Ominer did laugh. “Listen to you. ‘I didn’t think a single bad thought about you!’ ‘I did think bad thoughts but I’m really really sorry.’ Come on, all Akma asks is that we stick together before we do anything public. So let’s work on it, all right? It’s not hard. We just keep our mouths shut about stuff one of us does that bothers the others. We do it all the time in front of Father—that’s why he doesn’t know how much we all hate the queen.”
Khimin blanched, then blushed. “I don’t.”
“See?” said Ominer. “It’s fine if you don’t agree with us, Khimin. All Aronha was saying was, Keep your mouth shut about it and we can still accomplish everything we need to accomplish.”
“I agree with you about everything except . . . Mother,” said Khimin.
“Yes yes,” said Ominer impatiently, “we’re all so dreadfully sorry for her, the poor thing, dying as she is of the world’s slowest plague.”
“Enough,” said Aronha. “You preach to us of keeping peace, Ominer, and then you fall back into teasing Khimin as if the two of you were still toddlers.”
“We were never both toddlers,” said Ominer acidly. “I stopped being a toddler long before he was born.”
“Please,” said Mon quietly, inserting the word into a momentary silence so that all would hear it. His very softness won their attention. “To hear us, you’d think there really was a Keeper, and that he was making us all stupid so we couldn’t unite and oppose his will.”
Aronha, as usual, took his words too seriously. “Is there a Keeper?” he asked.
“No, there’s not a Keeper,” said Mon. “How many times do we have to prove it to you before you stop asking?”
“I don’t know,” said Aronha. He looked Mon in the eye. “Perhaps until I forget that whenever you told me something was right and true, ever since you were little, it turned out to be right and true.”
“Was I really right all those times?” asked Mon. “Or were you simply as eager as I was to believe that children our age could actually know something?”
Wrong. This is wrong. This is wrong.
Mon kept his face expressionless—he hoped.
Aronha smiled halfheartedly. “Go get Akma,” he said to Mon. “If I know him at all, he’s not far off. Waiting for one of us to go and get him. You do it, Mon. Bring him back. We’ll be united with him. For the good of the kingdom.”
Khideo greeted Ilihiak with an embrace. No, not Ilihiak. Ilihi. A man who was once a king, now insisting that there was nothing extraordinary about him, that he had not been touched by the hand of the Keeper. It seemed so odd, so much like a kind of failure. But not Ilihi’s failure, really. More as if the universe itself had failed.
“And how is the—how is your wife?” asked Khideo.
The normal meaningless greetings took only a few moments; they were made all the more brief because Khideo’s wife had died many years before, in trying to give birth to their first child. It would have been a boy. The midwife said that the child was so big, like his father, that the head tore her apart passing through the channel of life. Khideo knew then that he had killed his wife, because any child of his would be too large for a woman to bear. The Keeper meant him to be childless; but at least Khideo didn’t have to kill any more women trying to defy the Keeper’s will. So Ilihi, who knew all this, made no inquiries about family.
“The weight of government rests lightly on you, Khideo.”
Khideo laughed. Or meant to laugh. It came out as a dry sound in his throat. He coughed. “I feel my muscles slackening. The soldier I once was is becoming soft and old. I’m drying out from the inside. At least I won’t be one of those fat old men. Instead I’ll be frail.”
“I won’t live to see it!”
“I’m older than you, Ilihi; you’ll see me dead, I can assure you. A wind will come from the east, a terrible hurricane, and it will blow me up over the mountains and out into the ocean but I’ll be so dry that I’ll just float there on the surface like a leaf until the sun dries me to powder and I finally dissolve.”
Ilihi looked at him with such a strange expression that Khideo had to shove him gently in the shoulder, the way he had done when Ilihi was Nuak’s third and least favored son and Khideo took pity on him and taught him what it meant to be a man and a soldier. They had been together the day that Khideo finally had enough. The day he took his vow to kill the king. He had shoved him gently, just like this, and had seen tears come to Ilihi’s eyes. Khideo asked him then what was wrong, and Ilihi broke down and wept and told him what Pabulog had been doing to him since he was a little child. “It’s been years since he did it last,” said Ilihi. “I’m married now. I have a daughter. I thought it was over. But he took me out of my father’s presence at breakfast and did it to me again. Two of his guards held me while he did it.” Khideo went numb when he heard this. “Your father doesn’t know what use Pabulog made of you, does he?” And Ilihi told him, “Of course he knows. I told him. He said that it only happened to me because I was weak. The Keeper intended me to be born a girl.”
Khideo knew of many terrible things that had gone wrong in the kingdom of Nuak. He had seethed watching how Nuak mistreated the people around him, how he tolerated unspeakable vices among his closest associates, how only a few decent men were left among the leaders of the kingdom—but still there were those few, and Nuak was the king. But this was more than Khideo could bear. King or no king, no man could let such a thing happen to his son and not strike down the man who did it. In Khideo’s eyes, it was not his own place to kill Pabulog—that was for Nuak to do, or failing that for Ilihi to do when he finally found his tortured way to manhood. But Khideo was a soldier, sworn to protect the throne and the people from all enemies. He knew who the enemy was now. It was Nuak. Strike him down, and all these others would fall, too. So he made his vow that the king would die by his hands. He had him under his hands at the top of the tower, ready to eviscerate him with his short sword as one kills a cowardly enemy, when Nuak looked around and saw, in the borders of the land, a huge army of Elemaki coming to attack. “You have to let me live, so I can lead the defense of our people!” Nuak demanded, and Khideo, who had only been acting for the people’s good, saw that Nuak was right.
Then Nuak had led the full retreat of the whole army, leaving only a handful of brave men to defend all the women and children. Off in the wilderness, it was the men he had led in cowardly retreat who tortured him to death. And in the city, Khideo had had to bear the humiliation of letting Ilihi’s wife lead the young girls forward to plead for the lives of the people, because there weren’t swords enough to hold the Elemaki back for even a moment.
All of this was in the back of Khideo’s mind whenever he was with Ilihi. He had seen this boy at his weakest. He had seen him turn into a man and lead a kingdom. But the damage had been done. Ilihi was still broken. Why else would he have set aside the throne?
Yet, having heard Khideo’s playful thanatopsis—he meant it to be playful—Ilihi looked at him with strange concern. “You sound as if you long for death, but I know it’s not true,” said Ilihi.
“I long for death, Ilihi,” said Khideo. “Just not mine.”
Then the two of them burst into laughter.
“Ah, Lihida, my old friend, I should have been your father.”
“Khideo, believe me, except in the biological sense, you were. You are.”
“So have you come to me for fatherly counsel?” asked Khideo.
“My wife has heard rumors,” said Ilihi.
Khideo rolled his eyes.
“Yes, well, she knows you wouldn’t want to hear it from her, but as soon as I told you what we heard, you’d know it came from her. No man would tell this to me.”
It was well known that Ilihi had rejected the Zenifi’s absolute refusal to live with the sky people. It was well known that in his own home, angels visited often and were his friends. That was why no man of the land of Khideo would have spoken of secret things to Ilihi. He could not be tru
sted.
With the women it was different. Men couldn’t control their wives, it was that simple. They would talk. And they didn’t have sense to know who could be trusted and who could not. Ilihi and his wife were good, decent people. But when it came to protecting the Zenifi way of life—the human way of life—Ilihi simply should not be taken into confidence. Except that Khideo would never lie to Ilihi. If Ilihi wanted to hear whether the rumors were true, he knew he could come to the governor of the land of Khideo.
“The rumors?”
“She hears that some highly placed men of the land of Khideo are boasting that the son of Akmaro and the sons of the king have become Zenifi in their hearts.”
“Not true,” said Khideo. “I can assure you that not even the most optimistic among us has any hope of that group of young men declaring that they think angels and humans should not live together.”
Ilihi took that in silence and ruminated on it for a while.
“So tell me what that group of young men will declare?” asked Ilihi.
“Maybe nothing,” said Khideo. “How should I know?”
“Don’t lie to me, Khideo. Don’t start lying to me now.”
“I’m not lying. I should knock you down for accusing me of it.”
“What, the man who thinks he’s dry as a dead leaf, knock me down?”
“There are stories,” said Khideo.
“Meaning that you have a single reliable source that you trust implicitly.”
“Why can’t it just be stories and rumors?”
“Because, Khideo, I know the way you gather intelligence. You would never consent to be governor of this place if you didn’t have a highly placed friend in Motiak’s council.”
“How would I get such a friend, Ilihi? All those surrounding the king have been with him forever—since long before we got here. In fact, you’re the only man I know who’s a friend of Motiak.”
Ilihi looked at him narrowly, and thought about that for a while, too. Then he smiled. Then he laughed. “You sly old spy,” he said.
“Me?”
“You pure-hearted Zenifi, you rigid upholder of the law of separation, no man in the king’s council is talking to you. Now, that could mean your informant is a woman, but I think not, mostly because during your brief time in the capital you managed to offend every highly-placed woman who might have helped you. So that means your informant must be an angel.”
Khideo shook his head, saying nothing. People underestimated Ilihi. They always had. And even though Khideo knew better, he still managed to be surprised when Ilihi took only the slightest evidence and ran with it straight to the right conclusion.
“So you have struck an alliance with an angel,” said Ilihi.
“Not an alliance.”
“You find each other useful.”
Khideo nodded. “Possibly.”
“Akma and the sons of Motiak, they are plotting something.”
“Not treason,” said Khideo. “They would never act to weaken the power of the throne. Nor would Motiak’s sons ever do anything to harm him.”
“But you don’t want to see Motiak brought down, anyway,” said Ilihi. “Not you, not any of the Zenifi. No, you’re content with this arrangement, living here in these boggy lands—”
“Content? Every bit of soil we farm has to be dug up from the muck and carried here to raise the land above the flood. We have to wall it with logs and stones—which we have to float down from higher lands—”
“You’re still in the gornaya.”
“Flat, that’s what this land is. Flat and boggy.”
“You’re content,” said Ilihi, “because you have the protection of Motiak’s armies keeping the Elemaki from you, while Motiak allows you to live without angels in your sky.”
“They’re in our sky all the time. But they don’t live among us. We don’t hurt them, they don’t bother us.”
“Akmaro is your problem, isn’t he. Teaching the things Binaro taught.”
“Binadi,” said Khideo.
“Binaro, who said that the great evil of the Zenifi was to reject not just the angels, but the diggers as well. That the Keeper would not be happy with us until in every village in all the world, human, digger, and angel lived together in harmony. Then in that day the Keeper would come to Earth in the shape of a human, a digger, and an angel, and—”
“No!” Khideo cried out in rage, lashing out with his hand. If the blow had landed on Ilihi it would have knocked him down, for the truth was that Khideo had lost very little of his great strength. But Khideo slapped at nothing, at air, at an invisible inaudible mosquito. “Don’t remind me of the things he said.”
“Your anger is still a fearsome thing, Khideo.”
“Binaro should have been killed before he converted Akmaro. Nuak waited too long, that’s what I think.”
“We’ll never agree on this, Khideo. Let’s not argue.”
“No, let’s not.”
“Just tell me this, Khideo. Is there a plan to raise a hand of violence against Akmaro?”
Khideo shook his head. “There was talk of it. I let it be known that any man who raised a hand against Akmaro would find me tearing his heart out through his throat.”
“You and he were friends, weren’t you?”
Khideo nodded.
“Now every word he says is poison to you, but you’re still loyal?”
“Friends are more important than ideas,” said Khideo.
“If I liked your ideas better, Khideo, I might not be so glad that you put friendship ahead of them. But that doesn’t matter. You say that Akma and the Motiaki are not planning violence, not against their fathers, not against anybody.”
“That’s right.”
“But they’re planning something.”
“Think about it,” said Khideo. “What Akmaro weaves can be unwoven.”
Ilihi nodded. “Motiak won’t dare to prosecute his own sons for treason.”
“I don’t think he could even if he dared,” said Khideo.
“For defying the king’s own appointed high priest?”
“I don’t think we have a high priest,” said Khideo.
“Just because Akmaro disdains the title og . . .”
“Motiak abolished all priests appointed by the king. Akmaro came from outside, supposedly appointed by the Keeper of Earth himself. His authority didn’t derive from the king. So defiance of his teachings isn’t treason.”
Ilihi laughed. “Do you think that Motiak will be fooled by legal technicalities?”
“No,” said Khideo. “Which is why you haven’t heard the voices of those fine young men with royal blood raised in defiance against Akmaro’s vile mixing of the species and his upending of the rule of men over women.”
“But something is coming.”
“Let’s say that there will be a test case. I don’t know what it is—it’s not my business—but a test case that will be a very hard knot for Akmaro and Motiak to untie. Any solution they reach, however, will . . . clarify things for us.”
“You just told me more than you needed to.”
“Because even if you go straight to Motiak and tell him all that I’ve said, it will do no good. He has already planted the seeds. Akmaro will lose his status as ruler of the religion of Darakemba.”
“If you think Motiak will ever break his word and remove Akmaro from office—”
“Think about what I said, Ilihi.” Khideo smiled. “The test will come, and at the end of it, Akmaro will no longer be ruler of the religion of Darakemba. It will happen, and no warnings can prevent it, because the seeds of it have already been planted by the king himself.”
“You’re too clever for me, Khideo, I can’t figure you out.”
“I always was, and you never could,” said Khideo.
“All fathers imagine that,” said Ilihi. “And all sons refuse to believe it.”
“Which is true?” asked Khideo. “The confidence of the fathers? Or the refusal of the sons?”
&
nbsp; “I think that the fathers are all too clever,” said Ilihi. “So clever that when the day comes when they want to tell everything to their sons, their sons won’t believe them, because they’re still looking for the trick.”
“When I want to tell you all my wisdom,” said Khideo, “you’ll know it, and you’ll believe it.”
“I have a secret for you, Khideo,” said Ilihi. “You already taught me your wisdom, and I’ve already seen what you’ve got planned for poor Akmaro.”
“Did you think you could trick me into telling you by pretending that you already know?” said Khideo. “Give up on that, won’t you? It didn’t work when you were fifteen and it doesn’t work now.”
“Let me tell you something that you may not know,” said Ilihi. “Even though Akmaro was your friend—”
“Is my friend—”
“He is stronger than you. He is stronger than me. He is stronger than Motiak. He is stronger than anyone.”
Khideo laughed. “Akmaro? He’s all talk.”
“He’s stronger than all of us, because, my friend, he really is doing the will of the Keeper of Earth, and the Keeper of Earth will have his way—he will have his way with us, or he will sweep us aside and make way for yet another group of his children. This time perhaps descended from jaguars and condors, or perhaps he’ll dip into the sea and choose the sons and daughters of the squids or the sharks. But the Keeper of Earth will prevail.”
“If the Keeper is so powerful, Ilihi, why doesn’t he just change us all into peaceful, happy, contented little diggers and angels and humans living together in a perverse menagerie?”
“Maybe because he doesn’t want us to be a menagerie. Maybe because he wants us to understand his plan and to love it for its own sake, and follow it because we believe that it’s good.”
“What kind of featherbrained religion is that? How long would Motiak last as king if he waited for people to obey him until they loved the law and wanted to obey.”
“But in fact that’s why they do obey, Khideo.”
“They obey because of all those men with swords, Ilihi.”
“But why do the men with swords obey?” asked Ilihi. “They don’t have to, you know. At any point, one of them could become so outraged that he—”
Earthborn (Homecoming) Page 22
