As his body slowly replaced the blood he’d lost, he was able to move, but there was no profit in it. The scabs were forming then and the itching that heralded healing maddened him. They tied him down to keep him from tearing at the bandages with his teeth, frantic and weeping with misery. His struggles against the binding may well have prevented blood clots from forming in his legs and breaking loose to kill him with stroke or heart attack. And, God help him, he had eaten the meat on the long march from Kashan and so had undergone the hasta’akala when decently nourished. These things, for good or ill, probably saved his life.
His first sentence in Ruanja was a request to know Marc’s status. "That one is not strong," he was told, but he was too exhausted from the effort of asking to hear the answer and slept dreamlessly for once.
When next he woke, his head was clear and he was alone, unbound, in a sunlit room. With great effort, he got himself to a sitting position and looked at his hands for the first time. He had nothing left to react with, too weak even to wonder why it had been done.
He was still sitting, hunched and pallid and staring at nothing, when one of the Runa servants came in. "Someone’s heart will sicken if he does not see Marc," he said as firmly as he could.
Like twin infants put in different rooms to keep them from waking each other up, the two foreigners had been separated. The Runa knew that the sheer physical stamina evidenced by screaming meant that the smaller of the two would likely survive. They had hope of the quiet one but not much, and took him away to keep his strength from being sapped by the other’s constant waking. "That one is sleeping," Awijan told Sandoz. "Someone will bring you to him when he wakes."
Two days later, he sat again in wait for her, determined now to go to Marc no matter what. "Someone’s heart will stop if he does not see Marc," he insisted, and stood, moving toward the door on thin legs empty of bone. The Runao caught him as he fell and, muttering, carried him through the compound to the room where Marc was sleeping.
The stink of blood was everywhere and Marc was the color of rain. Emilio sat on the edge of the sleeping nest, his own ruined hands in his lap, and called Robichaux’s name. Marc’s eyes opened, and there was a glimmer of recognition.
He had no clue to what Marc said during those last hours. In Latin, he asked Marc if he wished to confess. There was more whispered French. When it stopped, Emilio said the absolution. Marc slept then and he did as well, sitting on the floor next to the bed, his head resting next to Marc’s right hand, still seeping blood. Sometime that night, he felt something brush his hair and heard someone say, "Deus vult." It might have been a dream.
In the morning, when the sunlight hit his eyes, he awoke, stiff and wretched. Rousing himself, he left the room and tried to get a Runao to call a healer or to put pressure on the oozing wounds between Marc’s fingers. Awijan only looked at him blankly. Later, he wondered if he’d remembered to speak Ruanja. Maybe he’d used Spanish again. He would never be sure.
Marc Robichaux died about two hours later without regaining consciousness.
"FATHER ROBICHAUX WAS in poor physical condition when this procedure took place," John was saying, "and did not survive it."
Emilio looked up and saw that everyone was staring at his hands. He put them in his lap.
"It must have been very difficult," the Father General said.
"Yes."
"And then you were alone."
"Oh, no," Emilio said softly. "Oh, no. I believed that God was with me." He said this with great sincerity and because of that, it was impossible to know if he was serious or if this was mockery. He sat and looked into Vincenzo Giuliani’s eyes. "Do you believe that? Was God with me?" He looked around at each of them: John Candotti, Felipe Reyes, Johannes Voelker, Edward Behr, his eyes coming to rest again on Giuliani, who found it impossible to speak.
Sandoz rose and went to the door, opening it. Then he paused, struck by a thought. "Not comedy. Not tragedy." Then he laughed, a feral sound, devoid of humor. "Perhaps farce?" he suggested. And then he left.
32
NAPLES:
AUGUST 2060
"I THINK PERHAPS that I was a disappointment to Supaari," Sandoz told them the next day. "Anne was a delight to work with, and they had enjoyed each other a great deal. I was not nearly so amusing."
"You were grieving and terrified and half-dead," Voelker told him flatly. And John nodded, in agreement at last with something Johannes Voelker had said.
"Yes! A poor dinner companion." Sandoz had a bright and brittle sound to him this afternoon. Giuliani was openly disapproving of this strange glittery mood; Sandoz ignored him. "I’m not sure Supaari really thought through the idea of formally accepting me as a dependent. It might have been a sort of spontaneous gesture of interplanetary goodwill. Maybe he wished he’d let the government have me after all." Sandoz shrugged. "In any case, he seemed primarily interested in the trade aspects of the situation, and I was not much good to him as an economic adviser. He asked me if I thought that there might be other parties coming from Earth. I told him that we had radioed news of our situation back to our home planet and that it was possible others might come. We had no way of knowing when. He decided to learn English from me because it is our lingua franca. He had already started to pick it up from Anne."
"So. You had work as a linguist," Giuliani said lightly. "For a time, at least."
"Yes. Supaari was making the best of things, I think. We had many conversations, once I was well enough to sort out which language I was supposed to use. It was good English practice for him, and he explained many things to me. You should be grateful to him. Most of what I understand about what happened came from him. He was very helpful."
"How long were you with him?" Giuliani asked.
"I’m not really sure. Six to eight months, perhaps? I learned K’San during that time. Appalling language. The hardest I’ve ever learned. Part of the joke, I suppose," he said, inexplicably. He stood up and began to walk around the room, jumpy and distractible.
"Did you hear anything of the violence that Wu and Isley reported?" Giuliani asked, watching him move from place to place.
"No. I was quite isolated, I assure you. I imagine, however, that with characteristic creativity, the Runa were beginning to expand on Sofia’s suggestion that they were many and the Jana’ata were few."
"Wu and Isley asked after you as soon as Askama brought them to Supaari’s compound," Giuliani said, pausing when he saw Sandoz flinch. "Supaari told them that he had made other arrangements for you. What was the phrase he used? Ah. Here: ‘more suited to his nature.’ Can you tell us why you were removed from the household?"
There was an ugly laugh. "Do you know what I said to Anne Edwards once? God is in the why." He would not look at anyone now. He stood with his back to them and stared out the window, holding the gauzy curtain aside, careful with the hardware of his brace, so as not to snag the fabric. Finally, they heard him say, "No. I don’t know what he meant by that, except that somehow he believed he was justified in what he did."
"In what he did," Giuliani repeated quietly. "You did nothing to cause your removal?"
"Oh, Christ!" Sandoz spun to face him. "Even now? After all this?"
He walked to his place at the table and sat down, shaking with anger. When he spoke again, his voice was very soft, but he was obviously fighting rage, braced hands rigid in his lap, eyes on the table. "My position in the household of Supaari VaGayjur was that of a crippled dependent. Supaari was not a flighty person, but I believe he must have tired of me. Or perhaps he simply felt that I had fulfilled my role as a language tutor when he became competent in English and that it was time for me to take up another position, so to speak." He looked directly at Giuliani then. "My residential and occupational preferences were not inquired into at any time. How explicit am I required to be?"
HE WAS ASLEEP when they came for him, just past dawn. Caught in the web of a dream, he was at first unsure if the hands were real or imagined, and by the time
he knew, their grip was unbreakable. Later on, when he asked himself if there might have been some way to escape, he knew the question was folly. Where could he have gone? What shelter would he have found? Equally pointless: the struggle, the demands for an explanation. The first blow drove the air from his lungs, the second knocked him nearly senseless. Efficient, they wasted no additional time in beating him. Half-dragged, half-carried, he tried to memorize the streets and had an impression that the route was fairly consistently uphill. By the time they arrived at Galatna Palace, his head was clear and he was able to breathe without pain.
Arms pinioned, he was escorted past the fountains he’d seen from Supaari’s compound and taken through a side entrance to the palace, down hallways bright with colored tiles and floored with marble and jasper, past internal courtyards, under vaulted, ribbed ceilings. The simplest aspects of the interior were gilded, walls overlaid by silver-wire trellis, each diagonal defined and sparkling with a jewel: emerald and ruby and amethyst and diamond. He saw, in passing, a formal room of ecclesiastical proportions fitted out with a wide indoor canopy in a yellow silken fabric figured and embroidered in turquoise and carmine and spring green, tasseled and fringed with gold thread, its richness echoed by the piles of cushions, ivory and red and blue, their plush fabric creased and divided by braid and costly welting.
Room after room: there was nothing straight that could be made curved, nothing plain that could be given a pattern, nothing white that could be brilliant. The very air was embellished! Everywhere, there was scent: a hundred fragrances and odors he could not name or recognize.
It was, he thought crazily, the most spectacularly vulgar place he’d ever been in. It looked and smelled like a cheap whorehouse, except the jewels were real and each dram of perfume probably cost a village corporation’s yearly earnings.
He tried both Ruanja and K’San each time they encountered someone new, but no one would respond and he thought at first that all the servants were mutes. As the day wore on, he was given short orders in a form of K’San that was unfamiliar to him, as High German might be unfamiliar to someone who spoke Low. Go there. Sit here. Wait. He did his best to comply; he was cuffed when he got something wrong. It was he who became mute.
In the days that followed, he was held with an odd mixture of freedom and constraint. There were others kept, as he was, in subtle but effective cages. They were able to move from cage to cage but not inside the palace proper. A zoo, he thought, trying to make sense of all this. I am in some kind of private zoo.
The others were a bizarre but beautiful group of Runa and some Jana’ata, and there were a few individuals whose species he was unsure of. The Runa who shared his cushioned captivity came to his assistance when he needed help because of his hands. They were extraordinarily affectionate and friendly and tried to make him feel a part of whatever odd society existed within the ornate and costly walls of Galatna Palace. In their way, they were kind, but they seemed almost stupid, as though bred for looks alone, with coats of unusual color, brindled or pied, one striped like a zebra. Most had fine-boned and overbred faces, a few had manes, several even approached taillessness. None spoke the dialect of Ruanja he’d learned in Kashan.
The captive Jana’ata were kept in a separate enclosure and paid him no attention, even though he could not detect any difference in their status within the zoo. They were heavily robed, with headdresses that covered their faces, smaller than Supaari. Later he found out they were females, and still later he realized that they must be the kind of sterile partners Supaari had told him about. He called to them in K’San, asked them to explain to him what this place was, but they kept to themselves. He was never able to get them to speak to him in any language.
He had been fed irregularly but well in Supaari’s household, like the pet of a small child who’d wanted a puppy but then lost interest. Here the food was provided ad libitum because, he supposed, so many of the others were Runa, who required more constant meals. It was an improvement in theory, but he had no appetite. The Runa always seemed touchingly pleased when he accepted food from them. So he ate, to repay their kindness.
It came to him that he was now perfectly useless, probably kept as a curiosity, as unique and odd as the gaudy trinkets he’d seen stuffing the alcoves and jamming the shelves of Galatna that first day. And then he was fitted with a jeweled collar, and his humiliation seemed complete. He was, he thought, the exact counterpart of a capuchin monkey kept on a golden chain by some sixteenth-century European aristocrat.
Supaari, however cool and perplexing, had at least been an intellectual companion. Now he tried to steel himself for the predictable effects of utter loneliness, to be patient with the hollow unreality he felt. He did sums and sang songs in his head and tried to pray but stopped when he realized that he was mixing the languages up. He was no longer certain of the differences between Spanish and Ruanja, and that frightened him as much as anything that had happened to him so far. The worst moment came when he realized that he couldn’t remember the name of his neighborhood back in Puerto Rico. I am losing my mind, he thought, one word at a time.
He was confused and vaguely frightened all of the time, but he forced himself to keep some kind of schedule, to exercise. This amused his Runa colleagues, but he did it anyway. There were scented baths, as elaborate and horrible as the rest of the place. As no one gave him orders about this, he chose the water with the least offensive perfume and did his best to keep himself clean.
"TELL US," HE heard the Father General say.
"I thought that I had been sold as a zoological specimen," Emilio Sandoz said, trembling violently now, staring at the table, each soft word a separate act of self-control. "I believed, for a while, that I was in a menagerie owned by the Reshtar of Galatna. An aristocrat. A great poet. The author of many songs, yes? A gentleman of catholic tastes. It was, in fact, a kind of harem. Like Clytemnestra, I was compelled to master submission."
IT WAS PERHAPS three weeks or a month later when one of the guards came to the cageside and spoke to the others, who huffed and twitched and crowded around him. He had no idea what anyone was saying, had made no effort to learn anything beyond the most rudimentary phrases of the language spoken here. It was a form of denial, he supposed. If he didn’t learn the language, he wouldn’t have to stay. Stupid, of course. For reasons he could not have articulated, he was suddenly afraid, but he calmed himself with thoughts that would, very soon, shatter his soul. He said to himself: I am in God’s hands. Whatever happens now to me is God’s will.
He was given a robe, obviously made specially for him, cut down to his size. It was staggeringly heavy and hot but preferable to parading around naked. He was taken, arms held firmly, to a plain and empty white room, unscented and unfurnished. It was astonishing. He was so relieved to be out of the welter, the visual and olfactory and auditory confusion, that he very nearly sank to his knees. Then he heard Supaari’s voice and, heart racing, felt a rush of hope, thinking that he would surely be released. Supaari will take me home now, he thought. It’s all been some mistake, he thought, and forgave Supaari for not coming sooner.
He tried to speak when Supaari entered the room but the guard cuffed him in the back of the head and he stumbled forward and fell, thrown off balance by the unfamiliar weight of the robe. He was long past anger at the abuse and felt only shame at falling. Pushing himself to his feet, he looked again for Supaari and found him, but saw then a Jana’ata of medium stature and vast dignity, with violet eyes of surpassing beauty that met and held his own with a gaze so direct and searching that he had to look away. The Reshtar, he realized. A man of learning and artistry, he knew. Supaari had told him of the Reshtar: a great poet. The author of the sublime songs that had brought Emilio Sandoz and his companions to Rakhat—
And then, suddenly, everything made sense to him, and the joy of that moment took his breath away. He had been brought here, step by step, to meet this man: Hlavin Kitheri, a poet—perhaps even a prophet—who of all his kind mi
ght know the God whom Emilio Sandoz served. It was a moment of redemption so profound he almost wept, ashamed that his faith had been so badly eroded by the inchoate fear and the isolation. He tried to pull himself together, wishing he’d been stronger, more durable, a better instrument for his God’s design. And yet he felt purified somehow, stripped of all other purpose.
There are times, he would tell the Reshtar, when we are in the midst of life—moments of confrontation with birth or death, or moments of beauty when nature or love is fully revealed, or moments of terrible loneliness—times when a holy and awesome awareness comes upon us. It may come as deep inner stillness or as a rush of overflowing emotion. It may seem to come from beyond us, without any provocation, or from within us, evoked by music or by a sleeping child. If we open our hearts at such moments, creation reveals itself to us in all its unity and fullness. And when we return from such a moment of awareness, our hearts long to find some way to capture it in words forever, so that we can remain faithful to its higher truth.
He would tell the Reshtar: When my people search for a name to give to the truth we feel at those moments, we call it God, and when we capture that understanding in timeless poetry, we call it praying. And when we heard your songs, we knew that you too had found a language to name and preserve such moments of truth. When we heard your songs, we knew they were a call from God, to bring us here, to know you—
He would tell the Reshtar: I am here to learn your poetry and perhaps to teach you ours.
That is why I am alive, he told himself, and he thanked God with all his soul for allowing him to be here at this moment, to understand all this at last …
Intent on his own rushing thoughts, and by the certainty and rightness that he felt, he made little effort to follow the conversation that went on around him, although it took place in Supaari’s own K’San dialect. He was not shocked when the robe was removed. Nudity was normal to him now. He knew that he was alien, that his body held as much interest for a man of learning as his mind. What educated man would not be curious, seeing a new sentient species for the first time? Who could fail to comment on the oddity of nearly complete hairlessness, the undeveloped nose? The strange dark eyes … the astonishing lack of tail …
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