604 - A plume of flame from Her lungs

“What do you mean make sure he hasn’t killed me? It’s not that bad! ....is it?”

I wasn’t where I’d thought I was, and nor was Kaninjer, and I realized possibly I had not said this as clearly as I’d meant to... if I had said it at all... and what had I said it for? He can’t really have said that, I thought. It had to be a vague-air dream. What was under me was too soft, and there was no huge crowd around... Iska’s infirmary? But then what’s Kaninjer doing here? He came after that. “No,” he said. I felt his hand on my brow. “You’ll be all right, Chivinga. It went well, you are all in one piece again, inside.”

My mind came together enough to remember what had happened, somewhat to my regret. When one wakes in pain and weakness after taking a bad wound in a good cause, one can wear the pain as a badge of courage and worthy sacrifice, feel the weakness with a measure of pride in one’s actions, expect the sympathy of awe and admiration. This wasn’t one of those times. Once I was healed enough for Kaninjer to clear me for admonishment, I’d be pilloried by any number of people, first for this whole duelling idea, second for leaning down to help an enemy up while he still had his sword in his hand. My seven-year-old son said it well: “Daddy, I thought you were supposed to stop getting wounded in the war.” There was no honourable satisfaction in the pain and weakness that I lay in. Just pain, and weakness.

Nor was there anything to do but follow the lines of the obscenely-ornate ceiling with my eyes, be cheerful and brave whenever someone was near, wish the pain would go away and think about wounding and being wounded. Not even in war, and it’s happened to me... it happened so many times in the Mezem and in war... am I wound-prone? I’d met and fought alongside and commanded warriors like that, who seem to have the worst luck, suffering one gash after another; and yet their luck is good enough that none of the wounds kill them or even end their time as warriors. I’d wondered before, whether it was just too consistent to be attributed to luck, whether there was some deficiency in their fighting. Yet if that is true of me, surely I’d be dead? My mistake here had been, because it was a duel of honour, trusting the fikker too much. Of course he’d seized his chance to kill the Yeoli Imperator-by-conquest; how many solas wouldn’t?

There was nothing to do but think about how a warrior’s life is a game of bare moments and the width of a hair separating triumph from disaster. I’d had my bowel and liver painstakingly patched up by Kaninjer, bringing to bear all his brilliant skill over however many aer it had taken, and now lay pierced and tubed and bandaged in his delicate care, rather than my corpse being dressed for the pyre and however much of the world loved me going into mourning, by a move that was barely more than a twitch of my hand. How many times had I looked into the eyes of one who’d failed in his attempt at such a twitch, and saw them flood full of ultimate shock, then the searching desperation to cling to all he was losing, and the heartbreaking last burst of love he sent to all those he wished to, as he felt the fatal severing within, from the steel in my hand?

Nothing to do but think of the man, holding firm in the face of all I made him suffer with soul-inspiring courage, breaking out in the end with vile treachery. A wounded fool’s reflex had made me kill him. He’d been maddened by pain and shock and half-stunned, not in a condition to reason, reduced through no fault of his own to primal rage, when he’d struck. I ached with remorse for his death, and savoured the joy of the pain I now had by his will as the counterpoint.

Nothing to do but think things like this that a warrior shouldn’t think, being out of practice being a warrior, perhaps, or from wound-weakness. It was as if the steel that had been in me was still echoing all along the path of the blade-shaped parting it had made, wherever its surface or edge had touched me inside, like a whispered chorus in an Arkan temple. This is telling me something, I thought. It’s a song being sung in a tongue I cannot understand. I felt I was on the edge of it. Should I talk to Azaila? I thought so, but the idea went out of my mind before I did it.

Nothing to do but doze fitfully, pain-wreathed, wondering if I would ever dream again of the Gods, or They’d finally spat out the last of me in disgust. Was I splattered on a rectangle of glass in Risae’s hand, about to be blown out by a plume of flame from Her lungs?

I’d know when I was cleared for recrimination by who Kaninjer let in. He was keeping me in his clinic for two nights at least. Niku, Skorsas and Kall he couldn’t keep out, and I learned what it was to be cossetted in recuperation by three lovers: three times as sweet as one, infinitely sweeter than none. Always there was a shoulder to lay my head on, a neck to bury my face in. My mother, Shaina, Etana and all my children were let in, too. Krero and Esora-e were not. All Assembly would not have fit, except once I was back in the Imperial bedchamber, but Kan would keep them out for certain if he had the slightest notion of how they’d take this. I couldn’t wait for the letter. Maybe the short-chainers would get their prove-Chevenga-is-crazy Committee. Maybe I was crazy. I had a feeling all my thoughts were not making sense. Or was it the drugs? If so, at least they were making madness relatively pleasant.