Earthborn (Homecoming) (43 page)

Shedemei tried desperately to think of retorts for all the things he said, the way she had done with the sons of Motiak, but she found the spell of his voice so compelling that she couldn’t answer. He owned her mind as long as he chose to speak to her. She knew that she
didn’t believe him; she just couldn’t remember, for the moment,
why.

He went on and on, but his speech didn’t seem long. Every word was fascinating, moving, funny, joyful, wise—you dared not miss any of it. Never mind that Shedemei knew that he was lying, that even
he
did not believe half of what he said. It was still beautiful; it was still music; the rhapsody of his words swept the people with it like a current in the icy water of Tsidorek, numbing them even as it moved them.

She only won her freedom from the magic of his speech when, near the end, he proposed his ultimate solution to the problem of the diggers. “We have all been sickened by the acts of wanton cruelty over the past months,” said Akma. “Every such action was against the laws that already existed, and we are glad that our wise king has made the laws even stronger by forbidding any persecution of people because of their religious beliefs. Nevertheless, there would have been no persecution if there had been no diggers living unnaturally among the men and women of Darakemba.”

There it was—the moment when Shedemei recoiled from his words and stopped finding his voice beautiful. But the others around her were not so clear minded, and she had to nudge the other teachers from her school and glare at them to make sure they knew that they should not believe what he was saying now.

“Is it the diggers’ fault that they are here? It was certainly never their intention! Some of them have lived in this area since the ancient days when diggers and angels always lived near each other—so that diggers could steal the children of angels and eat them in their dank warrens. One can hardly list that as a qualification for citizenship! Most diggers that live in Darakemba, however, are here because they or their parents took part in a raiding party on the borders of our land, trying to steal from hardworking men and
women the fruits of their labors. Either they were captured in bloody battle or were taken when a retaliatory raid captured a digger village; then they were brought here as slaves. That was a mistake! That was wrong! Not because the diggers are not suited to slavery—by nature they
are
slaves, and that is how the rulers of the Elemaki treat them all. No, our mistake was that even as slaves, even as trophies of victory, it was wrong to bring diggers into a nation of people, where some would be deceived. Yes, some would think that because the diggers were capable of a kind of speech, they were therefore capable of thinking like, feeling like, acting like
people.
But we must not be deceived. Our eyes can tell us that these are lies. What human hasn’t rejoiced to see an angel in flight or hear the eveningsong of our brothers and sisters! What angel has not delighted in the learning that the humans brought with them, the powerful tools that can be shaped and wielded by strong human arms! We can live together, help each other—though I am not saying that our brothers in Khideo may not continue to deprive themselves of the good company of the sky people if they so choose.”

Another appreciative laugh from the audience.

“But do you rejoice to see the buttocks of a digger flash in the air as he burrows into the earth? Do you love to hear their whining, grating voices, to see their claws touching food that you are expected to eat? Isn’t it a mockery when you see their spadelike fingers clutching a book? Don’t you long to leave the room if one of them should ever attempt to sing?”

Each line of abuse was greeted with a laugh.

“They didn’t choose to live among us! And now, stricken with the poverty that must always be the lot of those unequal to the mental requirements of real citizenship, they haven’t the means to leave! And why should they? Life in Darakemba, even for a digger, is vastly better than life among the Elemaki! Yet we must have respect for the Keeper of Earth and obey the natural repugnance that is the Keeper’s clear message to
us. The diggers must leave! But not by force! Not by violence! We are civilized!
We
are not Elemaki. I have felt the lash of the Elemaki diggers on my back, and I would rather give my life than see any human or angel treat even the vilest digger in that way! Civilized people are above such cruelty.”

The people cheered and applauded. Aren’t we all noble, thought Shedemei, to repudiate the persecution even as Akma is about to tell us a new way to begin it again, only more effectively.

“Are we helpless, then? What about those diggers who understand the truth and
want
to leave Darakemba, yet can’t afford the cost of the journey? Let us help them understand that they must go. Let us help them kindly on their way. First, you must realize that the only reason diggers stay here is because we keep paying them to do work that poor and struggling humans and angels would gladly do. Of course you can pay the diggers less, since they only need to dig a hole in the bank of a creek in order to have a house! But you must make the sacrifice—for their sake as well as our own!—and stop hiring them for any work at all. Pay a little more to have a
man
dig that ditch. Pay a little more to have a
woman
wash your clothes. It will be worth the cost because you won’t have to pay to have bad work redone!”

Applause. Laughter. Shedemei wanted to weep at the injustice of his lie.

“Don’t buy from digger tradesmen. Don’t even buy from human or angel shopkeepers, if the goods were made using digger labor. Insist that they guarantee that all the work was done by men and women, not by lower creatures. But if a digger wants to sell his land, then yes, buy it—at a fair price, too. Let them all sell their land, till not one patch of earth in Darakemba has a digger’s name attached to it.”

Applause. Cheers.

“Will they go hungry? Yes. Will their poverty grow worse? Yes. But we will
not
let them starve. I spent years of my childhood with constant hunger because
our digger slavedrivers wouldn’t give us enough to eat! We are not like them! We will gather food, we will use funds donated to the Assembly of the Ancient Ways, and we will
feed
every digger in Darakemba if we have to—but only long enough for them to make the journey to the border! And we will feed them only as long as they are on their way! They can have food from the larders of the Ancient Ways—but only at the edge of the city, and then they must walk, they and all their families, along the road toward the border. At stations along the way, we’ll have a safe place for them to camp, and food for them to eat, and they will be treated with kindness and courtesy—but in the morning they will rise and eat and be on their way, ever closer to the border. And at the end, they will be given enough to walk on for another week, to find a place within the lands of the Elemaki, where they belong. Let them do their labor there! Let them preserve the precious ‘culture’ that certain people prize so much—but not in Darakemba! Not in Darakemba!”

As he no doubt planned, the audience took up the chant; it was only with difficulty that he quieted them again so he could finish. The speech did not go on much longer after that—only long enough for him to rhapsodize again about the beauty of the ancient ways of the Nafari and the Darakembi, about how loving and inclusive the Assembly of the Ancient Ways would be, and how only among the Ancients, as they would call themselves, could true justice and kindness be found, for diggers as well as angels and humans. They screamed their approval, chanted his name, cried out their love for him.

He doesn’t have mine, Shedemei answered silently.

simple and humane solution to most of those who came.>

And how will it sound to the earth people?

Motiak will stop it, won’t he?

Doesn’t he see that to take away their livelihood and drive them from their homes so they can survive at all is every bit as cruel, in the long run?

The Keeper doesn’t work like that. He wants people to follow him because they love his way.

And they were back to plotting murder as quickly as they could.

“Let’s go home, Shedemei,” said one of the students.

“He was So wonderful,” said one of the others, shaking her head ruefully. “Too bad that everything he said was pure shit.”

Shedemei immediately reproved her coarse wording, but then laughed and hugged her. The students of her school might have been caught up in the moment, but they had been truly educated and not just schooled—they were able to hear something they had never before, analyze it, and decide for themselves that it was worthless, dangerous, vile. . . .

Maybe her student
had
used the only possible word for it.

When they got home to the school it was after dark. The girls rushed in to tell the others what had been said at the meeting. Shedemei spent those first few minutes going to the teachers who happened to be
earth people. She explained about Akma’s strategy of boycotting diggers to compel them to leave. “Your place here is safe,” she said. “And I will stop charging tuition for all our students, so their parents can spare more to hire diggers and help those they cannot hire. We will do all we can.”

She didn’t pass into the courtyard until the students who had heard the speech were telling about Akma’s statements about the diggers. They had good recall; some of it they reported word for word. Edhadeya was one of those who had not gone; as she told Shedemei, she didn’t know if she would be able to control herself, and besides, she had to prove that one of Motiak’s children, at least, had not lost all decency. Now, though, as she heard Akma’s statements about inferior digger intelligence, about their unfitness for civilized society, she did lose control. “He knew Voozhum! Not as well as my brothers, but he knew her! He knows that everything he’s saying is a lie, he knows it, he knows it!” She was flinging her arms about, ranting, almost screaming. The children were frightened, a little, but also admired this display of passion—it was a far cry from the brusque but even temper that Shedemei always showed.

Shedemei went to her and wrapped her in her arms. “It hurts the worst when evil is done by those we love,” she said.

“How can I answer his lies? How can I stop people from believing him?”

“You’re already doing it. You teach. You speak wherever you can. You refuse to tolerate it when others echo these vile things in your presence.”

“I hate him!” Edhadeya said, her voice rough with emotion. “I will never forgive him, Shedemei. The Keeper tells us to forgive our enemies but I won’t. If that makes me evil also, then I’m evil, but I will hate him forever for what he did tonight.”

One of the students, confused, said, “But he didn’t actually
do
anything, did he? He only talked.”

Shedemei, still holding Edhadeya close to her, said,
“If I point to a man walking down the street, and I scream to everyone, ‘There he is, there’s the man who molested my little girl! There’s the man who raped and tortured and killed my daughter, I know him, that’s the man!’—if I
say
that, and the crowd tears him to pieces, and yet I knew all along that he was not the man, that it was all a lie, was it just talk, or did I
do
something?”

Letting them think about this lesson, she led Edhadeya into the school to the cubicle, just like all the other cubicles, where she slept. “Don’t be troubled, Edhadeya. Don’t let this tear you apart.”

“I hate him,” she muttered again.

“Now that the others can’t hear, let me insist that you face the truth of your own heart. The reason you’re so angry, the reason you feel so betrayed that you can’t control your emotions, they burst your dignity, they make you almost crazy with grief—the reason for that, my dear friend, my fellow teacher, my daughter, my sister, is that you still love him and that is what you can’t forgive.”

“I don’t love him,” said Edhadeya. “That’s a terrible thing to accuse me of.”

“Cry yourself to sleep, Dedaya. You have classes to teach in the morning. And I’ll need a lot of other help from you as well. Tonight you can grieve and brood and curse and rage until you wear yourself out. But we all need you to be useful after that.”

In the morning, Edhadeya was useful indeed, calm and hardworking, wise and compassionate as always. But Shedemei could see that the turmoil had not subsided in her heart. You were named well, she thought—named for Eiadh, who made the tragic error of loving Elemak. But you haven’t made all of Eiadh’s mistakes. You have been constant of heart, where Eiadh kept deciding she loved Nafai more. And you may have chosen more wisely in the first place, because it’s not yet altogether certain whether Akma really is as single-minded in his pride as Elemak was. Elemak had proof after proof of the power of the
Oversoul and then of the Keeper of Earth, and still defied them and hated all they were trying to do. But Akma has never knowingly had any experience with the Keeper’s power—that’s an advantage that Akmaro and Chebeya, Edhadeya and Luet, Didul and even I have over him. So it just may be, poor Edhadeya, that you have not bestowed your heart as tragically and foolishly as Eiadh did.

Then again, it may turn out that you did even worse.