The Ships of Earth: Homecoming: Volume 3 (24 page)

As she expected, Yobar jumped back, startled. When he saw that Luet was not afraid, however, he soon came closer to investigate. Now she could show him what she wanted him to see—the secret that they had so carefully kept from all the baboons during their year in this place. She reached down, picked up a fragment of rind with plenty of the meat of the fruit still clinging to it, and ate noisily.

The sound of her eating drew the others, but it was
Yobar—as she had expected—who followed her example and began to eat. He made no distinction between fruit and rind, of course, and seemed to enjoy both equally. When he was full, he jumped around, hooting and frolicking, until others—especially young males—began to venture forward to try the fruit.

Luet slowly stepped back, then turned and walked away

She heard footsteps padding behind her. She glanced back; Yobar was following her. She had not expected this, but then Yobar had always surprised her. He was intelligent and curious indeed, among animals whose intelligence was only a little short of the human mind, and whose curiosity and eagerness to learn were sometimes greater.

“Come if you will, then,” said Luet. She led him upstream to the garden, where the baboons had long been forbidden to go. The last of the third crop of melons was still on the vine, some ripe, some not yet. He hesitated at the edge of the garden, for the baboons had long since learned to respect that invisible boundary. She beckoned to him, though, and he carefully crossed the edge into the garden. She took him to a ripe melon. “Eat them when they look like this,” she said. “When they
smell
like this.” She held the melon out to him, still attached to the vine. He sniffed it, shook it, then thumped it on the ground. With enough thumping, he broke it. Then he took a bite and hooted happily at her.

“I’m not done yet,” said Luet. “You have to pay attention through the whole lesson.” She held out another melon, this one not ripe, and though she let Yobar sniff it, she wouldn’t let him hold it. “No,” she said. “Don’t eat these. The seeds aren’t mature, and if you eat them when they look like this, you won’t have a crop next year.” She set the unripe melon down behind her, and pointed to the broken ripe melon in pieces around Yobar’s feet. “Eat the ripe ones. Shedemei says the seeds will pass right through your digestive system unharmed, and they’ll sprout right in your turds and grow quiet nicely. You can
have melons forever, if you teach the others to eat only the ripe ones. If you teach them to
wait.
”

Yobar looked at her steadily.

“You don’t understand any of the words I’m saying,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean you don’t understand the lesson, does it? You’re a smart one. You’ll figure it out. You’ll teach the others before you move on to another troop, won’t you? It’s the only gift we can leave for you, our rent for using your valley this past year. Please take this from us, and use it well.”

He hooted once.

She got up and walked away from him. The riding camels were ready for mounting now; they had been waiting for her. “I was just showing the garden to Yobar,” she said. Of course Kokor rolled her eyes at that, but Luet hardly noticed—it was Nafai’s smile, and Hushidh’s nod, and Volemak’s “Well done” that mattered.

On command, the camels lurched to their feet, burdened with tents and supplies, dryboxes and coldboxes full of seeds and embryos, and—above all—with not sixteen but twenty-three human beings now. As Elemak said only last night, the Oversoul had better lead them to their destination before the children get too big to ride with their mothers, or else it had better find them more camels along the way.

The first two days’ travel took them northeast, along the same route they had taken from Basilica. It had been a year since they came that way, however, and almost nothing looked familiar—or at least nothing looked more familiar than anything else, since all grey-brown rocks and yellow-grey sand begin to look familiar after the first hour.

Mebbekew rode beside Elemak for a short way, late in the second afternoon. “We passed the place where you sentenced him to death, didn’t we?”

Elemak was silent for a moment. Then: “No, we won’t pass it at all.”

“I thought I saw it.”

“You didn’t.”

They rode in silence for a while more.

“Elemak,” said Mebbekew.

“Yes?” He didn’t sound as if he was enjoying the conversation.

“Who could stop us if we simply took our share of the tents, and three days’ supplies, and headed north to Basilica?”

Sometimes it seemed to Elemak that Mebbekew’s shortsightedness bordered on stupidity. “Apparently you’ve forgotten that we have no money. I can assure you that being poor in Basilica is even worse than being poor out here, because in Basilica the Oversoul won’t give a lizard’s tit for your survival.”

“Oh, and we’ve been so well taken care of
here
!” said Meb scornfully.

“We were at a well-watered location for more than a year and not
once
did any travelers or bandits or eloping couples or families on holiday ever come near us.”

“I know, we might as well have been on another planet. An uninhabited one! I can tell you, when Dolya was too pregnant to move, the baboon females were starting to look good to me.”

Never had Mebbekew seemed more useless than now. “I’m not surprised,” said Elemak.

Meb glared at him. “I was joking, pizdook.”

“I wasn’t,” said Elemak.

“So you’ve sold your soul, is that it? You’re Daddy’s little boy now. Nafai senior.”

Mebbekew’s resentment of Nafai was only natural—since Nafai had shown him up so many times. But Elemak had long since decided to endure Nafai, at least as long as he stayed in his place, as long as he was
useful
. That’s all Elemak really cared about now—whether a person contributed to the survival of the group. Of Elemak’s wife and child. And it wouldn’t hurt for Mebbekew to recall exactly how much
more
useful Nafai was than Meb himself. “We’ve lived a year together,” said Elemak. “You’ve eaten meat that Nafai killed during every week of that year, and you still think he’s nothing more than Father’s favorite?”

“Oh, I know he’s more than just that,” said Mebbekew. “Everyone knows it. In fact, most of us realize that he’s worth more than
you
.”

Mebbekew must have seen something in Elemak’s face, then, for he dropped back and stayed in line directly behind Elemak for some time.

Elemak knew that Meb’s little insult was meant to enrage him—but Elemak was not going to play along. He understood what Mebbekew wanted: out of his marriage, away from the crying of his baby, and back to the city, with its baths and commodes, its cuisine and its art, and, above all, its endless supply of flatterable and uncomplicated women. And the truth was that if he went back, Mebbekew would probably do as well as ever in Basilica, with or without money; and Dol, too, would certainly find a good living there, being an almost-legendary child actress. For the two of them, Basilica would be a lot better than anything that lay ahead of them in the foreseeable future.

But that issue is closed, thought Elemak. It was closed when the Oversoul made such a fool of me. The message was clear—try to kill Nafai and you’ll only be made to bumble and fumble around like a half-wit, unable even to tie a knot. And now it wouldn’t be Nafai he’d have to overcome in order to change their destination, it would be Father. No, there was no escape for Elemak. And besides, Basilica had nothing for
him
. Unlike Meb, he wasn’t content to hop from bed to bed and live off any woman who’d take him in. He needed to have stature in the city, he needed to know that when he spoke, men listened. Without money, there was little hope of
that
.

Besides, he loved Eiadh and was proud of little Proya, and he loved the desert life in a way that no one else, not even Volemak, could ever understand. And if he went back to Basilica, Eiadh would eventually not renew his marriage contract. He would again be in the unmanly position of having to look for a wife solely in order to maintain himself in the city. That would be unbearable—
this
was how men were meant to live, secure with their women, secure
with their children. He had no desire to break up his family
now
. He had stopped dreaming of Basilica, or at least had stopped wishing for it, since the only land of life worth living there was out of reach to him.

Only Meb and Dolya still had fantasies of returning. And, useless as they both were, it wouldn’t hurt the company one bit to let them go.

So as Elemak and his father were choosing the site for that night’s camp, he broached the subject. “You know that Meb and Dolya still want to go back to Basilica.”

“They have so little imagination, I’m not surprised,” said Volemak. “Some people only have one idea in their lives, and so they can hardly bear to let it go.”

“You know that they’re also nearly worthless to us.”

“Not as worthless as Kokor,” said Father.

“Yes, well, it’s hard to compete with
her
.”

“None of them are
completely
worthless,” said Father. “They may not do their share of work, but we need their genes. We need their babies in our community.”

“Our life would be much easier … a lot less conflict and annoyance . . . if—”

“No,” said Volemak.

Elemak seethed. How dare Father not even let him finish his sentence.

“It’s not by my choice,” said Volemak. “I’d let anyone go back who wanted to, if it were up to me. But the Oversoul has chosen this company.”

Elemak stopped paying attention almost as soon as Father mentioned the Oversoul. It always meant that the reasonable part of the discussion was over.

When they camped for the night, Elemak determined that during his watch, if Meb and Dolya decided to slip away, he’d make sure he didn’t happen to notice them. It would be easy enough to find the way—the desert wasn’t all that challenging through here, and they’d have the best chance of the whole journey to return to civilization. Which wasn’t that good a chance, admittedly—there would be as great a risk of bandits as ever. Perhaps more, now that Moozh ruled in Basilica and would drive rough
and uncivilized men from the city. Maybe the Oversoul would watch out for them and help them get back to Basilica—and maybe not. Whatever happened, Elemak wouldn’t block their attempt, if they made one.

But they didn’t. Elemak even stood a longer watch than usual, but they never slipped out of their tent, never tried to steal a camel or two. Elemak finally woke Vas for his watch and then went to bed, full of fresh contempt for Meb. If it had been
I
who wanted to leave the group and live somewhere else, I would have taken my wife and baby and
left
. But not Mebbekew. He takes
no
for an answer far too easily.

At midmorning on the third day of travel, they reached the point where, to return to Basilica, they would have traveled north. Elemak recognized the spot; so, of course, did Volemak. But no one else did; no one realized that when they continued eastward instead of turning straight north, they were closing their last hope of restoring something like their old life.

Elemak didn’t feel at all sad about it. He wasn’t like Mebbekew—his life had centered in the desert all along. He had only returned to Basilica in order to sell his goods and find a wife, though of course he always enjoyed the city and thought of it as home. It’s just that the idea of
home
had never meant that much to him—he didn’t get homesick or nostalgic or teary-eyed about it. Not till Eiadh gave birth and he held Proya in his arms and heard the boy’s firm loud cry and saw his smile. And then home, to him, was the tent where Eiadh and Proya slept. He had no need of Basilica now. He was too strong in himself to hunger for a particular city the way Meb did.

But if this caravan was going to be Elemak’s world for the next few years, he was determined to make sure his position in this small polity was as dominant and important as possible. In the valley, where Zdorab’s garden brought in half the food and Nafai was as good at hunting as Elemak himself, there was no way for Elemak to fully emerge, secure in his position of leadership. Now, though, on camelback again, even Father deferred to Elemak’s
judgment on many, many issues, and while the Oversoul chose their general direction, it was Elemak who determined their exact path. He could look back over the company and find Eiadh, her eyes on him whenever she wasn’t busy with nursing the baby. The journey was reminding her of how essential he was to the survival of the whole enterprise, and he loved the pride she took in that.

The Oversoul had told Father that if they found a good safe route and had plenty of supplies, sixty days of steady traveling would bring them to their destination. But of course, sixty days of traveling was out of the question. The babies could never endure that long a stretch of heat and dryness and instability. No, they would have to find another secure place and rest again. And perhaps another after that. And in each place, they would probably have to stay long enough to put in a crop and harvest it to feed them on the next leg of their journey. A year. A year in each place, perhaps three years to make a sixty-day journey. Yet through it all, it would be Elemak truly leading them, and by the end of it everyone should be turning to me for leadership, with Father reduced to nothing more than what he ought to be—a wise old counselor. But not the true leader, not anymore.

That will be me, by right. If I decide then that the Oversoul’s destination is the place where I want to lead the group, then that’s where I’ll lead them, and they’ll get there safely and in good time. If I decide otherwise, of course, then the Oversoul can go hang.

The Nividimu River wasn’t a seasonal river—it rose from natural springs in the rugged Lyudy Mountains, which were high enough to catch snow in the winter. But the flow was never much, and when the river dropped steeply down the Krutohn Valley and reached the low, hot, dry desert, it sank into the sand and disappeared many kilometers before reaching the Scour Sea.

It was because of the Nividimu that the great north-south caravan trail climbed steeply up into the Lyudy Mountains and then followed the river down, almost to
the point where it disappeared. It was the most dependable source of drinkable water between Basilica on the north and the Cities of Fire to the south. Perhaps a dozen caravans a year passed along the banks of the Nividimu, and so it was almost to be expected that the Index would instruct them to make camp for a week in the foothills of the Lyudy Mountains while a northbound caravan with a heavy military escort made its way up the valley and then down the twisting road out of the mountains.