Or perhaps it was the loneliness. We had issued forth on our errand with only three people, but two of them were gone from me, and I understood in their absence just how much I cared for them both—not just Shame but his insouciant lover as well. I remembered the perfection of Ajan's clear voice, raised in song as we rode... looked at the bed in my borrowed room and thought it too empty.
My trunk had gone out ahead of us, of course, and by now was home in my studio. But there was pen and parchment available for those travelers who might need it, so I borrowed a sheet and sat at the narrow desk, staring at the blank page.
What now? So near the end of all this? I smoothed my fingers over the paper, careless of the oils on my skin. What word to describe the midpoint of the ride home? So close to completion, yearning for an ending, even a poor one. How painful it is to be in transition, and yet we are forever at that midpoint, never done with growing, never done with our small, personal evolutions.
Some of you are already familiar with our word ishan: the appreciation of the fullness of a thing's span, from beginning to end, with an understanding that it is worthy at every point in that span... that the ending is there, contained in the beginning, and that all the journey is in the ending. It is a good and gentle word, an appropriate one; it is foundational to Ai-Naidar, what allows us to see the intrinsic worth in every individual, no matter where they are in their lives.
I did not paint ishan. I am ashamed to admit I could not, because the pains and joys and healing and breaking of this paisathi of mine—the paisath of all of us—were too tender and new yet for me to have reached that serenity. I owned no serenity; all I felt was tension, and melancholy.
So I wrote that instead. Paisath. Journeys. I wrote it knowing that none of us are done with our paisath until we have died. That we honor ishan because we are deeply aware that all of us are in transition until we are here no longer, and that all of us need one another to live through that journey. To find meaning in it. To have the strength to see it to its end, and reason to celebrate it when we are able.
I had only the inn's ink pen and its small parchment; for that reason, paisath is the only word that is mounted in the book, for it was written on a page the length of my hand, one too small to be extended the way I did the tea house's larger sheet. And that ended up being just as it should be, for every paisathi requires a frame, something to give it context and meaning. Without that, it is just... a broken pot.
We came at last to the capital in the early afternoon of the following day. It felt as if I had left yesterday... and as if I had been gone forever... the only way I could count the days, true to my ishas, was by remembering the number of paintings: thirteen of them, for thirteen darelen I had sat with Kor Nai'Nerillin-osulkedi, Shame and priest and ajzelin. The days before we had chosen to spend that time together blurred together; only the art gave me a sense of the time I had spent on this journey that was to change all the days that came after so irrevocably.
The male aunerai had been here before, but that previous visit had not inured him against the experience; for all his stoicism I saw his breath catch at the sight of the capital's walls, and saw the emotion in his raised eyes.
Lenore Serapis, who had never seen it before, wept. For joy or heartbreak, I could not tell, and I doubted she could either.
I led them into the capital through the Ashumel's gate, and there we were awaited by the nakked, the Guardians who ward the safety of the Emperor. They fell in around us with the precision of their exquisite training; they did not speak, but they did not have to. They led and we followed. With this incomparable escort, we made our way through streets perfumed by the blossoming gardens, past fountains and golden buildings graciously framed in flowering trees, up the streets ever deeper into the atani until we had pierced its heart and reached the capital's center, the midpoint, the source of all the rays of Ai-Naidari influence: the dwelling of Thirukedi, the heart of the empire.
What do aunera think of it, seeing it for the first time? Do they expect something grander? Or is it overwhelming as it is? To us it is a little like a temple, the seat of Civilization; it is gracious in design and girdled in gardens and fountains, and the breezes that pass through it smell of incense. There is something of permanence in it—the warm golden stone—and something of the ephemeral, in the blossoms that litter the stairs leading inside, petals that are taken by the wind before any gardener can sweep them away. It is a little uncanny in that way: there is a sense to the heart of Kherishdar that it is maintained by the spirit of its people, rather than their bodily selves, and that all the Servants and Guardians and Public Servants who work there are ornaments on that spirit, which is animate without them.
But for me, I would say that what I remember most of the Emperor's residence, the few times I have been in it, was the light... warm, welling brightness, as if the soul might grow in response to it the way a flower would.
...but I was not to enter this time. The nakked escorted us to the residence and we found there a Servant, garbed in layered robes of mist-gray and pearled pink and wearing the token of empire around her wrist. So composed was she that I think the aunera took her for a statue until she spoke first, as was permitted by her role as one who greets those who come to a House.
"The nanaukedi, the fathrikedi and the aunera are to dismount," she said. "They will be taken inside to Thirukedi, who awaits them."
Haraa's surprise I felt in the tension of her shoulders and arms before she released me and slid off the beast. She joined the others, glancing at me once before one of the nakkedi gathered them with his eyes and led them away. As they walked up the steps, the Servant returned her attention to me.
"You are alone, osulkedi?" she asked, politely Abased but with a forthrightness that her role as the Emperor's Servant required.
"Shame could not return immediately," I said. "He will be escorting his penokedi home once that worthy is recovered enough to make the journey. I can explain further...?"
"Thirukedi will send for you when He is ready for your report," she said. "If you wish to leave your beast here, we will have it returned."
"That would be a great help," I said, and dismounted. I bowed, then. "I will await the Emperor's summons."
"Go with peace in your heart, osulkedi," she answered, and took the mount's reins.
She vanished then, leaving me to contemplate the palace's doors. The lord and his lovers and Haraa had all gone, and with them my duties had been discharged. It felt strange to be free of this mission; I could not help but feel as if too many things had been left unfinished. My artist's soul whispered that the final touches on the work had not yet been added, and I could not help but wonder. How would that story end? What final stanza awaited the poem that the lord had begun in his ascension on the stairs?
Perhaps I would never know.
At last I turned from the palace and departed, on foot. It was the first time since I'd left that I felt some hint of normalcy returning to my life. I found it... strange, but soothing. Even if journeys never end—perhaps particularly if they do not end—it is wise and good to rest, now and then.
What was it like to go home?
What is it ever like to go home? When one has been away? When one has changed so much?
I opened the door to my studio and saw again the gracious space I had spent so much of myself in. Aphorisms to soothe troubled spirits, wisdom tales to teach, words to inspire the young or the struggling, paintings to lift hearts or calm them... I touched my fingers to the edge of my work table and felt the years of my life there, layered on one another like glazes on a slow-drying painting. The air here had substance, and the pigment there had been formed of my own soul.
Every day. Day after day. Giving of myself. Pouring myself from a broken vessel onto parchment, racing to empty myself into my gifts to others before the last valuable thing in me had seeped away.
I sat on the window-seat in the early evening, watching people as they walked home from their errands, their work, their social calls. I remembered the feel of the pages of Shame's journals; remembered reading them right here, remembered my first astonishment at his genius. I remembered falling asleep on the window-seat, crumpled over the first of those journals.
I kept the dareleni.
I know it seems nonsensical at first hearing. I almost didn't. Kor was not present, and not likely to be so in the flesh for several days. But that was the thing that created the need for the dareleni. His absence had become a hole, and I made the art in response to that hole. Because even his absence implied him, and I could not do anything but face it.
So I went into the trunk, which had indeed been delivered, and brought out the paper block. I cut a page free and set it on my work table, a proper work table at last, large enough for me to spread out, for my arms to move without cramping. I laid out all my materials; I even opened my locked cabinet for the pigments made of ground gemstones and the precious metal leafs.
Perhaps I had been among aliens too long; perhaps even a moment is too long, for an Ai-Naidari to be among aliens. But when I put brush to paper, I was seeking a concept I could not easily choose a word to describe. It is thus, aunera: our words, uninflected, are plural—I have said this before, I believe—one begins with the plural and creates the singular. Thus, Ai-Naidar, and one Ai-Naidari. Until my visit to the colony, I had not realized that there was some other way to exist. That one might begin with the singular, and from that form the plural. That one might begin with isolation, and build community. It is not so with us; we assume community, and make allowances for isolation, and this is normal, this is how we survive, this is how we think.
...except for years, I had not been living that life.
Coming home to my echoing studio and the revelation of the empty years I had spent here, so devoted to my ishas and so consumed in my mourning, I realized... I had been living like an aunerai. Apart. Singular. Isolate. That the one rare and perfect love that Haraa had thought so astonishing had created that situation; I had had all that I needed, and when I lost it, the devastation was complete. Not just emotionally, but in my mind, in my assumptions, for it had taught me that one person was sufficient.
If one person is sufficient, aunerai, then when that person is taken away, no one can be again.
How strange, I thought as I painted flowers. How strange to realize how alien I had been in my own mind, long before I ever met one of you. How deep and perilous the crack in my pot. And how wise Thirukedi, to see it.
