216 - Earning my money

25 Jil 4974 : Chegra, Yeola-e

Dear Mamin:

I have to admit something. I didn’t tell you how much Chevenga is paying me. I am too embarrassed. I figured I’d just start sending to you. You probably think the first amount I sent, from Brahvniki, was a bonus for signing on. It was just my regular pay.

I know you’re supposed to go in to a potential employer with an idea of what your work is worth, and I know the amount you said I should, even though it made me squirm. And you’re supposed to not agree to the position without telling the potential employer what that amount is—or should I say, higher than that, and let him haggle you down to that, but go no lower.

I was squirming so much, I was thinking, I will go no lower than half what Mamin says. Sorry, Mamin. But I knew I wouldn’t have the nerve, not with him. Or with anyone.

But Chevenga didn’t ask me how much I wanted, or give me a chance to tell him. He just said he wanted to pay me twice what you said, and asked me, “Is that enough?”

I said, “No! I mean… it’s too much! I don’t have that much experience, Chevenga. And I know the treasury of Yeola-e must… not be full, now… but more to the point, I’m just not worth that much.”

“Look,” he said. “If I get a wound that’s going to kill me if I don’t get good surgery, fast, or catch some nasty disease that’s going to do the same, or the Arkans somehow get poison into me, you can save my life, right?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m a healer. These things are my work, my calling. I am a healer because it is what I have always wanted to be.”

“My life,” he said, “is worth that much to the people of Yeola-e. Besides, you have to make a living, and I know how it works with Haians; you support family at home on money that you earn for healing abroad.”

“But, Chevenga, really, I am a beginner…” And so it went, we argued back and forth, and you must think I’m a fool, Mamin, because we were arguing the wrong way, him saying more, me saying less.

In the end he put his foot down. He is very stubborn, at least about certain things. “I am paying you that much, Kanincha, and you’re going to sign to it, or you’re not going to sign at all and I’ll hire another healer who’s happy to take it, and that’s all there is to it,” he said. They say you shouldn’t do a negotiation unless you are willing to walk away, and whoever is more willing to walk away will win, and that was the case here; he was, so he won.

I signed. That’s why I’m sending you all this. I am even more ashamed to admit this to you, but I don’t even have to pay for room or board. Now we’re in the war camp, he has a big tent with a separate little room for me, and he has the army cooks make vegetarian things for me. This is in a place where no one even wears metal jewelry, not even him.

But if there’s any time I’m actually earning that money, it’s now. I… well… after the first battle I was here for, I was going to write you a long letter about what it was like, putting one severed or stabbed arm or leg or abdomen or chest back together after another and not even looking at their faces. I couldn’t sleep that night, for shaking and crying—which I had to do silently because he was going to come in sometime from celebrating, and I didn’t want him to notice and think I wasn’t happy healing his warriors—until I gave in and took some sedative.

At least I didn’t have to do the worst thing, triage. There are about twenty other Haians here, and that keeps going up, and they say I should get more used to it all first. They promise I will. But I’m not going to write about it at length after all, because you know it all already.

But now I am earning my money. They attacked the Arkans at dawn and they’d been fighting for perhaps a third of an aer when a warrior came running to the infirmary screaming “Kanincha! Kanincha! It’s Chevenga, he needs you, come right now!” I grabbed my bag and went running, and met some other warriors carrying him on a litter part way.

He was unconscious and convulsing weakly, his pulse very fast and weak, his breathing weak, his life-energy ebbing. “He’s been wounded with a blade with poison on it,” they said. “He told us to tell you it was dark on the blade, and it hurt right away and was cold and spread up and down… and then he said he was dizzy and couldn’t see straight, and we saw he was staggering, and his shield-side went weakest first, he kept leaning too far that way and dropped his shield before we could get him to let us get a litter under him.” The wound was purpling at the edges and bleeding too much for its depth.

Of course I knew what it was. I got a final mark of 98 per cent in poisons, made only the one mistake on the final examination, one cursed main symptom of that obscure Randish poison that I forgot, stupid me. But it’s so different to actually see it, in front of you, killing someone you know, someone who has put his trust in you completely to keep him alive. It was as if my soul divided into two, my feelings frozen, throat clenching, heart pounding, while my mind went totally flat calm and my hands just did what they had to do.

The snake the Arkans call fijifas, “vindictive,” because it will not just defend its place but chase after a person, even on a horse, is like lakesin but more potent and the highest-quality of the common poisons Arkans have for this mode of use. I’d have known it just from the left-sided weakness, the purple around the cut and the quick action, even without the other symptoms. No confidentiality concern here; they know what poison they used, and its symptoms. I had them hold his arm still to get the vein-needle with the antivenin in for his material body, gave him the drops of the isode and some others for good measure under the tongue for his life-energy, and had them run him into the infirmary to do the rest to stabilize him.

I’m writing at his bedside, with the paper held down by a rock on the night-table and his wrist in my left hand. His second-in-command, who most people call Steel-Eyes, wanted to move him back into his own tent for quiet, so we did, and she shooed everyone else out except his parents and his little brother and sister who work at fetching and carrying for him. But I swear, the entire army is crowded around the tent, and it’s as if I can feel their fear and their hope for him pressing on me, like a force pushing against the canvas walls.

I can feel him strengthening so I know he will recover, and I told Steel-Eyes that, and she told them, but I don’t think they’ll really believe it until they see him move or hear him speak. They have orders to be quiet, but I keep hearing them say his name.

I understand. I have my finger right where I can feel the throb of his life, but I still wish his face would stop being that awful corpse-like blank, that he’d wake up in a moment, smile and say “Everything is all right, Kanincha,” even though he probably won’t smile, because he’ll be in pain. Next best thing would be to have you here, but I can’t, so the next best thing after that is writing to you. Let them think I’m doing up a case report or something.

Lots of love from your son,
Kaninjer.

The pain came back first, sharp on my sword-arm, dull and throbbing and as if my skin no longer fit correctly on me everywhere else. Three of the comforting touches on me I knew, from infancy: my mothers and shadow-father. I opened my eyes but couldn’t get the blurring to go away, and when I turned my head the world spun sideways, making me sick. “It’s too soon to move, Chivinga,” Kaninjer said. “Just lie still.” Then, what he always said when he gave me drops: “Under the tongue.” Someone had taken Mana’s arm-ring off my sword-arm, because it was swelling, and put it on my shield-arm.

It was a while again before I had the wit to realize that all the sheathed swords gathered around the tent belonged to people holding some sort of vigil, and another while before it came to me that it was for me. By then Kaninjer had told me what had happened and that I would be all right. “Has no one told them?” I said with the scrap of voice I could find. “Emao-e?”

“Of course I told them. But you know how it is. They’re still worried.”

“Well, kyash, I’ve got to—” I tried to lift my head, sent the world and everyone in it spinning end over end, laid it back again. “Haul me out there… no, wait, I’m too weak, I’m too much a sight, take a message out there for me. ‘My warriors, who I love…’ ”

“You’re working too hard for your state,” Kaninjer said. “Can’t it wait? Relax.”

I realized I didn’t even know how the battle had gone. “Fine, I’ll relax,” I said. “Emao-e, you report.”

“A-e kras, but short. The Haian’s giving me the hairy eyeball. We thrashed them. Seeing this happen to you just put everyone into a rage. Now they’ve slunk all the way back into the ugly black fortress that they’ve made Vae Arahi into.”

“What, and walled themselves up in it? All of them?”

“Yes. How many did you expect would stay outside? End of report, Fourth Chevenga, do what your healer says and relax. Even I can tell you feel like a turd from the lead horse after the entire cavalry has galloped over it. That’s how you look.”

“Break camp,” I said. “And march. We’re—”

“Chevenga, you are incapacitated and I am in command!”

“As I was saying, we’re going to liberate Terera and sleep on soft beds tonight. So you give the order. Or don’t, if you think it’s a bad one.” Cursing me under her breath, she stalked out. A moment later I heard the wild roaring cheer as she gave it, then added that it had come from me.

So it was I came home in a wounded cart, weak as a newborn lamb, and not even allowed to see; it was decided for me that the sight of Arkan walls around Assembly Palace and the Hearthstone Dependent would be too much for me in my condition. I could smell the pine wind off Hetharin, though, and hear the familiar deep rushing of the falls. Finally I shed the tears that had waited for so long.

The Arkan civilians in Terera fled, either inside the walls or southward. The Yeolis poured out on the streets and roofs, even of places that were part burned out or just being rebuilt. Once we were in the town, I got Krero and Sachara to put me on an open litter, against Kaninjer’s protests, with pillows to hold me half-sitting. I couldn’t do much more than smile and clasp the thousand hands that reached close enough to find mine, but that was enough. Soon my sheets were speckled with flowers and splattered pink with wine. From up ahead came a crash and rumble; the Arkans had walled the town hall and converted it into a governor’s mansion, so that now that he and his guards had vacated, the people were tearing down the walls.

I had myself carried down to the lakeshore, where next fall I would have done my first Renewal, had I not already done it. I dipped my fingers in the water and brought them to my lips, to a thunderous cheer. Hear that all the way to Arko, I thought.

The people were willing to billet even Lakans, and virtually no one would take money in the market for food, as if we were all semanakraseyel, so we settled in and everyone else readied to party. Ankarye Chermena, who’d been with the Workfast Disseminatory before it and the Workfast Proclamatory had been outlawed, came to visit me; turned out she still was, after a fashion, as they were now secretly running news and messages throughout Yeola-e. “You’ve heard Terera is a hotbed of shadow-sibs?” she said, with a mischievous smile. “This nest of ex-scribblers and idle bureaucrats? Imagine. I came for your words, semanakraseye. Whatever you say will be all over Yeola-e in a half-moon.”

Making them good enough was work, of course, and Kaninjer looked apoplectic, but Ankarye’s pen was poised over her noteboard, and I wasn’t going to make them second-rate. I started, as had become my habit, “My people, who I love,” and spoke of their pain, and how I felt it with them, but how the end of it was now coming, in many more words. As for Kallijas Itrean, I told them, he’d given us the most sincere proof possible that he knew he could not take me honourably.

When I was finished, Kaninjer buried me in a back room of the town hall—those reliable signs of Arkans, the smell of beef and a brass oil-lamp, were still there—and cut off my visitors entirely. I started to feel he was right, saying I’d done too much; I’d thought too much, too. In the midst of celebration, I’d smelled trouble.

Never besiege, the old strategist’s rule is, since all the advantages lie with the besieged. I couldn’t doubt they were well-stocked, certainly long enough for reinforcements from the south to arrive, as I’d be a fool to imagine wouldn’t. I didn’t have the numbers to waste fighting walls, or siege engines, and I couldn’t sap them as they were built on solid rock. The A-niah were coming, but I didn’t know when, since it depended on Niku’s recovery. At the very best, we’d be stalled here, for who knew how long. But I had to retake it. It was Vae Arahi.

It needed the path unconceived, and the flash didn’t come. I would have been better off letting it go for now and sleeping, as Kaninjer advised. But, bothered by pain and wanting to make up for weakness, I strained. He couldn’t give me sedative, so soon after such an assault from other substances; he could massage me, but that I could ignore. He’d warned me that vindictive-snake poison can cause an after-fever. Sure enough, it came up.

In a half-aer I was burning; by nightfall, when everyone else was reveling, I was raving. I conceived several incomparably brilliant and absolutely certain plans, which were somehow accompanied by the music of Ilesias Janisen in its grandest passages. But each time I came to myself enough to think of dictating one to Chinisa—bless her, she was willing to be my secretary again, despite her age, even in the war-camp—the whole thing, details and gist alike, would go clean out of my head as fast as a puff of smoke in a gust of wind.

The Arkans had built Arkan-style baths, and when Kaninjer had me put in a cool one to bring down the fever, I thought I was back in the Mezem and started yammering in Arkan, offending everyone in earshot.

Finally, near midnight and after Kaninjer had started giving me drops every tenth or so, it broke. “Kaninjer,” I said, when I’d lain quiet for long enough to collect my thoughts. “You have to let me send Sishana for someone who was there when Kallijas cut me, who witnessed. I won’t sleep until I’ve spoken with one. Second Fire come, I can’t.” He railed a bit in his soft Haian way, but called Sish, who fetched Sachara.

“The great and honourable Kalicha Ityirian!” he spat. “Feh… we already knew you could take him. No surprise he figured it out.” He hadn’t had a chance to voice his opinion to me in private yet.

“Sachara, I just want you to remember,” I said. “Right after he did it, what was the expression on his face?” As I’d tried to wrest a plan out of my own brain, the sight had kept coming back to me, distracting me, as had his words, though I was still not sure I understood them. Now it had occurred to me that maybe there was a reason.

“His face?” Sach looked at me quizzically. “I thought he was sure he’d succeeded. I’d love to see it when he finds out he didn’t!” But seeing I was serious, he said, “Well… tell the truth, he looked a bit as if he’d swallowed a peach pit.”

“He said something to me in Arkan; if I repeated it, do you think you would know it?” He signed a hesitant chalk. I did the solas accent as best I could. “Maen ipelatzis.”

“Something like that,” he said. I said it again, one-up. “Yes! That’s it; that brings it back clear. What does it mean?”

“ ‘I’m sorry.’ No, he doesn’t think he can’t take me. His general does. Ha!” The flash came, so bright and beautiful it was almost head-splitting. I relaxed in relief, and was asleep so fast I didn’t even have the civility to wish Sach goodnight.