Earthborn (Homecoming) (23 page)

“It’s not for us to tell the Keeper whom he can or cannot speak to.”

“Well when are you going to put a stop to the women speaking of the Keeper as a ‘she’?” asked an old man.

“When the Keeper lets us know whether his body has a womb or not, we will tell one group or the other to change their conception of him. Have you seen him?” asked Akmaro.

The old man protested that of course he had not.

“Then don’t be too anxious to control other people’s ideas,” said Akmaro. “It might turn out to be you who would have to learn to say ‘she.’ ”

Didul laughed, as did many others—mostly the young ones, like him. But then, sobering, Didul added, “In the thirteen years since you have been high priest of Darakemba, Father Akmaro, there are still many who reject all the changes. Here in this gathering there are those women who hate having to teach congregations that include men, and men who hate teaching women. There are angels who dislike teaching humans, and humans who dislike teaching angels. Is it like this everywhere, or only here in Bodika where even the priests and teachers fail to have hearts that are at one with the Keeper?”

“Do they still teach those mixed congregations?” asked Akmaro.

“Yes,” said Didul. “But some have left their positions because they couldn’t bear it.”

“Did you appoint others to take their place?”

“Yes,” said Didul.

“Then it’s no different here from elsewhere. The mixing of men and women, of earth people, middle people, and sky people into one people, the Kept of the Keeper—that is not to be achieved in a single year or even thirteen years.”

“The quarreling among us can be bitter at times,” said Didul.

“And you always take the other side against us!” cried out one young angel.

“I take the Keeper’s side!” Didul insisted.

Akmaro rose to his feet. “What I wish you would all think about, my friends, is that there is a great deal more to what the Keeper asks of us than simply to associate with each other as equals.”

“So let’s concentrate on
those
things and forget the mixing up of species!” cried a woman angel.

“But if we who are priests and teachers can’t be one people,” said Akmaro, “how can we possibly expect
them to believe anything we say? Look at you—how you have sorted yourselves out, dividing all the female humans from the female angels, and over there, the male humans, and here, the male angels, and where are the diggers? Are you still sitting in the back? In the farthest place?”

A digger man stood up, looking nervous. “We don’t like to push ourselves forward, Akmaro.”

“You shouldn’t have to push,” said Akmaro. “How many of you here even know this man’s name?” Didul started to answer, but Akmaro held up his hand. “Of course
you
know, Didul. But is there anyone else?”

“How would we?” replied an angel. “He spends all his time holding little meetings out in the caves and tunnels of the diggers.”

“Is he the only one? Don’t humans and angels also teach diggers?”

Didul spoke up. “That
is
hard, Father Akmaro. There’s a lot of resentment of humans and angels among the former slaves. They don’t feel safe. The Kept among the earth people wouldn’t hurt a fly, but there are others.”

“And do the diggers here feel safe among the humans and angels?” asked Akmaro.

The diggers looked back and forth with embarrassment. “Here we do, sir,” said one of them, finally.

Akmaro laughed bitterly. “No wonder those who lie about what the Keeper wants have such an easy time converting people to their way of thought. What kind of example do they see among the Kept?”

They went on to other business then, bringing many matters of judgment before Akmaro, but the undertone of unease lasted through the whole meeting, and while some made an effort to cross the boundaries between the groups as the day wore on, others withdrew even further into knots of their own kind.

Finally it was evening, and as the evening song of angels and humans filled the air of the city of Bodika, Akmaro went to the home where Didul lived.

“Still not married?” Akmaro said. “And after all my advice.”

“Twenty is still young,” said Didul.

Akmaro looked him in the eye. “There’s something you’re not saying.”

Didul smiled sadly. “There are many things that men and women do not say, because to say them would only bring unhappiness.”

Akmaro patted his shoulder. “That’s true enough. But sometimes people torment themselves needlessly, fearing that if they speak the truth other people would suffer, when in fact the truth would set them free.”

“I might tell you,” said Didul. “I dream of telling you.”

“Well, then.”

“Not true dreams, Father Akmaro. Just . . . dreams.” He looked very uncomfortable.

“What’s for supper?” said Akmaro. “I’m famished. Talking wears me out and leaves me empty.”

“I have flatcakes. Or rather we can fry some up. Let me get the fire going by the cookstone.”

“Didul, the rule is for priests to work for their living, not for them to live in dire poverty. A cookstone!”

“It’s all I need,” said Didul. “And besides, I do my labor . . . well, I don’t own land. I gave it to the diggers who had once been slaves on it. I didn’t want to live from rents.”

“Gave it to them! Couldn’t you at least have sold it to them, letting them pay a little each year and—”

“It was a gift to me,” said Didul. “I didn’t earn it, and they were the ones who had labored on it for all their lives, some of them.”

“Well, how
do
you earn your miserable little flatcakes?” asked Akmaro.

“I have beans, too, and good spices, and fresh vegetables and fruit all year.”

“And how does this happen? Please don’t tell me that you’re accepting gifts from the people you teach.
That’s forbidden, no matter how sincerely willing the people are to give them.”

“No, no!” Didul protested. “I would never—no! I hire myself out. I do day labor for the people who would have been my tenants. And others, now. My reach is longer than any digger or angel. I’m good with a scythe, and I plow a straight furrow, and no one chops down a tree and dresses the wood more skillfully than I do. Even the ones who refuse to accept my teachings hire me when they need a tree felled.”

“A day laborer,” said Akmaro. “Day laborers are the poorest of the poor.”

“Is there anything wrong with that?” said Didul.

“Not at all,” said Akmaro. “You make me ashamed of my rents.”

“What I choose for myself isn’t a law for anyone else,” said Didul. He got out the fine-ground maizemeal and began to mix it with water and a pinch of salt.

“But when you speak, diggers and angels listen to
you,
I’ll wager,” said Akmaro. He helped Didul form the balls of dough and flatten them.

Didul shrugged. “Some do. Most do.”

“Is it as bad as the meeting today made it look?” asked Akmaro.

“Worse.”

“I don’t want to use the force of law to compel compliance,” said Akmaro.

“It wouldn’t work anyway,” said Didul. “Law can change how people behave when others are watching—that’s all. As you taught me back in the land of Chelem, the power of the whip is worthless against the stubborn heart.”

“Yes, well, there you are,” said Akmaro. “But what can I tell Motiak? We have to go back to the old ways, because the people won’t respect a priesthood that isn’t headed by the king?”

“No, not that,” said Didul.

“Or worse, tell him that we should give up trying to
teach the Keeper’s way! But I reread those old dreams of the Heroes as Nafai and Oykib wrote them in the ancient books, and the only meaning I can take from them is that the Keeper wants us to be one people, the three species of us, the two sexes of us, the rich and poor of us. How can I back away from that?”

“You can’t,” said Didul, slapping a flattened disc of dough on the sizzling cookstone.

“But if we force everyone to live together—”

“It would be absurd. Angels can’t live in digger holes, and diggers can’t sleep upside down on perches.”

“And humans are terrified of closed-in spaces and heights, both,” said Akmaro.

“So we just keep on trying to persuade them,” said Didul.

“Then there’s no hope,” said Akmaro. He flipped over another flatcake. “I can’t even persuade you to take a wife, or to tell my why you won’t.”

“Can’t you see why I won’t?” asked Didul. “See the poverty I live in.”

“Then marry a woman who is willing to work hard and cares as little for wealth as you do.”

“How many women are like that?” asked Didul.

“I know lots of them. My wife is like that. My daughter is like that.”

Didul blushed, and suddenly Akmaro understood.

“My daughter,” he said. “That’s what this is about, isn’t it! You come four times a year to Darakemba to meet with me—and you’ve fallen in love with Luet!”

Didul shook his head, trying to deny.

“Well, you foolish boy, haven’t you spoken to her about it? She’s not a fool, she must have noticed that you’re clever and kind and, or so I’m told by the women around me, probably the most handsome young man in Darakemba.”

“How can I speak to her?” said Didul.

“I would suggest using a column of air arising from your lungs, shaped by the lips and tongue and teeth into vowels and consonants,” said Akmaro.

“When we were young, I tormented her,” said Didul. “I humiliated her and Akma in front of everyone.”

“She’s forgotten that.”

“No she hasn’t.
I
haven’t, either. There’s not a day goes by that I don’t remember what I was and what I did.”

“All right, I’m sure she
does
remember. What I meant was that she forgave you long ago.”

“Forgave me,” said Didul. “But it’s a long stride from there to the love a wife should have for a husband.” He shook his head. “Do you want bean paste? It’s quite spicy, but the earth lady who made it for me is the finest cook I’ve ever known.”

Akmaro held out his flatcake, and Didul smeared the paste on with a wooden spoon. Then Akmaro rolled it up, folded the bottom end, and began eating from the top. “As good as you promised,” he said. “Luet would like it too. Can’t make it spicy enough for her.”

Didul laughed. “Father Akmaro, don’t you know your own family? Suppose I did speak to Luet. About this, I mean. About marriage. We talk all the time when I’m there, about other things—history and science, politics and religion, all of it, except personal things. She’s—brilliant. Too fine for me, but even if I dared to speak to her, and even if she somehow loved me, and even if you gave consent, it would still be impossible.”

Akmaro raised an eyebrow. “What, is there some consanguinity I’m not aware of? I had no brother, and neither did my wife, so you can’t be some secret nephew in the first degree.”

“Akma,” said Didul. “Akma has never forgiven me. And if Luet loved me he would take it as a slap in the face. And if you then gave consent to such a marriage, there would be no forgiveness. He’d go mad. He’d—I don’t know what he’d do.”

“Maybe he’d wake up and get over this childish vindictiveness
of his,” said Akmaro. “I know he’s never been the same since those days, but—”

“But nothing,” said Didul. “I did it to him. Don’t you understand? Akma’s hatred, all of it arises from the humiliation I heaped upon him that first day and so many days afterward—”

“You were a child then.”

“My father wasn’t cracking a whip over my head, Akmaro. I enjoyed it! Don’t you understand? When I see these people who tease digger children because of their poverty, because they live in holes and get dirty, because—I understand them. The tormentors. I was one. I know how it feels to have driven all compassion out of my heart and laugh at the pain of someone else.”

“You’re not the same person now.”

“I have rejected that part of myself,” said Didul. “But I’m the same person, all right.”

“When you pass through the water—”

“Yes, a new man. I become a new man. I’m a man who
does
not do those things, yes. But I’m still and always the man who once did them.”

“Not in my eyes, Didul. And I daresay not in Luet’s.”

“In Akma’s eyes, Father Akmaro, I am the same one who destroyed him before his sister, his mother, his father, his friends, his people. And if it ever happened that Luet and I became married—no, if he even heard that I wanted to, or that Luet was willing, or that you approved—it would set him off. I don’t know what he’d do, but he’d do it.”

“He’s not a violent man,” said Akmaro. “He’s gentle even if he does harbor ancient grudges.”

“I’m not fearing for my life,” said Didul. “I just know that someone as smart as Akma, as talented, as clever, as attractive—he’ll find a way to make us all regret that we ever dared affront him in such a way.”

“So what you’re telling me is that you refuse even to offer my daughter the possibility of marrying one of the finest young men I know in this whole empire,
solely because her
brother
can’t grow out of his childish rage?”

“We have no way of knowing what it was that happened inside Akma, Father Akmaro. He may have been a child, but that doesn’t make the things he felt then childish.”

Akmaro took the last bite of his flatcake. The bean paste having been used up, it tasted dry and salty. “I need a drink of water,” he said.

“The Milirek has no pure source,” said Didul, “and it flows from low mountains, some of which lose their snow for much of the year.”

“I drink the water that the Keeper gives me in every land,” said Akmaro.

Didul laughed. “Then I hope you won’t go down out of the gornaya! The slow-flowing waters of the flatlands aren’t safe. They’re muddy and foul and
things
live in them. I know a man who drank it once without boiling it, and he said his bowels didn’t stop running until he had lost a third of his body weight and his wife was ready to bury him, if only to save the trouble of digging yet another latrine.”

Akmaro grimaced. “I hear those stories, too. But somehow we have to learn to live in the flatlands. We’ve had peace for so long that people from all over are coming here. Former Elemaki, people from hidden mountain valleys, coming to Darakemba because under the rule of Motiak there’s peace and plenty. Well, the peace will last, I hope. But the plenty . . . we have to find a way to use the flatlands.”