265 - I will be with you

My strongest memories of the place they sent me to are the maple and oak leaves turning orange and gold as flames against a burning blue sky, tumbling clouds threatening chill autumn rain, the rafters of the house’s roof, plain, thick and uncarven, black with age and hosting the odd spider-web. To the dancing of sunlight through wind-tossed branches, I dozed, for days. I don’t remember much that I was not looking up at.

I remember the kindness of the family who took me in, though I don’t remember their names other than the woman whom everyone called ‘Mama’ had the surname of Shae-Irida, and there was a boy named Kamina and a girl named Moriha. The house smelled of ancient stone and wood, and wood smoke, and beeswax, and cooking, and dogs, sometimes wet from the stream, and drying herbs. There was an old tabby cat who took to me, often jumping up on the bed to press his chin against my cheeks and brow, then curling up beside my pillow. At night the only sound inside was the ticking of the stone-stove door, and the odd pop or snap from the fire inside. The silences between sounds seemed deeper, like the deeper black of night between the stars on the clearest of nights; the constant underlying susurrus of a war-camp was not there.

Not that any of it was beautiful to me, at first. Everything I saw seemed the mark of my own failure. I had never hated myself so in my life, not even from torture, because that had not been my own doing. I felt like an exile, cast out for weakness and incompetence, so feeble that everything down to lifting my head to drink had to be done for me, like a baby. I felt like a prisoner in my own skin, with a Haian for a jailguard, but knowing I had put myself there. I kept imagining my army coming to grief that my presence could have saved, and knowing every drop of blood would be on my hands. And I could not even know what was happening at all.

“You’ve got to stop fighting,” Kaninjer said to me over and over, in the first few days. “You’ve got to relax.” He’d lift one of my hands and let it go, and it would not fall limply; that’s how he knew. And yet if I raised my own head, the blackness would seize me. “It’s a paradox, Chivinga, I know. You can only have victory here by giving up, by stopping fighting. I know how that goes against all your habit, how it defies your understanding. But it’s still true.”

He was very strict with me, at first, making every choice for me, letting me make no move unaided, sometimes forbidding me to speak, sometimes even blindfolding me so I could not even have the disruption of sight. He would shush me every time I said a word against myself, saying, “It’s yourself you are fighting, and you’ve got to stop.”

The one thing he would let me do freely was cry, though I only had the strength to do it silently. He, and my siblings, and the Shae-Iridal—in a one-room house, if you bare your heart, you bare your heart to all—would comfort me with endless patience. He’d ask me what in the diet he was feeding me I liked the most, and make it for me again, and massage me for a good bead every day. When I became strong enough to be bored, he began bringing things that would interest me, reading to me, or getting my sibs or the Shae-Iridal children to.

I had not known that Haians have such a store of literature from before the Fire. Among Kaninjer’s favourite possessions, in which I’d see him engross himself sometimes to shut out the madness of war, was a book of Enchian translations of works that had already been ancient, then. I had one of the tiny gemlike verses of the poet Kyam committed to memory almost on first hearing; it means, essentially, the stroke of the past is in the past, but reads far sweeter than any sword-school proverb, of how neither prayers nor schemes nor all your tears will wash out what the finger of chance, or Gods, if you like, has written. He also wrote much and beautifully of death, such as how having drunk deeply of life, one must not shrink from drinking equally deeply of death. Many say the time before the Fire was an innocent one, without pain or toil or worry. I think such times come only in our dreams.

Forced into stillness by the stillness of my body, and nourished by rest and ease, my spirit eventually did surrender, and quit fighting. It happened all at once, I remember, when I heaved a huge sigh, and sagged all over as if I had died, and fell asleep almost instantly. I slept the rest of the day and the whole night. From then on I began gaining strength.

Forced into idleness, my mind wandered, ambling onto fields of thought that were huge, as it does when it is free. One day, stretching out under the great sky with a blade of grass in my mouth like a boy, I suddenly felt the agelessness of everything around me: the great trees with their arm-span-wide trunks, Kyam still living through his four-thousand-year-old words, the circling in the sky, lazy as a hawk’s, of the Niah scout watching over me, the skill handed down through millennia of generations—and, so ancient as to make these other ancientnesses into blinks of the eye—the sky and the Earthsphere themselves.

What were these things that obsessed me? My war, one among the thousand wars in the great sweep of history; my army, that could turn back into thirty-thousand disparate people, each going their own way, and so cease to exist in an instant, if they so chose; my life, thirty years against the eons that are the turning of the stars, a fire-spark that winks out and is gone in a moment.

What were we, human beings, with our grand conceptions of being of consequence? Ants crawling on a mountain: with feverish work, they build their cities, prosper, languish, fight, win, lose, flee to other hills, hatch, grow and die, their generations as fast as breaths; but one quick fall rain, and they are all washed away forever in an instant flood, that will itself subside in moments, while the mountain never changes, nor even notices.

I thought of all the places I had been in my life, all the roles I’d played, all the guises I’d worn. I had been a Lakan in a way, while captive in Laka; I’d been an Arkan, in a way, while captive in Arko. Sometimes I asked myself, am I still a Yeoli? Or am I citizen only of this—the sky that I embrace, and embraces me, above, and the earth, below?

I remembered, as I forgot all too easily, since it was so slight and fragmented, the predicted arc of my life that I had on that scrap of paper in my lap-desk, Jinai’s prophecy. It was with the army, so I could not read it, but by meditating I managed to bring it back entire. All of it was played out now, except “a crowd of blondies, Arkans, yelling your name, acclaiming you, you are speaking to them”—I could have put that down to the Mezem, except for the speaking part—and “Arko is twined with the whole rest of your life,” which would go at least to twenty-seven.

Would it take me that long to drive them out? Or would they try again once I had? Or had Jinai just been speaking of diplomacy? I thought of Minis, with his jewels and wheeled feet and hair that tried to drown him, with his unearthly Aan-blue eyes fixed on me, drinking into their depths everything I’d had time to teach him. Perhaps at twenty-seven, when he’d be seventeen, I’d see what would likely become of him.

I had fevers a few times, and colds, just as Kaninjer had predicted. I dreamed, sometimes the strangest things—what meant, for instance, myself, miniature, bursting out fist-first through my own ear-drum? Or an air-clear mountain lake that turned out to be made of solid glass, with the face of the nightmare as huge as the world looking up from the gloom at its bottom? I had the dream of being the central pillar of Assembly Palace, made of a centuries-old oak again, and of Shininao reaching down my throat to kill me, things that were familiar and so brought me to myself.

Like in a dream I remembered the days before I’d fallen, and saw clearly, to my horror, how awful I had been to everyone, and what a fool I had made of myself. The names of people I must apologize to came so fast that I begged Kaninjer for pen and paper, to make a list. My mind cleared enough to know how clouded it had been before, and the idea of the fate of Yeola-e depending on a mind in that state sickened me. How had we survived, let alone been victorious? A good command council and a good army, no other reason. I added to my list that I must thank them.

Worst was remembering the first battle of Chinisinal. If I had not been so brain-palsied with fatigue, might I have anticipated fire-arrows? And yet, why had no one else? Had they all become so dependent on me, to anticipate? Of course if that were the case, they’d just got a moon’s dose of the best cure.

Kaninjer allowed me no visitors at first, and then family only. My mother was there for about half the time; from that I gathered the army must still be fairly near, until she told me the A-niah had brought her, flashing her eyes upwards. “They told you,” I said, and we talked for a while, when we were alone, about the beauty of flying. Niku did not come. When I asked my mother why, she said, “She doesn’t know that you want her to, and isn’t sure where she stands with you.” Fair enough, after how I’d treated her. I put her name first on my sorry list.

“How goes it with Esora-e?” I asked her. She wouldn’t tell me, saying Kaninjer had forbidden me to hear anything painful. By that I gathered they hadn’t had a tearful all-is-forgiven reconciliation. I knew better than to ask whether he was still not speaking to me. When I asked myself whether my demoting him from the darya semanakraseyeni had been overly angry, an act tainted by the madness of fatigue, I decided it hadn’t, that I had been just. Niku had given over, and regretted; he had tried to push past me, and then justify. I wasn’t sure what he’d have to do to make me feel I could reinstate him.

As I grew stronger, Kaninjer allowed me my freedoms step by step, like a parent broadening a child’s bounds as he grows. I sat up, I fed myself, I walked short ways, I walked longer ways, I ran, I swam in the pond, I exercised. We celebrated my birthday with a bonfire and song; between the eight Shae-Iridal, the six of us in my family and my healer, we were enough of a crowd to make a decent dance line. Kaninjer forbade me wine, though.

I started meditating daily about half-way through the moon, kneeling on the mossy bank beside the pond, remembering how I had promised my mother I would hear the singing wind before the second battle of Chinisinal, and had had only a whiff of it. I got it clear the day before my birthday, a note and flash without an idea, just the reassurance, I will be with you. How had I been able to bear even a day, without it?

So sweetly warm it was in these lowlands, this time of year—there’d been only a hint of frost and most of the leaves were still on the trees—reminding me there was plenty of fighting season left. The old itch to action, that I’d forgotten how to feel, came back, but it was expansive, not desperate, like before; I could carry the peace of this place into war, to remember how Yeola-e truly ought to be, and use it to keep my balance. The last two days I was, however serenely, champing at the bit. Finally came the day to for kissing the hands of my hosts, for tears and hugs farewell. I walked out of the place into which I’d been carried, up to the ridge where Sijurai and Baska waited with double wings.