Earthborn (Homecoming) (39 page)

Edhadeya came to value him for his own sake. Two things about him, though, weighed heavily on her mind. She kept thinking about how even a man like him, a confirmed bigot, could actually harbor a fundamental decency deep within. The outward pattern of his life didn’t necessarily reflect what was inside him. It took terrible events to waken him, to get him to shuck off the man he seemed to be and reveal that inward self. But the decent self was there to be found.

The other thing that preyed upon her mind was what he had said about her brothers. The Unkept had held their meetings for thirteen years and they led to nothing. Then Akma succeeded in persuading all her brothers, all the king’s sons, to reject belief in the Keeper and, more specifically, obedience to the religion of Akmaro. And from that time forward, the most evil men felt free to do their dark business.

That can’t be what Akma intended. If he understood it the way Khideo does, wouldn’t he stop?

I should talk to Mon, not Akma, she told herself—not noticing that she must already have decided to talk to Akma. If I could get him to break ranks with the others . . . but no, she knew that was impossible. None of the brothers would betray the others; that was how they’d see it. No, it had to be Akma. If he changed his mind, they would change theirs. He would persuade them.

She kept hearing Luet’s despairing voice: “There’s nothing left in him, Edhadeya. Nothing there but hate.” If that was true, then talking to Akma would be a waste of time. But Luet couldn’t see into his heart. If Khideo had a spark of decency in him, couldn’t Akma also? He was young, still; he had been damaged in childhood far more than Khideo had. The world had been misshapen for him ever since; if once he saw the truth, couldn’t he choose to be a different man in a very different world?

These were the thoughts that drove her as one night she locked the school, leaving Khideo—no, Lissinits—as caretaker of it. Then, torch in hand, she walked in the brisk autumn air to her father’s house. On the way she thought: What if there were no safety? If I were an earth woman—or man, or child—I wouldn’t dare to make this walk in darkness, for fear of being set upon by cruel men who hate me, not because of anything I’ve done, but because of the shape of my body. For those people these streets are filled with terror, where all my life I’ve walked without fear, day and night. Can they truly be citizens, when they haven’t the freedom to walk the city?

As she expected, Akma was in the king’s house, in the library wing, where he slept most nights now. Not that he was asleep. He was up, reading, studying, jotting down notes to himself in the wax on a bark; one of dozens of barks covered with scribbling. “Writing a book?” she asked.

“I’m not a holy man,” he said. “I don’t write
books. I write speeches.” He swept the barks to one side. She liked the way he looked at her, as if he had been hoping she would come. She had his full attention, and his eyes didn’t wander over her body the way most men’s did. He looked into her eyes. She felt as though she ought to say something very clever or very wise, to justify his interest in her.

No, she told herself sternly. That’s just one of his tricks. One of the things he does to win people over. And I’m not here to be won over. I came to teach, not to be taught.

No wonder I once loved him, if he always looked at me like that.

To her surprise, what she blurted out now was nothing like what she had come to say. “I used to love you,” she said.

A sad smile came over his face. “Used to,” he whispered. “Before there was any issue of belief.”

“Is it an issue of belief, Akma?” she asked.

“For two people to love each other, they have to meet, don’t they? And two people who live in utterly different worlds have no chance of meeting.”

She knew what he meant; they had had this conversation before, and he had insisted that while she lived in an imaginary world in which the Keeper of Earth watched over everyone, giving purpose to their lives, he lived in a real world of stone and air and water, where people had to find their own purposes.

“Yet we’re meeting here,” she said.

“That remains to be seen.” His words were cold and distant, but his eyes searched her face. For what? What does he want to see? Some remnant of my love for him? But that is the one thing that I dare not show him because I dare not find it in myself. I can’t love him, because only a monstrous, callous woman could love the man who caused so much pointless suffering.

“Have you been hearing the reports from the provinces?”

“There are many reports,” said Akma. “Which did you have in mind?”

She refused to play along with his pretense of innocence. She waited.

“Yes, I’ve heard the reports,” he said. “A terrible business. I wonder your father hasn’t called in the military.”

“To attack what army?” she asked scornfully. “You’re smarter than that, Akma. An army is useless against thugs who melt away into the city and hide by wearing the clothing of respectable men of business, trade, or labor during the day.”

“I’m a scholar, not a tactician,” said Akma.

“Are you?” she asked. “I’ve thought about this a great deal, Akma, and when I look at you it’s not a scholar that I see.”

“No? What monster have you decided that I am?”

“Not a monster, either. Just a common thug. Your hands have torn holes in the wings of angel children. Diggers hide in terror during the night because they fear seeing your shadow come between them and the moonlight.”

“Are you seriously accusing me of this? I have never raised my hand in violence against anyone.”

“You caused it, Akma. You set them in motion, the whole army of them, the whole nasty, cruel, evil army of child-beaters.”

He shuddered; his face contorted with some deep emotion. “You can’t be saying this to me. You know that it’s a lie.”

“They’re your friends. You’re their hero, Akma. You and my brothers.”

“I don’t control them!” he said. He only barely controlled his voice.

“Oh, you don’t?” she answered. “What, do they control
you
then?”

He rose from the table, knocking over his stool as he did. “If they did control me, Edhadeya, I’d be out preaching against Father’s pathetic little religion right now. They beg, they plead. Ominer’s all for doing it,
Pour the bronze while it still flows, he tells me. But I refuse to lend my name to any of these persecutions. I don’t want anybody hurt—not even diggers, despite what you think of me. And those angels, with holes torn in their wings—do you think I didn’t hear that with the same rage as any decent person? Do you think I don’t want the thugs who did that punished?” His voice trembled with emotion.

“Do you think they would have had the boldness to do it if it weren’t for you?”

“I didn’t invent this! I didn’t create hatred and resentment of the diggers! It was our fathers who did it, when they changed the whole religious structure of the state to
include
the diggers as if they were people—”

“Thirteen years since they made those changes, and in all those years, nothing happened. Then you announced that you’ve ‘discovered’ that there is no Keeper—in spite of my true dream by which the Keeper saved the Zenifi! In spite of knowing that it was only by the power of the Oversoul that the very records from which you took your ‘proof were translated. You persuade my brothers—even Mon, I don’t know how—even Aronha, who always used to see through silliness—and then, the moment that Father’s heirs are united in their unbelief, the floodgates open.”

“You might as well blame my mother, then. After all, she gave birth to me.”

“Oh, I think there is blame before you. I found out, for instance, that Bego has been part of a longtime conspiracy against Akmaro’s teachings. If you search your memory honestly, I wonder if you won’t find that it was Bego who led you to your ‘discovery’ of the nonexistence of the Keeper.”

“Bego isn’t part of anything. He lives for his books. He lives in the past.”

“And your father was inventing a new future, doing away with the past. Yes, Bego would hate that, wouldn’t he? And he’s never believed in the Keeper, I
realize that now—insisting on a natural explanation for everything. No miracles, please—remember him saying that over and over? No miracles. The people of Akmaro escaped because it was in the best interest of the digger guards to let them go. The Keeper didn’t make them sleep. Did anybody
see
them sleeping? No, Akmaro simply dreamed a dream. Go with the simplest explanation every time, that’s what he taught us.”

“He taught us that because it’s true. It’s intellectually honest.”

“Honest? Akma, the simplest explanation of most of these stories is that the Keeper sends true dreams. The Keeper intervenes sometimes in people’s lives. To avoid believing that you have to come up with the most convoluted, twisted, insulting speculations. You dare to tell me that my dream was only significant because it reminded people of the Zenifi, not because I was actually able to tell the difference between a true dream and a normal one. In order to disbelieve in the Keeper, you had to believe that I was and continue to be a self-deceptive fool.”

“Not a fool,” he said, with real pain in his expression. “You were a child. It seemed real to you then. So of course you remember it as being real.”

“You see? What you call intellectual honesty I call self-deception. You won’t believe me, when I stand before you in flesh and blood and declare to you what I saw—”

“What you hallucinated among the dreams of the night.”

“Nor will you even believe the simple truth of what the ancient records say—that the Rasulum, just like the Nafari, were brought back to Earth after millions of years of exile on another world. No, you can’t stick with the
simple
explanation that the people who wrote these things actually knew what they were talking about. You have to decide that the books were created by later writers who simply wrote down old legends that accounted for the divinity of the Heroes by claiming
that they came from the heavens. Nothing can be read straight. Everything has to be twisted to fit your one, basic article of faith that there is no Keeper. You can’t know it! You have no proof of it! And yet faith in that one premise—against which you have a thousand written witnesses and at least a dozen living ones, including me—faith in that one premise leads you to set in motion the chain of events that leads to children being mutilated in the streets of the cities and villages of Darakemba.”

“Is this why you came?” asked Akma. “To tell me that my disbelief in your true dream really hurts your feelings? I’m sorry. I had hoped you would be mature enough to understand that reason has to triumph over superstition.”

She hadn’t touched him. Hadn’t reached that spark of decency hidden deep inside. Because there was no such spark, she knew that now. He rejected the Keeper, not because he was hurt so badly as a child, but because he truly hated the world the Keeper wanted to create. He loved evil; that’s why he no longer loved her.

Without another word, she turned to go.

“Wait,” he said.

She stopped; foolishly, she allowed another spark of hope to brighten.

“It’s not in my power to stop these persecutions, but your father can.”

“You think he hasn’t tried?”

“He’s going about it all wrong,” said Akma. “The civil guard won’t enforce the law. So many of them are actually involved in the Unkept.”

“Why don’t you name names?” said Edhadeya. “If you truly meant what you said about wanting to stop the cruelty—”

“The men I know are all old and none of them are going out beating up children. Are you going to listen to me?”

“If you have a plan, I’ll take it to Father.”

“It’s simple enough. The reason the Unkept feel
such rage is because they only have two choices, either to join in with a state religion that forces them to associate with lower creatures—don’t argue with me, I’m telling you what
they
think—”

“You think the same—”

“You’ve never listened to me long enough to know
what
I think, and it doesn’t matter anyway. Listen now. They are rebelling out of a sense of helpless rage. They can’t strike at the king, but they can strike at the priests and the diggers. But what if the king decreed that there no longer
was
a state religion?”

“Abolish the Houses of the Keeper!”

“Not at all. Let the Kept continue to assemble and share their beliefs and rituals—but on a completely voluntary basis. And let others who believe differently form their own assemblies, and without anyone’s interference have
their
rituals and teachings. As many assemblies, as many beliefs as people want. And the government will simply look on and interfere with none of them.”

“A nation should be of one heart and mind,” said Edhadeya.

“My father destroyed all hope of that thirteen years ago,” said Akma. “Let the king declare religious belief and assembly a private matter, with no public interest at all, and there will be peace.”

“In other words, in order to save the Kept from attack, we should remove the last protections we have?”

“They
have
no protections, Edhadeya. You know it. The king knows it. He has found the limits of his authority. But once he has abolished all government sponsorship of a religion, he can make a law that no one can be persecuted because of their religious beliefs. That one will have teeth, because it will protect everyone equally. If the Unkept want to form an assembly of fellow believers, they will have protection. It will be in their interest to uphold that law. No more secret meetings. No more hidden societies. Everything out in the open. Suggest it to your father. Even if you
don’t think my idea has merit, he will. He’ll see that it’s the only way.”

“He won’t be fooled any more than I am,” said Edhadeya. “This decree you propose is exactly what you’ve wanted all along.”

“I didn’t even think of it till yesterday,” said Akma.

“Oh, pardon, I forgot that it took Bego a certain amount of time to get you to think up his ideas as if they were your own.”

“Edhadeya, if my father’s religion can’t hold its own by the sheer power of its truthfulness, without any help from the government except to protect its members from violence, then it doesn’t deserve to survive.”