, as you have. I had to do it, as you will.

I remember opening my eyes as I struggled, feeling the burning water swirl but seeing only dark, and knowing my senses were fading because all my strength was in my fingers. I remember the warmth of the Ritual Monk’s hand again, clasping my mouth and nose. Then peace, and the music full of colors I knew from before, so engrossing it made me forget my name. The crash of light, noise and pain that tore it away I resented at first, and tried to fend off with my arms.

Someone’s mouth was on mine, tasting of lentils, many hands touched me, I was cold all over, something flat and hard and heavy pressed against my back. Then my ears cleared, and in the crowd-roar I heard the name I had forgotten. I was lying on the pier, the monks reviving me; the smoke-path in the sky I followed down to a great tongue of flame on the fire-dish. I had succeeded. “Can you hear me, semanakraseye?” someone was saying, though I hadn’t thought my aunt was so near. I realized he was speaking to me.

I was through the gate, that changes all. It seemed strange that my hands and body, as the monks wrapped me in towels, looked the same as they had before. My sword-hand was strangely heavy; on my third finger was the demarchic signet, put on while I was unconscious as per custom. I wanted someone, especially my mother, to hold me, my hand at least; she was not in sight, but the monks, sensing it, or knowing from before that a new semanakraseye feels like a butterfly just out of the chrysalis, handled me gently.

All across the square, hands danced in the air, streams of wine and flowers and kerchiefs flew; I raised my signetted hand to them, and the roar doubled. No more distance; I was theirs now, one with their fears, their dreams, their whims; I felt the bond, shining and steely as chains, as hands clasped mine all through Terera and up the path by the falls.

Donning the white linen robe, I went to the sacred place on Haranin for my meditation. That heightened state, like the thick of battle, doesn’t lend itself well to being remembered. It seemed all my questions were answered, and those that weren’t would be in their time, or the answer I would choose. No vision came; it seemed to me I’d had the most relevant one for myself already, at seven, and Jinai had had, through me, the most relevant one for Yeola-e. I needed mostly to gain calm, which I did. Then I went down to the Hearthstone, to brand myself. I made the first mark, as is custom, over my heart.

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