Children of God

by Mary Doria Russell

  “In opposition to all that ferocity,” she resumed, “there have been great jurists, resourceful diplomats, men whose voices can restore calm and bring others to their senses. You, my lord, are named for the greatest of these: Hlavin Mra, whose wisdom is enshrined in the fundamental law of Inbrokar, whose oratorio ‘Shall We Be as Women?’ is sung by every breeding male when he comes of age and takes his place in society.”

  “And what if Hlavin Mra had been born third?” his namesake asked. “Or even first?”

  Selikat was silent for a time. Then she beat him. “What if?” was more dangerous than “Why?”

  BUT FOR SELIKAT’S INFLUENCE, HE MIGHT HAVE ENDED LIKE SO MANY other reshtari of his caste: seduced by the sumptuous pleasures of the third-born nobleman’s indolent, easy life, and dead by middle age of obesity and boredom. There were nearly unlimited opportunities for consumption; Dherai and Bhansaar, fearing assassination, forestalling intrigue, were happy to provide Hlavin with anything he wanted, as long as he did not want what was theirs. Barred from breeding, banished to Galatna Palace with a harem of Runa concubines and neutered Jana’ata thirds, Hlavin had for his companions in exile the extra sons of the lesser nobility, who were allowed to travel more freely than their betters. Together, they filled the empty days with violent games that frequently ended with broken bones, or whiled the time away with monstrous banquets and increasingly debased sex.

  “At least when she screamed, I knew someone was paying attention to me!” Hlavin shouted, drunk and adrift, when Selikat berated him for damaging a concubine so badly the girl had to be put down. “I am invisible! I might as well be Jholaa! Nothing is real here. Everything of importance is elsewhere.”

  A few reshtari embraced their own effacement and sought to lose themselves utterly in the chanting self-hypnosis of the Sti ritual. But Hlavin craved more, not less, of existence. Some reshtari were men of substance who had no taste for combat or for law and genuinely preferred scholarship; these continued their education beyond the training of their elders and from their ranks came architects, chemists, civil engineers, historians, mathematicians, geneticists, hydrologists. But Hlavin was no scholar.

  Selikat’s own training was thorough and she knew the warning signs of intelligence twisting. Without some way out of this trap, Hlavin would destroy himself, one way or another. There was one possibility.… She had resisted it for a long time, hoping that he would find some other scent to follow.

  Selikat made her decision that evening, watching Hlavin from a little distance as he listened to the Gayjur civic choirs, the ancient chants filling the air as the second sun set. Put two Jana’ata within half a cha’ar of one another at this time of day and the chorusing would begin, inevitable as darkness. There was no part for thirds: all harmonies were based on two voices. She had never been able to beat the music out of Hlavin. He had no right to sing, but it was the only time he seemed content, and she could hear him when the breeze was right, taking the dominant melody or counterpoint as it pleased him, embellishing the original tones with chromatic elements that extended or defied the bass line. When the last notes faded with the dying sunlight, she went to him, and spoke, not caring who else heard.

  “Do you recall, my lord, that once you asked: And what if Hlavin Mra had been born third?”

  Staring at her, Hlavin lifted his head.

  “Even so,” Selikat said with quiet conviction, “he would have sung.”

  Why did she do it? he asked himself later. It was, of course, the Runa way to sacrifice themselves for their masters. And in any case, there was less than a season left to Selikat: she was nearly fifty, old even by the standards of court Runa. Perhaps she simply hated waste, and knew the end he’d come to if he could not release what was in him. It was even possible that she wished him happiness, and knew that without music, there would be none in his life.… Whatever the reason, the Runao who had raised Hlavin Kitheri chose to give him one last gift.

  Startled by her words, they both fell silent. Listening carefully for the telltale sound of breath caught, they heard footsteps, both knowing the outcome. “He would have made his life song,” Selikat called as she was taken away, “no matter what his life was made of!” These were her last words to him, and Hlavin Kitheri did his best to honor them.

  ALMOST FROM THE BEGINNING, HE PUT HIMSELF AT RISK.

  With the focused ferocity of his ancestors, Hlavin Kitheri dismissed the young fools his brothers had tried to stupefy him with, and called instead for physicists, mathematicians, musicians, bards, surrounding himself with anyone of any caste or age grade who could be induced to teach him. He devoured first the bones and meat of rhythm and harmony and imagery. Then, when the most desperate hunger was assuaged, he tasted the delicacies of solfège: pulse, meter, contour, ambitus; pitch, scale, microtones; vowel length and stress, the interplay of linguistic and musical structures.

  Pleased to find so apt a student, his teachers thought him one of their own—a theoretician, who would expound on the traditional chants. Naturally, it was a shock when he sang aloud to check his understanding of a canto’s phrasing, and they reported this to the paramountcy, but privately, they accepted it. And, they noted, the Reshtar had a remarkable voice: supple, true, with extraordinary range. A pity really, that it could not be heard more widely …

  Soon, however, he dismissed the academics as well and, when he was rid of them, began to produce songs classical in form but unprecedented in content, a poetry without narrative but with a lyricism so compelling and powerful that no one who heard his songs could ever again be ignorant of the hidden treasures and unseen beauties of their world. The VaGayjuri firsts and seconds gathered at his gate to hear him. He permitted this, knowing that they might carry his songs away with them to Piya’ar, to Agardi, to Kirabai and the Outer Islands, to Mo’arl and finally to the capital itself. He wanted to be heard, needed to reach beyond his walls, and did not end his concerts even when he was warned that Bhansaar Kitheri had been dispatched to investigate this innovation.

  When Bhansaar arrived, Hlavin welcomed him without fear, as though the visit were merely a courtesy call. Selikat had succeeded in beating obliquity into him and, choosing wisely from his seraglio, the Reshtar of

  Galatna introduced his brother to several remarkable customs and, afterward, feted him with liqueurs and savories that Bhansaar had never tasted the like of. “Harmless novelties—charming really,” Bhansaar decided. Somehow, in the midst of all the graceful, clever talk, with poetry that praised his own wisdom and discernment echoing in his mind as he fell asleep each night, it began to seem that there could be no legal reason to silence young Hlavin. Before he left Gayjur, Bhansaar even proposed—more or less on his own—that Hlavin’s concerts be broadcast, like state oratorios.

  “Indeed,” Bhansaar ruled in his official finding, “that which is not forbidden must be permitted, for to find the opposite true implies that those who established the law were lacking in foresight.”

  And surely that was a more subversive notion than merely allowing the Reshtar of Galatna to sing his own songs! What more innocuous pursuit could a Reshtar indulge in than poetry, after all?

  “He sings only of what can be had within Galatna: of scent, of storms, of sex,” Bhansaar reported to his father and brother when he returned to Inbrokar. When they were amused, he insisted, “The poetry is superb. And it keeps him out of trouble.”

  Thus Hlavin Kitheri was permitted to sing, and in doing so he lured freedom to his prison. Hearing his concerts, staggered by his songs, even firsts and seconds were inspired to shake off the tyranny of genealogy and join him in sublime and scandalous exile, and Galatna Palace became the focus for the gathering of men who would never ordinarily have come together. With his poetry, the Reshtar of Galatna now redefined legal sterility as purity of mind; cleansing his life of the tainted past and forbidden future, he made it enviable. Others learned to live as he did—on the cusp of experience, existing entirely within moment after ephemeral moment
of rarefied sexual artistry, unmuddied by considerations of dynasty. And among them were men who did not simply appreciate Kitheri’s poetry but who were capable themselves of composing songs of startling beauty. These were the children of his soul.

  He meant no more than this: to be content, to live in the eternal present, triumphant over time: all elements in balance, all things stable, the chaos within him contained and controlled, like a woman in her chamber.

  And yet, when he had, at last, achieved that very desire, the music began to die in him. Why? he asked, but there was no one to answer him.

  He tried at first to fill the void with objects. He had always prized rarity, singularity. Now he sought and collected the finest and oldest, commissioned the most costly, the most highly decorated, the most complex. Each new treasure bought a holiday from hollowness, as he studied its intricacies and pored over its nuances, tried to find in it some quality that would summon the light, the flashing brilliance.… But then he would put the thing aside, the savor gone, the scent dissipated, the silence unbroken. He passed the days pacing and waiting, but nothing would come—nothing ignited any spark of song. His life had begun to seem not a poem but an incoherent collection of words, as random as a Runa domestic’s brainless chatter.

  What he felt was beyond boredom. It was a dying of the soul. It was a conviction that there was nothing anywhere in his world that could cause him to breathe in a full measure of life again.

  Into this night, like the gilding of first dawn, came a crystal flask of striking simplicity, containing seven small, brown kernels of extraordinary scent: sweetly camphoric, sugary, spiced—aldehydes and esters and pyrazines released in a sudden jolt of fragrance that rocked him as a volcano’s eruption rocks the ground, which he breathed in, first gasping, then crying out like an infant newly born. With the fragrance filling his head and chest came the knowledge that the world held something new. Something wonderful. Something that drew him back toward life.

  There was more: syn’amon, the merchant Supaari VaGayjur called the next consignment. Klohv. Vanil’a. Yeest. Saydj. Ta’im. Koomen. Sohp. And with each astonishing delivery, a promise of the unimaginable: sweat, oil, infinitesimal fragments of skin. Not Jana’ata. Not Runa. Something else. Something other. Something that could not be purchased except in its own coin: life for life.

  Here then was the complex dance of unprecedented scent and sound and sensation, the superb moment of agonizing sexual tension, the astonishment of unparalleled release. All his life he had sought inspiration in the despised, the unnoticed, the unique, the fleeting; all his life he’d believed that each experience, each object, each poem could be self-sufficient, perfect and entire. And yet, eyes still closed in climax, finishing with the foreigner that first time, he realized, Comparison is the source of all significance.

  How could he have been deaf to this for so long?

  Consider pleasure, he thought, as the foreigner was taken away. With a Runa concubine or a captive Jana’ata female, there was inequality of a sort, certainly a basis for comparison, but it was obscured by the element of duty done. Consider power! To understand power, one had to observe powerlessness. Here, the foreigner was most instructive, even as the intoxicating scent of fear and blood began to dissipate. No claws, no tail, a laughable dentition, small, imprisoned. Defenseless. The foreigner was the most contemptible of conquests …

  … the embodiment of Zero, the physical manifestation of the starting point of experience …

  That night, Hlavin Kitheri lay still on his cushions, meditating on the absence of magnitude, on the cypher that separates positive from negative, on the nothing, on the No Thing. When such comparisons were made, orgasm became as inexhaustibly beautiful as mathematics, its gradations—its inequalities—sublimely arrayed for the highly trained aesthete to recognize and appreciate.

  Art cannot exist without inequality, which is itself established by comparison, he realized.

  He called for the foreigner again at first light. It was different the second time, and the third. He called together the best of the poets—the most talented, the most perceptive—and, using the foreigner to teach what he had learned, found that the experience was different for each of them. Now he listened with new understanding, and he was entranced by the variety and splendor of their songs. He was wrong about the possibility of pure experience—he knew that now! The individual was a lens through which the past looked on the moment, and changed the future. Even the foreigner was marked, changed, by each episode in a way that Runa concubines, that Jana’ata captives never had been.

  In the heady days following that first encounter, Hlavin Kitheri produced a philosophy of beauty, a science of art and its creative sources, its forms and its effects. All life could be an epic poem, with each moment’s meaning thrown into relief by the slanting light of past and future, of dusk and dawn. There must be no isolation, no random experience or any singularity! To raise life to Art, one must classify, compare, rank—appreciate the inequalities so that the superb, the ordinary and the inferior may be known by their contrast.

  After seasons of silence, the transcendent music of Hlavin Kitheri was heard again in an outpouring of artistic energy that washed over his society like a tidal wave. Even those who had ignored him previously, made uncomfortable by his outrageous interests and extraordinary notions, were now transfixed by the glory he seemed to shine upon unchanging verities.

  “How beautiful!” men cried. “How true! Our entire society, all our history, can be understood as a faultless poem sung generation after generation, with nothing lost and nothing added!”

  In the midst of this ferment, more foreigners came to the gate of Galatna Palace, with a young Runa interpreter named Askama, who said these were members of the foreigner’s family who had come to take him home.

  Hlavin Kitheri had by that time nearly forgotten the small seed of this vast florescence, but when his secretary approached him, he thought, Let no one be mured up. Let no one be confined by another’s wish or need. “The only prison is our own limitations!” the Reshtar sang out, laughing.

  Swaying slightly from side to side, afraid to misunderstand, the secretary asked, “My lord: let the foreigner Sandoz go?”

  “Yes! Yes—let the chamber be opened!” Kitheri cried. “Let Chaos dance!”

  This, then, was the foreigner’s last service. For Hlavin Kitheri had been born into a society that imprisoned the spirit of all its people, that perpetuated dullness and ineptitude and indolence among the rulers, that enforced passivity among the ruled. Hlavin understood now that the entire structure of Jana’ata society was based on rank, but this was an artificial inequality, propping up the worst and enervating the best.

  “Imagine,” the Reshtar urged his followers, “the spectrum of variation that might naturally be evident if all were released to battle for their place in an authentic hierarchy!”

  “He’s as mad as my mother,” men began to say.

  Perhaps he was. Unblinded by convention, freed from all restraint, having no stake in what was, Hlavin Kitheri conceived of a world where nothing—not ancestry, not birth, not custom—nothing but ability, tested and proven, would determine a man’s place in life. And, briefly, he sang of this with a terrifying grandeur of imagination until his father and brothers realized what he was saying, and forbade the concerts.

  Who would not have been unbalanced? To have dreamt of such liberty, to have imagined a world without walls—and then to be imprisoned again …

  Hlavin Kitheri had true friends, genuine admirers among the poets, and some of them stayed on with him in this new and more awful exile. Prudent men, they hoped that he might find a way to be content once more within the small, exquisite territory of Galatna Palace. But when he began to kill the members of his harem one by one, and sat to watch the bodies rot, day after day, the best of them left him, unwilling to witness his descent.

  Then, the flare of light in the darkness: news that Jholaa had been successfully bred and was no
w carrying, news that the Reshtar of Galatna would be released from his exile and allowed back to Inbrokar City for a short time, to attend the ceremonies marking the inauguration of the Darjan lineage, the naming of his sister’s first child, and the ennobling of the Gayjur merchant who had brought him Sandoz.

  Hlavin Kitheri had measured and compared and judged the mettle of those who ruled and knew himself unmatched, unfathomed. “Why?” had been answered. All that remained were “When?” and “How?” and, knowing this, the Reshtar of Galatna smiled in silent ambush, waiting for the moment to seize liberty. It came when his absurd brother-in-law Supaari VaGayjur left Inbrokar with a nameless infant. That afternoon—with the sudden, certain rapacity of a starved predator—Hlavin Kitheri brought down everyone who stood in his path to power.

  He spent his final days as Reshtar in a series of death ceremonies for his murdered father and brothers, for his slaughtered nephews and nieces, for his defenseless sister, and the gallant but terribly unfortunate houseguest Ira’il Vro—all “foully attacked in the night by Runa domestics subverted by the renegade Supaari VaGayjur.” Indeed, the entire domestic staff of the Kitheri compound was declared complicit and swiftly killed. Within hours, a writ of VaHaptaa status was laid on Hlavin Kitheri’s fleeing brother-in-law, authorizing summary execution of Supaari VaGayjur and his child, and anyone who aided their escape.

  Having swept aside obstacles like so many scythed flowers, Hlavin Kitheri began the elaborate ritual of investiture as forty-eighth Paramount of the Patrimony of Inbrokar, and prepared to set his people free.

  Naples

  October—November 2060

  THE WEATHER THAT OCTOBER WAS DRY AND WARM, AND THIS ALONE was enough to make a difference to Emilio Sandoz. Even after a hard night, sunlight pouring through his windows was curative.

  Using his hands gingerly because it was impossible to predict what would trigger the pain, he spent the earliest hours of each day neatening the apartment, determined to do as much as he could without anyone else’s collaboration or permission. After such a long seige of invalidism, it was pure pleasure to make a bed and sweep a floor and put away clean dishes on his own. By nine o’clock, unless the dreams had been very bad, he was shaved, showered and dressed, and ready to move to the high, safe ground of solitary research.