Lion's Heart, page 7
part #1 of Chevenga Series
I found out later to whom he spoke and what was said. My mother was out on some business then; he would have been too ashamed to go to her anyway, admitting a child of nine had faced him down. But Esora-e, coming in sweaty from training, noticed his look, and badgered the story out of him. "Later we will laugh," he said, astonished but not surprised, "now, we must be angry. If he runs roughshod over us now he'll grow up to do the same to the people; he's got a strong sense of justice, but none of power—other people's, that is. Here's what to do, Veraha. Go back to his room. Don't talk or listen to him. Just pick him up, tuck him under your arm and carry him outside. If he hits you, hit him back, a little harder; make him feel who's stronger. Behind the Hearthstone there's a flat place where the stream pools deep. Take him there, and toss him in. Then walk away without a word."
Veraha took the suggestion to the letter. Though I didn't hit him, credit me for that, I squirmed with all my strength, yelling all manner of things. But stone-cutting is good for the arms. The water was scalding crisp on my skin.
Now it was my turn to be too ashamed to admit something to my mother. I slunk into my room by the window like a half-drowned rat. At dinner I combed my hair with great deliberation right in front of him; but not knowing who had given me my comb, he missed the full significance, and merely gave me a satisfied nod, thinking he had corrected me. That night I lay awake conceiving evil plots. All futile; we had sworn.
My mother found out when my shadow-father mentioned my drenching to her in passing. I don't know what she said to Veraha, but he never upbraided me without good reason again. That night just before my bedtime he and I made peace. He had a bear's embrace, that a child could lose himself in, though I was not quite ready to enjoy it. When we let go he looked about to do something, but not sure; then just bid me good night, choosing not to. I forgot about it.
It was almost fall, my tenth birthday coming round. Late at night at the new moon, a faint sound on my dresser half woke me, but I fell asleep again. In the morning I remembered, and began to look there excited, in the hope of finding some magical gift that the sprites of sleep had brought. Then as I woke more fully, sober knowledge checked me; I was old enough now to have learned, albeit recently, how slim the chances of this were. Being grown-up, I thought, means no longer looking for that sort of thing, in fact not needing to any more. Putting aside my sadness, I rose, and opened the top drawer to take out a kilt. Green caught my eye: the magical thing was there. It was the malachite piece I'd picked out in the market in spring, carven into a hexagon smooth as mirror-glass, with the profile in low relief of my father.
I felt many things, as I gazed at it, and weighed it in my hand. But they were muted now, and mostly I felt its beauty. Now nearly everyone in the family has at least one such portrait, of someone they love; it's lucky he makes them small, so that when the war came they could be taken to safety. My mother has the best, of course. But I got one of the first. I went to him and kissed his hand, though he pulled it away.
Years later, when I was a man and we knew each other entirely except for my foreknowledge, we spoke of it. "I finished carving your Tennunga a few days after we bought the stone. But I couldn't give it to you then. I suspected you would have felt I was trying to buy into the household, like a worker buying a share. In the crassest of ways, too: with the image of your father, whose place I was taking, as if I could worm my way in by pretending to give him back to you."
"And now," I said smiling, "it comes clear you were entirely right." No one understands the power of art more, I suppose, than an artist. We laughed together, and he went on. "When we made peace after I threw you in the stream, I almost gave it to you. I wanted to badly, then, to win your forgiveness. But I saw that would be as much as saying your forgiveness could be bought, and you would have been offended, the stone cheapened in your eyes. Was I right then too?"
"Of course," I said, and we laughed again. Then he went serious once more, his red-gold brows knitting. "I… I did not carve it for such a small thing as to gain your love for myself. Though I should say, that is not a small thing—but it would have been for myself. I carved it for you, not to remember my currying favor, but to remember him. Only when I had made peace with all of you, could it mean all to you that I carved. Before that, we both would have lost out, wouldn't we?"
I signed chalk, and kissed his hand again. He tried to pull it away, but I was stronger now, and yanked him into a hug. The cold knowledge is always there: that, had he not insinuated his way into our household, he never would have had the chance to do all that made me love him, so I never would have. I remind myself that I chose my shadow-parents no more than I chose him, only the time of my birth making it different. In the winds of chance blow the seeds of families, and the cast of the die of proximity is everything. Veraha was here, so we got him. My mother eventually had three children by him: Makaina in 1537, Ilachesa in '39 and Masarao in '41.
When my grandmother found out the full story, she took me aside and asked what the greatest lesson for me in this was. Flushed with the joy of having made peace, I floundered. "That you can't bring back people who've died? That you shouldn't be mean no matter what? That children are just children?"
She kept signing charcoal and pursing her lips and saying, "Obvious, obvious, if you haven't learned that already you're an idiot, you've got good eyes, boy, open them," and so forth. "One would think you'd forgotten what you are," she said finally, making me begin to see.
My father had spoken of it, once when he'd taken me up on the mountain. "Know the written law, and the law unwritten. One can find oneself holding power that comes not of position, but of others' love, or fear, or ignorance. You will come into a lot of this, Chevenga. Its lure is very strong in your soul."
As always he was right; I had come into it already. It had brought me to grief, I saw, because in my anger I had abused it. No more important lesson can there be, for an Ascendant.
VI
I laid into growing up like a starving child into a meal.
Children play at it first: House, Workfast, War, and the best, Healer. We played Trust Me Trust You, the game where one dangles over the edge of a cliff from the hands of another, each one letting go in turn, even when our Teachers hadn't ordered it. Once when I was eight or nine we got hold of a skin of nakiti, the strong Enchian stuff. The honor and peril of the first draught fell to me, and I made sure to keep my face entirely impassive as it scorched a trail down my throat. Not a sip, either: wanting not to be outdone I gulped a mouthful like water. Commending its quality sagely I passed it on to Nyera, and next thing I knew the rocky ground leapt up and struck me in the face. I was sick for two days.
Nakiti enslaves, as they say, but no substances so enthrall the mind as chalk and charcoal. Our second favorite game was Assembly. No one over twelve could vote, in our perfect Yeola-e; wine was never watered down for children and combing was illegal.
I remember the day they impeached me. "Chevenga's always demarch," Krero said. "We should let someone else be for once. Like me." I agreed, intrigued as we are intrigued to see an old part played by a new actor, and play a new one ourselves; I had always wanted to try my hand at farming. The next in the succession, Artira, who had begun to avoid me by this age, had gone off with Naiga, who was a little young for statecraft, to torment crawdads in the stream with a stick; so I named Krero my little brother.
I argued my way out of accusations of throwing dirt at servants, picking my nose and peeing myself, which led to something of a scuffle; finally Sachara said, "We're the people, we don't need a crime, we can toss him anytime we feel like it. Everyone who wants to get rid of Chevenga, sign here." Seeing them all do this with relish, giving me the most severe looks of judgment and condemnation, I knew I was doomed. The vote was unanimous. With all the gravity it requires I said, "The people wills," and gave the rock we used as the Crystal of the Speaker to Krero.
"Now you have to kill yourself," said Nyera, at which everyone pricked their ears and gazed at me. "What?" I gasped; I had never heard of such a thing. She said, "My mother told me that demarchs who get impeached kill themselves."
I was sure this wasn't law, else I would have known; this I told her. "I know it's not law," she said. "It's because it's so sad. Aren't you sad, Cheng?"
In truth, I was already eagerly drawing straight furrows in the green meadow in my mind; it came to me that perhaps I was not playing this properly. Trying again, I found I would be sad, but not enough to kill myself; I remembered the cliff of Haranin, and doubted I had sadness that great in me for anything. But Krero said, "I hereby forbid Chevenga to kill himself, and anyone else to suggest it." This should have been a sign. He turned into a small Notyere; after a number of fights, though there was no precedent for bringing a demarch back then, they reinstated me. When I asked Krero in his trial to explain himself, he laughed and said, "I had to find out how far I could lead you all."
Me he led further. One day in the summer of my eleventh year he said, "You're always demarch. But you've never done the Kiss of the Lake."
Blood roared in my temples. At heart I had known, ever since I had seen my father do it: I would be challenged, or challenge myself. In the daytime I could tell myself that all my forebears had succeeded; but before dawn, when one lies alone, and one's secrets all rise and open their dark petals in one's mind, I knew I had no proof I could do it.
I had been forbidden to try by every adult to whom I had ever said a word about it. I could have told my friends that, and been right. But even to my own inward ears, this rang of excuse; at that age we had little respect for rules made for our own safety. The children were all nudging each other and trading glances that said, "Will he?"
I said nothing, only turned and strode toward the swimming-hole. Bursting into thrilled babbling they followed. There had been seven or eight; by the time we were at the water's edge, there were at least twenty, giggling and jumping with excitement. Everyone swore silence, of course. I felt as my father had looked, the blood-song turned to stillness all through me; it came more easily than I had thought. As the adults had stood back from him, the children stood back from me.
We had to make do with a pretend fire-dish and torch, and a stick for the spear. Mana and Krero both wanted to be the Ritual Monk, which they settled by sharing her duty. We skipped the oration but they called me out, putting the thunder of command into their small voices. Remembering my fathers grace, and trying to put it into every cell of my body, I made the sign, kneeling, stripped and stepped into the water. Just as he had, I lowered my head.
The water's cold burned my eyes; the pebbled bottom shimmered with ripples of sun and minnows darted, long brown specks among the stones. It was like diving; I had without thinking taken a deep breath in before I went down. My lungs began to strain, but no matter; I had felt that before in breath-holding contests. Mana forgot he was not supposed to touch me; I had to shake his hand off my shoulder.
Then came the moment in which one must rise out and take a breath; it almost caught me unprepared. I pulled myself lower by the stick as my father had. My chest suddenly felt as if it were being torn apart and crushed at once, and my legs screamed to leap up; just above my head was air and life, and all I needed to give up for it was my honor, and what was that? I thought of the children, how they would forgive me; I was only a child, after all, making a game of an adult's act. But then I thought, What am I worrying about? It's only death, which is going to come anyway. My ears roared as they had on the cliff, and I heard the voice of the harmonic singer enwrapping me, making my body's death-struggle fall away from me. A hand lay flat between my shoulder blades, not pressing me, but holding me; that was the gentleness I would show to myself, even taking blood-red lava down into my lungs which like a sun spreading out its spikes splits one into shreds. The pain ceased, and like a king on his divan I lay back to watch the colors flow like oil on water and hear the music of my death.
A kerchief lying across the hand of an adult: how must it feel, lying limp with its silken corners trailing from her fingers, treasured but forever carried and used? I felt so. Or like a bellows, with air being blown into me by some stronger force, some elder strength that held me utterly in its grasp. I tore my face away when I could, and light and din came shrieking back into my head. Arms tightened around me; only by that did I know I was thrashing. I vomited for a long time. Looking I saw it was water, flowing away into the ground; I remember wondering why it felt like fire. There were adults all around with piercing faces, gripping hands; it was my mother's arms I had felt. All-spirit, I thought—we've been caught.
Just as the demarch is in the struggling stage, well before he loses consciousness, the Ritual Monk places her hand across his mouth and nose, so that when he ceases to control his body he will draw no water into his lungs. Of this subtlety my friends and I had been ignorant. They had pulled me out, then run for help when I did not wake, pulling all my parents out of work; my lungs had taken in water and I'd come within a hair's width of dying.
My parents carried me back to the Hearthstone in a blanket. I remember the sickening swing of their stride, being passed from one to another, and trying to bury my face in the corner of the rough wool while the sun beat on my throbbing head. They let me yank at my forelock with my fist, but when I began rasping, "It was all my doing, no one's but mine, punish me and no one else," Esora-e said, "Shut up. You'll be punished well enough."
Bethera the healer came, wrapped me in sheepskins and fed me a draught of warm milk; she was going to give me more, but my mother said, "No medicines, yet." That and the looks on their faces made me afraid. I called for one of them to come hold me but none would; only Larala the mongrel, who had adopted me, came and pushed his wet nose into my hand. They were taking a vote, wordlessly; I saw my mother turn up her hand for chalk.
It was she who spoke to me, putting one hand on my shoulder while inwardly I begged for both her arms, for the praise of a past day to drive away this shame. "There was a reason we forbade you," she said. "We did not tell you what it was because we did not think you would understand. Now you will have to."
"You may lose the demarchy. Not in punishment for disobedience, but by teaching yourself fear. Do you see, my child? Because it was done wrongly you hurt yourself, and when your proper time comes it is this you will remember. That will make it much harder. Perhaps impossible."
"Better not to let the years pass, and grave in the fear. What do you do, when a horse throws you?"
There is a state one arrives at in training when fatigue stops thought but the limbs keep moving, driven only by the voice of the Teacher; then all seems unreal, the lock-step-lock the turning of an endless wheel, and one knows only movement, one is nothing but movement, the mind dead of all thought.
Thus I felt now, as they led me back to the swimming-hole by my hands; my eyes saw the mountains above me and the grass at my feet, but the sights held no meaning for my mind; my legs planted and pushed my weight forward of a will not mine. My shadow-mother told the First Story, to inspire me, I think, but I heard only snatches of it.
When I stepped into the water, with Esora-e behind me this time, I threw up again, polluting its clarity. The woman I had overheard at my father's Renewal had spoken true: the second time is the worst. I was not afraid of death in itself, for I'd lived; it was feeling myself dying, a feeling I now knew. Looking down I saw only that terrible helplessness in the shining water, as a fighting-novice learns to see pain written upon the landscape on which he drills before he learns to see pride. Forgetting that I was anything but a frightened child, I ceased to be, and the rippling surface congealed into a mountain-wall I could not pass. I stood clutching myself with tears streaming down my face, inwardly pleading to my parents to have mercy on me. Veraha was looking at me with the most pity, being unused to such things, and I almost reached out my arms to him. But the three faces that my own more truly reflected were marble-cool, waiting, and the one I reflected truest, now dead, I knew would be the same. I was a child, but had done an adult thing. Esora-e lifted his hands from my shoulders.
I cannot recall whether I took in a deep breath or not, though I would guess I did. I remember the water's cold burning my face again, and that I did not open my eyes this time. In the peace beneath the surface I suddenly found the panic cleared enough to let me think; one will often find that the doing is less terrible than the dreading, for one witnesses oneself continuing to live during it. Besides, it was familiar; I had been here before, and lived to come again. I put all my soul into my shield-hand, locked around the bottom of the stick, making of my fingers the steel rings that fasten a banner to the pole, and remembered the thought that had held me last time. This time it came in the form of a memory: It's only dying sooner. As I felt pain and desperation work deep into me, Esora-e's hand clamped around my mouth and pinched my nose. Had I struggled Upwards he could not have held me by that grip; now I understood the act of the Ritual Monk, in my body and my soul. The greater hand of the God-In-Myself lay upon my back again, with the sound of the singing wind. I gave myself, and ceased to know. When I awoke they were all grinning. Esora-e carried me down the mountain on his shoulders.
Many years later, when my eyes were level with his, I would ask him, "Where did you learn to be the Ritual Monk?"
"I've been wondering when you'd ask me that," he would say, and smile, scratching his moustache. "Do you really think you were the first demarch to try it before his time?" I would come away laughing, with a glow in my heart. I should have known.
I turned twelve, and outsparred fifteen-year-olds tall as grown-ups, with hair under their arms. My friend Kamina Shae-Buraina, who'd always had trouble with fear, was required to jump off the cliff of Akaturin. It is forbidden, when it is not required, because it is truly dangerous, claiming a life every now and then; in spite of that, when his nerve failed him at the top, I leapt myself, commanding him to follow. He managed it. For that, I got from him his best shirt, from my parents a combing to peel my hand, and from Azaila three moons cleaning the School latrines: justice entire.
