Earthborn (Homecoming) (29 page)

“Is
my friend—”

“He is stronger than you. He is stronger than me. He is stronger than Motiak. He is stronger than anyone.”

Khideo laughed. “Akmaro? He’s all talk.”

“He’s stronger than all of us, because, my friend, he really is doing the will of the Keeper of Earth, and the Keeper of Earth will have his way—he will have his way with us, or he will sweep us aside and make way for yet another group of his children. This time perhaps descended from jaguars and condors, or perhaps he’ll dip into the sea and choose the sons and daughters of the squids or the sharks. But the Keeper of Earth
will
prevail.”

“If the Keeper is so powerful, Ilihi, why doesn’t he just change us all into peaceful, happy, contented little diggers and angels and humans living together in a perverse menagerie?”

“Maybe because he doesn’t
want
us to be a menagerie. Maybe because he wants us to understand his plan and to love it for its own sake, and follow it because we believe that it’s good.”

“What kind of featherbrained religion is that? How long would Motiak last as king if he waited for people to obey him until they
loved
the law and
wanted
to obey.”

“But in fact that’s why they do obey, Khideo.”

“They obey because of all those men with swords, Ilihi.”

“But why do the men with swords obey?” asked Ilihi. “They don’t have to, you know. At any point, one of them could become so outraged that he—”

“Don’t throw this in my face just for a jest,” said Khideo. “Not after all these years.”

“Not for a jest,” said Ilihi. “I’m just pointing out that a good king like Motiak is obeyed, ultimately, because the best and strongest people know that his continuing rule is good for them. His kingdom brings them peace. Even if they don’t like all his rules, they can find some way to be happy in the empire of Darakemba. That’s why
you
obey him, isn’t it?”

Khideo nodded.

“I’ve thought about this a long time. Why didn’t the Keeper of Earth just
stop
Father from doing the things he did? Why didn’t the Keeper just lead us to freedom instead of making us serve so many years in bondage before Monush came? Why why why, what was the plan? It troubled me until one day I realized—”

“I’m relieved. I thought you were going to tell me that your wife gave you the answer.”

Ilihi gave him a pained look and went on. “I realized that it wouldn’t do the Keeper any good to have a bunch of puppets just doing his will. What he wants
is companions. Do you see? He wants us to become like him, to want the same things he wants, to work toward the same goals, freely and willingly, because we want to. That’s when the words of Binaro will be fulfilled, and the Keeper will come and dwell among the people of Earth.”

Khideo shuddered. “If that is true, Ilihi, then I’m the enemy of the Keeper of Earth.”

“No, my friend. Only your ideas are his enemy. Fortunately, you are more loyal to your friends than to your ideas—that’s part of what the Keeper wants from us. In fact, I daresay that in some future time, despite all your loathing of the mixture of the species, you’ll be remembered as one of the great defenders of the Keeper’s friends.”

“Ha.”

“Look at you, Khideo. All these people who have the same ideas as you, but who are your friends? Who are the people you love? Me. Akmaro.”

“I love a lot of people, not just you.”

“Me, Akmaro, my wife—”

“I detest your wife!”

“You’d die for her.”

Khideo had no answer.

“And now even this angel informant of yours. You’d die for
him,
too, wouldn’t you?”

“With all these people you think I’d die for, it’s amazing I’m still alive,” said Khideo.

“Don’t you hate it when somebody knows you better than you know yourself?”

“Yes,” said Khideo.

“I know you hate it,” said Ilihi. “But there was once a man who knew me better than I knew myself. Who saw strength in me that I didn’t know was there. And do you know what?”

“You hated it.”

“I thanked the Keeper for that man. And I still beg the Keeper to keep him safe. I still tell the Keeper, He’s not your enemy. He thinks he is but he’s not. Keep him safe, I say.”

“You talk to the Keeper?”

“All the time, these days.”

“And does he answer?”

“No,” said Ilihi. “But then, I haven’t asked him any questions. So the only answer that I need from him is this: I look around, and I still see his hand guiding the world around me.”

Khideo turned away from him, hiding his face. He didn’t even know why he was hiding; it wasn’t that he felt any strong emotion. He just couldn’t bear to look Ilihi in the eye at this moment. “Go to Motiak,” he whispered. “Tell him what you need to tell him. We won’t be stopped.”

“Maybe not,” said Ilihi. “But if you
aren’t
stopped, it will be because, without realizing it, you were serving the Keeper’s purpose all along.”

Ilihi kissed him—on the shoulder, because his head was averted—and left the garden of the governor of the land of Khideo. The governor remained in that garden for another hour, till the evening rain. He came inside the house soaking wet. He had no servant to remonstrate with him. Ever since he learned that Akmaro and his wife really did all their own cooking and washing, Khideo had done the same. Khideo would match Akmaro virtue for virtue, pretension for pretension, sacrifice for sacrifice. No one would ever be able to say that Khideo may have been right, but Akmaro was still the better man. No, they would have to say, Khideo was every bit as good a man,
and
he was right.

As good a man,
and
right, but it was Akmaro who had won the free obedience of Ilihi. Akmaro had stolen even that prize, after all these years.

Darakemba might be the capital of a great empire, but in some ways it was still a small town. Gossip on some subjects spread quickly to the greatest households. Thus it took only a few weeks for Chebeya to get word of the opening of a new school. “She calls the place ‘Rasaro’s House,’ if you can believe the effrontery.”
“I asked who the schoolmaster was, and she actually said it was herself!” “She claims to be teaching exactly as the wife of the Hero Volemak taught, as if anyone could know
that
.” “None of the children are of what you could call good families, but the appalling thing is that she mixes even those children right in with . . . the children of . . . former . . .”

“Slaves,” said Chebeya. It was only by the most heroic effort that she refrained from reminding these friends of hers that her husband and she had spent the last decade teaching that, in the eyes of the Keeper, the children of the earth are no less valued than middle children or children of the sky.

“And they say that she would gladly teach boys right among the girls, if any parents had such a lapse of judgment and decency as to allow it.”

After some consideration, Chebeya wrote a note and had one of the teachers who lived near the new school drop it off for her. It was an invitation for the new teacher to come and call on her.

The next day, she got her note back again. Scrawled in a hurried hand on the bottom was the notation, “Thanks, but school takes up all my days. Come visit me, if you’d like.”’

At first Chebeya was startled and, she had to admit, just the tiniest bit offended. She was the wife of the high priest, wasn’t she? And this woman refused her invitation and casually invited
her
to come calling—and at school, no less, not even at home.

Chebeya was immediately ashamed of her own offended dignity. Besides, this new teacher was all the more interesting now. She told Luet what she had heard and what had happened to her invitation, and Luet immediately insisted on coming along. By the time they left home to make the visit, Edhadeya had somehow been included. “I want to see what the ancient Rasa was like, as a teacher,” she explained.

“You don’t actually expect her school to be like that legendary one, do you?” asked Chebeya.

“Why shouldn’t it be?” said Edhadeya. “Just having
a woman at the head of it—that makes it more like Rasa’s school than any other I’ve heard of.”

“They say that the diggers have always had women’s schools taught by women,” Luet said.

“But this woman is human,” Edhadeya reminded her. “She is, isn’t she?”

“She calls herself Shedemei,” said Chebeya. “The whole ancient name, not Sedma the way we say it now.”

The younger women tried out saying the name.

“They must have held their whole mouths differently in the old days,” said Luet. “Has our language changed that much?”

“It must have, for the angels and diggers to be able to pronounce it,” said Edhadeya. “They say there used to be sounds that the sky people and earth people couldn’t even make, and now there aren’t.”

“Who says the language changed?” said Luet. “Maybe they learned to make new sounds!”

“There’s no way to learn how language sounded in the past,” said Chebeya, “so there’s no point in arguing about it.”

“We weren’t arguing,” said Luet. “We always talk like this.”

“Ah,” said Chebeya. “Mildly contentious, with just a hint of backtalk to your mother.” But then she smiled and the two girls laughed, and after walking a good way into an old neighborhood that had never been fashionable they reached the right avenue. An old angel was out on a perch in the shade of his porch, watching the goings-on in the street. “Old sir,” said Luet, because she was youngest, “can you tell us the way to the new school?”

“School for girls?” asked the old man.

“Are there so many on this street?” asked Luet in her most innocent I’m-not-being-sarcastic voice

“The whole corner up there, three houses butted up against each other on this side.” He turned his back on them, which for an old man wasn’t quite as rude as it would have been for a young one. Even with
his back turned, they heard him mutter, “School for mud rats.”

“Definitely one of the Kept,” said Edhadeya quietly.

“Oh yes,” Luet whispered. “I thought so at once.”

They were all too well-bred to laugh aloud at the old man—or at least too conscious of the image they had to present, given that someone on the street was bound to recognize them as the king’s daughter and the wife and daughter of the high priest.

Only when they were in front of the three houses that held the school did they realize why it was an especially apt location for a school that would mix the three peoples. Just up the cross street was a space of rough country where a stand of shaggy old trees by an old creek bed had never been cut down. There were a few huts where poor humans might live, and there were thatched roofs in the trees where angels with no money made their home. That alone would have identified it as a slum; but they also knew that both banks of the creek were pocked and tunneled to make houses for freed slaves who had quickly squandered their freedom bonus and now lived in desperate poverty, hiring out for day labor if they were in good health, the others begging or starving if they weren’t skilled enough to get piecework. Akmaro had often taught that the existence of such places was proof that the people of Darakemba were unworthy of the great wealth and prosperity that the Keeper had given them. Many of the poor survived only because the Kept contributed food at the House of the Keeper and the priests and teachers brought it to the warrens. Some people actually had the gall to complain that they’d contribute more, but they knew that lazy diggers would probably get most of it. As if these people had not already wasted half their lives or more as unpaid slaves in the houses of the rich!

So this Shedemei had chosen to open her school close to the place where diggers lived; she was serious about including their children in her school. But it was also a place where any breeze from the western
mountains would bring her the notorious smell of the creek. Rat Creek, some called it. Akmaro always referred to it as Keeper’s Creek. Polite people never spoke of it at all.

Since the doors of all three houses stood open, and all three porches held young girls quietly reciting or memorizing or simply reading, it was hard to guess which was the main entrance to the school. And as it turned out, it hardly mattered, for Shedemei herself came out to greet them.

Chebeya knew at once that it had to be Shedemei—she exuded an air of being very much in control of things, and invited them in with such a hurried greeting that it seemed barely civil. “The younger children are just getting down for their afternoon naps,” she said. “So please talk quietly in the corridor.”

Inside the school, they found that Shedemei must have rented the houses around the corner and through the block as well, for the young girls were napping in the shade of some old trees in a central courtyard—those that weren’t dangling from the lower branches, of course. Chebeya noticed several adult women moving from girl to girl, helping them settle down, bringing drinks of water to some. Were these women teachers or servants? Or was there such a distinction in this place?

“I can’t believe it,” murmured Edhadeya.

“Just little children, sleeping,” said Chebeya, not understanding Edhadeya’s surprise.

“No, I mean—could that really be old Uss-Uss? I though she was ancient when she was a servant in my bedchamber, and I haven’t seen her in . . . oh, so long, I thought she must be dead by now, but there, walking toward that door . . .”

“I never met your legendary Uss-Uss,” said Luet, “so I can’t very well help you recognize her now.”

Chebeya finally saw which woman Edhadeya meant, a bent old digger with a slow and shuffling gait.

Shedemei was just returning from the courtyard. Edhadeya asked her at once. “That earth woman, just
going into the house across the courtyard—that’s not Uss-Uss, is it?”

“I appreciate your not calling out to her,” said Shedemei. “A shout would have disturbed the children, and it wouldn’t do any good because your old servant is almost completely deaf now. By the way, we call her Voozhum here.”

“Voozhum, of course. So did I, the last few months before she left,” said Edhadeya. “I’ve thought about her so often since then.”