6 - Tennunga's assassination in context

I cannot remember meeting Mana-lai Chereda; he seemed born my friend, since we’d been born thirteen days apart and our parents had put us together as babies. When I was seven, he, Nyera Harayel, Krero Saranyera, Sachara Shae-Shaila and I were a tight clique. Loosed at the end of one day in the spring of that year, we five and Artira, the one sib of mine big enough to join us, ran up to our secret fortress on the mountain.

A pall had fallen over my family in the past two days. My mother, as I knew by eavesdropping, had been struck with a terrible foreboding. It is the nature of her gift that she often feels this without knowing why; her child dying in the stream she’d guessed by the timing of the feeling. Now no stream-tests were imminent, no one was ill, the country was not at war, so she could not know what was coming, whether earthquake or accident or something else, only that it would come without any other warning.

The only measures that brought her any relief were forbidding us all to do anything risky, and carrying a knife, so that whenever she hugged me I felt it, that little sliver like fear in the midst of her love, its hilt, ready to hand, like a knot against my ribs. It was only on the condition that we climb no rocks or trees that she let us go up the mountain. Seeing her face, I swore on my crystal for all of us. She was wearing her white linen tunic with the tricolor border that day, turquoise, deep leaf green and orange twined in vines. I remember it like yesterday.

It was the sort of spring day where the scent in the air signals the coming of summer, calling children outdoors as strongly as musk calls the deer. The streams suddenly run wild and muddy, the air carries sound again, and on every hillock and bank life unfurls in a thousand shapes and colours under the bright sun. The world is set free once more, and no one feels freer than the young. But when we were about halfway up, and I had long forgotten that there could be darkness or danger in the world, we heard hooves thumping on the path behind us, and our names shouted through the trees.

It was my shadow-mother. She was in full armour, and on her face was what I knew right away was the look of the battlefield, though I’d never seen it before. She snatched up Artira and me, commanded the others to run straight back to the Hearthstone, hiding if they heard anyone in the woods, and spurred her horse to a gallop down the mountain while we clung.

The courtyard was in turmoil, people running around with weapons as if the Enchians were storming the Hearthstone, others screaming the names of their kin, others just standing dazed, or gripping each other by the shoulders. My shadow-mother put us down and galloped out again. Artira began to cry, and I consoled her, kissing her hair, which was my father’s gold spun finer, though I felt like crying myself. All I could think of was that whatever Mama had feared had happened.

My shadow-father Esora-e came staggering through the gate, unarmoured but armed. He had dirt in his black hair, and more caked in a crust on his face and moustache, except where tears had washed clean trails through it. “All-Spirit, you have no mercy!” he howled, and flung his sword, that had been in his family for three centuries, down on the flagstones with a clash. That started everyone else yelling, and Artira clung harder to me. Then he saw us, and weeping to All-Spirit-in-Him to give him guidance, he came to us.

I think he decided Artira was too young to understand, because he left her in the care of my aunt Minina, while he picked me up in trembling arms, and carried me up to their room. We sat by the window which overlooks the first gentle slope of Hetharin. I can see now why he told me then, if I imagine myself him looking into those eyes, Karani’s eyes, Tennunga’s too, and yet with that part that is from none of us. He had to tell me. I’d always wanted to know everything that was happening around me as soon as I could.

That morning I had put a fistful of yellow lupines in my vase, and the room was full of their fragrance. To this day I never have lupines in a vase near me. Smelling them indoors brings that day back to me, in full, unfailingly.

"Chevenga," he said, “Your blood-father is dead.”

There is a moment of numbness that comes right after the worst news, I have learned. You might think ‘Oh’ and nothing else, or else see the outward significances of the event without emotion; it occurred to me, for instance, that now I would become semanakraseye as soon as I was twenty. I felt suddenly older and more grown up, a feeling such as the steel man of the ancient legends must have had when he first saw the missiles of his enemies bounce off his naked chest—but cold, like donning armour without ever having seen a battle.

Yet while Esora-e told me what had happened, I wondered such things as why Daddy himself wasn’t, since he’d been there and therefore could tell it best. Knowledge has layers; I knew, for instance, what a butterfly cut was from seeing it done on the ground, and I could imitate the motion using a stick for a sword. But I did not know how to do it. In the same sense, I knew my father was dead, and yet he was a great warrior, and young; immortal, in other words. He would always be with me, strong and wise and golden-haired; whatever they’ve always had, and needed, seems eternal to children.

“A heart-stab,” Esora-e was saying. “The quickest, easiest way… he’d hardly have felt anything, he wouldn’t have had time. One stroke, aiming’s easy from behind where he can take his time… one of those little Enchian blades, made just for that… they make them by the thousands there. Experts they are, masters! They couldn’t kill him any other way.”

My shadow-father raised his hands and cursed all dark-work, calling on Saint Mother, All-Spirit, my father’s soul, and Shininao, in whose beak he was now clutched, to loose their ill-wish on every murderer, until words failed him and he laid his head down on the window-ledge and howled as I had never seen an adult do. Though I was weeping myself, I put my arms around him and kissed his soiled hair, to comfort him; I remember I got grit in my teeth. Panting, he sprang up and grasped my hand, and led me at run down to the courtyard. “I wish we could spare you this, Chevenga,” he said hoarsely as we went. “But an Enchian backstabber decided otherwise.” By the south wall of the courtyard there was a linden tree, in the shade of which we would customarily lay our dead.

The silence reminded me of when he’d been underwater, last year. But this did not end. Servants of Assembly just out of session and staff who had been working late still wore their white-bordered kerchiefs; the masons who had been repairing the portico rail stood with their hands empty, tools strewn at their feet. The warriors returned one by one, clasping forelocks. All the cooks stood in a row, some of their hands spotted with bits of vegetable. No one wept; this was still shock, not yet sunk into belief.

The rest of that day, how I went to his corpse thinking he wasn't dead, put my hand in his blood, and saw my own corpse through my mother's hand, though I didn't know it until later in her room when I looked into her mirrror, you know already.

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5 - The War of the Travesty

“In the old days,” my father told me, “demarchs could do what they liked, at least much more so than now. You always had to do as the people voted, but you could own money, or marry whom you pleased without Assembly approval, or initiate legislation yourself. No one questioned that the semanakraseye would obey the vote, because they always had.”

He shifted the long iron thing in the fire again, as if he was checking it for something. It was in some way familiar, I realized.

“But when we took up the sword, everything changed. Imagine, Chevenga, what would happen if the Enchians attacked us again, and it was not me who must decide what to do, but Assembly. They’d make a good plan, well thought out, yes? But we’d be in pieces before a tenth of it was ready. A decision from the many is most just, but from the few is…?”

“Quickest.” I knew from my little brothers and sisters; if I wanted to do effective mischief with their help, I’d learned, I had to take charge.

“Yes. That’s why we relinquish our wills to our commanders in war. And so, because the people would trust only the semanakraseye with such power, it fell to us to command. Thus we became warriors.

“So, one must be the people-wills-one, subject to all due process, but First General First as well, giving orders while others relinquish their wills to you. Years of this, and one can come to think enough of oneself that a semanakraseye’s constraints can feel…” He made the sign of being in chains.

He shifted the thing in the fire again, and I knew as surely as if he’d said it that he’d felt this way himself.

“War is a strain on the customs of the peaceful, you’ll see. Go fetch me a bowl of cool water, a linen cloth, a towel and the aloe salve on Mama’s night-table, please and thank you.”

“A long time ago, about ten generations,” he said when I’d come back with the things, “there was a semanakraseye by the name of First Notyere Shae-Arano-e. He was a great warrior and commander, and Yeola-e held off the strongest enemies during his term. But in peacetime he began to feel his leash too short. Forgetting all that he had been taught, and losing sight of All-Spirit and its meaning to a semanakraseye, he tried to free himself of it.

“His friends came to be only those who’d do what he said even if they doubted its rightness. He feasted and gave them gifts paid for with the people’s taxes—the semanakraseye could take freely out of the treasury then—wore fine clothes and jewels, and made himself as rich as any foreign king except perhaps the Imperator of Arko.

“Next he started forgetting small duties, or slightly overstepping, and those who protested he’d persuade it had been necessary, or buy off, or distract with fear-mongering talk of enemies all around, or subtly threaten. People grumbled, but forbore. Then a Servant of Assembly who often opposed him was found guilty of vandalism, and hence had to resign her position. When a similar thing happened to another detractor of Notyere’s, people grew suspicious. When enough proof was found to suspect, albeit not to charge, they began a petition to impeach him.

“From then, he took his own part in Assembly fairly openly, which, as you know, is not done. Then, seeing true danger, he hired and set loose dark-workers. The petitioners would find their papers missing or their horses stolen or a town claiming they’d already come through. Lies were spread, people even got beaten; but in the end there was a referendum, and it went strongly for impeachment.

“And everyone waited for him to stand up in Assembly as is required, say ‘The people wills,’ and step down. They couldn’t imagine otherwise; they were Yeolis. To them, anything else would be like being stabbed in the heart from within the heart. How is that possible?

“He’d had people ready, armed. He announced that he was falsely condemned and fraudulently impeached, so that justice left him no choice but to retain his position. When the Keeper of the Arch-Crystal tried to take it from him, he struck her with his wristlet.

“Do you know the notches on the doorpost of the School of the Sword, the ones that are framed? Notyere tried to take it, one of the first things; he knew the war-teachers were against him, and wanted them out of the way fast. By killing them, yes… Merasha Kaili, the war-master then, said to him, ‘A heroic last stand you want from us, Notyere, no surrender, so you can kill us without shame—well, you’ll have it, but you are our students, who held the Sword as children while we watched. We could never harm you.’ They all left their swords on their hooks and took up staves, except one who carried the Sword of Saint Mother flat on the backs of her hands, and fought their way out without spilling a drop of blood.

“Now Notyere’s sister Denaina—yes, your shadow-mother is named after her—who should have become semanakraseye on her brother’s impeachment, had slipped out a window. In Terera, she called out the people to right this travesty, which is how the war got its name. They surrounded her, linked arms and threatened a common criminal charge on anyone who tried to break through. No one dared try. But the war had begun, and these very corridors where you play naked saw Yeoli kill Yeoli.” He made the gesture of protection around us both.

My father looked into the fire, then with the cloth carefully washed a spot on his chest, next to the brand-scar he’d had as far back as I could remember, and toweled it dry thoroughly. Some final rite remained.

I tried to imagine people making war-cries and shouting death-threats to each other in the offices where I now pestered the staff, drawing Yeoli blades on each other beside these hearths and lintels whose running patterns I knew by heart, cutting each other near my grandmother’s mementos. I couldn’t. No sword-marks mar the posts of the Hearthstone Dependent; in this place where children are raised, they’d been effaced the moment there was peace.

“The war really only lasted six days. Notyere guessed wrongly that the warriors who had served under him would follow him to the extent of wading in the blood of their own. Most turned at the start, shocked and enraged. All-Spirit working in us wards off mindless loyalty and blind obedience… in the end Denaina took office, and Notyere was charged. He and all those who had been loyal to him were sentenced to exile without safe conduct.

“You know how it is, we do not believe in execution as a punishment; but what exile without safe conduct means is that a person ceases to be a Yeoli the moment he’s sentenced and is not protected on the way to the border, and so the usual legal constraints on killing him no longer apply.

“Outside the court waited those whose kin he had caused to die. Though Denaina herself came out with her arms around him, and pleaded with them to stay true to the gentle ways they had preserved at such cost by forgiving, they took him from her and killed him right on the courthouse steps.

“So ended the life of the semanakraseye who would be king. But the mind of the people was not at ease. If it could happen once, why not again? ‘What will bring the second Fire,’ they were thinking, ‘is not weapons or knowledge, but choices made in error…’ How to forestall temptation?

“What is found wanting must change. So the laws on the semanakraseye were very much tightened, and hold the same today. That’s why I, and you in your turn, Chevenga, cannot own any property, why we must beg so many things, why we cannot even openly suggest laws, why there are acts for which we would be impeached without petition, and so on.

“But not even then was the national mind at ease. Denaina did a seven-day abstinence, and when she returned among the people she understood at once. Power had corrupted Notyere, and they’d had to leave her some; she was still First General First, could still command the warriors who relinquished their will.

“So she said to those who filled Terera Square, ‘My people, I fear that what every semanakraseye since the first has feared would happen, has happened. You no longer trust me, because of my position.’ Some said chalk in agreement and others said charcoal, and so she said, ‘Even that is too many. All-Spirit must be that—all the people of Yeola-e—else it is nothing. Ask me, my people, to do that which is most hard to do, and I will do it or die trying; thus I will prove to you that I am no more and no less than your people-wills-one.’

“An uproar of debate filled the square. Because the hardest thing to do is die, of course, but they didn’t want to do that in case she succeeded, in which case they’d have lost a semanakraseye who had proven herself trustworthy. ‘If there were some way of dying without dying,’ they told her, ‘we would ask that of you.’

“So she thought for a moment, then said, ‘Call my name three times, with all the yearning for reassurance that is in you.’ They did, and she walked into the Lake and did what I did today.

“That they accepted as proof, but Denaina felt it needed renewing, so four years later she did it again. So it became custom—but it has never been law. It has never been required of us. The secret of the Kiss of the Lake, Chevenga, is not that we do it, hard though it is. Its power is that we do it by choice, that we are willing. It seems like law, by the way they call, but it’s nowhere on the books. Our love for the people alone binds us to it.

“I chose to let them command me. You may decide otherwise, that it’s too much, and they might impeach you; but they’d have to go through all the usual trouble. As always, you choose.”

That, I thought, is true giving. I understood why I’d felt what I’d felt when he’d knelt after the third call. I felt it again, something vast inside, and faintly ringing, like the harmonic singer’s voice or a deep whispered wind as if a mountain could breathe. ‘Yes, I will do it,’ I thought. ‘I want to be semanakraseye, and nothing else.’

Just about then my mother came into the room, and sat behind him. My father pulled the iron thing slightly out of the coals, and I saw its end, a symbol, glowing no less bright. I suddenly knew where I’d seen it before: on my grandmother’s mantelpiece, next to the comb. The symbol was the same hermaphroditic twined halves as they both had on their chests, her three times, him just once. I had never put those two things together in my mind. Perhaps I thought of the marks as something both of them had been born with; everything a child comes into seeing seems permanent. “We chose it all,” he said, grasping the iron firmly in two hands, tapping it against the andirons to knock off any ash, and turning the glowing end inward, fast.

Something made me look at his face as he did it. A sheen and then beads of sweat formed fast on his brow; but otherwise it was as if he was feeling nothing, his eyes and lips keeping that same soft calm. Anyone but him who claims credit for teaching me to bear pain does so in error.

To me it seemed to last a lifetime; hearing the sizzle and smelling his seared flesh made me think that must be what the Athyel of Iyesi must have smelled all too much on those nine days. Then just as suddenly his hands drew it away and placed it carefully down. He took a deep breath, and then leaned back against my mother, closing his eyes, and let us take care of him, his day’s work done.

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4 - The Kiss of the Lake

I was three when the last Enchian war ended. At five, I got to see the first foreigners I’d ever seen, a party of Enchian envoys visiting Assembly Palace. The straight hair I’d been expecting, as I knew Enchians mostly had it, but it was still amazing, hanging straight from their brows or the crowns of their heads like brown or ash-blond waterfalls. They’d move and their sheets of hair would swing like a curtain, the ends cut in lines as perfect as a curtain-hem. They wore collars that looked like they must be strangling, jewelry that had metal everywhere, glistening in the light from the skylights and chandeliers, and were wrapped in the furs of animals too small to eat. They were all men, which made me ask if there was such a thing as women in Tor Ench, setting my grandmother to laughing.

“You’ve heard they carry hidden arms?” my grandmother said, when I asked her about the little knives they all had in their sleeves, tiny straight blades with a tang of fearful bile in them, to my perception. “Your father permits it; that’s his way, to call to their honour by trusting them.” Pride thrilled through me; knowing fear, children love courage.

Growing up in the Hearthstone and Assembly Palace, I soaked in politics along with the smells of stone and papers and book-lined offices, just as a farm child soaks in weather and soil, and a weaver’s child, warp and woof. It was at six that I first became truly aware of it.

That year there was a referendum over whether to answer Lakan raids with full-on war, as they’d become so frequent. The people living there and the nationalists argued hard for chalk, naturally. One person I will not name even cited the old augury that in this century Yeola-e would break our custom of warring only to our borders or a little beyond to make up for what we’ve lost, and conquer a great nation.

When my father’s time came to speak (the semanakraseye presides in Assembly, but can take the speaking crystal him or herself only on the request of a Servant of Assembly) he spoke eloquently against anything more than equal raids, and in the end the vote went solidly charcoal. But he had to say it to the faces of the bereaved and the raped and the ruined, in the Assembly chamber gallery.

I remember asking him once about the scar that split one of his pale thick eyebrows into a fork at the end. “Someone who disagreed with my stand on something threw a rock at me a while ago,” he said. “Sometimes they forget what’s right and will hurt you for doing it.”

I learned multiplication from my grandmother the year the city of Asinanai voted to renovate its great common baths. The city council asked to allocate five-hundred ankaryel and the vote went seven-in-ten chalk, so they got three-hundred and fifty for it. I still think of the number sometimes when I step into a common bath.

I took a dutiful but distant interest. Some day, I knew, I would be semanakraseye; I would grow into it as I grew into size, in some mysterious way become filled with the sacredness I saw in my father, and all Yeola-e would love me as they did him. In the meantime, there were trees to climb, friends to wrestle with, games to play. With my present sweet and my future set, I couldn’t imagine a happier life.

Of course children are spared the harsh details. The year I was six my father did his second Kiss of the Lake.

My grandmother took me into her room to get ready. Her name, in case you don't know, is Second Naingini Shae-Arano-e, and she had been semanakraseye for thirty-nine years before retiring to give it to my father. Many still called her Nainginin, Naingini who is a mountain, making me hope that would happen with me, too.

In all that time she’d acquired many mementos, mostly gifts from envoys: a jade horse and rider from some place up the Brezhan, a gilded Arkan pen with the ink contained in its shaft, a blue feather half a man-height tall from some impossible Srian bird, a samovar from Brahvniki, a low-relief portrait of some king in alabaster. Central on her mantelpiece, on a special stand, stood the comb that had been her national retirement gift. It was made of ebony polished as smooth as glass in the shape of a tulip, and had a mother-of-pearl inlay of the Hermaphrodite, with a diamond in one of his/her eyes standing for chalk, and a black sapphire in the other for charcoal.

Up until then, I’d have given up food for a day just to touch it. That morning she casually took it off its stand and used it to comb my hair.

In the courtyard, everyone was gleaming, ringlets combed to brilliance, kilts and cloaks without a wrinkle. When my father came out, wearing a white robe and carrying the national Speaker's Crystal, everyone went silent.

When I was growing up I’d often search in my mother’s Arkan-glass mirror for his likeness, squinting sometimes to fill it in with the brush of imagination. My chin and cheekbones would eventually sharpen into similar lines, and—to my everlasting amazement, since in my inward eye his head keeps company with the mountaintops—I’d grow as tall as he was. But never did my nose come to equal his in its length and grace, and the dyes were all wrong; his hair was white-gold, the curls standing up around his head like the sun’s aureole, while mine is my mother’s black.

Now something made me look at his sword-hand, and I saw the semanakraseyeni signet was gone from his finger, leaving a pale band on the skin. I couldn’t imagine he’d been impeached, so this had to be some aspect of the rite. His hazel eyes were very still, reminding me of the ancient meditating demarchs carven in stone; but his body seemed to sing with an invisible brightness. He greeted no one and everyone stood off from him, even my other parents; making him a stranger was somehow part of the rite too.

Terera Square was jammed, every near roof fringed with people, overloaded boats nudging each other in the harbour. On the pier stood five senaheral in full scarlet robes, with things ranged out so neatly they had to be ceremonial: a spear, an unlit fire-dish on a tripod, and other things I couldn’t name. One of the monks began to sing, and everyone quieted. His voice thinned, and a second note somehow formed out of the first, soaring upward from pitch to pitch like a bird on mountain wind. He was a harmonic singer, trained to sing with two voices. I can’t remember hearing it for the first time; it is and always will be, for me, the sound of sacredness.

He stopped singing and another monk began declaiming in archaic Yeoli; not understanding, I listened to people whispering around me. “The second time is always the hardest,” someone said. “Because he knows what it will feel like.” What what would feel like? My father stepped forward, naked now; the monk raised his arms and said, “People of Yeola-e, call him out!”

My memories of his victory-parade after the war were fading, like an old dream, but I could still remember the ecstatic chanting of his name, the flower-petals filling the air, the streams of wine, the love glowing all around. This will be like that, I thought; we’ll yell his name and maybe there’ll be some boring ceremony to satisfy the monks and then everyone will break out the flasks and stop looking so sombre. So I called him that way, saying “Daddy” instead of “Tennunga,” of course.

But thirty-thousand other voices all roared out not in adoration, but in demand. Stunned, I looked across the square. It’s three times they call, of course, and for the second and third, the faces were faces no longer but stone masks carven hard and merciless; the raised fists were weapons. These were not the Yeolis I knew, but strangers possessed, not even with anger but with power, power above all feeling, above all forgiving, high and untouchable and immovable, taking every abasement as its unquestioned due. It was as if All-Spirit itself had turned against him, and was demanding some final reckoning.

I was suddenly dizzy, tears in my eyes, black rage in my heart, my legs like water as I imagined myself him. How could they so abuse him, after all he had done for them? He was semanakraseye! I grabbed my grandmother’s leg and took in a deep breath to let out a howl, and she cuffed me on the ear with the back of her hand, just hard enough to hurt a little. “Chevenga, you’re just watching it; pay attention to him, who’s doing it.”

My father stood still and alone, like a candle flame. The roaring cry that washed over the square and shook my very bones didn’t cow him at all, but seemed instead to enter and fill him, somehow fueling his shining brighter still. After the third call he went to his knees, his hand on his heart, but it wasn’t stiffly or hesitantly as if against his will, but like water, with the grace of complete consent, a submission that was pride itself. “All is as it should be,” that motion said. Every bad feeling in me snuffed out instantly. I felt touched to my very core with something more huge than all the mountains in Yeola-e, that I could not name.

He turned and stepped down the steps from the dais into the lake. The red-clad monks followed him, with the spear and a lit torch and the fire-dish, the eldest of them carrying nothing; I know now, of course, she was the Ritual Monk. When he was standing in waist-deep water, they set the fire-dish on its stand in the water before him and a little to his sword-side.

As they all placed themselves I saw him look down into the water. Now I know what he was about to do, I wonder what he saw there. The shimmering leather-and-steel wings of Shininao? A wall of blackness that he must walk through? Or, like me, a gate that he must force open, beyond which lay the bright days of his next four years of office? I never had a chance to ask him.

He knelt so the ripples lapped over his shoulders. A monk planted the butt of the spear in the mud to his shield-side, and he curled his shield-arm hard around its shaft. The fire-dish had a spar with a raised crook like a sling, I noticed, as he laid his sword-hand wrist in it. He tested his grip on the spear, shifted and set himself like a runner at the starting line. A monk put the flaming torch into his sword-hand, so it was above the fire-dish. Standing behind him, the Ritual Monk put her hands on his shoulders, then threw them upwards, symbolizing that he was free. The crowd drew its breath.

It’s always your inclination, to take in as big a lungful of air as you can, as if you were diving; but if you forbear, it’s over sooner. I did; I couldn’t help it. A pause came, in which he knelt still as stone; then he bowed his bright head into the water.

I held my breath, as everyone did, and imagined myself him, seeing the little stones in the brown mud, feeling the chill water all around me and the wood of the spear-shaft on my arm. When my lungs were straining more than I could bear, I took several long sweet breaths, and noticed others around me doing the same. He stayed under; in fact he lowered his grip on the spear to draw himself a little further down. Somehow it was that motion that made me begin to understand what they had asked him to do.

I watched with the horror of the helpless. The monk who held the spear had pushed his robe back from his arms, and they were very well-muscled, but still it began to twitch and tremble in his hands like a living thing. From a distance, it seemed, I heard my grandmother whisper, “Strength, my child, calm, my child, let it go, give in, let it go…” The people watched his throes in expectant quiet; he’d die in the cold and silence of the lake, alone among enemies. The Ritual Monk put one hand down into the water next to his head, which was muddy now over his golden locks from his struggle. For the first time in my life I heard a humming, like tiny wings, and realized it was Shininao, hovering near.

What must come came. He went still, and all the world did. His fingers going lax let the torch fall into the fire-dish, and a huge gout of flame leaped up. Now the crowd roared in triumph; now the wine and flowers came out; now, having rewarded his generosity with death, they chanted his name.

I felt tears coming, but swallowed them, remembering how he’d taken this; I wouldn’t dishonour his memory with a child’s weeping. Let them do with me what they will, I thought, shame me, drown me, whatever they want; I’ll be stone, and let them touch me as much as he did; I cared not a speck of kyash for them. My grandmother peered at me for a bit, but said nothing.

From the water they lifted a dead weight, hanging limp in their hands as they carried it back to the dais. His long arms trailed; his water-darkened hair lay pasted across his empty face. A knot of people gathered around, hiding him from me, one man kneeling fast. The crowd quieted again; then I heard a gasping cough and several quick tearing breaths with a shred of his voice in them. Shortly he was up, hands steadying him, his face flushed dark; then he grinned and waved, the signet back on his finger, and the cheering tripled.

I stood frozen, light and dark alternating in my eyes, shaking all over, not knowing what I felt, except that Shininao’s wings still hummed in my ears. The rejoicing was a thousand days journey distant; it seemed like a jest in the worst taste. Even his grin was wrong; what I wanted more than anything, I realized, was to be far away from here, hidden away in a dark and quiet place. I managed to slip away in the ruckus and pick my way out of the crowd. I ran full-tilt all the way home and hid on the top shelf of my mother’s wardrobe.

I crouched there unmoved as they called me through all the rooms and the corridors and then outside on the mountain, saying, “Chevenga! We are worried about you! We don’t know that you’re all right! Come out and let us know!” I didn’t see why I should care, or want to be with anyone. They found me, finally, by ripping apart the room. My shadow-father had his comb out and my wrist in his hand to give me the comb across my palm when my blood-father came in from the semanakraseye’s customary meditation on the mountain.

“We can’t punish him for doing something before we know why he did it,” he said. His voice had an unearthly calm. He beckoned me to sit with him, next to the fire, not looking back to see if I’d obey.

Something in me had died, it seemed. I always wanted to be near him, but now I didn’t; I wanted no one, my heart turned into a stone. Of course I obeyed anyway, though I didn’t go in under his arm when he opened it to me, but sat on the hearth not touching or looking at him. His warmth somehow seemed icy, deadly.

“You thought they were killing me, and that made you angry at them,” he said gently. “Then you saw you’d been fooled, and that made you angry at me as well.”

I stared at him, wondering how he could read my mind. Named, the feeling came roaring up, and he pulled me onto his lap as I began letting it out. “I thought you were drowning!” I screamed, battering his shoulders with my fists. “I thought you were dead!” He wrapped his big arms tenderly around me, making me feel shielded as always, and reminding me of what I thought I’d lost. I bawled wordlessly then, seizing two fistfuls of his hair in my fists and burying my face in his neck. “Shh shh, my child,” he whispered, “it’s all right, I’m here, I’m with you, I’m not dead… do I seem dead to you?”

What I knew in the depths of me, I don’t know. I recall not thinking I knew anything. But many times, on hindsight, I’ve recognized the sharpening of an emotion by foreknowledge. This one had the feel.

“You probably aren’t keen on the idea of doing it yourself,” he said, when I’d gone on long enough to wash it out and gain some calm. He wiped my tears away with a hard-skinned hand.

I remembered the stone-cruel faces. “If they want me dead, even a little bit,” I said, “why should I work for them?”

I know now how much he wanted me to have the life that meant so much to him. But he showed nothing. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to. Nothing’s graven in stone yet. All it would take is for me to recommend against your being approved and you never would be. Do you want me to do that?”

I’d sent it out in anger; now seeing the reality held before me made me look a little deeper into my heart. I’d never lived for anything else, and could imagine nothing else; without it I’d be nothing. As well I suddenly remembered the flawless grace of his giving, and how it had called to something very deep and huge in me. That’s being semanakraseye, I thought. That’s what it means. I signed charcoal.

On the hearth on the other side of him lay a long iron rod whose end disappeared into the orange coals of the fire. He must have put it in while I was having my tantrum. He studied and shifted it slightly.

“Whatever your tutors say when you throw snowballs at them, there’s a semanakraseye in there somewhere,” he said. “I’ll explain it all to you. There’s a story… do you need to visit the privy first? No? You’re sure, Chevenga? All right.”

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3 - The delicate bones of a cold-slain infant

My earliest memory is my mother’s fire. A pair of square orange eyes with gold edges I would see, or a monster with stickles in his spine made of fire-jewels – then the poker in Mama’s great hand destroying all in a hail of sparks, and creating new.

My floor, warm sheep-fur that tickled my skin; my roof, the creaking base of her wicker chair; my door, her legs. The dogs would shove their noses at me until I took them in under my arms. A thread of yarn stretched from the ball to above, twitching now and then; she’d be crocheting socks or a marya or a crib-blanket for the next sib coming, still in her womb. My blanket was blue and green, the colours of Yeola-e; of course she’d made me a marya in the Vae Arahi pattern, with the single and double stitches interlacing and reflecting each other to a child’s eyes running over them, to mean balance and transaction. I’d wear it all my life, from now when the fringe dragged on the floor until I was a man and it fell just to my waist.

“Do you remember your father and me tossing you back and forth?” my mother once asked me. “Of course I do!” I answered. “It was like flying.” The swoop upwards, the rush of air on my naked skin, the moment of weightlessness, the firm warmth of huge hands full of love catching me; you can never forget such a thing. I was about six when they told me I was too big for it any more, and I wept bitterly.

I was four, and she was big with child, but reading instead of crocheting. Irritated, since reading made her oblivious to me, I twirled a lit twig to make light-trails in the air. “Fourth Chevenga, you’re not allowed to do that and you know why, yet you’re doing it,” she said. “Why?”

“Why aren’t you making a blanket for the baby coming?” I asked.

Instead of upbraiding me for answering a question with a question, as she should have, she said, “I’m doing something else for the baby coming.”

I had always been taught strictly never to lie, punished far worse for denying I had done wrong than for doing it, so this was a shock. I’d never imagined she could. “Mama…” How to put this? Politely, was all I could think of. “If you please, may I know why you’re lying?”

My mother is quiet by nature, but not from timidity. She is a warrior who fought with distinction beside my father in the wars against Tor Ench, before she went asa kraiya to have children—not one whose eyes went wide or whose cheeks reddened easily. Her eyes were so much like mine that I could very easily become her in my mind, as I did now, my chin and nose adult and female, black love-locks brushing my face, the heat of tears in my eyes just enough to shimmer like faint sun on the edge of a cloud. My question forgotten, I wanted to fling my arms around her and say “There there” as she did me when I cried; I’d never seen her cry in my life.

“I owe you truth, my child,” she said finally, a tear trickling down her cheek. “But I can give you only very little—only that there is a reason I am not making a blanket for the baby coming, but you are too young to know it. I’m sorry, Chevenga; will you forgive me?”

I wrapped my arms around her neck and kissed her in answer, and never mentioned it again.

She gave birth without trouble, but the baby died in the stream. They gave him his rites in the hearth, after the rest of us were supposed to be in bed, but I crept in silently, and with their eyes fixed on the fire, none of my four parents caught me. I saw the flames curling around his body, turning it black, heard his tiny delicate fingers crackling. I fled back to bed and wept my pillow soaking, then dreamed. Such dreams always slip out of my mind when I try to understand them, like a faint star that one cannot see looking straight on, only a little off to the side.

But when I thought about it, I understood it all. She had foreknown his death and that he’d never need a crib-blanket, but had wanted to spare the rest of us the pain of knowing in advance. This didn’t seem out of the way to me.

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2 - On the stream-test

[Editor’s note: It is with Chevenga’s permission that we publish his original account of his stream-testing, and defense of the practice.]

You might say my life truly begun on my father's death; but I'll go back to the beginning as most would consider it. I was born on atakina 19, 1547. Two days afterwards, my parents carried me up Hetharin, with the two monks of Senahera to bear witness.

It was a fall day like ones I remember: the land lies sweet as after the act of love, the scent of ripened crops fills the mountain air, and in the sun the lowland trees at the peak of their fall turning seem on fire. Along the path that follows the melt-water stream from Hetharin, that always runs ice-cold from the glacier above, they climbed with me to the naked heights, to where the air carries so little life one must breathe hard to draw it in, and nothing grows but lichen and flowers smaller than a fingernail. It seems a place little worth the climb, until you turn around.

Assembly Palace and the Hearthstone Dependent lie as small as two lidless jewel-boxes, pale and shining in the sun, far below. Vae Arahi is a handful of square stones strewn in a circle, the School of the Sword a gold tinderbox across the way. Beyond the lip of the valley mouth Terera Lake shows plainly its shape, that of a wide scythe, with the city Terera piled about its tip. Only the mountain’s siblings remain large, Haranin across the valley of Vae Arahi, Saherahin to its north, Perin north of Hetharin. Beyond them stand the white-helmeted peaks no one sees who doesn’t make this climb, the shoulders of the nearer ones forest-green, the farther ones deep steel blue, and so on, fading into distance until they drop from the rim of this facet of the Earthsphere. Here one sees, clear as a stroke to the heart, the smallness of oneself alone, and indeed all things human, and the greatness of that which is greater than us, and all things as one.

There is no praying to Gods for athyel. We cannot receive comfort from a voice in the sky. It was for my parents then as it would be for me twenty years later, with my own child. If we yearn to ask the age-old Yeoli question, “Would Yeola have taken me in?” the answer will never come to us on the wind. Unless we feel our worth in our hearts, we are without it.

So it was for my parents, blood and shadow; they must stand aside helpless, the curse and duty of all parents who still do this. My strength unaided would decide it. I had had my fair preparation, a nine-moon stay without cares in my blood-mother’s womb, a birth without trouble and two days of having all four of them doting on me; now I must make good my claim to go on, alone. The Senaheral both placed their feet astride the stream, marking out a length of water, the one with the sand-timer readied to turn it, and they and my parents sang the song. My mother knelt beside it, unwrapped me from my wool blanket and my diaper, and laid me in, and the monk started the sand-timer running.

We are called barbarian for this, often by people who keep slaves and maintain tyrants, who practice human sacrifice or sport-killing, or whose custom is to cut off the tenderest part a girl-child has, thinking that for a woman to have sexual pleasure is evil. Perhaps my reader is of such a people and takes offense; then, like two youngsters caught rolling in the dirt, we must do chiravesa, each try taking the part of the other.

So, I am a Lakan: these Yeolis with their baby-killing, doomed—for what god would take into his hand a people who scorn paying the sacred blood-price, yet freeze to death infants without dedicating so much as a finger-bone to the Divine Ones? Such impiety is what brought down the Fire…

I am an Arkan: without Gods, giving their heirs to the whims of chance, as if chance has better judgment than a good sensible father…! All Yeolis are milksops to their hairy-chested wives, without the testicular fortitude to purify them properly so as to ensure the stability of society and the possibility at least of entry into Celestialis after death…

Having envisioned myself you, if you are Lakan or Arkan, I am in my rights to ask you to return the favour. Having so done we will both see truth: that barbarity is in the heart of the beholder as beauty is in the eye. Who am I to call you barbarian, or you to call me? If there is some race on the Earthsphere perfect by all standards, let them call the rest of us barbarian.

The custom of the stream-test is to be judged by its justice. It is true that many other Yeoli families have given it up, since we increased enough not to interbreed long ago, and life got easier. But I was born to serve my people; should we not take customary pains at least to give them good?

It was just to me too, to whom trials harder than most Yeolis’ likely awaited. If I were too weak, why let my failure or my death wait till I was old enough to understand what failure and death are? This way is quick; the child dies unknowing; the parents are freed to try again and so the demarch can be better assured of worthy heirs.

Most unjust are those who say my parents could not have loved me to have done such a thing. Their hearts lay in the ice-water with me, nameless though I was. I know from standing there myself. It was worst for my blood-mother, since she’d carried me; at one point, I’ve learned, she reached to snatch me out when I looked at her, and my two fathers had to seize her. How else can it be? But they must think of others besides themselves.

I’ve been told I’d think differently if I could remember the sight of them, standing still with calm faces while my flesh shrank and my breathing weakened, while the life in me, so new, first felt itself flagging, and the air shimmered with the steel wings of Shininao, waiting to draw out my soul once it came loose. Perhaps a child is one who has not yet learned to see beyond himself, and so the world was nothing but pain and terror to me then, and forgetting is merciful in leaving me unmarked. As a man, now, I don’t let the thought stain my belief. Besides, I had reason to trust my parents. They had loved me all my life.

These are only words. I would prove more taking my own child there in my arms. As we are grateful so may we be thanked.

In my own turn, as I would so many times later, I fought without speculating. Afterwards they lifted me out limp and blue, warmed me in their arms and their maryal and carried me back down to the Hearthstone. When my heart didn’t cease and I turned from blue back to pink, they voted on my name, sharing one crystal by their hearth, and making the chalk and charcoal hand-signs.

The decision was not unanimous, but three-to-one, and as such votes are secret, I don’t know who the dissenter was. It was a war-like time, with Tor Ench and Laka both threatening us, and they were all four warriors, as my mother had not yet laid down her sword. I guess also they sensed something about me. Only three demarchs have had the name previously, and none since the War of the Travesty, two hundred years ago; it was considered too rife with the sound of war and grandeur, invoking the animal believed, even before the Fire, to be the monarch of animals, and her fighting spirit. It has a tinge of human domination too, being descended in meaning from the name of the king who so expanded Iyesi a millennium ago and whom the Enchians still worship, First Curlion, who was himself named after warrior kings from earlier still. In a more archaic Yeoli, “che” means heart and “i-veng,” lion. Thus I became Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e.

Thus they cast their dice, and, for good or ill, I grew into the cast. I have been everything and nothing, torn down to the blood-drop, raised to the heavens. I am athye but to some have been God, have been guided by Gods and have yearned a thousand times, the Gods know, to have my prayers answered. I have been both the living hand and the dead steel itself, in the hands of my people. I have felt the call both of Curlion and of Saint Mother, and patterned my life accordingly. We seize life and life seizes us, at once, like dancers.

Like all athyel, I had nothing to judge myself by, ultimately, but the heart’s own measure, “Is it kind or cruel?” If you intend to judge me, I beg nothing more than the usual observance of chiravesa. Dead as I am now, I cannot be with you, but I need not; you have my whole life-story in your hands, sworn on the Oath of the Scrivener to be true and complete. You will know me, and so can imagine being me, better by reading this than anyone did, probably, in life, even those closest.

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