Treason (15 page)

I was surprised. “You do things I can’t dream of doing.”

“Together,” he said. “Alone we aren’t as strong as you.”

“Then make yourselves like I am.”

“There are secrets that the carbon chains can keep even from us.”

That was that. Yet it didn’t occur to me, not for weeks, that this gave me an advantage that would set me free. For the simple reason that I didn’t want to be free of them.

When I spoke to the rock, I learned many things that brought me to myself. The wars were continuing, and as I learned to endure the agony of the many deaths, I also learned to study the wars and see where the battles were being fought. When I talked to the rock, the earth’s skin became my skin, and I learned to feel where the cries were coming from. The battles at first were on the plain between Allison and the headwaters of the Rebel River. Then the battles moved to the hill country of Robles, and northwest to the confluence of the Myron and the Rebel where the Rebel River ceases to be called Swoop and begins to be called Mueller. And then the war was in Wizer, a land my father had conquered, and that meant that the Nkumai had swept all before them and were at the borders of my country.

It didn’t matter now that I knew the secret of the Nkumai’s iron. It didn’t matter that my father had sent me away and my brother, Dinte, wanted to kill me. I was no longer a radical regenerative, and I was twice the soldier my father was and by far a better general than Dinte. I was needed, if my Family was to endure.

At first the thought of going to war was repugnant to me, but my Family’s need tore at me, and I began to ask the rock. I asked whether one life could be more important than another, and the rock said no. I asked whether it was right to end one life, if, by ending it, many others could be saved. The rock said yes. And I asked if loyalty meant anything to the forces of the universe, and the rock wept.

Loyalty? What but loyalty made the rock respond to the call of the Schwartzes? The earth understood trust, and I asked if it was good for me to go back and lead my Family. And the rock said yes.

This conversation was not the product of one night’s sleep under the sand, however. It took many nights and many sleeps, and the months passed before I knew that I could go home; that I must go home.

“You can’t go home,” said the spokesman.

“The rock spoke to me and told me I should go.”

“The rock told you it was good for you to go. Good for you. Good for your family. But not good for us.”

“Good for the earth.”

“The blood soaks into the earth the same no matter who wields the civilized tools,” said the spokesman. “If you go, it will be good and it will be bad. I can’t let you go,
we
can’t let you go; you’ve taken all we have to teach and now you’ll use it to destroy and kill in the name of loyalty.”

“I swear I’ll never use what you’ve taught me to kill.”

“If you kill, you’ll use what we taught you.”

“Never.”

“Because now every man who dies at your hand will scream into your soul forever, Lanik.”

It was something to give me pause.

When the warfare moved to the lowlands of Cramer, not three hundred kilometers from Mueller-on-the-River, the capital, I could wait no longer. Helmut and I were playing in the pinnacles of a knife-like ridge of mountains, doing acrobatics a thousand meters above the sand, when I pulled the rock out from under him and he fell.

The rock caught him on a ledge a hundred meters below me and far above the desert.

“You bastard!” he shouted.

“I have to!” I shouted back. “If you warn the council, they can stop me!”

“You said you loved me!”

I did. I do. But I said nothing. He tried to crawl up the rock. But I forbade the rock to hold him, and I was stronger. He tried to make handholds in the rock. But I was stronger. He tried to throw himself from the ledge to the sand below, but the rock would not let him jump because I said so. And I was stronger.

The ridge pointed northwest, and I went northwest. When it ended, I plunged down into the sand, and ran all day and all night, forbidding my body to sleep. I went by the fastest way any Schwartz could travel, and because none was faster than I, no pursuit could overtake me.

It took eight days. I slept while running, for my mind had to have sleep even when my body didn’t. At last I reached a place where clouds skitted through the sky and where occasional clumps of grass poked from crevasses in rocks, and I was out of Schwartz. It should have been a relief, and I was glad enough to see green instead of the endless yellows and greys and browns of the desert, but I regretted leaving, so much that I stopped and turned around and almost started back.

I remembered my father’s face. I remembered him saying, “Lanik, I wish to God there were something I could do.” I heard his voice plead, “The body is ruined. Will the mind still serve me? Will the man still love his father?”

Yes, you land-hungry bastard, I thought. You’re up against something you’re no match for. And I’ll come. I’m coming.

I turned back around and headed north into the high country of Sill.

The land had been wasted by war.

Burnt-over fields were accented by the shells of houses and piles of ashes that had once been humbler huts. I walked kilometers of ruin, in what had to be marginal farmland at best, this close to the desert. What purpose could be served by such destruction? No great military objectives lay nearby. All it could achieve was the starvation of the people. The land had been murdered. Tortured.

Yet I knew the people of Nkumai (as well as anyone could know them in their endless intertwining lies) and such destruction wasn’t in their nature, not the people who stood at the lips of their treehouses and sang the morning. Even their endless, fumbling bureaucracy and the hypocritical denial that they bought and sold for profit—these were more symptoms of good intention than of deep-seated corruption. Besides, greed would have left these fields intact. Only vicious, mindless hate could make someone want to destroy the land instead of conquering it.

But who could hate even the simple-mindedly violent people of Sill? My father had let them alone, even when he conquered their two neighbors, because for all their boisterous village life and boasting and raiding, they were ultimately harmless.

I got angrier the farther I walked.

At last I reached land that was watered by rivers and irrigation, and here there were people working to rebuild the canals. New houses were going up, makeshift homes to keep the rain off. I had lost track of seasons—the rains would be coming soon.

Only now did it occur to me that I was naked, and nudity was frowned on in this part of the world. The idea of clothing seemed foreign to me—I had been without it for a year, at least, ever since I fell from the birdnet in Nkumai. But how does a man get clothing when he has neither friends nor money, and people stare at him and avoid him when they see him coming?

The problem was solved for me. I slept, this time with body as well as mind, in the grass growing along the bank of the River Wong, and when I awoke three women were staring at me. I moved slowly, so as not to alarm them. “Greetings,” I said, and they nodded. So much for conversation, I thought. “I mean you no harm,” I said.

They nodded again. “We know.”

I guess in my unclothed condition it was no secret I wasn’t in the mood for rape. I couldn’t think what to say to them next, except the obvious. “I need clothing.”

They looked at each other in puzzlement.

“I don’t have any money,” I said, “but I can promise you I’ll pay you within a month.”

“Then you aren’t the Naked Man,” one of them murmured.

“Is there only one?” I asked.

“He walks through the fields from the desert. Some say he will take vengeance on our enemies.”

So I had been noticed, and word had spread. Not at all odd that such people would take the mysterious and make of it a solution to their problems. “I’m the one,” I said. “I came from Schwartz. I’m going to find the army that did all this.”

“Will you kill them?” whispered the youngest, who was far along in pregnancy.

“I will stop them from killing,” I promised, wondering if I really could. “But in the meantime, I need clothing. It’s time for me to dress.”

They nodded, and walked away. They were in no hurry, and in the gently rolling countryside they were soon out of sight. I plunged into the water to wait for them, and amused myself by lying on the bottom of the river, watching the fish. Everything was ravaged above the surface of the water, but in the slow current of the River Wong the fish never noticed.

I realized I had been underwater a long time, surfaced, and began breathing again. No sooner had I brought my head into the air than a woman nearby screamed, and answering shouts brought others on the run. Again I realized I had fallen into the trap of thinking and acting like a Schwartz. I had to stop doing things that other people couldn’t do.

“He was under there all this time,” the woman was saying to the two-score people who crowded around her, glancing frequently at me, where I stood in the water. “He was under there all the time and I was here for an hour, for a whole hour.”

“Nonsense,” I said. “I couldn’t have been under there for more than fifteen minutes.”

They looked at me with respect and awe (and not a little fear) and the pregnant woman held out an armful of clothing. I walked out of the water, and they stared at me, as if they expected something unusual. I almost laughed to remember the way the sailors on the Singer ship had reacted to the way I looked before the Schwartzes cured me. If they could see me now—in full possession of the sort of power the sailors had only imagined me to have before. Yet the way these people looked at me reminded me of my shyness about nudity when I was young and in Mueller. I dressed quickly, not waiting for my skin and hair to dry.

“Thank you,” I said when I was dressed.

“We are honored,” said a man who seemed to be in charge—an old man. I realized that there were no men of arms-bearing age.

“Your sons are all off to war?”

“There is no war anymore,” the headman said.

The pregnant woman agreed, soberly. “For Sill, there is no war.”

“There is no Sill,” said the headman. “We’re Nkumai now.”

I looked at them, all nodding in agreement. “Is that so? Then what enemy do you want me to kill?”

They were silent. Until one old woman cried out bitterly, with tears in her eyes. “Nkumai! Kill the Nkumai! For God’s sake, if you have any power at all—”

Others took up the cry. “Kill the Nkumai! For our sons, for our homes, for our land, kill the devils!”

I could hear the song of hate and death in their hearts, and I nodded softly and walked on.

“What’s your name!” the pregnant woman shouted after me.

I turned and called out, “Lanik Mueller.”

To my surprise, the crying and shouting died quickly. Some looked terror-stricken. Some wrinkled up their face in distaste, as if I had made some obscene joke. Other faces simply froze, expressionless. Then they all silently left me and went back to their homes. Only the old woman addressed any kind of message to me. She spat in the dirt.

It could only have been my name that turned them from friendship and hope to hatred and fear. But what could my name mean in a place like this? In Mueller my name had been well enough known, being the heir apparent, but why should my name be familiar in Sill? I’d been gone for a year, throughout the whole war. I pondered the question as I headed north again, bearing a little west, on my way to Mueller-on-the-River. Could Dinte have hated me so much he spread stories about me as a traitor? Or blamed some atrocity on me? Impossible to believe that Father would let him do such a thing. Had I been gone so long that Father was no longer the Mueller? I could make no sense of it.

There were patches here and there that the Nkumai had missed, places where the green was deep and the harvest would be good enough; the people would not starve. As I ran, however, I saw no one. Had the word spread ahead of me? Were people avoiding the journey of the Naked Man? Or was it the name of Lanik Mueller they shied from? Neither seemed impossible. Fast as I was traveling, rumors could pass me; how else could the survivors of Sill have heard tales of the Naked Man, when I had traveled all day and most of the night? The stories of Rumor as an evil bird that flies faster than sound must be true.

It was a good thing I didn’t get hungry. As I passed wheatfields and vegetable gardens my mouth remembered the taste and I wished for the food, but I had no need for it and didn’t stop. Besides, if I
had
been hungry, no one was there to share food with me, and I was not yet ready to be a thief in a land where there would be little enough to eat this year.

The River Sill was two days behind me when I finally saw another person. Or persons. I felt the pounding of hooves before I saw them. They were coming from the north, from Mueller. And when they came into sight, I recognized the banner of the Army of the East. The commander would be Mancik, my godfather.

But Mancik wasn’t with them, though the commander’s banner was there; thus I knew that he had died. If I’d had a knife, I would have given him grief, but I had no weapon, and after a few moments I had other things on my mind.

I didn’t know the commander, nor did I know the soldiers who leapt from their horses and bound me. I consented to the binding partly because I was confused and partly because I was outnumbered. There’s a limit to how many body parts even a reformed radical regenerative can renew. And they looked willing to take me apart.

“I’m told to bring you to the capital alive,” said the commander.

“Then I won’t hinder you,” I answered. “That’s where I was going.”

This apparently made them angry. Two soldiers struck me at once, and I was dazed for a moment. “I’m Lanik Mueller,” I said, spitting out the words, “and I won’t be treated like this!”

The commander looked at me coldly. “We know who you are, and after the way you’ve treated this land, any way we treated you would be far kinder than you deserve.” He looked for a moment, grimly, across the wasted fields. “Of all the traitors who have ever lived, Lanik Mueller, there must be a special place in hell reserved for you.”