006 - The start of life, and the end

Sukala’s was a refuge. It was so good to free of parents and rituals and obligations in her cave, and just be able to look at what I wanted among all her amazing things. She was so much like one of us, but bigger.

At six, I started war-training, in Esora-e’s class, and stood out right away. In the anteroom of the School of the Sword hangs the Sword of Saint Mother, which she gave to us from her own hand so we would have the choice to fight or not, and the tradition is for all new students to wrap their sword-hands around the grip. When I’d done it, I’d lifted the Sword slightly, which had created a big stir. My talent put a much greater weight on my shoulders, in his mind.

“Capirya is kidding,” Sukala said once when we went up in spring. “Get us tea and come be witness. It looks like she’s having triplets this year.”

The goat-shed was a lean-to against a cliff going up, made of big sticks lashed together. The mama-goat, who was black and white, looked like she’d burst out the sides, she was so big. “Don’t crowd her,” Sukala said. “Birthing mothers need space.”

“Why?” said Nyera.

“They have to think about opening up. In their minds and in their bodies. If they’re crowded, they tighten and won’t let the babies out.”

“What happens if they won’t let the babies out?” said Krero.

“I bet they die, same as people,” I said. “Like Sach’s aunt.” That had been about three moons ago, and she and the child had both died. Everyone took a few steps back, wordlessly. The goat came over and shoved her head onto Sukala’s lap.

“She looks happier than either of my mamas when they’re having a little sibling,” I said. I’d been too young to remember Ardi’s, Sena’s or Naiga’s birth, other than having a general sense of much birth around one time, but had seen both my mothers pace and sweat and moan before they’d gone into the change-room—the place in the Hearthstone Dependent where people went both to be born, and, if it was expected, to die—to have Lanai and Handaotha.

“Goats don’t have so much brain to squeeze out such a small hole,” said Sukala.

“It’s a big brain that makes it hard?” said Mana. “Krero’s mama had it really easy then.”

“Mana just fell out on the floor, like ffffllub,” said Krero.

“Krero went shooting out like an arrow with his mama not even trying.”

“Mana went pwiinnng across the room...” We were all giggling too hard for them to go on, then, except for Sachara, who’d wandered back into the cave, since nothing was happening with the goat. I followed him and Krero and Mana followed me and we poked around Sukala’s things. She always had a pot of soup simmering on the stone-stove, that she’d flavour different ways. We peeked in, and I slammed the lid shut again when we saw the eyeball floating in with the garlic cloves and tubers. We ran back out to the goat-shed.

When we came back to her, Capirya was lying down, her belly so huge she was as wide as she was long, like a giant, fuzzy toadstool with four legs and a head, and breathing fast. “It’s because there’s so much baby in her there isn’t so much room for her lungs,” Nyera said. “My mama told me what that feels like. I saw when she had my little brother.”

“They let you in?” I said. “My parents never let me in. That’s not fair.” I was keen to see Capirya do it, since this was as close as I was going to get to birth until I was a daddy myself. She did a strange, closed-mouthed bleat, and strained. Just like a goat, she never stopped eating as she laboured.

I went to her back end and watched it all, the first shining string of birth-phlegm, the bulging outward under her tail with the red slit growing round, the translucent bag of water with first one, and then another, tiny white hoof in it. The baby goat was ready inside her, like magic, to dive into the world. She strained a few times, then it fell with a plop onto the straw, the bag bursting open with a splash of water.

“Don’t crowd her!” said Sukala. “She still has two to go.” We’d closed in, wanting to see the kid wriggle out of the bag and lift its head, to see if it could get to its feet. We backed off, until we closed in again, and she reminded us, and we did the same again, and she reminded us again, with infinite patience. The kid’s eyes were open. It sneezed, and opened its mouth, and let out a tiny mewling bleat, as if to say, “I’m in the world now! And I’m hungry!” It tried to find a nipple in its mama’s neck as she diligently licked it clean. We watched, rapt, as the second kid came out, so much faster and more easily, and the third almost with no effort at all, falling out as Krero had said Mana must have fallen out on the floor, ffflub. She kept counting them with her nose, as if to sniff, “One, two, three, all accounted for… one, two, three, all accounted for…”

“Why did it get so much easier each time?” I asked Sukala.

“Each kid not only made the path for itself, but for the one after,” she said, ruffling the hair on the back of my head. “It is always hardest for the one who leads.”

It was so beautiful, to see the start of life. Capirya was such a good mama, licking and nosing and talking to her babies in bleating goat-talk. They had a harder time lying back down than they’d had standing up in the first place, too clumsy to do it any way but falling. They found her nipples in the fur. Just on the edge of my memory, I remembered taking my mother’s breast myself, the warm firmness in my mouth that was refuge from everything, how it made everything right in the world, however cold and deadly things seemed. I have forgotten since. I only remember that I remembered.

“You’ve all stayed so long, you must be hungry,” said Sukala. “Would you like soup?”

“Mmm!” said Nyera, “I’d love—”

“No no, no thanks, Sukala… our parents are expecting us for dinner at the Hearthstone!” I said fast, and looked at Nyera, trying to say Trust me! Trust me! with my eyes. “All of us!”

“I hear my Dad calling right now!” said Mana. “Me too!” said Krero and Sachara, both at once. “Bye, Sukala! Bye, Capirya! Bye, kids!” Nyera hardly had a choice but to follow us, though all four of us had to swear on our crystals, second Fire come, before she’d believe Sukala would try to feed us eyeball soup.

It was the spring after that that my father was killed. The five of us and Artira, the one sib of mine big enough to join us, ran up to our secret fortress on the mountain. For me it was as much to get away from the pall that hung over us, from the terrible sense of foreboding my mother had, as anything else. Her only relief was to forbid us to do anything risky, and carry a knife, which I felt like a little sliver of terror in the midst of her love.

Such a beautiful day to die on. The scent in the air signaled summer, calling us outside as strongly as a hunger, the streams ran wild and muddy, the air carried sound again, and on every hillock and bank and slope, life unfurls in a thousand forms and colours. It was my shadow-mother, full-geared and on horseback, galloping up the path, who got me and Ardi. What my mother had feared, I knew, had happened.

There were full-geared warriors riding or running all around the Hearthstone and Assembly Palace. Shadow-mama put us down in the courtyard and galloped back out. People stood stunned to utter silence: servants of Assembly just out of session, staff who had been working late in their white-bordered kerchiefs, the masons who had been repairing the portico rail, the cooks, some of their hands spotted with bits of vegetable. Seeing none of our parents around, Ardi and I clung together, and when she started crying, I kissed her hair, which was my father’s gold spun finer, and said “It’s all right, Ardi,” though I knew I was lying.

My shadow-father Esora-e came staggering through the gate, 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, his sword in his hand. It had been in his family for three centuries, but he flung it down on the flagstones with a clash, and himself next, flat on his face, screaming.

I went to him, and put my arm around as much of his back as it was long enough to touch. I kissed his hair, too, dirt-soiled as it was; I got grit in my teeth. He looked up at me, and cried, “He’s dead! Your father, he’s dead, he’s dead he’s dead he’s dead aaaaiiiiiigh!!” I’d picked a fistful of yellow lupines while we’d been out, and was still holding them, and smelling their scent, right then. To this day, I can never have lupines near me.

There is a moment of numbness that comes right after the worst news, I have learned. You think ‘Oh,’ and nothing else, or see the implications without emotion; it occurred to me, for instance, that now I would become semanakraseye when I was twenty. I felt suddenly 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.

“Heart-stab from behind,” Esora-e mastered himself enough to say, through sobs. “He must hardly have felt anything… he wouldn’t have had time… one of those little Enchian blades, made just for that… they couldn’t kill him any other way.”

At the same time, I wondered such things as why Daddy himself wasn’t telling me what happened, 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, 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. I would not understand at heart he was gone until I had his blood on my hand, and I saw my own time of being gone, too.

Once the warriors had made certain there was but one assassin, they stood down. He’d tried for my mother next, but she’d been facing him. She killed him with the knife.

The runners of the Workfasts Proclamatory and Disseminatory, who'd take the news to the rest of Yeola-e, were gone even before his corpse was brought in. Assembly went right back into session, with my aunt Tyeraha taking up the crystal as regent semanakraseye, to pass the necessary measures.

The people of Yeola-e feel their semanakraseye as a reflection of themselves living, so if he dies in office, they feel as if part of themselves has died. He’d been loved more than most, too. All across the nation, people closed the markets and workfasts, wept in the streets, did the feeling-dances of anger and grief. And everyone, at first, clamored for war against Tor Ench, saying that this, if anything, was an attack. We are not used to assassinations, unlike Lakans or Arkans, who barely look up from their fields when a politician gets knifed.

He lay in state for the next day, and his funeral was the next evening. It was my grandmother who touched the torch to his pyre, seeing him out of this world as she had seen him into it. His ashes were given to farmers, a pinch apiece to scatter on their land, a custom by which a semanakraseye serves many in death as he served many in life.

His immediate family went the next three days doing no work and being entirely cared for, as per custom. Then came my aunt’s Kiss of the Lake, so I got to see it again.

Enjaliansi, who was then king of Tor Ench, swore the highest oaths that the assassin had acted alone and unknown to him, and investigated for us. The conclusion: the man had done it to avenge an elder brother my father had killed personally in the war.

But I suspect he also wanted to make a name for himself in history. If it was to burn himself a fiery place in our memory forever, he succeeded well. He twists his knife in my own heart whenever there is something I would have done for, or shown, or talked about to, my father. This is why I don’t mention his name. I won’t help preserve it.

To show goodwill, King Enjaliansi had the man’s wife, children and remaining brothers all beheaded. Goodwill, he said in answer to my aunt’s remonstrations, cannot be conveyed in half measures. At least it meant he wished peace. After a bitter and emotional debate, the war vote went charcoal.

Three of my father’s wisdom teeth went to my remaining parents, and the fourth to me, as that was his known wish. As semanakraseye, he’d had nothing else to bequeath. His ivory comb had been, in name, my mother’s. She gave it to me.

It sunk in that life would never be the same. Grief aged, darkening like meat; I wished back the day he had died, when it had still been possible to pretend he hadn’t, when life had been recently-enough disturbed to resemble the innocent time before.

In the morning when I should have seen him kiss my other parents goodbye for the day, in Assembly where he should be holding the crystal and saying, “Order, sib Servants!”, at night when I should feel his arms around me and his kiss goodnight, I felt him killed again, killed and killed, over and over, the truth of it ground into me like the sword-stroke practiced a thousand times.

It seemed for a while, as I wore the black head-ribbon (which was hardly visible on my head), that I should not go to Sukala’s. Her place was too much a place of life and birth and joy for one so entwined with death as me. But one day, just as winter was about to make the climb hard, Krero came to me and said imperiously, “Fourth Chevenga Shae-Arano-e, Sukala summons you.” I was so taken aback—Sukala never summoned people—that I went up out of sheer shock.

“You seek no comfort in your grief from your old sage, love?” she said, serving me tea, as if she were one of the people who’d care for the family. I didn’t have the words to explain, at that age, but just said, “Sorry.”

“No, no, no. You didn’t hurt me. You hurt only yourself. Now come here.” I flung myself into her arms, and bawled until I was limp.

But there was the one pain I could not wash out with tears on her shoulder, as I had not told her, the first thing that ever came between her and me. Best I stay alone with that, I felt then, even if that meant a new wall between me and all the world.