Earthfall (Homecoming) (29 page)

“Luetigo means that you’re their aunt,” said Oykib. “Remember, you adopted them first. The one on the bed—puh-
to
—”

“pTo,” Chveya corrected him.

“The injured guy,” said Oykib. “He’s very grateful that after you showed them the honor of taking them to be your nephews, you than showed them the even greater honor of letting them be your fathers. It’s a big deal to them. And I think it’s permanent.”

“Yes,” said Hushidh. “You see it, too, don’t you, Chveya?”

“They’ve taken you into their lives, Mother,” said Chveya. “You’re family. Tied in with them like the way you’re tied to me. They aren’t joking. It’s not just a formality.”

“They think,” said Oykib, “that it means that all the Old Ones will be friends with the—people, the angels—forever.”

“Good,” said Nafai. “I think we’re off to a very good start. Now let’s give the two of them time alone. Lock up the medicine, Shedya, and let’s get out of here for a few hours.”

“He won’t like the pain.”

“Can you give him something that leaves him conscious?”

“Yes,” said Shedemei. “But will his twin let me do it?”

Poto wasn’t happy about it. But when Luet bowed before him, both hands out in supplication, he seemed to understand that no harm was meant by the tool in Shedemei’s hand. She applied it to pTo’s shank, and then they all withdrew from the room.

“They trust us,” said pTo.

“Or else we’re both prisoners,” said Poto.

“Test them, then. Try to leave. They’ll let you go, I know it.”

“I won’t leave until you can leave with me.”

“Then we
are
prisoners. But it is my injury that binds us here, and not the Old Ones.”

Poto was back on the bed now, examining his otherself’s wounds. “pTo,” he said, his voice filled with wonder. “The tear in your wing—it’s healing.”

“That can’t be,” said pTo. “Tornwing never heals. Tornwing is devil’s meat.”

“But it
is
true. The sides of the tear have been joined together, and a scar is forming between them, just like on fur skin. The Old Ones have the power to make leather heal.”

“Oh, Poto. Who can say now that it was wrong for me to come down to the Old Ones?”

“Boboi can,” said Poto wryly.

“What do
you
say?” asked pTo.

“I say that my otherself led the way. I say that without your courage and daring and disobedience, the people would have remained strangers to the Old Ones. But now the Old Ones are our friends. And one of them is our aunt, and we are her fathers.”

For Elemak, learning the language of the diggers was like a return to his youth, to the days when he braved the dangers of the road in order to earn his rightful place as his father’s heir. In those days he was quick with languages, picking them up from men he hired, from guides, from hosts in the cities he visited. The first few languages took real effort, but after a while he began to find regularities, patterns in them. Bozhotz was like Cilme except that all
B
sounds became
P
sounds, and long vowels became diphthongs with terminal
U
’s. Just set your mouth right, be careful of a few words that didn’t mean the same thing in the different languages—
olpoic
does not mean
home
in Bozhotz, so don’t ask a man to take you to his olpoic if you don’t want to get stabbed—and you could get along. After long enough on the road, it became so easy that, while Elemak took pride in his ability with language, he took little interest in it.

Now he was discredited as his father’s heir, he would never be free to roam the world again—and even if he were, there’d be no place worth going—his wife had repudiated him in front of the entire human population of this planet, and all that was left to him was to learn the language of some overgrown underground rodents.

But that was all right. Even learning the rudiments of it from Oykib was all right. After all, he might be Nafai’s pet brother, but he wasn’t actually Nafai himself. In fact, if things had worked out differently, Oykib might at last have been the brother that Issib would have been, if he hadn’t been crippled. Smart, but not smart-mouthed; obedient, but willing to take the initiative; courageous but not foolish; confident but not boastful. He liked Oykib. He wished that he couldn’t tell how obviously Oykib distrusted and feared him. Well, there was that bit about throwing him around a little in the library back on the ship. A matter of temper. No use trying to explain to him that it was Nafai that Elemak was angry at, Nafai’s betrayal. No use trying to suck up to him, either, explaining that if once, just once, Nafai had shown a sign of being like Oykib, they would have been friends. It was enough to learn the language from him, to help him puzzle out the hard bits, to search for the rules and patterns.

Because there
were
rules and patterns. Nothing from the languages of Harmony applied, of course, because digger language had evolved on its own, without human antecedents. But there were still constants in language. Ways of expressing time so that language could convey past and present and future, cause and effect, motive and intention. Actors and actions forced every language to develop, after a fashion, nouns and verbs. And quite quickly—almost as quickly as when Elemak was young—he caught on to the
feel
of the language, the music of it. When they went to the forest edge to converse with the observers who watched there, Elemak could see that they liked the way he talked, liked the sound of his voice, the fact that one of the gods could handle digger speech.

Elemak could see that Oykib was a little jealous. After all, he had begun as the teacher, and now, after a few weeks, it was Elemak who was teaching, if not the meanings of things, then the grammar and pronunciation, the idiomatic usage. When could Oykib have developed an ear for such things? This was his first foreign language, and Elemak’s fiftieth. To Oykib’s credit, though, he said nothing but praise for Elemak’s ability, and there was no hint of Oykib resisting the change in their relationship or trying to get out of teaching Elemak anymore. If only Nafai had had such self-control….

The time came at last, however, when he felt confident enough to try to communicate with the hostages on the ship. Four of the original nine had already been let go—the soldiers who had been prepared, at the war king’s command, to kill the kidnappers. But the four kidnappers remained, and, most important of all, Fusum, the son of the blood king, the man who planned it all. “I want him rehabilitated,” said Volemak. “I want him to be the one who carries human culture to the diggers, because he was the one who tried to destroy us. His friendship is the friendship that matters most.”

So Elemak would make friends with him. “But I’ll do it my way, Father, or not at all.”

“What way is that?”

“Fusum is a man of violence and anger, Father,” Elemak said.

“So we must teach him another way.”

“First we must establish who is the teacher,” said Elemak. “Then we can set about teaching him another way to live.”

Volemak had his doubts, but finally he gave in. “No harm to him, though, Elya,” said Volemak. “Nothing to make the enmity between him and us worse than it already is.”

So Elemak wouldn’t hurt him. Not permanently, anyway. And in exchange for that promise, he had a free hand in every other way. A free hand, and no observers.

Except that at first he would only be able to meet with Fusum and the other diggers inside the ship, where he would be watched by the computer they still called the Oversoul, even though he hadn’t even a tiny fraction of the power the real Oversoul exercised back on Harmony. Well, let the machine watch. Let it make its reports to Volemak and Issib and Nafai. There’d be no secrets. Besides, Nyef and Issya were busy worrying about their little angel twins. Nasty little creatures. Bones like twigs. But they were so pretty when they flew, and they had made nice-nice with Nafai’s bitch so now they were all family. Naturally Nafai was too stupid to realize that it does no good to ally yourself with weakness. The angels were useless. Skymeat, the diggers called them. As far as Elemak could figure, the only reason the angels weren’t wiped out by now was that the diggers wanted to keep a steady supply of their favorite dish. Sentient casserole, that’s all the angels were, stew on the wing, and
those
were the ones that Nafai and Issib were going to befriend.

Please, Father,
don’t
make me stay down here and make friends with the strongest, most courageous and self-willed of the strong, aggressive diggers! Elemak almost laughed out loud, sometimes, thinking about how Father’s clever maneuvering to try to create peace was setting up a future in which it was Elemak who was the expert on the only creatures of Earth that were worth knowing, while Nafai’s expertise pertained to their worthless, witless, boneless prey.

Elemak told Oykib first. “I’m going to start working with the hostages now. I’ll want to meet with you every day and compare what I’ve learned about the language and culture from them with the things you’ve learned from the free diggers down here.”

Oykib accepted that, and never even hinted that he might want to go with Elemak into the ship to work with the hostages. A good boy, a marvelous boy.

Then Elemak went to Shedemei. “Wake up the four kidnappers first,” he said. “I want to practice with them for a while. Learn from them, hear them talking to each other, in circumstances where I’m in control so they can’t just take off into the brush when the questions get hard.”

“They’re very strong,” said Shedemei. “Stronger than you might think.”

“But I think they’re very strong,” said Elemak. “So I don’t think I’ll be surprised.”

“I’m just saying you might not want to be alone,” she said.

“And I’m just saying that I might not want to give them the slightest hint that I fear them,” said Elemak. “I’ve handled men more dangerous than this—men from cultures I didn’t know anything about until they showed me by their actions. It’s my field of study. I don’t look over your shoulder on the genetics thing, do I?”

Shamed, Shedemei awoke the four kidnappers one at a time. Elemak made it a point to be the first face they saw when they woke up. He also made it a point to handle them roughly and constantly. They felt his grip on their shoulders as they were propelled along the corridors of the ship. By their ankles he pushed each one ahead of him up the ladderway to the deck of the ship that he would use as his school, his negotiating table, his prison.

Four weeks he spent with them, learning all he could. New vocabulary every day, of course, and more and more complex rules of grammar, which he scrupulously shared with Oykib every night when the diggers were locked down. But also he learned the culture, the way things worked in the underground city. How the blood king was the holy one, who gave boys the passage into young manhood. The blood king also marked the feast of the skymeat babies, taking care to assign much credit to the men with good clean kills, and most credit of all to those who brought their prey home alive, crippled but not bleeding. Thus the war king trained the young men in fighting, stalking, killing; chose their officers; led them against prey both large and small; but it was the blood king who conferred all honors, the blood king who chose which men were great and which were nothing.

Mufruzhuuzh had been a great war king, but there were men who said that his mistake was marrying Emeezem. Not that he had a choice, of course. He was forced into it. And it wasn’t his fault that because of her dreams and voices she was made deep mother, master of the underground city. But her very strength had weakened him; he deferred to her too much, listened to her when he should have been listening to his men. It left a vacuum.

Fusum’s father, Shosseemem, should have filled that vacuum. He should have stepped in and helped the men feel their strength instead of letting Emeezem’s dominance leach it away. But Shosseemem was as immobilized by Emeezem’s visions as Mufruzhuuzh was. After all, she had said that the Untouched God was coming from the sky, and he came. They saw him among the undergods and demigods, saw how he moved with confidence and power, and they dared not doubt Emeezem’s authority even when she counseled weakness and passivity.

Watch, she said! Watch and wait! Learn before you act! Well, they had watched, they had waited, and then one day Fusum came to them and said, “Are you men or women? If you’re women, then where are the infants to suckle at your teats? And if you’re men, then why are you still waiting and watching, when you have seen where the babies are kept and how ill-watched they are? They have neither tunnels nor nests, so their babies are at ground level all the time. Why haven’t we taken them to the blood king?”

“Because the blood king doesn’t ask for them. And the war king doesn’t command us to act.”

“That is because they are ruled by women. But I am a man, and if I have no men to rule over me, then I will rule myself. These are not gods, even if they did come from the sky. Don’t they piss out their urine onto the ground just as we do? Don’t they eat and breathe and defecate as we do? What is there that is divine about them?”

“These are the lies that Fusum told us,” they insisted to Elemak. “He deceived us. If we had known that you truly are gods, as we do now, we would never have heeded him. Forgive us, mighty one, let not the wrath of your shining fathergod strike us down,” and so on and so on until Elemak wanted to strangle them for their weakness and disloyalty.

But he showed them no sign that he didn’t approve of their abject betrayal of Fusum. He let them believe that he wanted them to profess undying devotion to the shining god—to Nafai, the lying little bastard. And when he had learned from them all that he could learn, he told Volemak that he thought they were ready to come out of the ship to where Shedemei and Oykib, Chveya and Yasai and whoever else was trying to learn digger ways could work with them.

Oh, Volemak and all the others were so
happy
with the work that Elemak had done with them. They were so compliant, those four. So eager to please. So rich with information and wisdom. Their wives were sent for and came up to join the conversations; they all got along so well, the humans and the four who once had stolen a baby out of Elemak’s house. “I’m proud of you, Son,” said Volemak. “You took those who harmed you and your family, and made friends with them. It was a good work, and well done.”