Children of God

by Mary Doria Russell

  In the crowded streets and jammed compounds of the last few cities, their advice was now more crucial than ever—there were so many strangers, so many people thrown together! Starving and confused, Jana’ata would lash out in anger and fear, tearing without warning at the throat of any Runa porter who refused them entry. Protocol Runa took over at the gates, listening to stories of old alliances, deciding whom to admit. They chose only the best of the Jana’ata, the highest, those of the oldest septs to defend Inbrokar; sent the others on, farther north, to survive as they might.

  Now, looking out across the valley at the gathered host of their own kind, they busied themselves with the floating ensigns and the flashing armor, with the ordering of the Jana’ata warriors in riverine ranks, and prepared themselves to witness, with their masters, the combat. But when it was time for the challengers’ response, the rebels did not sing, their distant high cries of derision spoiling the lords’ harmonies with a dissonant, droning sameness.

  The protocol Runa ignored the screaming taunts flung at them by their conspecifics on the hill. They had devoted their lives to the stately ballet of rank and respect. Their profession was about to become extinct, but these women would leave the realm of light and movement knowing that they had done their duty to the last.

  INSIDE THE WALLS, MORE PRAGMATIC PEOPLE HAD PREPARED DIFFERENTLY for this day, years in the making, and were preparing even now. Loyalty ran as deep in some Runa as their very veins, and when this loyalty had been repaid with kindness or even simple decency, such Runa saw no reason to abandon their families.

  So they looked to the north, and wondered if the snow in the high mountains was melted by now, and packed hoarded food, and shared desperate rumors.

  “There is a safe place in the mountains.”

  “They have their own foreigner there.”

  “They turn no one away.”

  THICK-MUSCLED ARMS HELD AWAY FROM A TAUT BODY, HLAVIN KITHERI felt the weight of his overgarments—stiff with gold embroidery and glittering with jewels—taken from his shoulders. He was not large nor was he young, but he had hunted for food and wrestled for sport frequently throughout his middle years, and now he breathed with ease and confidence as his armor was unbuckled and laid neatly on the ground nearby. He paid no heed to his attendants. Instead, he concentrated on the walk, the build, the scent of the man who approached him now from the south, armed only with the weapons phylogeny had provided them both: grasping feet and bludgeoning arms with slicing claws; heavy, powerful tails; jaws capable of ripping a throat away from its spinal column.

  They had not seen each other in many years, but Supaari’s face was still familiar. He had the advantage of height and reach, but he’d aged poorly, Kitheri observed. The muzzle was flecked with gray, the cheeks were hoi-low —he was, undoubtedly, missing teeth. And thin: ribs showing, tail badly filled out. Stiffness in the right knee, and—yes, a hesitation in movement at the hip. Chest muscles weakened by long raking scars that scored the left shoulder.

  This will be not a contest but an execution, Hlavin Kitheri thought. A pity, for we are two of a kind. We have both tried to change the world from rock to cloud, and our lives from bone to pelt. I battle for the future, for the lives of children unborn. He, too, battles for the lives of children, but he fights for the past—to exact revenge, to balance old wrongs, to wipe from the world reminders of old shames. Neither of us will live to see what we have made, but an element of tragedy always makes for good poetry, Kitheri thought, smiling. And he wondered who would sing it.

  Rain before long, he thought, looking at the thunderheads building in the west as the battle hymns drew to their climax. The wind shifted then, bringing Runa taunts from the distance, and the quiet near sound of his adversary’s steps. Will he speak? Kitheri wondered urgently as Supaari came to a halt a little distance away. What will such a man say at such a moment?

  Nothing, evidently: this was a practical person, not a poet. Without a word, Supaari sank into a bent-kneed crouch with a slight hitch in the movement that shouted news of his bad right leg. So, equally silent, Hlavin Kitheri stepped forward with conscious grace, ready to engage.

  The instant the Paramount came within reach, Supaari threw his weight back on his left leg and tail; gripping Kitheri’s ankle, he heaved himself backward and pulled the other man to the ground in a startling move that brought the Paramount’s throat within reach. Kitheri twisted free and, in a single sweeping motion, he uncoiled from the ground and whirled head downward, bringing his own tail to bear. Half-standing, Supaari jerked away, but was not fast enough and took a staggering blow just below his ear—insufficient to bring him down but a solid hit—and he backed off for a few moments to recover.

  Both more cautious now, the two men circled, arms bent and wide, their own loud breathing deafening them to shrieks and distant roaring. Without warning, Supaari pivoted on his stronger leg, but rather than a caudal attack to bash breath from the Paramount’s chest, he used the momentum to send his right heel down hard on the back of Kitheri’s knee. An excellent move and one that might have worked, had he kept his balance. He lost advantage when they both went down, grunting at the impact with the ground.

  Grinning now, pleased that the fight was not such a mismatch as he had feared, the Paramount rolled upright, celestial violet eyes steady, body obedient to his will. “You’re better than I expected,” he told his dead sister’s widower, without a whiff of irony. “It won’t be good enough, but you will die well.”

  There was no answer except the sharp, instructive smell of rage, and the next attack was more effective. The Paramount worked to break the tail-launched pedal grip that pinned both his arms, but he failed, so he pushed hard with all the strength of his lower body, and they went down together, muscles violently strained, lungs bursting. The fall broke Supaari’s hold on him and Kitheri took that chance to twist, locking his arms around the other man’s body.

  The delicate arteries of Supaari’s eyes could be seen with utter clarity, the short fine hairs of the muzzle coming into view as he threw his head back to get a grip on the Paramount’s throat. Enthralled, Hlavin Kitheri did not strain away from the teeth that sank into the thick skin at the base of his own neck, but rather closed his eyes, savoring with all his being this one last wholly experienced instant. He could smell Supaari’s panting breath now, knew subliminally what this man had eaten and drunk on his last day of life. Listening to the thudding of tails thrashing against the ground in search of leverage, Kitheri heard with a rapist’s intimacy the small, whining sounds of another’s body in extremity.

  He bent then into a crescent. Jamming his feet against Supaari’s chest, Kitheri straightened like a bow with a scream of release. He hardly noticed the pain as Supaari’s teeth ripped from his throat, but he was gallant enough to declare, gasping, as he struggled to his feet, “First blood to the challenger!”

  The soft-footed circling resumed, and there were three more near encounters that left their chests heaving with a noisy, exhausted hunt for air; neither was young, and this match had been harder fought and longer than either had expected. Breaking the rhythm of the bout, close to the end of his own strength, Kitheri took the offense at last, turning his own shorter reach to advantage with the feint of a low turn. When this drew Supaari into a parry for a blow to his legs, Kitheri converted the motion into a lunge, throwing his shoulder into Supaari’s chest, past arms bent for defense. There was an instantaneous, reflexive response: Supaari locked his arms around the Paramount’s back—the fatal error.

  Their eyes met once more in that lethal embrace; then, with a swift upward rip, Kitheri ended it, and stepped away. Arms flung wide in ecstasy, he sang out to the multitude on the hillside before him: “Behold the art of dying!”

  SUPAARI DID NOT FALL IMMEDIATELY, NOR DID HE LOOK DOWN TO SEE what had happened to him. He simply turned away and took a few steps as his guts roiled out of the rent in his belly onto the spoiled ground. For one terrible moment, it seemed to Sofia that he
would trip over them, but then his knees buckled. For uncounted seconds, she did not breathe, reluctant to fill her own lungs and allow life to go on, without him.

  “He will kill me, Fia,” he’d told her, his voice as cool as a breeze that carried the pure, transparent fragrance of mountain snow, and the promise of storms. “Kitheri has trained from childhood as a warrior, and he will kill me.”

  Supaari had sat across from Sofia on the ground that morning, surrounded by the Runa army they had helped Djalao to create, a force now swollen by VaInbrokari Runa who had seized their freedom and joined their people outside the walls. Sofia did not protest what he said, concentrating instead on feeling nothing at all. It was an old skill, one that had allowed her to survive the war that ended her childhood, and second nature now that war had become her whole world again. In some ways, Supaari had already left her. They had not seen each other much in the past years, fighting on different fronts. Once the children had gone, there was so little to speak of, except the war.

  There was a strange sacred hollowness to Supaari, as though each advance for the Runa had carved out some new space in his own soul, each success and competence driving home to him the utter irrelevance of his own kind. “They don’t need us anymore,” he’d said once, with a kind of ethereal joy. “Perhaps they never did.”

  So when Supaari announced that he would die, Sofia simply rose onto her knees and held out her arms to him. He leaned forward and rested his forehead against her body. “He will kill me,” he said again, his voice so low that she could feel the sound in her own small chest, “but I will do the people honor.”

  Alone now, staring at his gutted body in the distance, Sofia said, “You fought well.” Lifting a still face to the mountainous clouds, she heard the splat and spatter of the storm’s first drops, and then only felt them as their quiet song was drowned by the shrill screams of Runa soldiers giving voice to frustration and boredom, to grief, and to their rage at these stubborn djanada holdouts who still dared to defy Runa authority and power and justice.

  Armored infantry thundered down the slope like a cataract, parting around Sofia as a river flows around a rock, flooding the Jana’ata field before smashing through the main gate. The meat defiant, the meat insurgent, the meat fighting, Sofia thought. The meat in full cry.

  She stood a long time watching, but then began her own progress across the trodden, sloping ground, aware of the sharp fragrance of crushed vegetation broken by the charge; aware of intermittent explosions and shrieks of terror and triumph; aware of the wind’s roar, augmented now by the roaring of a fire too fierce to be rained out.

  Supaari’s corpse and the Paramount’s were nearest to her, for their combat had taken place in the center of the field, in view of each side. Both bodies had been equally trampled and tumbled in the rush toward the gate: united in death.

  She was too small to straighten Supaari’s limbs and could not bring herself to gather his belly’s contents, so she ignored all that. Sitting by his head, she ran her hand along the fine soft fur of his cheek, over and over, while his body cooled and she paid the awful debt of love.

  “LET ME DIE,” SUUKMEL SAID, DULLY INSISTENT, AS TAKSAYU PULLED HER along. “Let me die.”

  “No,” her Runa friend told her, as often as she said this. “There are the children to think of.”

  “Better to die,” Suukmel said.

  But Taksayu and the other Runa harried and tormented her, each of them carrying a Jana’ata infant or dragging a child or pushing a woman along, cruel in their desire to get these few to safety. So Suukmel kept on, one step following the other like heartbeats that would not cease, until the light and her own unhardened body began to fail, and she crumpled to the ground. The respite was brief. A child’s soft slippers, shredded and bloody after hours of forced marching over increasingly rocky ground, stepped under her eyes. Dazed by exhaustion, Suukmel looked up and saw the stony face of her foster son, Rukuei, the Paramount’s first-born, who had been, only hours ago, a boy of twelve.

  Rukuei: whose hard violet eyes had seen the forty-eighth Paramount of Inbrokar dismembered by a mob, whose mind would always carry the vision of a burning city and of a battlefield humped and soaked by Jana’ata dead, black with blood. Teachers and poets and storytellers; engineers, geographers, naturalists; athletes of balance and beauty, whose very walk was artistry. Philosophers and archivists; financiers and specialists in law. Men of state and men of music; men of youth and of maturity and of gray age. All left to decay in the rain.

  “My father honored you,” Rukuei told his foster mother pitilessly. “Be worthy of him, woman. Stand up and live.”

  So she got to her feet, and walked on northward, leaving scarlet footprints on the stones, next to those of a man of twelve.

  IT WAS WELL PAST FIRST SUNDOWN LONG DAYS LATER WHEN THEY SAW the monster. Perched on two bony legs, it was naked, and hairless but for a beard and mane and mystifying patches of fur here and there, and it held a parasol made of frayed blue fabric high over its head. Beyond surprise even at a sight so bizarre, none of the refugees spoke. Neither did the monster. It simply stood in their way.

  Without warning, a Jana’ata appeared. Many Runa broke free of paralysis then, and moved to place their bodies between their charges and this stranger. When they realized the Jana’ata was unarmored, with a small child riding his back, they looked at each other in confusion, no longer knowing who was a danger and who could be trusted.

  “I am Shetri Laaks,” the man called out. “You are all here because Runa have chosen to preserve the lives of Jana’ata. Therefore, my wife, Ha’anala, and I offer you food and shelter until you are strong enough to make your next decisions. This is my brother-in-law, Isaac. As you see, he is a foreigner, but one who is no danger to you. My wife will explain the rules of our settlement. If you care to abide by them, you are all, Runa and Jana’ata, welcome to remain with us, as others have.”

  From somewhere in the little knot of weary bewildered women, a voice cried out in irritable protest, “Your brother-in-law! Are you married to a foreigner then—?”

  But before Shetri could answer, Rukuei came forward. “I see the face of a coward, who lives while warriors rot,” he shouted. “I smell the stink of one fit only to eat dung!”

  “Ah, but dead men have such small appetites, even for dung,” Shetri replied, not unkindly, but with no intention of being drawn into combat with an exhausted youth. He had seen this aggressive terror in so many boys: still reeling from the deaths of fathers, uncles, brothers, and ashamed to be alive. “I am afraid, sir, that I’d have proved a warrior of indifferent conviction and less skill. Instead, I have contrived to live at the expense of no person’s life,” he said, glancing at Taksayu and the other Runa before returning his eyes to the boy’s and adding, “not even my own. If my company displeases you after you’ve eaten and rested in my compound, you may relieve yourself of its inconvenience by leaving.”

  Befuddled by the soft response, the boy was speechless. He was also swaying with fatigue and his feet were torn to tatters, Shetri noted. But it would be an insult to offer him any aid, so Shetri simply said, “Allow me to show the way.”

  It was then that a woman of middle years came toward him and rested her hand briefly on his arm. “What a lovely child,” she said, trying not to let her voice quaver as she gazed up at the baby on Shetri’s back. “Such beautiful eyes.”

  “Yes,” Shetri agreed neutrally, knowing that she was working through the genealogical possibilities.

  She drew in a small breath as she drew also the inevitable conclusion. “A family trait, coming down from the dam’s lineage perhaps?” she asked from behind a finely woven veil, torn now and unraveling from one edge.

  “Yes,” Shetri said again, preparing to be attacked, if not injured.

  But the woman merely spoke to the boy who had challenged Shetri. “Rukuei,” she said, finding some reserve of stateliness within, “it seems that you have arrived by the gods’ decision among �
� family. This man’s wife will be, I think, a near cousin, through your father’s line.” She turned back to Shetri Laaks and straightened. “I am Suukmel Chirot u Vaadai, and this is my foster son, Rukuei Kitheri.” Shetri’s visible astonishment allowed her a moment of restored superiority, but Suukmel was a realist. “Your invitation is a great kindness. We are in your debt. My foster son and I—. No,” she corrected herself, holding out her other hand to Taksayu, “we would all be grateful to accept your hospitality, on whatever terms you shall be pleased to dictate.”

  “There will be no debt, my lady, nor even terms,” said Shetri, tearing his eyes away from the boy he now recognized as a young, male version of his wife. “An agreement rather, if you are pleased to stay with us.”

  “Do they sing?” Isaac asked then in the flat, toneless speaking voice so eerily at odds with the high purity of his singing.

  Suukmel, uneasy, looked to Shetri. “My brother-in-law loves music,” Shetri explained minimally, knowing she was too tired to take in more.

  But Suukmel answered Isaac. “Rukuei knows many songs. He has the makings of a poet,” she said. “And of a warrior,” she added for his pride’s sake.

  Isaac did not look at anyone. “He’ll stay,” was all he said.

  N’Jarr Valley