Children of God (37 page)

He bent then into a crescent. Jamming his feet against Supaari’s chest, Kitheri straightened like a bow with a scream of release. He hardly noticed the pain as Supaari’s teeth ripped from his throat, but he was gallant enough to declare, gasping, as he struggled to his feet, "First blood to the challenger!"

The soft-footed circling resumed, and there were three more near encounters that left their chests heaving with a noisy, exhausted hunt for air; neither was young, and this match had been harder fought and longer than either had expected. Breaking the rhythm of the bout, close to the end of his own strength, Kitheri took the offense at last, turning his own shorter reach to advantage with the feint of a low turn. When this drew Supaari into a parry for a blow to his legs, Kitheri converted the motion into a lunge, throwing his shoulder into Supaari’s chest, past arms bent for defense. There was an instantaneous, reflexive response: Supaari locked his arms around the Paramount’s back—the fatal error.

Their eyes met once more in that lethal embrace; then, with a swift upward rip, Kitheri ended it, and stepped away. Arms flung wide in ecstasy, he sang out to the multitude on the hillside before him: "Behold the art of dying!"

SUPAARI DID NOT FALL IMMEDIATELY, NOR DID HE LOOK DOWN TO SEE what had happened to him. He simply turned away and took a few steps as his guts roiled out of the rent in his belly onto the spoiled ground. For one terrible moment, it seemed to Sofia that he would trip over them, but then his knees buckled. For uncounted seconds, she did not breathe, reluctant to fill her own lungs and allow life to go on, without him.

"He will kill me, Fia," he’d told her, his voice as cool as a breeze that carried the pure, transparent fragrance of mountain snow, and the promise of storms. "Kitheri has trained from childhood as a warrior, and he will kill me.

Supaari had sat across from Sofia on the ground that morning, surrounded by the Runa army they had helped Djalao to create, a force now swollen by VaInbrokari Runa who had seized their freedom and joined their people outside the walls. Sofia did not protest what he said, concentrating instead on feeling nothing at all. It was an old skill, one that had allowed her to survive the war that ended her childhood, and second nature now that war had become her whole world again. In some ways, Supaari had already left her. They had not seen each other much in the past years, fighting on different fronts. Once the children had gone, there was so little to speak of, except the war.

There was a strange sacred hollowness to Supaari, as though each advance for the Runa had carved out some new space in his own soul, each success and competence driving home to him the utter irrelevance of his own kind. "They don’t need us anymore," he’d said once, with a kind of ethereal joy. "Perhaps they never did."

So when Supaari announced that he would die, Sofia simply rose onto her knees and held out her arms to him. He leaned forward and rested his forehead against her body. "He will kill me," he said again, his voice so low that she could feel the sound in her own small chest, "but I will do the people honor."

Alone now, staring at his gutted body in the distance, Sofia said, "You fought well." Lifting a still face to the mountainous clouds, she heard the splat and spatter of the storm’s first drops, and then only felt them as their quiet song was drowned by the shrill screams of Runa soldiers giving voice to frustration and boredom, to grief, and to their rage at these stubborn djanada holdouts who still dared to defy Runa authority and power and justice.

Armored infantry thundered down the slope like a cataract, parting around Sofia as a river flows around a rock, flooding the Jana’ata field before smashing through the main gate. The meat defiant, the meat insurgent, the meat fighting, Sofia thought. The meat in full cry.

She stood a long time watching, but then began her own progress across the trodden, sloping ground, aware of the sharp fragrance of crushed vegetation broken by the charge; aware of intermittent explosions and shrieks of terror and triumph; aware of the wind’s roar, augmented now by the roaring of a fire too fierce to be rained out.

Supaari’s corpse and the Paramount’s were nearest to her, for their combat had taken place in the center of the field, in view of each side. Both bodies had been equally trampled and tumbled in the rush toward the gate: united in death.

She was too small to straighten Supaari’s limbs and could not bring herself to gather his belly’s contents, so she ignored all that. Sitting by his head, she ran her hand along the fine soft fur of his cheek, over and over, while his body cooled and she paid the awful debt of love.

"LET ME DIE," SUUKMEL SAID, DULLY INSISTENT, AS TAKSAYU PULLED HER along. "Let me die."

"No," her Runa friend told her, as often as she said this. "There are the children to think of."

"Better to die," Suukmel said.

But Taksayu and the other Runa harried and tormented her, each of them carrying a Jana’ata infant or dragging a child or pushing a woman along, cruel in their desire to get these few to safety. So Suukmel kept on, one step following the other like heartbeats that would not cease, until the light and her own unhardened body began to fail, and she crumpled to the ground. The respite was brief. A child’s soft slippers, shredded and bloody after hours of forced marching over increasingly rocky ground, stepped under her eyes. Dazed by exhaustion, Suukmel looked up and saw the stony face of her foster son, Rukuei, the Paramount’s first-born, who had been, only hours ago, a boy of twelve.

Rukuei: whose hard violet eyes had seen the forty-eighth Paramount of Inbrokar dismembered by a mob, whose mind would always carry the vision of a burning city and of a battlefield humped and soaked by Jana’ata dead, black with blood. Teachers and poets and storytellers; engineers, geographers, naturalists; athletes of balance and beauty, whose very walk was artistry. Philosophers and archivists; financiers and specialists in law. Men of state and men of music; men of youth and of maturity and of gray age. All left to decay in the rain.

"My father honored you," Rukuei told his foster mother pitilessly. "Be worthy of him, woman. Stand up and live."

So she got to her feet, and walked on northward, leaving scarlet footprints on the stones, next to those of a man of twelve.

IT WAS WELL PAST FIRST SUNDOWN LONG DAYS LATER WHEN THEY SAW the monster. Perched on two bony legs, it was naked, and hairless but for a beard and mane and mystifying patches of fur here and there, and it held a parasol made of frayed blue fabric high over its head. Beyond surprise even at a sight so bizarre, none of the refugees spoke. Neither did the monster. It simply stood in their way.

Without warning, a Jana’ata appeared. Many Runa broke free of paralysis then, and moved to place their bodies between their charges and this stranger. When they realized the Jana’ata was unarmored, with a small child riding his back, they looked at each other in confusion, no longer knowing who was a danger and who could be trusted.

"I am Shetri Laaks," the man called out. "You are all here because Runa have chosen to preserve the lives of Jana’ata. Therefore, my wife, Ha’anala, and I offer you food and shelter until you are strong enough to make your next decisions. This is my brother-in-law, Isaac. As you see, he is a foreigner, but one who is no danger to you. My wife will explain the rules of our settlement. If you care to abide by them, you are all, Runa and Jana’ata, welcome to remain with us, as others have."

From somewhere in the little knot of weary bewildered women, a voice cried out in irritable protest, "Your brother-in-law! Are you married to a foreigner then—?"

But before Shetri could answer, Rukuei came forward. "I see the face of a coward, who lives while warriors rot," he shouted. "I smell the stink of one fit only to eat dung!"

"Ah, but dead men have such small appetites, even for dung," Shetri replied, not unkindly, but with no intention of being drawn into combat with an exhausted youth. He had seen this aggressive terror in so many boys: still reeling from the deaths of fathers, uncles, brothers, and ashamed to be alive. "I am afraid, sir, that I’d have proved a warrior of indifferent conviction and less skill. Instead, I have contrived to live at the expense of no person’s life," he said, glancing at Taksayu and the other Runa before returning his eyes to the boy’s and adding, "not even my own. If my company displeases you after you’ve eaten and rested in my compound, you may relieve yourself of its inconvenience by leaving."

Befuddled by the soft response, the boy was speechless. He was also swaying with fatigue and his feet were torn to tatters, Shetri noted. But it would be an insult to offer him any aid, so Shetri simply said, "Allow me to show the way."

It was then that a woman of middle years came toward him and rested her hand briefly on his arm. "What a lovely child," she said, trying not to let her voice quaver as she gazed up at the baby on Shetri’s back. "Such beautiful eyes."

"Yes," Shetri agreed neutrally, knowing that she was working through the genealogical possibilities.

She drew in a small breath as she drew also the inevitable conclusion. "A family trait, coming down from the dam’s lineage perhaps?" she asked from behind a finely woven veil, torn now and unraveling from one edge.

"Yes," Shetri said again, preparing to be attacked, if not injured.

But the woman merely spoke to the boy who had challenged Shetri. "Rukuei," she said, finding some reserve of stateliness within, "it seems that you have arrived by the gods’ decision among… family. This man’s wife will be, I think, a near cousin, through your father’s line." She turned back to Shetri Laaks and straightened. "I am Suukmel Chirot u Vaadai, and this is my foster son, Rukuei Kitheri." Shetri’s visible astonishment allowed her a moment of restored superiority, but Suukmel was a realist. "Your invitation is a great kindness. We are in your debt. My foster son and I—. No," she corrected herself, holding out her other hand to Taksayu, "we would all be grateful to accept your hospitality, on whatever terms you shall be pleased to dictate."

"There will be no debt, my lady, nor even terms," said Shetri, tearing his eyes away from the boy he now recognized as a young, male version of his wife. "An agreement rather, if you are pleased to stay with us."

"Do they sing?" Isaac asked then in the flat, toneless speaking voice so eerily at odds with the high purity of his singing.

Suukmel, uneasy, looked to Shetri. "My brother-in-law loves music," Shetri explained minimally, knowing she was too tired to take in more.

But Suukmel answered Isaac. "Rukuei knows many songs. He has the makings of a poet," she said. "And of a warrior," she added for his pride’s sake.

Isaac did not look at anyone. "He’ll stay," was all he said.

IT WAS NOT COWARDICE OR WEAKNESS THAT UNDERMINED RUKUEI’S bright, fierce resolve to return to the south and fight on. It was the unanswerable question he heard in his dead father’s voice, melodic with irony: "And whom shall you challenge? Some Runa horde?"

Had his mother been of first rank, or even second, Rukuei would now be Paramount Presumptive, but she was only a third. Was a concubine’s child entitled to fight as his people’s champion? There were no ranked half-brothers to inherit in their own right, nor any uncles to serve as regent while he was trained, if the law held the patrimony his. Who then is Paramount? Rukuei asked himself, no longer seeing the exhausted women and children around him, or the stranger with the baby or the freakish foreigner, or the eroded hills and gorges revealed as he and the others followed Shetri Laaks through a labyrinth of ravines.

Blackened stones, whitened bones: color is gone from the world, Rukuei thought, oblivious to the tilted, fractured strata—ocher and jade and cobalt in the late light of second sundown. Dance is gone, and beauty, and law and music, he thought. Smoke remains, and hunger.

Beyond fatigue, Rukuei found one certainty to grip. He was now the eldest male of his sept, and the responsibility for decision was his. Suukmel and the other women and children could go no farther. We will remain with these people until the lady Suukmel is ready to travel again, he thought as his little band trudged the last cha’ar to the strangers’ encampment.

It was beyond thinking where they would go then—just as the place they were led to was now beyond seeing. Already blind, he let himself be guided by strong, gentle hands to a place that smelled of unfamiliar bodies. Too tired to eat, he plunged into a sleep so deep it was all but unconsciousness, and did not awaken for many hours.

WHEN HE DID, IT WAS IN SLOW SEQUENCE, EYES LAST: TO THROBBING PAIN in his feet, to the scent of ointment bound to them by clean dressings, to a gabble of languages, to bright daylight filtering through the dirty fabric of a ragged tent.

Lying still, he listened to the conversations just outside—a revolting mix of K’San and Ruanja with random elements of commercial Malanja and snatches of court Palkirn’al. The appalling grammar and sloppy diction instantly put him into a foul humor made worse by the frantic morning hunger of a young male who was only beginning to put on the height and muscle of manhood.

Already on edge, he was startled by a slight motion to his left and came upright, ready to fight—whom he had no idea, why he could only guess. The world was full of enemies and everything good was gone. But the movement was only a woman’s hand pushing a crudely carved bowl toward him. He stared at it, repulsed by the jellied mess it contained, and then followed the hand to the arm to the face, and blinked when he saw his father’s eyes, alive and amused.

The woman was young and visibly pregnant, naked and unveiled. "You look like my daughter," she said, and sat back comfortably, at ease on the ground, and unconcerned to be alone in a tent with him. She gave the bowl another little push.

He turned his head away, mouth twisting with revulsion, but heard the woman’s voice again. "The life you knew is over. You must live in a new way," she said. "Before, everything was decided. Now you must make choices." She spoke in K’San but its precision was polluted by Ruanja’s slurred vowels—a rural domestic’s grating accent. "You may choose to hate the necessity of choosing, or you may value it. Each choice has consequences, so you must choose wisely."

He stared at her and, infuriatingly, she smiled. "For the present, of course, you need only choose between eating this awful-looking stuff or remaining very, very hungry."

He sat up straighter and reached for the bowl, as she knew he would. He was, after all, a normal boy, constantly hungry under the best of circumstances and starving now. He lifted the bowl to his mouth, but reared back from the unfamiliar smell; then tipped it down his throat in ravenous, almost sobbing gulps.

"Good," she said, pleased as she watched him.

"It’s not as bad as I thought it would be," he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

"Think hard about what you just said," she advised. "My experience is that many things are not as bad as I thought they would be." The smell of anger filled the tent, but she did not retract her use of the dominant pronoun in his presence. "Here, each of us makes choices, so each of us must learn to be a sovereign soul: I think, I decide. This is no insult to you or anyone else." She gestured again toward the emptied bowl. "It’s better with salt," she informed him prosaically, "but we don’t have any salt right now."

"What was it?"

"Are you sure that you choose to know?" she asked, ears wide, his father’s eyes entertained. He hesitated, but lifted his chin. "Kha’ani embryos," she told him.

Horrified, his own ears flattened and he nearly vomited, but then he glanced back into those eyes and swallowed hard.

"Good," she said again. "Do you understand? Everything is a choice, even what you eat. Especially what you eat!" She stood and looked down at him, her face a slender version of his own—the Kitheri bloodline visibly governing this generation as it had the last. "Here Jana’ata eat no Runa. In this settlement, we do not repay life with death. So. Choose. Will you live at the expense of others or will you do what you must to live another way?" And permitting him to think for himself, she turned and left the tent.

HE WAS YOUNG AND SOUND, AND HIS FEET HEALED MORE QUICKLY THAN the women’s. Within a day or two, he was able to leave the tent and hobble a little distance up the nearest foothill to a vantage from which he could see the shards and remnants of a civilization. For a few days, solitary and silent, he watched the people in this high, chilly valley. Burning with disgrace, writhing at their debasement, he sought out his foster mother, and raged and raged. She listened without comment until he was done, and then gestured for him to sit by her.

"Do you know what I miss most?" Suukmel Chirot u Vaadai asked serenely. "Table manners." Rukuei pulled away from her embrace to gape at her. Suukmel smiled, and drew him close again. "No one knows how to eat this stuff properly. I’ve spilled kha’ani egglings on myself three times already. How can one maintain any dignity with albumin all over one’s fur? No wonder Ha’anala goes naked!"

Suukmel said this to amuse Rukuei and the absurdity worked, but Taksayu was unbending. "That person goes about naked because she doesn’t know any better," the Runao sniffed from a nest in the corner. "Raised in the wilderness by foreigners and feral Runa!"

Rukuei hardly knew what to think about that extraordinary statement, which didn’t prevent him from having an opinion. "It is unendurable that a Jana’ata woman should go about utterly unclothed," he declared, "no matter how degraded her upbringing."

"She says that we Jana’ata must learn to live only by our own devices. It may be necessary for us to become completely independent of the Runa, although she herself hopes this shall not come to pass, and does what she can to prevent it," Suukmel informed them. Rukuei and Taksayu both stared. "She’s trying to learn to weave with a foot loom, but she hasn’t managed it yet, and until then, she goes naked as she was bom—"

"Can you imagine!" Taksayu cried. "Jana’ata weaving!"

"Also, she says she simply doesn’t like clothes," Suukmel continued. "But she knows it upsets the rest of us, and she doesn’t like to make a fierno."

"What is a fierno?" Rukuei demanded irritably, the Ruanja word suddenly infuriating him. Of all the differences he had to face among these strangers, the bastardization of language was the most distressing. How can anything make sense if the words you think with are disordered and imprecise? he cried inwardly.

"I asked her that," Suukmel said comfortably. "Fierno means ’a thunderhead’ but the phrase implies being the cause of a big storm. Making a fuss." Rukuei grunted. "It is a nice image," Suukmel offered, knowing Rukuei well. "I like the phrase. It reminds me of my lord husband, prowling the courtyard after some tedious meeting, working himself into a fierno—"

She stopped abruptly, rain falling into her heart. The tent suddenly felt cramped and confining, too filled with people, even though she had only Taksayu and Rukuei with her.

"Perhaps," she said, "walking would be good for me." Taksayu’s ears dropped, and Rukuei looked dubious. "Yes," Suukmel said then, certain because they doubted both her wisdom and her propriety. "Yes, I should like to try a walk."

"HOW CAN THIS HA’ANALA BE MY COUSIN?" RUKUEI ASKED SUUKMEL SEVERAL mornings later, as they broke their fast with a strange but not unpleasant pate provided by the Laaks household. "My father had no brother or sister. And how can that foreigner be Shetri’s brother-in-law?"

There was a momentary stiffening. "Isaac is certainly unusual, but he sings beautifully, don’t you agree?"

The change of subject did not go unnoticed. "Is it so awkward, what I have asked?"

"Awkward?" Suukmel repeated.

She had known this day would come, but had never anticipated that it would be in such circumstances. Pride of lineage was moderated among the unranked children of Hlavin’s harem, but Rukuei knew who his father was, if not what Hlavin had done to reach the paramountcy. Whose disgrace to reveal first? she asked herself. The father’s or the uncle’s? There are no innocents in this except the children of dead men: Ha’anala and Rukuei.

"I wonder if you would take me to your place on the hillside this morning?" she asked lightly, rising from a badly made cushion that was nonetheless fragrant with mountain moss. She moved to the tent opening, letting her eyes become accustomed to the light, looking up at the colorful shapes that she had initially taken for unusually designed city walls ringing the valley.

Rukuei stared up at her. "Is it worse than awkward?" he asked, getting to his feet as well.

"I believe with practice I shall learn to see things at a distance, instead of merely imagining them," she said, confirming his suspicions. "Shetri tells me those are not ramparts but mountains! He says it takes some six day’s constant climbing to reach the peaks. How far is it to the place you go to?"

"Far enough for privacy," Rukuei told her.

They left the tent and began the ascent, taking care with the loose rocks that made the climb a scramble. Suukmel coped with the disorientation by keeping her eyes down, not in submission but to focus on the relatively solid ground nearby. Glancing up every few moments, she tried to estimate the size of things, but she was constantly surprised when she found some «tree» was only a shrub much nearer than she had thought, or when a bright color she believed to be some far-off person’s cloak suddenly took flight and darted into the thin air.

"Things are not always what they seem," she said aloud, as Rukuei showed her how to sit on a fallen tupa’s trunk. As she caught her breath, she looked out over the valley, trying to reconcile what her eyes told her with what she knew was there. "The tents look lovely in this light, don’t they? Like jewels in the sun. Which is real, I wonder? The beauty of the tents at a distance or—"

"The wretchedness they conceal," Rukuei finished for her, and settled himself. "Tell me what is so terrible that it must be heard up here, my lady."

It seemed at first some epic poem of heroes and monsters, of prisons and escapes, of triumph and tragedy. She told of the crushing sameness of unvarying tradition, of a world in which nothing mattered but what had been decided uncounted generations earlier. And she tried to explain the despair of knowing that nothing could change, the fear that something would: the terror of the unknown and the secret wish for it, in so many hearts.

Caught up in this romance, it was a long time before Rukuei realized that the nameless one was Supaari VaGayjur; that this traitor was his own uncle by marriage, having sired a daughter out of Jholaa Kitheri; that this daughter was now grown and pregnant with her second child by Shetri Laaks; that Ha’anala’s eyes were like his own because they shared a grand-sire. It was even longer before he could take in what Suukmel told of how Hlavin Kitheri had seized the paramountcy—

"Are you saying that my father killed them?" Rukuei cried. "Killed them all? His own kin?" He stood and strode away, not tall but gangling. So young, Suukmel thought. So young…. "I don’t believe you!" he insisted, sweeping out a circle of defense. "This is impossible. He would never have—"

"He did. He did, beloved! Try to understand!" she cried, as desperate as he. "Your father was like lightning in the night—beautiful and dangerous and sudden. They forced it on him! They were killing him! They had shut him up behind walls greater than those mountains," she said, waving her arm at the huge stone crags she only half understood. "They had silenced him, and he was dying, Rukuei! He was dying of the silence! Think of the music he wrote for you and the other children! Hear it in your heart! Know that it would have died in him if he hadn’t—"

Rukuei sank to the ground like the child he was. The constant wind sweeping the valley was loud in their ears, and brought the shrieking laughter of small children chasing one another through the village of tents, the calls of women, the songs of men, the ordinary bustle of a village going about the tasks of everyday life. Deaf to this cheerful noise, he saw in the distance what Suukmel was blind to: destitution, bare subsistence, naked poverty, the words for which did not yet exist in any Rakhati language because such conditions had never before existed on Rakhat.

"How?" he cried. "How could it have come to this?" Suukmel went to him and knelt at his side. He wrenched away, ashamed and angry, and stood again on feet still swollen and sore, and left his foster mother without a glance, for he was his father’s son and felt the charge build within him and looked now only for someone to strike. Striding down the shattered stone of the hillside, heedless of the falls he took and the cuts he added to his battered young body, he followed the sound of his cousin’s voice to a small crowd of Runa and Jana’ata, her odd accent notable among the gabble as she helped build a barrier—who knew why—across a small swift river that cut through the valley center.