013 - This icy pin-knife of pain and fear

It was a little after my third visit to Surya that everyone on the training-ground found themselves noticing Niku. “Your wife,” Kyirya Sencheli said to me, brushing dust off the back of his kilt, “is fast today.”

The Niah unarmed fighting style, no surprise, has drawn all manner of wisdom from the motions of flying, especially to do with balance and leverage and strikes from high one-foot stances; there is a tricky move to down an opponent called ‘pulling over the cliff’ which relies on speed. Niku could rarely do it to Kyirya and almost never to me, but today she’d done it handily to him every time she’d tried.

She had a certain glow on her, too; between that and the greater speed I should have known, except that my heart was at least half shielding itself from knowing. “What do you mean, what’s up?” she said on the next change of partners, when I asked her. “Aba.”

I took a deep breath. Everyone else took how close we were standing to each other as meaning we were partnered, so we were. Her hands were like lightning; just as I was goading myself faster to match, she pulled me over the cliff, all but effortlessly, with a big cheery grin. “You’re definitely with child,” I said, from the dust.

If only there were only joy in it, I thought. Not this icy pin-knife of pain and fear at its core. My mind was right back in that mountain glade near Arko, with the cypresses like giant spearheads all around, a tiny cooling body in my arms, and the rushing of the stream-water continuing ceaseless, oblivious to our devastation.

I couldn’t imagine she wasn’t feeling it worse than I, but she was not showing it. Once I was back on my feet she kissed me, and Tyirian, who was calling, barked “Chevenga and Niku, you can do that in bed!” much to everyone else’s mirth. But afterwards when they didn’t have their minds full of move and countermove, and so put two and two together, they came with hugs and words of blessing, mostly “Strength.” They remembered what it had been for us last time.

It could not be pure joy for us, and there was little to say except to make the calculation. The child would be born next winter, a half-month or so past the solstice, when I was twenty-nine.