Karen Wehrstein - Chevenga 01 - Lion's Heart

Scanned by Highroller.

Proofed by .

Made prettier by use of EBook Design Group Stylesheet.

Lion's Heart by Karen

Wehrstein

Book I

PROLOGUE

The story with which every Yeoli's story begins:

Once upon a time in the great Empire of Iyesi, there was a sect called

the Athyel, who believed in no god but the God-In-Ourselves, and that

humanity by nature is free. When the King 14th Jopal had risen to power,

he sent his warriors to kill all who would not abandon their creed and

pledge themselves to his. The Athyel refused. Nine days the streets ran

with blood and the sky shone with flame, and all who were not killed fled

into exile or into hiding.

Now it happened that a teacher in an Athyi school gathered together

her students and fled away with them into the mountains. Although they

soon were tired and hungry, and some of the children were lost or eaten by

wild beasts, she barely let them rest as much as they needed, and at each

choice of ways chose one without pausing, though she didn't know which

way to go.

One day, near the end of their strength, they came to a deep wide

valley. On the shore of a lake they found a woman fishing. The teacher fell

on her knees and begged her aid.

"Many years ago," the woman said, embracing the teacher, "the

knowledge came to me that Athyel children would flee to this place, driven

from Iyesi. So I prepared for you as best I could: the house is large, you

see, the garden wide and the goats many. My name is Yeola. Come in! All

this is yours."

So they went in and ate from the great pot of stew which hung waiting,

then lay down upon the many mats and blankets, while she tended their

hurts with medicines she had in plenty.

"Yeola, our benefactress," the teacher said, "we could never thank you

enough. But every time our way forked, I chose without pausing, so it is

entirely by chance we came here. How could you have known many years

ago that we would?"

"Foreknowledge works outside of time," Yeola answered. "Had chance

taken you to the next valley instead, I would have known to wait there.

That is hard to understand, I know, for those who don't have a touch of it

themselves; perhaps the best explanation is to say that the God-In-Me told

me."

The teacher was overjoyed. "You are one of us!"

"No," said Yeola. "But I can speak the language of your thought. I

believe in none of the gods as their priests would have me do, and believe

in all of them as they are: the spirit of life as people feel it. I serve no god,

for none has spoken and asked it of me; I serve all, because their presence

asks, in all the wonders of life. I proselytize for no god, since each is part of

the truth as nations are part of the world; but I speak the language of

each, so that I may understand all people. To Enchians I would have said

my prescience came from First Curlion, to nature-cultists, from the

Hermaphrodite, to animists, from the mountain-sprites, to Fire-cultists,

from the Twin Hawks. But you happen to be Athyel, so I said it came from

the God-In-Myself."

"Well… I thank you for being so considerate as to speak in the language

of our thought," the teacher said finally. "But I am curious to know where

you believe it came from."

"I believe—I firmly believe—it came from all of them. Or none. Or me.

Or out of the sky. I firmly believe I do not know. Also that I do not care. It

came from the world of the unknown, which is wondrous because it is

unknown. All the gods' names are names for it. Once given, such a name

becomes Truth, the name of the Truth a people feel from the unknown.

Yours is the God-In-Ourselves. So I used it, to give you from the unknown

your Truth of where my prescience came from.

"Not that it matters a whit anyway. I hope this never ends up in some

chronicle. You're here, there's food and bed, and you are invited to stay as

long as you like."

So it was, they stayed. When they were strong enough they began the

work of life, on the land, and continued their education from the many

ancient books that Yeola had. Seek wisdom, she taught them, find the

God-In-Yourselves: live by the ultimate law that is hardest to live by: that

there is no ultimate law. For meanings their native tongue had none for,

they invented new words; for settling their disputes and making their

common choices they created new customs.

Years passed, and the children grew, built houses and had children of

their own. Yeola grew old. In their thirtieth year in the valley, as their

children were just beginning to have children, Yeola took ill, and it

became clear she would soon die.

Around her bed the people gathered. "My children," she said, "you

think I have shared everything I have with you, but in all honesty I have

not. I see I must now.

"I could never choose your ways any more than I could think your

thoughts. You will choose whether to stay in this valley or go somewhere

else, to remain Athyel or take up some church, to retain your customs of

being the other and of voting or return to your previous ways. Yet there is

one choice I did dearly wish to deny you forever, pretending to myself in

my foolishness that this peaceful garden in which we live was the whole

world. There was one thing I hid from you. You must choose what has

always been the hardest choice. It's in the chest where I keep my things, at

the very bottom."

In the box they found a sword.

The sight brought back a thousand things to those who had fled Iyesi:

the iron-armored warriors of Jopal, houses falling in flame, the cries of the

dying, the smell of smoke and blood.

"Never did I want you to bear killing tools," Yeola whispered, "and be so

tempted to kill. But someday someone may come wanting to kill you, who

has no ears for your words of justice or sense. Someday having it may save

your lives, which I cannot deny you. You must choose, whether to take it

up or not.

"I ask only this: see what I show you now." Opening the packet she

showed them, they found five books of an age beyond thinking. The pages

were darkened but the writing was visible, and made them start and

shiver in their hearts. A human hand is unsteady, and will err; this writing

was flawless, as could only have been done by the hand of a machine.

"I guessed Jopal would burn your libraries. So I took these, which the

first Athyel collected from the ruins. They knew people would start

doubting it was human-crafted fire that burned the world, for such power

is beyond imagining today; so the proof must be preserved. These were

written when such weapons existed, and speak of them.

"The knowledge to make them is lost—but only for now. Do you know

what the common weapon of war was, 500 years before the Fire?" She

cast her gaze to the sword.

"We won't have this thing!" one cried. "We'll throw it into the deepest

lake we can find I" But another clenched his fists and said, "Are you mad?

Someone will come, just as Yeola said, as Jopal did. If our parents had had

swords, all would have been different!" A quarrel ensued, each side

horrified at the other. "Yeola,' they said finally, "we see this thing's two

edges now, very well."

"You are forgetting something," she said. "This is not a good or evil

thing, for it does not live. It's only a piece of steel. Never can it kill, without

a living hand wielding it, and bare hands can kill without swords. What

brought the First Fire, and will bring the Second, is not weapons or

knowledge, but choices made in error. Remember that."

They swore they would, and Yeola died.

Once again they wept and clung together, and found strength; once

again they felt a sunset, and a dawn.

They buried her beside the lake, and then all bathed naked in the clear

water, to cleanse themselves. Later she became known as Saint, for having

been divine in her humanity, and Mother, for having been mother in spirit

to a people. Her sword, serving as a sign to all and belonging to no one,

now hangs in the School of the Sword. In her honor, the people named the

valley in which they lived Yeola-e.

I

Vae Arahi, Spring Y. 1554

Two days after I was born my parents carried me up Hetharin, with the

two monks of Senahera to bear witness.

It was a fell day like ones I remember: the land lies sweet as after the

act of love, the scent of ripened crops fills the mountain air, and in the sun

the lowland trees at the peak of their fall-turning seem on fire. Along the

path that follows the meltwater stream from Hetharin, they climbed with

me to the naked heights, to where the air carries so little life one must

breathe hard to draw it in, and nothing grows but lichen and flowers

smaller than one's fingernail. It seems a place little worth the climb, until

one turns around.

Assembly Palace lies small as a lidless jewel box, pale and shining in the

sun, far below one's feet. Vae Arahi is a handful of gravel strewn in a

circle, the School of the Sword a gold tinderbox across the way. Beyond

the lip of the valley mouth the lake shows plainly its reputed shape, that of

a wide scythe, with the city Terera piled about its tip. Only the mountain's

siblings remain large: Haranin at one's face, Saherahin at its shield-side,

Perin to one's own sword-side. Beyond them stand the white-helmeted

peaks no one sees who doesn't make this climb, the shoulders of the nearer

ones forest-green, the farther ones deep steel-blue, and so on, fading into

distance out of mind, till they drop from the rim of this facet of the

Earthsphere. Here one sees, clear as a stroke to the heart, the smallness of

oneself alone, and the greatness of all things as one.

There is no praying for us. We cannot receive comfort from a voice in

the sky. It was for my parents then as it would be for me six years later,

when I entered the School of the Sword to begin my war-training. Asked

did I will this, I signed chalk, yes; I could feel the ability I had been born

with, as people can, and was to my mind obliged to defend my people. I

put my hand on the sword of Saint Mother, as all the masters and novices

watched: the hilt, worn down to nothing by the touch of generations of

initiates and replaced uncounted times, the straight dark blade, never

used, the same she gave us. Hanging by chains, it stirred at my touch, and

then came up with my hands as I hefted it; all down the line of people

there was whispering. It was then I felt lost and frightened, to have so

easily moved something so sacred, and knew I had taken on something I

did not understand. But we cannot pray to her who lived a millennium

and a half ago. If we must ask the age-old question all Yeolis seem to at

one time or another, "Would she have taken me in?", the answer will never

come to us on the wind. Unless we feel our worth in our hearts, we are

without it.

So it was for my mother: they must stand aside helpless, the curse and

the duty of all parents; my strength unaided would decide it. I had had my

fair preparation, a good birth and my two days of having them all to

myself; now I must make good my claim to go on, alone. The Senaheral

placed their feet astride the stream, marking out a length of water just

below the cleft where it gushes out. My mother knelt beside it, unwrapped

me from my wool, and laid me in.

We are called barbarian for this. Often it is by people who keep slaves

and maintain tyrants, who practice human sacrifice or sport-killing, or

whose custom is to cut off the tenderest part a girl-child has, thinking that

for a woman to have pleasure is evil. Perhaps my reader is of such a people

and takes offense; then, like two striplings caught rolling in the dirt, we

must each be the other.

If I were a Lakan, then… these Yeolis with their baby-killing, doomed—

for what god would take into his hand a people who scorn paying the

sacred blood-price, yet freeze to death babies without dedicating a

finger-bone to the Almighty? Such impiety will bring down the Earned

Fire upon them again…

Or an Arkan: without gods, giving their heirs to the whims of chance,

as if chance has better judgment than a good sensible father! All Yeolis

are milksops to their hairy-chested wives, without the testicular juice to

choose which children they will keep, let alone correct or purify those

women…

Having played you, I am in my rights to ask you to play me. Having so

done we will both see truth: that barbarism is in the heart of the beholder

as beauty in the eye. Who, therefore, am I to call you barbarian, or you to

call me? If there is some race on the Earthsphere perfect by all standards,

let them call the rest of us barbarian.

Let the custom be judged by its justice. It is true that many other Yeoli

families have given it up, since we increased enough not to interbreed, and

life got easier. But I was born to serve my people; should we not take

customary pains at least to give them good? It was just to me too, to

whom trials harder than most Yeolis' awaited. If I were too weak, why let

my failure or my death wait till I was old enough to understand what

failure and death are? This way is quick; the child dies unknowing; the

parents are freed to try again, also best for a demarch.

Most unjust are those who say my parents could not have loved me, to

have done such a thing. Their hearts lay in the ice-water with me,

nameless though I was. I know from standing there myself. It was worst

for my mother, who had carried me. How else can it be with parents? But

they must think of others than themselves.

I've been told I'd think differently if I could remember it, the sight of

them, standing still with calm faces while my flesh shrank and my

breathing weakened, while the life in me, so new, first felt itself failing,

and the air shimmering with the steel wings of Shininao the Carrier

waiting to draw out my soul when it came loose. Perhaps a child is one

who has not yet learned to see beyond himself, and so the world must have

been nothing but pain and terror to me then. But I think better of myself,

now I am an adult, than to let the memory stain my belief. Besides, I had

reason to trust my parents. They had loved me all my life.

These are only words. I would prove more taking my own firstborn

there in my arms. As we are grateful so may we be thanked.

In my own time, as I would so many times later, I fought without

speculating. Afterwards they lifted me out limp and blue and went back to

the Hearthstone. When I turned from blue back to pink and my heartbeat

didn't cease, they voted on my name. By the hearth they made the signs of

the rite, sharing one crystal, and took up chalk or charcoal, one by one, to

choose.

The decision was not unanimous, but split three-to-one. (To this day I

do not know which one of them voted against, and never will.) It was a

risk, after all, one they only dared because my father was so well-regarded.

Only three demarchs had ever borne the name, and none since the War of

the Travesty, two hundred years ago. It was considered too rife with the

sound of war and grandeur, invoking the beast that was named Monarch

of Beasts even before the Fire, and her fighting spirit. It has a tinge of

human domination too, being descended in meaning from the name of the

king who united Iyesi and whom Enchians still worship, First Curlion, who

took it from warrior-kings older still. In the pure ancient tongue Yeola

made, "che" is heart, and "i-veng" is lion.

Thus they threw their die, and I grew into the cast. In full: Fourth

Chevenga Shae-Arano-e, at that time Ascendant to the Demarchy of

Yeola-e.

I have been everything and nothing. I am Athyi but to some have been

God, and yearned a thousand times, God knows, to pray. I have been both

the living hand that wields it and the dead steel itself; I have been torn

down to the roots and raised again cell by cell, enveloped by fire and

water. I have been measured beside Saint Mother, and my namesake

Curlion; I did in fact feel the call of both, and,pattern my life accordingly.

Yet we seize life and it seizes us at once, like dancers, and mine danced

down a path whose sign-stone could bear no name but one: Chevenga.

Like all Athyel, I had nothing to judge myself by ultimately but the

hearts own measure: "Is it kind or cruel?"

If you mean to judge me, I beg nothing more than the usual observance.

I need not be with you—you have my whole life-story in your hands, with

every scene written out as full as would fit. You may know me better by

reading this than in life; I kept some, secrets there, none here. Perhaps

you are not Yeoli and don't know our ways; no matter, this one is simple.

One becomes the other, like an actor. Imagine what I saw, speak what I

spoke, feel what I felt. A greater fevor I could not wish.

II

My earliest memory is my mother's fire. A pair of square orange eyes

with gold edges, I would see, or a monster with stickles in his spine made

of fire-jewels—then the poker in Mama's great hand striking it, destroying

all in a burst of sparks, and creating new.

My floor was warm sheep-fur that tickled my skin; my roof, the

creaking base of her wicker chair; my door, her legs. The dogs would shove

their noses at me until I took them in under my arms. A thread of yarn

stretched twitching from the ball to above; she'd be crocheting socks, or a

crib-blanket for the next sib coming, still in her womb. My blanket was all

rich bright blues, purples and turquoises, in running patterns which, if

you journeyed across them with your eyes as children do, predicted and

reflected each other; there was the Vae Arahi pattern too, single and

double stitches interlacing, to mean balance and transaction. I wore it

over my shoulder like a warrior's chlamys, to the mirth of grownups, until

I was six, and kept it all my life.

One day, when I was about four, she was big with child, but reading

instead of crocheting. Objecting, since this made her oblivious to me, I

twirled a lit twig to make light-trails in the air. "You know very well you

are not to do that, and why not, yet you are doing it," she said. "Why?"

"Why aren't you making a blanket for the new one?" I asked.

Instead of upbraiding me for answering a question with a question, she

said, "I'm doing something else for the new one."

I had always been taught strictly never to lie, punished far worse for

denying I had done wrong than for doing it. Nor had I ever needed much

training in reading faces. Not knowing what else to do, I asked her, civilly

as I had been taught, "Mama, if you please, may I know why you're lying?"

She was a warrior who left the field to bear children; not one whose

eyes went wide, or whose cheeks took a touch of red easily. Her eyes were

so much like mine that I could always become her easily. Now as she

looked into the fire I did, my chin and nose adult and female, lovelocks

brushing my face, the heat of tears in my eyes just enough to shimmer like

faint sun on the edge of a cloud. Lie forgotten, I wanted to fling my arms

around her; I had never seen her cry in my life.

"I owe you truth," she said finally, "but I can give you only very little.

Why I'm not crocheting, you are too young to hear. I am sorry, Chevenga.

Will you forgive me?"

I wrapped my arms around her neck and kissed her in answer, and

never spoke of it again. The child died in the stream. They gave him his

rites in the hearth, after the rest of us were in bed. I heard, and saw with

my inner eyes at least, the flames curling around his body, his fingers,

delicate as my tiniest sib's, crackling. I wept my pillow wet, then dreamed.

Such dreams always slip out of my mind as I get close to them, like a faint

star that one can see from the tail of one's eye but not looking straight on,

or the Second Fire, too terrible for the mind to approach any way but

circuitously.

But afterwards I understood it all. She had foreknown his death, but

wanted to spare the rest of us the grief of foreknowledge. Only later did I

learn her gift was known. To me nothing of this seemed out of the way, nor

my having guessed it, though I could not know why.

I was three when the Tor Enchian war ended; by the time I was six, we

were sending each other envoys. I got to see their delegation in Hall, these

glittering creatures with pompous manners, wearing strangling collars,

metal jewelry and the furs of animals too small to eat, something I had

heard of but not believed. They were all men, which made me ask my

grandmother if there were any Tor Enchian women, to her mirth.

Strangest of all, since they had been born with it, was their hair; not

loose-curled, or even wavy, but spear-straight, hanging from the crowns of

their heads like the smooth flow on the lip of a waterfall. When the leader

moved the ends swung like a curtain in the breeze, cut in a perfectly

straight line, a sight to see.

They all carried knives in their sleeves, little straight blades with a tang

of bile like fear about them. Even indoors, where one never wears arms;

my father permitted it. "You've heard they carry them?" my grandmother

said when I asked about it. "That's his way, to call to their honor by

trusting them." She said it with neither approbation nor reproach, I recall,

but pride thrilled through me. Being helpless, children know fear, so they

love courage.

There was a referendum that year over whether to answer Lakan raids

on the border with war, our border-folk pressing for chalk. Some western

fool cited the old augury, that in this century we would break our custom

of warring only to our borders, and conquer a great land, and tried to

entice my father that way. Of course he had no wish to be King of Laka.

When his turn came to speak—I already knew the demarch always speaks

last—he said only that to think of raids as war just because western

farmfasts were getting too many children for their land was against our

law. In the end the vote went solidly charcoal, and he was praised. But he

had to say it to the faces of those children, and the bereaved. Once a rock

was thrown at him; I remember the scar, splitting the end of one of his

pale thick eyebrows into a fork. When I first touched it, he said,

"Sometimes they forget what is right, and hurt you for doing it."

The great baths in Asinanai were proposed that year; the city council

Karen Wehrstein - Chevenga 01 - Lion's Heart

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: