Lions heart, p.1
Lion's Heart, page 1
part #1 of Chevenga Series
Scanned by Highroller.
Proofed by Aunti
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!" 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. 1544
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 favor 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.
