The Memory of Earth (4 page)

Nafai was surprised at the question. How could Father take the estate manager with him, when Elemak was also gone? Truzhnisha would keep the household running, of course; but without Rashgallivak, who would manage the greenhouses, the stables, the gossips, the booths?
Certainly not Mebbekew—he had no interest in the day-to-day duties of Father’s business. And the men would hardly take orders from Issib—they regarded him with tenderness or pity, not respect.

“No, Father left Rash in charge,” Issib said. “Rash was probably sleeping out at the coldhouse tonight. But you know Father never leaves without seeing that everything’s in order.”

Elemak cast a quick, sidelong glance at Nafai. “Just wondered why certain people were getting so cocky.”

Then it dawned on Nafai: Elemak’s question was really a back-handed compliment—he had wondered whether Father had put Nafai in charge of things in his absence. And plainly Elemak didn’t like the idea of Nafai running any part of the Wetchik family’s rare-plant business.

“I’m not interested in taking over the weed trade,” said Nafai, “if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I’m not
worried
about anything at all,” said Elemak. “Isn’t it time for you to go to Mama’s school? She’ll be afraid her little boy got robbed and beaten on the road.”

Nafai knew he should let Elemak’s taunt go unanswered, shouldn’t provoke him anymore. The last thing he wanted was to have Elemak as an enemy. But the very fact that he looked up to Elemak so much, wanted so much to be like him, made it impossible for Nafai to leave the gibe unanswered. As he headed for the courtyard door, he turned back to say, “I have much higher aims in life than skulking around shooting at robbers and sleeping with camels and carrying tundra plants to the tropics and tropical plants to the glaciers. I’ll leave that game to you.”

Suddenly Elemak’s chair flew across the room as he jumped to his feet and in two strides had Nafai’s face pressed against the doorframe. It hurt, but Nafai hardly noticed the pain, or even the fear that Elemak might hurt
him even worse. Instead there was a strange feeling of triumph. I made Elemak lose his temper. He doesn’t get to keep pretending that he thinks I’m not worth noticing.

“That
game
, as you call it, pays for everything you have and everything you are,” said Elemak. “If it wasn’t for the money that Father and Rash and I bring in, do you think anybody’d pay attention to you in Basilica? Do you think your
mother
has so much honor that it would actually transfer to her
sons?
If you think that, then you don’t know how the world works. Your mother might be able to make her daughters into hot stuff, but the only thing a woman can do for a
son
is make a scholar out of him.” He practically spat the word
scholar.
“And believe me, boy, that’s all you’re ever going to be. I don’t know why the Oversoul even bothered putting a boy’s parts on you, little girl, because all you’re going to have in this world when you grow up is what a
woman
gets.”

Again, Nafai knew that he should keep his silence and let Elemak have the last word. But the retort no sooner came to his mind than it came out of his mouth. “Is calling me a woman your subtle way of telling me you’ve got some heat for me? I think you’ve been out on the road too long if
I’m
starting to look irresistible.”

At once Elemak let go of him. Nafai turned around, half-expecting to see Elemak laughing, shaking his head about how their playing sometimes got out of hand. Instead his brother was standing there red-faced, breathing heavily, like an animal poised to lunge. “Get out of this house,” said Elemak, “and don’t come back while I’m here.”

“It’s not your house,” Nafai pointed out.

“The next time I see you here I’ll kill you.”

“Come on, Elya, you know I was only joking.”

Issib floated blithely between them and cast an arm
clumsily across Nafai’s shoulders. “We’re late getting into the city, Nyef. Mother
will
be worried about us.”

This time Nafai had sense enough to shut his mouth and let things go. He
did
know how to hold his tongue—he just never remembered to do it soon enough. Now Elemak was furious at him. Might be angry for days. Where will I sleep if I can’t go home? Nafai wondered. Immediately there flashed in his mind an image of Eiadh whispering to him, “Why not stay tonight in
my
room? After all, we’re surely going to be mates one day. A woman trains her favorite nieces to be mates for her sons, doesn’t she? I’ve known that since I first knew you, Nafai. Why should we wait any longer? After all, you’re only about the stupidest human being in all of Basilica.”

Nafai came out of his reverie to realize that it was Issib speaking to him, not Eiadh. “Why do you keep goading him like that,” Issib was saying, “when you know it’s all Elemak can do to keep from killing you sometimes?”

“I think of things and sometimes I say them when I shouldn’t,” said Nafai.

“You think of
stupid
things and you’re so stupid that you
say
them every time.”

“Not
every
time.”

“Oh, you mean there are even
stupider
things that you
don’t
say? What a mind you’ve got! A treasure!” Issib was floating ahead of him. He always did that going up the ridge road, forgetting that for people who had to deal with gravity, a slower pace might be more comfortable.

“I like Elemak,” said Nafai miserably. “I don’t understand why he doesn’t like me.”

“I’ll get him to make you a list sometime,” said Issib. “I’ll paste it onto the end of my own.”

It was a long but familiar road from the Wetchik house to Basilica. Until the age of eight, Nafai had always made the round trip in the other direction, when Mother took him and Issib to Father’s house for holidays. In those days it was magical to be in a household of men. Father, with his mane of white hair, was almost a god—indeed, until he was five Nafai had thought that Father
was
the Oversoul. Mebbekew, only six years older than Nafai, had always been a vicious, merciless tease, but in those early years Elemak was kind and playful. Ten years older than Nafai, Elya was already mansize in Nafai’s first memories of Wetchik’s house; but instead of Father’s ethereal look, he had the dark rugged appearance of a fighter, a man who was kind only because he wanted to be, not because he was incapable of harshness when it was needed. In those days Nafai had pleaded to be released from Mother’s household and allowed to live with Wetchik—and Elemak. Having Mebbekew around
all the time would simply be the unavoidable price for living in the place of the gods.

Mother and Father met with him together to explain why they wouldn’t release him from his schooling. “Boys who are sent to their fathers at this age are the ones without promise,” said Father. “The ones who are too violent to get along well in a household of study, too disrespectful to abide in a household of women.”

“And the stupid ones go to their fathers at age eight,” said Mother. “Beyond rudimentary reading and arithmetic, what use does a stupid man have for learning?”

Even now, remembering, Nafai felt a little stab of pleasure at that—for Mebbekew had often bragged that, unlike Nyef and Issya, and Elya in his day,
Meb
had gone home to Father at the age of eight. Nafai was sure that Meb had met every criterion for early entry into the household of men.

So they managed to persuade Nafai that it was a good thing for him to stay with his mother. There were other reasons, too—to keep Issib company, the prestige of his mother’s household, the association with his sisters—but it was Nafai’s ambition that made him content to stay. I’m one of the boys with real promise. I will have value to the land of Basilica, perhaps to the whole world. Perhaps one day my writings will be sent into the sky for the Oversoul to share them with the people of other cities and other languages. Perhaps I will even be one of the great ones whose ideas are encoded into glass and saved in an archive, to be read during all the rest of human history as one of the giants of Harmony.

Still, because he had pleaded so earnestly to be allowed to live with Father, from the age of eight until he was thirteen, he and Issib had spent almost every weekend at the Wetchik house, becoming as familiar with it as with Rasa’s house in the city. Father had insisted that they
work hard, experiencing what a man does to earn his living, so their weekends were not holidays. “You study for six days, working with your mind while your body takes a holiday. Here you’ll work in the stables and the greenhouses, working with your body while your mind learns the peace that comes from honest labor.”

That was the way Father talked, a sort of continuous oratory; Mother said he took that tone because he wasn’t sure how to talk naturally with children. But Nafai had overheard enough adult conversations to know that Father talked that way with everybody except Rasa herself. It showed that Father was never at ease, never truly himself with anyone; but over the years Nafai had also learned that no matter how elevated and hortatory Father’s conversation might be, he was never a fool; his words were never empty or stupid or ignorant. This is how a man speaks, Nafai had thought when he was young, and so he practiced an elegant style and made a point of learning classical Emeznetyi as well as the colloquial Basyat that was the language of most art and commerce in Basilica these days. More recently Nafai had realized that to communicate effectively with real people he had to speak the common language—but the rhythms, the melodies of Emeznetyi could still be felt in his writing and heard in his speech. Even in his stupid jokes that earned Elemak’s wrath.

“I’ve just realized something,” said Nafai.

Issib didn’t answer—he was far enough ahead that Nafai wasn’t sure he could even hear. But Nafai went ahead and said it anyway, speaking even more softly, because he was probably saying it only to himself. “I think that I say those things that make people so angry, not because I really
mean
them, but because I simply thought of a clever
way
to say them. It’s a kind of art, to think of the perfect way to say an idea, and when you
think of it then you have to say it, because words don’t exist until you say them.”

“A pretty feeble kind of art, Nyef, and I say you should give it up before it gets you killed.”

So Issib
was
listening, after all.

“For a big strong guy you sure take a long time getting up Ridge Road to Market Street,” said Issib.

“I was thinking,” said Nafai.

“You really ought to learn how to think and walk at the same time.”

Nafai reached the top of the road, where Issib was waiting. I really
was
dawdling, he thought. I’m not even out of breath.

But because Issib had paused there, Nafai also waited, turning as Issib had turned, to look back down the road they had just traveled. Ridge Road was named exactly right, since it ran along a ridge that sloped down toward the great well-watered coastal plain. It was a clear morning, and from the crest they could see all the way to the ocean, with a patchwork quilt of farms and orchards, stitched with roads and knotted with towns and villages, spread out like a bedcover between the mountains and the sea. Looking down Ridge Road they could see the long line of farmers coming up for market, leading strings of pack animals. If Nafai and Issib had delayed even ten minutes more they would have had to make this trip in the noise and stink of horses, donkeys, mules, and kurelomi, the swearing of the men and the gossip of the women. Once that had been a pleasure, but Nafai had traveled with them often enough to know that the gossip and the swearing were always the same. Not everything that comes from a garden is a rose.

Issib turned to the west, and so did Nafai, to see a landscape as opposite as any could possibly be: the jumbled rocky plateau of the Besporyadok, the near-waterless
waste that went on and on toward the west. A thousand poets at least had made the same observation, that the sun rose from the sea, surrounded by jewels of light dancing on the water, and then settled down in red fire in the west, lost in the dust that was always blowing across the desert. But Nafai always thought that, at least where weather was concerned, the sun ought to go the other way. It didn’t bring water from the ocean to the land—it brought dry fire from the desert toward the sea.

The vanguard of the market crowd was close enough now that they could hear the drivers and the donkeys. So they turned and started walking toward Basilica, sections of the redrock wall shining in the first rays of sunlight. Basilica, where the forested mountains of the north met the desert of the west and the garden seacoast of the east. How the poets had sung of this place: Basilica, the City of Women, the Harbor of Mists, Red-walled Garden of the Oversoul, the haven where all the waters of the world come together to conceive new clouds, to pour out fresh water again over the earth.

Or, as Mebbekew put it, the best town in the world for getting laid.

The path between the Market Gate of Basilica and the Wetchik house on Ridge Road had never changed in all these years—Nafai knew when as much as a stone of it had been changed. But when Nafai turned thirteen, he had reached a turning point that changed the meaning of that road. At thirteen, even the most promising boys went to live with their fathers, leaving their schooling behind forever. The only ones who remained behind were the ones who meant to reject a man’s trade and become scholars. When Nafai was eight he had pleaded to live with his father, at thirteen he argued the other way. No, I haven’t decided to be a scholar, he said, but I also haven’t decided
not
to be. Why should I decide now?
Let me live with you, Father, if I must—but let me also stay at Mother’s school until things become clearer. You don’t need me in your work, the way you need Elemak. And I don’t want to be another Mebbekew.