Hienama (12 page)

‘Where’s Arken?’ I asked
him.

‘Where’s Ysobi?’ he asked
back.

‘Working,’ I said. ‘So?’

Again, Zehn shook his head. He
fixed me with a stare, and a feeling like cold water ran down my
spine.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘I want to talk to you,’ he
said. ‘Somehar has to.’

‘Talk, then.’

‘Not here. Outside. Leave the
harling with Fahn.’

I resented these orders at
once. ‘Tell me here,’ I said. By this time, a few ears were
beginning to tune into our conversation. I sensed a stillness sweep
over the group like a softly spreading plague.

‘You don’t want me to talk to
you here, trust me,’ Zehn said.

I bristled. ‘Then maybe I don’t
want to hear what you’ve got to say.’

Fahn, who had Zeph on his lap,
said, ‘Is everything OK, Jass?’

Zehn continued to stare at me. ‘I need
to talk to you,’ he said, in a low voice. ‘You must listen.’ He
softened. ‘Please.’

I got to my feet. ‘All right.’
I turned to Fahn. ‘Would you watch Zeph for a minute?’

Fahn was frowning, perplexed.
‘Of course.’

My son held out a hand to me.
He looked furious. ‘Don’t,’ he said.

I touched the ends of his
reaching fingers. ‘I’ll be five minutes at most, I promise.’

Zehn and I went out front, onto
the street. Hara were still strolling through the evening, making
for the bar. I heard the band start playing; a roll of drums. There
was a spreading communal lawn in front of us, shivering with
daffodils. The air tasted green in my mouth. A rangy greyhound was
nosing through the flowers, wagging his tail.

Zehn and I sat on a stone bench
beneath the eaves of the bar. Zehn was silent at first, so I had to
say, ‘What is it, then?’

He rubbed his hands through his
hair. ‘Somehar has to tell you,’ he said.

I didn’t say the obvious. I
kept quiet, although that cold water down my back was turning
slowly to ice.

‘Ysobi is still seeing
Gesaril,’ he said.

I kept calm. ‘Understandably.
The har’s in a state and Ysobi’s his teacher.’

‘No, Jass.’ Zehn groaned.
‘You’re going to think this is just sour grapes, I know, but there
are things you should know. Tibar told me. Everyhar knows.’

‘OK,’ I said slowly. ‘Explain
exactly what you mean.’

‘On the nights Ysobi’s not with
you, he’s with Gesaril. He does it secretly, only Tibar saw him
sneaking out of the house one morning. He did a bit of detective
work after that. Discovered it’s a regular thing.’

It was the secretiveness that
distressed me, although I didn’t show it. I didn’t know what to
say, really. I had a flashback to dropping the pearl, a twinge of
pain.

‘I’m sorry, but I think you
should know,’ Zehn said.

‘What makes you think I don’t?’
I said.

Zehn raised his eyebrows. ‘You
can’t be serious.’

‘A chesna bond is different,’ I
said. ‘I’m not selfish with him, Zehn.’

‘I don’t believe you. You’re
lying. You didn’t know.’

‘Well, think what you like. I’m
going back inside now.’

I stood up. I really meant to
leave him sitting there, but he grabbed my arm. ‘You’re stupid,’ he
said. ‘Do you think you’re the first?’

‘Let me go!’

‘No!’ Zehn grabbed my other
arm. ‘You have to listen, Jass. The last time… we all liked him,
really liked him, in the same way we like you. We had to watch
Ysobi destroy him. Nohar intervened. Now he’s not here
anymore.’

‘What are you saying?’ I asked
coldly. ‘Is he dead?’

Zehn shook his head. ‘No. At
least, not physically. He left Jesith.’

I sat down again. ‘What was his
name?’

‘Mori… Morien.’

‘When?’

‘About two years ago.’

That recently?
I
swallowed with difficulty. ‘I suppose you’d better tell me.’

‘It was the same,’ Zehn said.
‘It always is. Mori wasn’t the first either. I’ve not been here
that long, but you get to hear things. It’s a pattern, Jass.’

‘Did this Mori have a harling
with Yz?’

‘No. That’s irrelevant. Ysobi
got together with Mori, and it was different in some ways. They
didn’t socialise, like you do; well, not together. But Mori was
smitten with him. It was the same story; the aruna training. It
blew Mori’s mind away. He fell in love. And then another student
came. I don’t need to tell you more. You can guess it.’

‘This is not the same, Zehn. It
really isn’t.’

‘Oh, open your eyes!’ Zehn
yelled. ‘Don’t you get it? All that ascetic teacher stuff is
bullshit! Ysobi gets off on hara adoring him. He makes it happen.
I’m sure he wants the chesna bond, when it happens, but then
another needy, pretty face shows up and he can’t resist doing what
he does. It’s a power trip. You have to face it and accept it.’

‘No, I don’t,’ I said. ‘You’ve
told me. I’ll discuss it with him. Now I’m really going back
inside.’

‘Don’t be a fool,’ Zehn said.
‘You have that harling now. Get out of the chesna state while you
can. Finish it. You have friends, good friends. None of us want to
see you go the same way Mori did.’

‘You’re in no position to
lecture me about Ysobi’s behaviour,’ I said. ‘Everyhar knows what
you are. Maybe it takes one to know one? Or rather you’re
projecting your way of being onto Ysobi?’

Zehn did not get angrier, as I
expected. He sighed. ‘Jass, I’m no angel, I know that. I think you
also know why… maybe. But I don’t do this whole guru power thing.
Never. I take aruna with hara, maybe too carelessly. I make them
like me too much, I know. Perhaps I don’t want commitment, or
perhaps my standards are too high… I don’t know. But I am
not
like him. When things go bad with my roon friends, they
stick around, like Fahn. They don’t run because they can’t bear to
stay here. I’ve never destroyed anyhar.’

‘Fahn might contest that,’ I
said.

‘Ysobi gets off on it, Jass.
There’s no getting away from it. He’s messed with Gesaril’s mind,
as he messed with yours. The only difference is that you’re a
stronger har. Ag knows what he’s saying to Gesaril. The har should
have been sent back to the Shadowvales, you know that. Only he’s
still here. If you don’t believe me…’ He shook his head again.
‘Nohar will speak to you about it, because they’re scared you’ll
run, like Mori did. Although…’ He fixed me with a stare. ‘It hasn’t
got that bad yet. Don’t let it, Jass, please.’

‘What was so bad? Why did Mori
run?’

It wasn’t easy to listen to it.
All the time, I visualised Mori having my face. It didn’t help. The
trouble started because the unnamed student needed Ysobi’s full
attention, or so he said to Mori. The har was damaged, fragile… It
sounded all too familiar. The student was distressed by Ysobi’s
chesna bond with Mori; he felt jealous and inadequate. But, instead
of simply saying ‘Tough luck, I’m just your teacher. Don’t get
fixated on me,’ Ysobi asked Mori if, for a while, they could keep
their bond low key, not obvious. Mori said to his friends that it
was as if Ysobi had asked him to pretend their relationship didn’t
exist and never had. He was confused, wondering if he was at fault
to mind about it. Listening to this narrative, my blood slowly
froze in my veins. I swear I could feel the crystals forming. Like
me, Mori had tried to be understanding and dispassionate, but it
came to the point when he was seeing less and less of Ysobi, and
hara were starting to look at him askance. Eventually, he
confronted Ysobi. He asked why a student should make such demands,
and suggested it wasn’t exactly normal. In response, Ysobi accused
him of being small-minded and jealous.

‘Tell me,
is
that
normal?’ Zehn asked. ‘Mori wasn’t jealous. He was as accommodating
as you’re trying to be. He was in love, but despite that, he kept
getting slapped – severely.’

‘How did it end?’

Zehn sighed. ‘It wasn’t
good.’

The worst thing about the
situation was that Ysobi somehow undermined Mori so much, he began
to think he was in the wrong. He waited for the tiniest crumbs of
approval that Ysobi would throw from the table. Even listening to
it, I felt sick. There were good days, after Ysobi had been
pleasant with him, when Mori would seem at one with himself again,
and then there were the bad days. The student, like Gesaril, was
obsessed. He took to lurking round Mori’s home and once a window
was broken. Mori took to sleeping with a knife beneath his pillow
because three times he woke up in the morning to find his house had
been broken into and his possessions damaged. He was reluctant to
tell Ysobi about this, since he thought Ysobi wouldn’t believe him,
and sure enough, when it finally got too much and Mori had to
speak, Ysobi accused him of trying to hurt the student
deliberately, of spreading gossip and lies. Of course, Mori had
talked to hara about it. Who wouldn’t?

‘It was like a slow erosion of
his spirit,’ Zehn said. ‘We told him to end the chesna bond, but he
wouldn’t listen to anyhar. He tortured himself about his supposed
faults, questioning his own sanity, I think. It was as if he was
completely under a spell. Ysobi sent him a letter, insisting it was
out of concern, but listing everything Mori should and should not
do in order to get along with others. It was just a list of
complaints, nothing more. Mori took it all in and told hara he had
a problem controlling himself. You felt like you wanted to slap
him, or shake him out of it, but he was also worn so thin, it
seemed cruel even to address it with him.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I
interrupted. ‘Hara welcomed Yz into the social group with me. Why
would they do that if he’d been so vile?’

Zehn shrugged. ‘He’s not
dislikeable, Jass. And he is our highest-ranking hienama. A damn
good one too. Everyhar blamed the student, said he’d fooled Ysobi.
We all wanted to believe it, because to believe otherwise of a
spiritual mentor kind of destroys the whole picture, doesn’t it? I
think Sinnar spoke to Ysobi about it, and what little information
filtered through suggested Ysobi was in a mess too. He felt Mori
was too demanding, too clingy. He couldn’t deal with it. But Mori
wasn’t like that. Not really. The situation just ground him down.
It would have been better if Ysobi could have just finished it,
since Mori lacked the strength to, but he didn’t. Sometimes, he was
how he’d always been; affectionate and understanding. The next
minute he was distant and harsh. You can imagine; it was slow
torture for Mori. It got to the point where he felt Ysobi blamed
him for everything, for existing, I guess. So one night, he simply
upped and left. He disappeared, without a word to anyhar.’

‘Didn’t any of you go after
him?’

Zehn nodded. ‘Sinnar sent some
hara, mainly because he was afraid Mori would do something bad to
himself, but they tracked him down to Two Meadows and he told them
to leave him alone. He didn’t want to come back, not for anything.
After that, I heard a few things about how something similar had
happened a couple of times before. Ysobi doesn’t socialise because
of it, apparently. He says he knows what effect some aspects of the
training can have and yet… well, now there’s you. It’s as if he can
only resist for so long.’

I felt as if I’d been beaten up
and rubbed both hands over my face, very hard, as if to press away
the unwelcome truth. ‘And yet you all let me…’ I shouldn’t have
said it, but it was a thought expressed aloud. ‘You all
let
me.’

‘Well… despite me… most hara
thought it
was
different this time. And maybe it is, because
he’s doing it behind your back. It’s probably because of the
harling.’

‘His name is Zeph,’ I said.

‘Don’t leave here,’ Zehn
said.

‘I have no intention of doing
so.’ A surge of pure anger poured through me. ‘You want it to go
bad between Yz and me, I know you do. Forget it, Zehn. What you
want: it’s never going to happen. You can tell me tales all you
want. It’s the past. I won’t judge the present by other hara’s
experiences. Now, will you let me go?’

He’d held on to me all that time. I had
pins and needles in one arm.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ Zehn said.
‘At least investigate. I’m not lying to you.’

I investigated all right. I
went back into the bar and took Zeph from Fahn’s arms. Minnow
dashed over to me and said, ‘What did he tell you?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I’m going
now. See you later.’

‘We’re your friends,’ Minnow
said.

‘Are you?’ I walked out.

Whatever Zehn had said, and
however much I thought it was coloured by his own desires, Minnow’s
simple words had confirmed Zehn’s information. I went straight to
Sinnar’s house.

I knew my way around and snuck
around the guest wing until I found the occupied room. Nohar saw
me, or maybe they
had
seen me approach and gave me the space
I needed.

Gesaril was alone. I was
thankful for that, because I’m not sure what I would have done if
Ysobi had been with him. The har looked dreadful, a shadow. I stood
over his bed, with Zeph held against me. I stared down at him,
projecting the dehara know what. He woke from a fretful sleep and
saw me there. He didn’t speak.

‘Tell me,’ I said coldly, ‘what
is it you want, Gesaril?’

‘Only him,’ he answered simply,
rawly, as if every last shred of strength had been wrung from him.
‘I’m sorry.’

Was he?

‘You can kill me,’ he said. ‘I
can’t put up a fight.’

‘You should go home.’

‘He won’t let me.’ Gesaril
stared at Zeph, and I saw then he was not the har he’d been when
he’d first arrived. All that flirty madness of youth had gone. He
was hollow, as a dead tree is hollow.

Zeph was very still against me,
although I could hear him breathing. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought
him to this place. ‘You want to go home, Gesaril?’ I asked. My lips
were numb, but somehow I could speak.