The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls

by Anissa Gray

  “Did I hear you correctly, Edhya?” asked Elemak. “Are you telling me what to do?”

  “You tried to kill him once before,” said Eiadh. “The Oversoul won’t let you. Don’t you realize that? And this time you might get hurt.”

  “I appreciate your concern for me, Edhya, but I know what I’m doing.”

  “I know what you’re doing, too,” said Eiadh. “I’ve watched you with Nafai for all these years, and I thought, at last, Elya has learned to give Nafai his proper respect. Elya’s stopped being jealous of his little brother. But now I see that you were just biding your time.”

  Elemak would have slapped her face for that, except that the baby’s head was in the way, and he would never harm his own child. “You’ve said enough,” he warned.

  “I’d beg you to stop because you love me,” said Eiadh, “but I know that would never work. So I’m begging you to stop for your children’s sake.”

  “For their sake? It’s for their sake that I’m doing this. I don’t want their lives disrupted for the sake of Rasa’s conspiracies to get control of Dostatok and turn this into a village of women like Basilica.”

  “For their sake,” said Eiadh again. “Don’t make them see their father humiliated in front of everyone. Or worse.”

  “I can see how much you love me,” said Elemak. “Apparently your bets are on the other side.”

  “Don’t shame them by letting them see that you’re a murderer in your heart.”

  “Do you think I don’t understand this?” said Elemak. “You’ve had a yen for Nafai ever since Basilica. I thought you’d outgrown it, but I was wrong.”

  “Fool,” said Eiadh. “I admired his strength. I admired yours, too. But his strength has never wavered, and he’s never used it to bully other people. The way you treated your father was shameful. Your sons were in the other room, listening to how you talked to your father. Don’t you know that someday, when you’re old and frail, you may hear that same kind of disrespect from them? Go ahead, hit me. I’ll set down the baby. Let your sons see how strong you are, that you can beat up a woman for no greater crime than telling you the truth.”

  Meb burst through the door. He had his bow and arrows. “Well?” he said. “Are you coming or not?”

  “I’m coming,” said Elemak. He turned to Eiadh. “I’ll never forgive your for that.”

  She smirked at him. “In an hour you’ll be asking for my forgiveness.”

  Nafai knew as he approached exactly what to expect. He had the memories of the Oversoul. He had heard the conversations between Elemak and his fellow plotters. He had listened as he ordered everyone to keep the children in their houses. He had felt the fear in everyone’s hearts. He knew the damage Elemak was doing to his own family. He knew the fear and rage that filled his heart.

  “Can’t you make him forget this?” asked Nafai.

  〈No. That wasn’t one of the powers I was given. Besides, he’s very strong. My influence over him is oblique at best.〉

  “If he had chosen to follow you, he would have been better for your purposes than I am, wouldn’t he?”

  〈Yes.〉It might as well speak plainly, since it could keep no secrets from Nafai now.

  “So I’m second choice,” said Nafai.

  〈First choice. Because Elemak doesn’t have it in him to recognize a purpose higher than his own ambition. He’s far more crippled than Issib.〉

  Nafai sped south, the paritka skimming over the ground, automatically finding a smooth route at a pace Nafai found unimaginable. He cared nothing for the miracle of this machine. It was all he could do to keep from weeping. For now, as he focused on the people of Dostatok instead of the labors of restoring a starship, he “remembered” things that he had never guessed. The struggles and sacrifices Zdorab and Shedemei had made for each other. The cold hatred Vas felt for Obring and Sevet, and, ever since Shazer, for Elemak. Sevet’s bitter self-loathing. Luet’s and Hushidh’s pain as their husbands treated them more and more like Elemak’s idea of what wives should be, and less and less like the friends they were supposed to be.

  Issib, who depends on Hushidh for everything in his life, how shameful for him to regard his wife as something less than a partner in all his work! And how more shameful for me, when my wife is the greatest of women, at least as wise as I am, that I have made her feel as she felt when I left her.

  For he had seen all their hearts from the inside, and that is a vision that leaves no room for hate. Yes, he knew that Vas was a murderer in his heart—but he also “remembered” the agony that Vas went through when Sevet and Obring brought such shame on him. Never mind that Nafai himself had never thought that humiliation was an excuse for murder. He knew how the world looked from Vas’s point of view, and it was impossible to hate him after that. He would stop him from getting his revenge, of course. But even as he did, he would understand.

  Just as he understood Elemak. Understood how Nafai himself looked through Elemak’s eyes. If only I’d known, thought Nafai. If only I’d seen the things I did that made him hate me.

  〈Don’t be a fool. He hated your intelligence. He hated how you loved being intelligent. He hated your willing obedience to your father and mother. He hated even your hero-worship of Elemak himself. He hated you for being yourself, because you were so similar to him, and yet so different. They only way you could have kept him from hating you would have been to die young.〉

  Nafai understood this, but it changed nothing. Knowing all that he knew did not change the fact that he longed for things to be different. Oh, how he longed to have Elemak look at him and say, “Well done, Brother. I’m proud of you.” More than those words from Father, Nafai needed to hear them from Elemak. And he never would. The best he would get from Elemak today was his sullen compliance. The worst would be Elya’s dead body.

  “I don’t want to kill him,” whispered Nafai, over and over.

  〈If you don’t want to, then you won’t.〉

  And then, again and again, Nafai’s thoughts came back to Luet. Ah, Luet, why did it take this cloak to make me understand what I was doing to you? You tried to tell me. Lovingly at first, and in anger lately, but the message was the same: You’re hurting me. You’re losing my trust.

  Please don’t do it. And yet I didn’t hear. I was so caught up in being the best of the hunters, in living the man’s life among men, that I forgot that before I was really a man, you took my hand and led me down to the Lake of Women; you not only saved my life, you also gave me my place with the Oversoul. All that I am, all that I have, my self, my children, I received it all at your hands, Luet, and then rewarded you shamefully.

  〈You’re nearly there. Get control of yourself.〉

  Nafai pulled himself together. He could feel how the cloak worked within him, healing the skin around his eyes from the reddening that had come with his tears. Instantly his face gave no sign of having been in tears.

  Is this how it will be? My face a mask, because I have this cloak?

  〈Only if you want it to be.〉

  Nafai “remembered” where Elemak and Mebbekew had gone, to lay an ambush for him. Vas and Obring were back in the village, making sure everyone stayed indoors. Elya and Meb were waiting, bows in hand, to kill Nafai as he approached.

  Nafai’s first thought had been to simply go around them, where they couldn’t see him. Then he thought of flying past them so quickly they couldn’t shoot. But neither course would be useful. They had to commit themselves. They had to put the arrows in him, unprovoked. “Let them strike me,” said Nafai. “Help Meb with his aim—he’ll never do it without your help—calming him, helping him concentrate. Let both arrows hit me.”

  〈The cloak doesn’t stop pain.〉

  “But it will heal me, once I pull the arrows out, right?”

  〈Well enough. But don’t expect miracles.〉

  “All of this is a miracle,” said Nafai. “Help Elemak miss my heart, if you’re worried.”

  Elemak missed his heart, but not
by much. Nafai slowed the paritka enough that they could get a clear aim. He could see, only an instant after the Oversoul itself saw, how the paritka frightened them both; how Meb almost lost his nerve, almost threw down his bow and ran. But Elemak never wavered, and his murmured command held Meb at his post, and then they aimed and fired.

  Nafai felt the arrows enter his body, Elemak’s buried deep in his chest, Meb’s arrow through his neck. The latter arrow was more painful, the former more dangerous. The pain of both was exquisite. Nafai almost lost consciousness.

  〈Wake up. You’ve got too much to do to nap now.〉

  It hurts it hurts, Nafai cried out silently.

  〈It was your plan, not mine.〉

  But it was the right plan, so Nafai didn’t pull the arrows out until the paritka brought him into the center of the village. As he had expected, Vas and Obring were terrified when they saw the paritka fly in and hover over the grass of the meetingplace, Nafai slumped in the seat, an arrow protruding from his chest, another stuck clear through his throat.

  Luet, called Nafai silently. Come out and pull the arrows from me. Let everyone see how I was ambushed. That I carried no weapon. You must do your part.

  He could see as if through Luet’s own eyes; the kind of closeness that had almost driven him mad, back when he received his father’s vision so long ago, was now much more easily borne, for the cloak protected him from the most distracting aspects of the Oversoul’s recorded memories. He saw clearly what her eyes saw, but only hints of her feelings, and almost none of that stream of consciousness that had maddened him before.

  He saw how her heart leapt within her at the sight of him, and how she was stricken by the sight of the arrows in him. How she loves me! he thought. Will she ever know how I love her?

  She cried out. “Come out, all of you, and see!”

  Almost at once Elemak’s voice came from the distance. “Stay in your houses!”

  “Everybody!” cried Luet. “See how they tried to murder my husband!”

  They were pouring out of the houses, adults and children alike. Many of them screamed and cried at the sight of Nafai, the arrows in him.

  “Look—he didn’t have even a bow with him,” she said. “They shot at him with no provocation!”

  “It’s a lie!” cried Elemak, striding into the village. “I thought they’d try something like this! Nafai put the arrows in himself, to make it look like an attack.”

  Now Zdorab and Volemak were there with her, and they were the ones who reached up and pulled the arrows from him. The one in his neck had to be broken and pulled out from the arrowhead side. Elemak’s arrow tore his chest badly coming out. He felt the blood rush out of both wounds, and speech was still impossible for him, but Nafai also could feel the cloak working within him, healing him, keeping the wounds from killing him.

  “I refuse to let you blame us for this,” said Elemak. “Nafai’s an expert at playing the victim.”

  But Nafai could see that no one was buying Elemak’s lies, except perhaps Kokor and Dol, who were never terribly bright and were easily deceived.

  “No one believes you,” said Father. “Nafai himself knew that you were planning this.”

  “Oh, really?” asked Elemak. “Well, if he’s so wise now, why did he stroll right into this supposed ambush?”

  Nafai put the answer in his father’s mind.

  “Because he wanted everyone to see your arrows in him,” said Father. “He wanted everyone to see clearly who and what you are, so there’s never any doubt about it.”

  “Most of us saw it all along,” said Rasa. “We hardly needed Nafai to bear such wounds.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Luet. “Nafai wears the cloak of the Oversoul. He’s the starmaster now. The cloak is healing him. There’s nothing Elemak and Mebbekew can do to harm him now.”

  Am I ready yet? Nafai asked. The pain had subsided considerably.

  〈Almost.〉

  Elemak was keenly aware that no one was with him now, except Meb, who had no choice. Even Vas and Obring were averting their gaze from him—there’d be no support from them. But then, he had never expected any. “Whatever we did,” said Elemak, “we did for the sake of our children, our wives—and your wives and children, too. Do you really want to leave here? Is there a one of you who wants to leave this place?”

  “None of us want to go,” said Luet. “But we all knew that this was the plan from the beginning—to take us to Earth. That was never a secret. No one lied to you.”

  And then—the crowning insult—Eiadh added her voice to Luet’s. “I don’t want to leave Dostatok,” she said. “But I would rather wander in the desert forever than have a decent man killed to keep us here.”

  She spoke with fire, and Elemak felt it burn within him. My own wife, and she damns me with her accusations.

  “Ah, you’re all so brave now!” he cried. “But yesterday you agreed with me. Did any of you really think that our peace and happiness here would be preserved without bloodshed? You’ve all known it from the beginning—as long as Nafai was free to stir things up, there’d be mutiny and dissension among us. The only hope we have of peace is what I tried to do more than eight years ago.”

  〈Now.〉

  He rose to his feet. To his surprise, he was unsteady, lightheaded. At once he “remembered” why—the cloak took energy from his own body when it had to, and the process of healing him so quickly was sucking strength from him faster than the cloak could replenish itself from the sunlight. However, he also knew that this temporary weakness would not stop him from doing all that he needed to do.

  “Elemak,” he said. “I’ve wept all the way here. It fills me with anguish, what you’ve tried to do. If only you’d bent enough to accept the Oversoul’s plan—I would have followed you gladly if you had only done that. But all along, it’s been you, your ambition to rule, that has torn us apart. If you hadn’t plotted with them, led them, do you think these weak ones would ever have resisted the Oversoul? Elemak, don’t you see that you’ve brought yourself to the edge of death? The Oversoul is acting for the good of all humanity, and it will not be stopped. Do you have to die before you’ll believe that?”

  “All I know is that whenever the Oversoul gets mentioned, it’s you or your whiny wife or your mother the queen who’s angling for control.”

  “None of us has sought to rule over you or anybody else,” said Nafai. “Just because you live every waking moment with dreams of controlling other people doesn’t mean that the rest of us do. Do you think that it’s my ambition that created this paritka I’m standing on? Do you think it’s Mother’s plotting that holds it off the ground? Do you think it was Luet’s—what did you call it, whining〉—that brought me here, a day’s journey in an hour?”

  “It’s an ancient machine, that’s all,” said Elemak. “An ancient machine, just like the Oversoul. Are we going to take our orders from machines?”

  He looked around for support, but the blood on Nafai’s throat and tunic was too fresh; no one met his gaze except Mebbekew.

  “We’re moving the village to the north, near Vusadka,” said Nafai. “And all of us, including the older children, will work with the Oversoul’s machines to restore one starship. And when it’s ready, then all of us will enter the starship and rise up into space. It will take us a hundred years to reach Earth, but to most of us it will seem like a single night, because they’ll sleep through the whole voyage, while to the rest of us it will seem like a few months. And when the voyage ends, we will come out of the ship and stand on the soil of Earth, the first humans to do so in forty million years. Are you telling me that you mean to deprive us all of that adventure?”

  Elemak was silent; so was Mebbekew. But Nafai knew what was passing through their minds. A grim resolve to back down now, but at the first opportunity knock him unconscious, slit his throat, and throw his body in the sea.

  It would not do. They had to be convinced of the futility of resistance. They had to stop their p
lotting and concentrate their efforts on making the ship spaceworthy.

  “Don’t you see that you can’t kill me, even though at this very moment, Elemak, you’re imagining slitting my throat and throwing my body into the sea?”

  Elemak’s rage and fear redoubled within him. Nafai could feel it, striking at him in waves.

  “Don’t you see that already the Oversoul is healing the wounds in my throat, in my chest?”

  “If they were real wounds at all!” cried Meb. Poor Meb, who still thought that Elemak’s original lie might be revived.

  In answer, Nafai plunged his finger into the wound in his own throat. Because the scar tissue was already forming, his finger had to tear its way in—but no one could miss the fact that Nafai’s finger was into the wound nearly to the third knuckle. A couple of people gagged; the rest gasped or moaned or cried out in sympathetic pain. And, in truth, the pain was considerable—worse as he pulled his finger out than when he plunged it in. I must learn to avoid theatrical gestures like that, thought Nafai.

  He help up his bloody finger. “I forgive you for this, Elemak,” said Nafai. “I forgive you, Mebbekew. If I have your solemn oath to help me and the Oversoul as we build a good ship.”

  It was too much for Elemak. The humiliation was far worse now than it had been in the desert eight years before. It could not be contained. There was nothing in his heart but murderous rage. He cared not at all now what others thought—he knew he had already lost their good opinion anyway. He knew he had lost his wife and his children—what was left? The only thing that could heal any part of the agony he felt inside was to kill Nafai, to drag him to the sea and plunge him in until he stopped kicking and struggling. Then let the others do what they wanted—Elemak would be content, as long as Nafai was dead.

  Elemak took a step toward Nafai. Then another.

  “Stop him,” said Luet. But no one got in his way. No one dared—the look on Elemak’s face was too terrible.

  Mebbekew smiled and fell in step beside Elemak.

  “Don’t touch me,” said Nafai. “The power of the Oversoul is in me like fire. I’m weak right now, from the wounds you gave me—I may not have the strength to control the power I have. If you touch me, I think you’ll die.”