Children of God

by Mary Doria Russell

  “Lord: to study the gifts of the tongue—to learn the songs of your people.”

  “Ha’an told me this!” Supaari cried, making sense at last of something Anne Edwards had once said. “You came because you heard the songs of our poets and admired them.” He stared at Sandoz: not an interpreter bred to trade, but a second-born who chose to make no children, and a poet who serves many! No wonder Sandoz had shown no interest in commerce! That was when everything fell into place—it seemed brilliant, at the time. “Would it please you to serve among the poets whose songs brought you here, Sandoz?”

  For the first time in a full season, the foreigner seemed to brighten. “Yes, lord. This would honor your most unworthy guest. Truly.”

  So Supaari set out to make this possible. The negotiations were delicate, intricate, delicious. In the end, he achieved a subtle and beautifully balanced transaction: the crowning achievement of a remarkably successful mercantile career. The foreigner Sandoz would be provided with a life of service to Hlavin Kitheri, the Reshtar of Galatna, whose diminishing poetic power might once more be lifted to greatness by inspiring encounters with the foreigner. The Reshtar’s younger sister, Jholaa, would be released from the enforced barrenness of her existence, as would Supaari himself, by their marriage and by the foundation of the new Darjan lineage with full breeding rights. Since Supaari VaGayjur’s own wealth would endow the Darjan, the Most Noble Patrimony of Inbrokar gained a third sept without any hint of unseemly inconstancy: an ideal multiplication of descent lines with no division of inheritance.

  Agreement reached, the transfer of custody took place. Sandoz appeared to settle into the Reshtar’s household reasonably well after his placement in Galatna Palace. Supaari himself had overseen the foreigner’s presentation to the Reshtar; he was, in fact, a little unnerved by the pathetic, trembling eagerness with which Sandoz invited Kitheri’s attentions. But the merchant left Galatna Palace elated over his own good fortune, and believing that he had done right by Sandoz.

  It wasn’t long before Supaari realized that there might have been some kind of misunderstanding. “How does the foreigner?” he inquired some days after the transfer, hoping to hear that Sandoz was thriving.

  “Well indeed,” was the reply. Even after his initiation, the Reshtar’s secretary reported, Sandoz was extraordinary: “Fights like a virgin every time.” The Reshtar was pleased and had already produced a splendid song cycle. His best in years, everyone said. The puzzle, Supaari learned, was that the foreigner reacted to sex with violent sickness. This was disturbing but, Supaari thought, it was evidently normal for his kind. One of the other foreigners had been bred just before she was killed in the Kashan riot, and Sofia too had trouble with nausea.

  In any case, the deal was done; there was no second-guessing it now. And the Reshtar’s poetry was lovely. So was Supaari’s new home, the city of Inbrokar; so was his new wife, the lady Jholaa.

  But then the poetry took a very odd turn, and the Reshtar was silenced. And Inbrokar was maddeningly boring compared to the bustle of Gayjur. Jholaa, Supaari noted wryly, was not boring but she was, quite likely, mad. And Sandoz was gone now, sent back to wherever he came from by the second party from H’earth, which had itself disappeared. Returned to H’earth as well, most likely. Who knew?

  In view of how the mating had turned out, Supaari was inclined to wish he’d never known any of them—Sandoz, the Reshtar, Jholaa. Fool: this is what comes of change, Supaari told himself. Move a pebble, risk a landslide.

  It was then that Supaari realized with sickening certainty that if he was to sire another child to take this one’s place, his second encounter with Jholaa would be even uglier than the first. At this level of society, bloodlines were guarded like treasure, and it occurred to him that Jholaa had probably never even seen Runa bred, which was the way most commoners got their first instruction in sex. Supaari had initially approached the lady with a certain untraditional anticipation of the staggering erotic beauty defined and promised by the Reshtar’s poetry, but it had quickly become clear that Jholaa herself was unfamiliar with her famous brother’s more recent literary output. The child Supaari would kill in the morning had, on the occasion of her conception, nearly cost her sire an eye; he’d have funked the job entirely if pheromones and the irresistible scent of blood hadn’t taken over.

  When the union was concluded, Supaari had retreated from it with relief, badly disillusioned. And he understood at last why so many Jana’ata aristocrats preferred to be serviced by Runa concubines—bred for enjoyment and trained to delight—the moment their dynastic duty had been accomplished.

  SLEEPING NOW AND EXHAUSTED FROM THE STRUGGLE TO EXPEL HER husband’s brat, the lady Jholaa Kitheri u Darjan had always been more of a dynastic idea than a person.

  Like most females of her caste, Jholaa Kitheri had been kept catastrophically ignorant, but she was not stupid. Allowed to see nothing of genuine importance, she was keenly observant of emotional minutiae—astute enough to wonder, even as a girl, if it was malice or simply thoughtless cruelty when, at her father’s whim, she was allowed beyond her chamber and permitted to recline silently on silken cushions in a dim corner of an awninged courtyard during some minor state gathering. But even on those rare occasions, no one came near or even glanced in her direction.

  “I might as well be made of glass or wind or time,” Jholaa had cried out at this indifference when she was only ten. “Srokan, I exist! Why does no one see me?”

  “They do not see my most beautiful lady because she has the glory of the moons in her!” her Runa nursemaid said, hoping to distract the child. “Your people cannot look upon the moons, which live in truest night. Only Runa like your poor Srokan can see such things, and love them.”

  “Then I shall look upon what the others cannot,” Jholaa declared that day, shaking off Srokan’s embrace, and gave herself the task of staying awake past second sundown, and then past the setting of Rakhat’s third and smallest sun, to see for herself these glorious moons.

  There was no one to deny her this, no bar to her ambition except the powerful drowsiness of childhood and of species. It was as frightening as anything a Jana’ata could do, but Srokan was there in the courtyard with her, telling stories and sharing gossip, her fine hands stroking Jholaa: calming the girl as she lost sight first of blues and next of yellows, contrast fading to a gray lightlessness and then to a dense darkness as confining as an aristocratic woman’s life. The only things that staved off blind panic were Srokan’s voice and the comforting familiar scents of nursery bedding and incense, and the aroma of roasted meat lingering in the air.

  Suddenly, Srokan gripped Jholaa’s arms and lifted her to her feet. “There! The clouds have run away and there they are!” she whispered urgently, holding Jholaa’s head so that the girl would look in the right direction—so she could see, like small cold suns, the glowing disks: moons in inky blackness, beautiful and remote as mountain snow.

  “There are other things in the night sky,” Srokan told her. “Daughters of the moons! Tiny sparkling babies.” Jana’ata eyes were not made to see such things and Jholaa could only accept her nurse’s word that this was so, and not some silly Runa story.

  This was the only memorable event of her childhood.

  For a time, Jholaa shared isolation with the Kitheri Reshtar, her third-born brother, Hlavin. His title meant “spare,” and like Jholaa, Hlavin’s purpose was simply to exist, ready to transmit the patrimony should either of their elder brothers come to nothing. Hlavin was the only one aside from Srokan who noticed Jholaa, telling her stories and amusing her with secret songs, even though he was beaten for singing when his tutor caught him at it. Who but Hlavin could have made her laugh as the wives of Dherai and Bhansaar filled nurseries with children who displaced Hlavin and Jholaa in the Kitheri succession? Who but Hlavin would have cried out for her, moved to keening by her story of the moons, and by her confession that as each new niece and nephew was born, Jholaa herself felt more and more like a mo
on child: invisible to her own people, sparkling, undreamt of, in the darkness.

  Then Dherai’s own Reshtar was born, and then Bhansaar’s; the succession was deemed stable, and Hlavin was taken from her, exiled to the port of Gayjur to safeguard his nephews’ lives from a young uncle’s frustrated ambition. Even in exile, Hlavin found a way to sing to her, and sent Jholaa a radio receiver so that she could hear her own words about the moons’ daughters, riding on waves as invisible as stars, woven into a transcendent cantata sung during his first broadcast from Galatna Palace, which was allowed because he did not sing the traditional chants that belonged to those born first or second, but something new and wholly other.

  The concert left Jholaa angry, somehow, as if her words had been stolen from her, not given as a gift. When the music ended, she swept the radio from its pedestal, as though it were to blame. “Where is Galatna?” she demanded as Srokan bent to gather the wreckage.

  “It is set like a jewel, on a mountain above the city of Gayjur, and that is by an ocean, my lady,” Srokan told her. Srokan looked up, her blue eyes wide. “So much water, you can stand on its edge and look—look as far as you can, but there’s no end to it!”

  “You lie. There’s no such thing as water like that. All Runa lie. You’d kill us if you could,” Jholaa said with flat contempt, old enough, by then, to know a master’s fear.

  “Nonsense, little one!” Srokan cried with good-natured surprise. “Why, Jana’ata sleep away the red sun’s time and true night, and no one harms you! This devoted one does not lie to her darling mistress. The moons were real, my lady. The ocean is real! Its water tastes of salt, and its air is of a scent no landsman knows!”

  Resentment was, by then, the only leavening that could lift Jholaa from the torpor that immobilized her for days at a time. She had come to hate the luckless Runa domestics who were her only companions, despising their ability to go into the world, the shameless sluts, unveiled and unguarded, to see oceans and breathe scents Jholaa would never know. Holding an elegant claw to Srokan’s ear, Jholaa began to peel it from the woman’s head, relenting only when the Runao admitted she had not seen or tasted this ocean herself and had only heard stories from the kitchen help, who came from the south. Hlavin would have told her the truth of the ocean, but he was lost to her, so Jholaa allowed her nursemaid’s shaking hands to stroke and soothe her, and breathed in the salt scent of blood, not ocean.

  Later that night, as Jholaa lay blind in the dark, useless light of Rakhat’s small, red sun, she decided to execute Srokan for thinking how she might murder Jana’ata in their sleep, and to have the woman’s children killed as well, to clear the line.

  Srokan was old anyway. Stew meat, Jholaa thought dismissively.

  Which was why there was no one to warn Jholaa or to prepare her for what would happen after her wedding: her domestics were frightened of her and none had the courage to explain why they were dressing her for a state ceremony. But Jholaa was used to being displayed on such occasions, and was not surprised to find herself taken to a stateroom filled with dazzlingly decorated officials and all her male relatives, who continued to chant, as though she were not there.

  She stood quietly through the endless ceremonial declamations; these events tended to go on for days, and she had long since given up listening carefully. But when she heard her own name sung, she began to pay attention, and then she recognized the melody that sealed a marriage, and realized that she’d just been legally bound to a man whose lineal name she’d never heard before. Eyes wide behind her jewel-encrusted veil of gold mesh, she turned to ask someone—anyone—if she were being sent to another country, but before she could speak, her father and brothers surrounded her and moved Jholaa to the center of the room.

  Her Runa maids reappeared and, when they began to remove her robes, Jholaa spoke up, demanding to know what was happening, but the men only laughed. Furious now and frightened, she tried to cover herself, but then the man whose name she could not quite remember came so close she could smell him, and dropped his own robe off his shoulders and he—. He did not merely look at her, but moved behind her and gripped her ankles and—

  She fought, but her screams and struggle were drowned by the wedding guests’ roars of amusement and approval. Afterward, she heard her father comment with chuckling pride to the others, “A virgin! No one could deny it after all that!” To which her eldest brother replied, “Almost as much of a fighter as that outlandish foreigner Hlavin and his friends use …”

  When it was over, she was taken through a courtyard made festive for the occasion to a small shuttered room where she sat, ripped and bewildered, and listened to poetry sung in honor of the fourth-born Jholaa Kitheri u Darjan: against all odds, bred to a third-born merchant who would never have sired a child at all but for the foreign servant Sandoz. And when at last Jholaa bore that child, its lineage was unquestionable; this was, she came to understand, the only reason for her own existence.

  A similar fate, she believed, was all that awaited her daughter. The lady Jholaa never looked at her infant, after the first moments of its life, when she got a hand loose from the midwife’s grip and tried to slash the child’s throat, from pity and disgust. Later, when her brother Dherai appeared briefly in her room to tell her that the infant was deformed, Jholaa did not care.

  “Kill it then,” was all she said, and wished someone had done the same for her.

  Naples

  September 2060

  IT HAD TAKEN HOURS TO CALM DOWN AFTER THE POPE’S VISIT, AND Emilio Sandoz had only just fallen asleep when the knocking startled him half out of his bed. “God! What now?” he cried, falling back against the pillow again. Prone and exhausted, he shut his eyes resolutely and shouted, “Go away!”

  “I hope you’re talking to God,” a familiar voice called, “because I’m not going back to Chicago.”

  “John?” Sandoz bolted out of bed and pushed open the tall wooden shutters with his elbows. “Candotti!” he said, astonished, head stuck out the dormer window. “I thought they sent you home after the hearings!”

  “They did. Now they’ve sent me back.” Grinning up at him, John Candotti stood on the driveway, long bony arms wrapped around a paperplast box, Roman nose making a sundial of his half-bald head in the late afternoon light. “What is this? I gotta be the Pope to get invited in?”

  Sandoz slumped over the windowsill, elbows on the wood, nerveless fingers dangling like stems of sta’aka ivy from his wrists. “Come on up,” he sighed with theatrical resignation. “The door’s open.”

  “So! El Cahuna Grande tells me you just interviewed the Holy Father for a research assistantship,” John called, trudging up the stairs and ducking under a doorway that Emilio—head and shoulders shorter—had never noticed was low. “Nice play, Sandoz. Very slick.”

  “Thank you so much for pointing that out,” Emilio said, his English suddenly more Long Island than Puerto Rico. He was bent over the little table, putting the braces on. “Now why don’t you give me a nice paper cut and pour some lemon juice in it?”

  “Billy Crystal. Princess Bride,” John said promptly, putting the box down in a corner. “You need some new material, man. Did you watch any of those comedies I suggested?”

  “Yeah. I liked that Dutch one, East of Edam, best. No Sign of Life was good, too. I don’t get the jokes in the newer stuff. Anyway,” he cried, indignant now, “how was I supposed to know who the Pope was? Some old guy shows up at my doorstep—”

  “If you’d taken my advice,” John said with the thin patience of an exasperated seminary admonitor, “you would have gotten the jokes. And you would have recognized the effing Pope when he came to meet you!” Sandoz ignored him, as he had ignored the forty-year hole in his awareness of recent history, too sick to care at first and now simply refusing to acknowledge it. “Do you have any idea how important it was that Gelasius came to us? I told you—it’s time for you to catch up on things! But do you ever listen to me? No!”

  And you aren’
t listening now, John realized, watching him. Emilio had gotten better at putting the braces on by himself in the past two months, but the procedure still took a fair amount of concentration.

  “—and Giuliani just stands there, letting me dig the hole!” Sandoz was muttering as he pulled each hand into an open brace and then rocked the atrophied forearms outward to toggle the switches. There was a quiet whirring noise as the flat straps and electronic hardware closed over his fingers, wrists and forearms. He straightened. “One of these days, John, I would really love to sandbag that sonofabitch.”

  “Good luck,” John said. “Personally, I think the Cubs have a better chance at winning the World Series.”

  They sat at the table, Sandoz slouching into the chair nearest the kitchen and John taking the Pope’s seat opposite him. Glancing around the room as they traded lines from East of Edam and Back Streets and a couple of old Mimi Jensen flicks, John took in the bed, the socks on the floor, the dishes in the sink, and then stared suspiciously at Emilio, rumpled and unshaven. Sandoz was ordinarily meticulous, the black-and-silver hair brushed, the conquistador beard closely trimmed, his clothes spotless. John had expected the apartment to be immaculate. “All spiritual enlightenment begins with a neatly made bed,” Candotti intoned, waving broadly at the mess. He frowned at Emilio. “You look like shit. When’s the last time you got any sleep?”

  “About fifteen minutes ago. Then some pain-in-the-ass old friend came by and woke me up. You want coffee or something?” Emilio rose and went to the tiny kitchen, where he opened the cupboard and pulled out the beans, making himself busy with his back to Candotti.