The Call of Earth: 2 (Homecoming) (37 page)

“Then instead of talking to each other,” said Nafai, “and instead of getting resentful about it, perhaps we should listen. Perhaps the Oversoul is only waiting for us to spare it some scrap of our attention to tell us what’s going on.”

“I’ll wait then,” said Rasa. “But this better be a good plan.”

They waited, all three with their own questions in their hearts.

From the look on Nafai’s and Luet’s faces, they received their answer first. And as Rasa waited, longer and longer, she realized that she would get no answer at all.

“Did you hear?” asked Nafai.

“Nothing,” said Rasa. “Nothing at all.”

“Perhaps you’re too angry with the Oversoul to hear anything from her,” said Luet.

“Or perhaps she’s punishing me,” said Rasa. “Spiteful machine! What did she have to say?”

Nafai and Luet glanced at each other. So the news wasn’t good.

“The Oversoul isn’t exactly in control of this,” said Luet finally.

“It’s my fault,” said Nafai. “My going to the general put things at least a day ahead of schedule. He was already planning to marry one of them, but he would have studied it for another day at least.”

“A day! Would that have made so much difference?”

“The Oversoul isn’t sure that she can bring off her best plan, so quickly,” said Luet. “But we can’t blame Nafai for it, either. Moozh is impetuous and brilliant and he might have done it this quickly without Nafai’s . . .”

“Stupidity,” offered Nafai.

“Boldness,” said Luet.

“So we’re condemned to stay here as Moozh’s tools?” asked Rasa. “Well, he could hardly misuse us more carelessly than the Oversoul has.”

“Mother,” said Nafai, and his tone was rather sharp. “The Oversoul has not misused us. Whether Hushidh marries Moozh or not, we will still take our journey. If she does end up as Moozh’s wife, then she’ll use her influence to set us free—he’ll have no need for us once his position in the city is secured.”

“Us?”
asked Rasa. “Set
us
free?”

“All of us that we already planned for the journey, even Shedemei.”

“And what about Hushidh?” asked Rasa.

“That’s what the Oversoul can’t do,” said Luet. “If she can’t prevent the wedding, then Hushidh will stay.”

“I will hate the Oversoul forever,” said Rasa. “If she does this to sweet Hushidh, then I’ll never serve the Oversoul again. Do you hear me?”

“Calm yourself, Mother,” said Nafai. “If Hushidh had refused him, then I would have agreed to be consul, and it would have been Luet and I who stayed behind. One way or another, it was going to happen.”

“Is that supposed to comfort me?” Rasa asked bitterly.

“Comfort
you?”
asked Luet. “Comfort
you,
Lady Rasa? Hushidh is my sister, my only kin—you’ll have all the children you ever bore with you,
and
your husband. What are you losing, compared with what I’m going to lose? Yet do you see me weeping?”

“You
should
be weeping,” said Rasa.

“All the way through the desert I’ll do my weeping,” said Luet. “But for now we have very few hours to prepare.”

“Oh, am I supposed to teach you the ceremony?”

“That will take five minutes,” said Luet, “and the priestesses will help me anyway. The time we have must be spent in packing for the journey.”

“The
journey,”
said Rasa bitterly.

“We must have everything ready so it can be loaded onto camels in five minutes,” said Luet. “Isn’t that so, Nafai?”

“There’s still a chance that all will work well,” said Nafai. “Mother, now is not the time for you to give up. All my life, you’ve held firm no matter what the provocation. Are you collapsing now, when we need you most to bring the others into line?”

“Do you expect
us
to get Sevet and Vas, Kokor and Obring to pack up for a desert journey?” asked Luet.

“Do you think Elemak and Mebbekew will take these instructions from
me?”
asked Nafai.

Rasa dried her eyes. “You ask too much of me,” said Rasa. “I’m not as young as you. I’m not as resilient.”

“You can bend as much as you need to,” said Luet. “Now please, tell us what to do.”

So Rasa swallowed, for now, her grief, and stepped back into her old familiar role. Within minutes the whole house was set in motion, the servants packing and preparing, the clerk drafting letters of recommendation for every teacher who would be left behind, and reports on the progress of every pupil, so that they could all find new schools easily after Rasa left and the school was closed.

Then Rasa walked the long corridor to Elemak’s bridal chamber, to begin the grueling process of informing the reluctant travelers that they
would
attend the wedding, since soldiers would be marching them there, and they
would
prepare for a desert journey, since for some reason the Oversoul had decided that they
would not have suffered enough until they were out among the scorpions.

This was hardly the way Elemak would have wanted to spend the morning after his wedding. It was supposed to be a leisurely time of dozing and lovemaking, talking and teasing. Instead it had been a flurry of preparations—hopelessly inadequate preparations, too, since they were supposedly preparing for a desert journey and yet had neither camels nor tents nor supplies. And it was disturbing how badly Eiadh had adjusted to the situation. Where Mebbekew’s Dol was immediately cooperative—more so than Meb himself, the slug— Eiadh kept wasting Elemak’s time with protests and arguments. Couldn’t we stay behind and join them later? Why do
we
have to leave just because Aunt Rasa is under arrest?

Finally Elemak had sent Eiadh to Luet and Nafai to get her questions answered while he supervised the packing, to eliminate needless clothing—which meant bitter arguments with Rasa’s daughter Kokor, who could not understand why her light and provocative little frocks were not going to be particularly useful out on the desert. Finally he had blown up, in front of her sister Sevet and both their husbands, and said, “Listen, Kokor, the only man you’re going to be able to have out there is your husband, and when you want to seduce
him,
you can take your clothes
off.”
With that he picked up her favorite dress and tore it down the middle. Of course she screamed and wept—but he saw her later, magnanimously giving away all her favorite gowns—or perhaps trading them for more practical clothing, since it was likely that Kokor had owned nothing serviceable at all.

If the ordeal of packing had not been enough, there was the mortifying passage through the city. True, the soldiers had done a fair job of being discreet—no solid phalanx of brutish men marching in step. But they were still Gorayni soldiers, and so passersby—most of them also heading for the Orchestra—cleared a space around them and then gawked at them as they passed. “They look at us like we’re criminals,” Eiadh said. But Elemak reassured her that most bystanders probably assumed they were guests of honor with a military escort, which made Eiadh preen. It bothered Elemak just a little, in the back of his mind, that Eidah was so childish. Hadn’t Father warned him that young wives, while they had sleeker, lighter bodies, also had lighter minds? Eiadh was simply young; Elemak could hardly expect her to take serious matters seriously, or even to understand what was serious in the first place.

Now they sat in places of honor, not up among the benches on the upward slopes of the amphitheatre, but down on the Orchestra itself, to the righthand side of the low platform that had been erected in the center for the ceremony itself. They were the bride’s party; on the other side, the groom’s party consisted of many members of the city council, along with officers of the Basilican guard and a few—only a handful—of Gorayni officers. There was no sign of Gorayni domination here. Not that there needed to be. Elemak knew that there were plenty of Gorayni soldiers and Basilican guards discreetly out of sight, but close enough to intervene if something unexpected should happen. If, for instance, some assassin or other curiosity-seeker should attempt to cross the open space between the benches and the wedding parties around the platform, he would find himself sporting a new arrow somewhere in his body,
from one of the archers in the prompters’ and musicians’ boxes.

How quickly things change, thought Elemak. Only a few weeks ago I came home from a successful caravan, imagining that I was ready to take my place as a man in the affairs of Basilica. Gaballufix seemed to be the most powerful man in the world to me then, and my future as the Wetchik’s heir and Gabya’s brother seemed bright indeed. Since then nothing had stayed the same for two days at a time. A week ago, dehydrating mind and body on the desert, would he have believed he might be married to Eiadh in Rasa’s house not a week thence? And even last night, when he and Eiadh had been the central figures in the wedding ceremony, could he have imagined that at noon the next day, instead of Nafai and Luet being the childish, pathetic hangers-on at Elemak’s wedding, they would now sit on the platform itself, where Luet would perform the ceremony and Nafai would stand as General Moozh’s sponsor?

Nafai! A fourteen-year-old-boy! And General Moozh had asked
him
to stand as his sponsor for citizenship in Basilica, offering him to Hushidh as if Nafai were some important figure in the city. Well, he
was
an important figure—but only as the husband of the waterseer. Nobody could possibly think that he deserved any such honor in and of himself.

Waterseer, raveler . . . Elemak had never paid much heed to such things. It was all priestcraft, a profitable business but one he didn’t have much patience with. Like the foolish dream that Elemak had had out on the desert—it was such an easy matter to turn a meaningless dream into a plan of action, because of the gullible fools who believed that the Oversoul was some noble being instead of a mere computer program responsible for pressing data and documents from city to city by satellite.
Even Nafai himself was saying that the Oversoul was just a computer, and yet he and Luet and Hushidh and Rasa were all full of tales about how the Oversoul was trying to arrange things so the marriage wouldn’t take place and they would all end up out on the desert, ready for the journey, before the day was over. What, could a computer program make camels appear out of nothing? Make tents rise up out of the dust? Turn rocks and sand into cheeses and grain?

“Doesn’t he look brave and fine?” asked Eiadh.

Elemak turned to her. “Who? Is General Moozh here?”

“I mean your brother, silly. Look.”

Elemak looked toward the platform and did not think Nafai looked particularly brave or fine. In fact, he looked silly, all dressed up like a boy pretending to be a man.

“I can hardly believe he would walk right up to one of the Gorayni soldiers,” said Eiadh. “And go speak to General Vozmuzhalnoy Vozmozhno himself—while everyone was still asleep!”

“What was brave about that? It was dangerous and foolish, and look what it led to—Hushidh having to marry the man.”

Eiadh looked at him in bafflement, “Elya, she’s marrying the most powerful man in the world! And Nafai will stand as his sponsor.”

“Only because he’s married to the waterseer.”

Eiadh sighed. “She
is
such a plain little thing. But those dreams—I’ve tried to have dreams myself, but no one takes them seriously. I had the strangest dream last night, in fact. A hairy flying monkey with ugly teeth was throwing doo-doo on me, and a giant rat with a bow and arrow shot him out of the sky—can you believe
anything so silly? Why can’t
I
have dreams from the Oversoul, can you tell me that?”

Elemak was hardly listening. Instead he was thinking of how Eiadh had clearly been envious because Hushidh was marrying the most powerful man in the world. And how she had admired Nafai for his damnable cheek, in going out and accosting General Moozh in the middle of the night. What could he possibly have accomplished, except to infuriate the man? Pure stupid luck that it had ended up with Nafai on that platform. But it galled Elemak all the same, that it was Nafai who was sitting there, with all the eyes of Basilica upon him. Nafai who was being whispered about, Nafai who would be seen as the husband of the waterseer, the brother-in-law of the raveler. And as Moozh installed himself as king—oh, yes, the official word for it would be
consul,
but it would
mean
the same—Nafai would be the brother-in-law of majesty and the husband of greatness and Elemak would be a desert trader. Oh, of course they would restore Father to his place as Wetchik, once Father realized that the Oversoul wasn’t going to be able to get anybody out of Basilica after all. And Elemak would again be his heir, but what would
that
title mean anymore? Worst of all would be the fact that he would receive his rank and his future back as a gift from
Nafai.
It made him seethe inside.

“Nafai is so
impetuous,”
said Eiadh. “Aren’t you proud of him?”

Couldn’t she stop talking about him? Until this morning, Elemak had known that Eiadh was the finest marriage a man could make for himself in this city. But now he realized that in the back of his mind he had really been thinking that she was the finest
first
marriage a
young
man could make. Someday he would need a real wife, a consort, and there was no reason to think that
Eiadh would grow up into such a one. She would probably always be shallow and frivolous, the very thing that he had found so endearing. Last night when she had sung to him, her throaty voice full of rehearsed passion, he had thought he could listen to her sing forever. Now he looked at the platform and realized that it was Nafai, after all, who had made a marriage that would be worth having thirty years from now.

Well, fine, thought Elemak. Since we
won’t
get away from Basilica, I’ll keep Eiadh for a couple of years and then gently ease her away. Who knows? Luet may not stay with Nafai. When she gets older she may begin to wish for a
strong
man beside her. We can look back on these first marriages as childish phases we went through in our youth. Then
I
will be the brother-in-law of the consul.