You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all
the sins you never had the courage to commit.
the sins you never had the courage to commit.
M
y culture only has a handful of love stories. The kind that define generations worth of love; the kind that boys will not admit longing for, and girls dream of their entire lives. The kind that teach us how to be, how to care, how to love. With poignant clarity, I remember this about the stories: they all end in tragedy. Of the five, one tale in particular haunts me. Yes—one, in particular, seems a morbid shadow of my own life. Forbidden, because the love between soldiers, although known and encouraged, could not be made whole. Our island race demanded reproduction; and so all viable men were expected to marry women, no matter how fiercely they loved their comrades. We are an unromantic people; overly pragmatic, unsentimental.
—but once, there were two, idia kardiah. Same hearted. The legends say they were one soul in two bodies, divided unevenly. Gennaios, the word for brave, was filled with all dark aspects of the split soul, felt compelled by duty, darkness, and not a lack of morality, but the opposite—a need to fulfill his life's purpose above all else. (And that purpose was to win the war). He was merciless in his pursuit of these aims. He did not flinch, nor feel compassion on the battle-field. The other half of the soul, Fovos, was named for fear. Not because he was a coward. But he was so intimately connected to all sources of fear—his heart was too large. He cared too much, too deeply. Fear comes from the potential of loss.
Gennaios and Fovos were raised together; they were not brothers of blood, but of arms, and they were deeply in love.
And, together, they completed all weaknesses in the other. In war, they were beautiful—poetic, in the way of epics. When they fought alongside one another, they were symmetry. One pushed, the other pulled. They were balanced as the sun as the moon, the earth and the sea, the day and the night.
Fovos loved too much, and Gennaios not enough.
Do you already know how the story ends? (How this story, told a thousand-thousand times, will never change?)
Gennaios, a general at the time, had a decision to make on the battlefield. They had been unexpectedly flanked, and Fovos’ regiment was their only line of defense. Gennaios knew they could counter the attack successfully—but with heavy losses. He knew the other part of his soul was there; that Fovos would fight bravely, that—
That he died. And Gennaios knew it when he ordered them not to retreat, but to face the threat. They won the battle, but Fovos died in the defense.
These stories can never end so simply, however.
Fovos, killed by a Prince of the Khashran, by a keeper of souls, must be punished for his crimes against the Prince's people. And for this punishment, the Khashran prince ripped Fovos’ soul from his body in death and assigned the soul to Gennaios. Somewhere else, the story might have ended beautifully—they might have been made whole, together, in one body. Not here. Not in this tale. Gennaios, so haunted by Fovos’ feelings of betrayal and love, could not bear to harbor his soul. In order to survive and do right by his people, Gennaios met with a shaman and asked to have Fovos ripped from him—the shaman warned him that to separate them again would cause irreparable damage, that he would never be whole again. But Gennaios agreed.
And when Fovos was killed not just once, but twice, the good parts of Gennaios’ soul were ripped away, never to be salvaged.
But they had won the battle. Fovos' life, ended, had been worthy. After, Gennaios’ descendants were said to be the most competent of soldiers. They did not flinch in making the decisions that would ruin their souls; and many, many years later his descendent's fulfilled Gennaios' destiny. They won the war.
I won the war.
If I trace my family line back to the beginning, to when we first settled on Oresziah—
Gennaios was a part of me. His blood, in my veins. His curse, in my heart. I never paid much mind to it; the story, in my heritage, was told not as a negative, but a positive. If Fovos had been faced with the same decision, he would not have sacrificed Gennaios—and he would have lost the battle. And that, that is what boys are taught.
That is what they are told, when they are blooded for the first time in combat.
(I wonder how much of the tale carries truth; if any of it does. My mother taught it not to me as a history, but as a warning when she began to notice my feelings for Bondike. 'You will never be happy with him,' she had said. 'He will ask too much of you. You will try to give it, but some of us... some of us simply don't have as much heart as others. We run out of what we can give, and start offering the worst parts of ourselves instead.')
I close my eyes and listen to the Rapax; the way if I let it, the noise consumes all other aspects of my life. Just the tumbling of water, the roaring. If I let it—
(I think of the story now because, in legend, the two men would meet at a river in the woods. After each battle. And together, they would wash the blood from one another’s bodies. My mother told me this, too. She told me there had been good in Gennaios. Just not enough).
—if I let it, it all goes away.
I step into the water and for a moment, pretend—
I am Gennaios, and Fovos stands just beyond me; and the water washes all the blood I have ever spilt. But I know when I open my eyes, nothing will have changed.
Yet, when I do, at last... everything has. A Phoenix rests on the riverbank, something out of myth, out of legend.
(Just as Gennaios and Fovos were).
I regard him quietly. At first I do not recognize him. And then, I see something in the eyes.
“I was wondering,” I say at last, above the water’s roar. “When you would try and find me. If you could.”
In that moment, I know—I had let him go. Perhaps it had been Sereia, or the wounds, or Amaroq’s death. Perhaps it had been all or none of these things. Perhaps—
Perhaps I would have let him stayed gone. But now that he is here, I smile a wolf’s smile, all my teeth on display. Because I know he needs me; and because he needs me, I will not let him go. Not out of compassion, or a sense of duty, but because some of us, when we have no good left, give whatever remains.
With false humor, "I must admit, Adonai, you have outdone yourself. I did not expect you to find me with such... shall we say... flare." A crooked smile that meets my eyes; a flash of happiness, and then. I remember.
You will never be enough, Adonai.
No one is. But I smile anyway, glad to see him, and the gladder I become the softer my demeanor grows.
