Earthborn (Homecoming) (49 page)

With those words, the light coming from the messenger’s body seemed to increase in brightness and intensity—something Mon would have thought impossible, since he was already nearly blinded when he looked at him. Yet he was able to see that the man of light extended his arm and a bolt of lightning crackled in the air between his finger and Akma’s head. Akma seemed to dance in the air for a moment like an ash suspended over a fire; then he fell in a heap. The huge stone roared again, and again dust and smoke arose to blind them all. When it cleared, the stone was gone, the messenger also, and the earth was still.

Khimin was weeping. “Father!” he cried out. “Mother! I don’t want to die!”

Mon might have scoffed, but the same feelings were coursing through his own heart.

“Akma,” said Aronha.

Of course, thought Mon. It’s my older brother who has the decency to remember our friend instead of thinking of himself. Mon was filled with new shame. He got up and staggered to where Akma lay unconscious.

“There
is
a Keeper,” Ominer was intoning. “I know there’s a Keeper, I know it now, I know it, I know it.”

“Shut up, Ominer,” said Mon. “Help us get Akma into the sunlight, onto the grass.”

They carried him then, his body limp.

“He’s dead,” said Khimin.

“If the man of light meant to kill him,” said Mon, “why would he tell him to stop interfering with the Kept? You don’t have to give instructions to dead men.”

“If he’s alive,” said Aronha, “then why isn’t he
breathing? Why can’t I find a pulse or hear a heartbeat?”

“I tell you he
is
alive,” said Mon.

“How can you know that?” demanded Ominer. “You haven’t even checked him.”

“Because my truthsense affirms it. Yes, he lives.”

“Suddenly your truthsense is back again?” asked Aronha ironically.

“It never left. I denied it, I ignored it, I fought against it, but it never left.” It hurt to say these words. And yet it was also a relief.

“This whole time your truthsense has been telling you that the things we taught were lies?” asked Aronha.

Aronha’s tone was a slap in the face. “Akma told me that my truthsense was a lie! Self-deception! I was ashamed to talk about it.” He could see contempt on Aronha’s face. “Are you going to blame this on me, Aronha? Is that the kind of man you are? It’s all Mon’s fault that you were doing this? The Keeper sends us a being of light to tell us that we were lying, destroying something that mattered, and you’re going to point the finger at
me
?”

It was Aronha’s turn to look ashamed. “I made my own choice, I know it. I kept thinking, if Mon says it’s right, it must be right—only I knew it was wrong, and I was using my reliance on you as an excuse. The younger boys, now, they can hardly be held responsible. You and I and Akma put a lot of pressure on them and—”

“I made my own choices too!” Khimin shouted. “The messenger didn’t come to stop
you.
He came to stop us
all
.” Mon realized that Khimin was proud that he had been visited by a messenger from the Keeper. That had to be better than a true dream. Examining his own heart, Mon realized that he had such feelings, too.

“The messenger may have come to stop us all,” Ominer said, “but he only spoke to Akma. Because
the truth is that we were all following Akma from the beginning.”

“Oh, aren’t you the brave one, blaming it on him,” said Khimin. “It’s all the fault of the one who’s lying there like a dead man.”

“I’m not saying that to excuse us,” said Ominer. “As far as I’m concerned, that should make us even more ashamed. We’re the sons of the king! And we let someone talk us into defying and shaming our father and everything he had taught us.”

“It was my fault,” said Aronha. He managed to hold his voice steady, but he dared not look them in the eye. “I may have half-believed some of Akma’s ideas, but when it came to starting our own religion, restoring the old order of the state—I knew it was wrong. I knew the people we were working with were contemptible opportunists. I knew that the diggers we were driving out of Darakemba were better people than our supposed friends. And I’m the one who was raised to be king. I don’t deserve it. I forbid you to call me Ha-Aron anymore. I’m just Aron.”

Mon couldn’t contain his frustration any longer. “Don’t you see what you’re doing, even now? We followed Akma because he flattered us and fed our pride. We loved it while we were doing it, too. We loved being important and powerful. We loved making Father back down before us, we loved changing the world, we loved thinking we were smarter than everybody else and having people admire us and treat us like we were important. It was pride that kept us going. And now what are we doing? Khimin’s wetting himself because we were
so
important that the Keeper sent a man of light to stop us—don’t argue with me, Khimin, I was feeling the same thing myself. And Aronha here wants to take all the blame himself, because
he’s
the one who should have known better and don’t you see? It’s still pride! It’s still the same thing that got us into trouble in the first place!”

“I’m not proud,” said Aronha, and now his voice
was trembling. “I can’t stand the thought of facing anybody.”

“But we will,” said Mon. “Because we have to let them see what a miserable bunch we are.”

“Isn’t that a kind of pride, too?” asked Ominer nastily.

“Maybe it is, Ominer! But you want to know the one thing I’m really proud of? The one thing that makes me glad that you’re my brothers, that I’m one of you?”

“What?” said Aronha.

“That not one of you suggested that we go on fighting the Keeper,” said Mon. “That it didn’t cross your minds that maybe we could remain a part of the Assembly of the Ancient Ways.”

“That doesn’t mean we’re
good
or anything,” said Ominer. “It might just mean we’re terrified.”

“We could only rebel when we could fool ourselves into thinking that we believed there was no Keeper. Now we know better. We’ve seen things that we never imagined, things that happened only in the time of the Heroes. But remember those stories? Elemak and Mebbekew saw things every bit as strong as this! And yet they kept rebelling, right to the end of their lives. Not us! Our rebellion is over.”

Aronha nodded. “I still meant what I said about being Aron now.”

Mon shot back at once, “You’ll stay Aronha until Father tells you otherwise! He didn’t take away the honorific the whole time you were shaming him.”

Aronha nodded again.

“This will kill Mother,” Khimin said, weeping.

Mon put his arm around his youngest brother and held him. “I don’t know if we can decently ask Father to take us back. But we have to go to him, if only so he can have the victory of turning us away.”

“Father will take us back,” said Aronha. “That’s the kind of man he is. The question is whether we can undo any of the harm we’ve caused.”

“No,” said Ominer. “The question is, will Akma
live or not? We have to get him back to Darakemba. Do we keep him here and hope that he’ll revive? Or search for help to carry him back?”

“There are four of us,” said Khimin. “We can carry him.”

“I’ve heard that Shedemei the schoolmaster is a healer,” said Mon.

“Now we need help from a woman we referred to as a criminal mixer of species,” said Aronha bitterly. “In our time of need, it doesn’t cross our minds to turn to our own Assembly of the Ancient Ways. We know, we always knew, that the only help we can count on will be found among the Kept.”

Shame tasted foul in their mouths as they made a litter for Akma out of their coats and staves, then lifted the staves to their shoulders to carry him. As they neared more settled country, people ran out to see them, these four men carrying what seemed to be a corpse on their shoulders, as if to take him to be buried.

“Go,” Aronha said to them—said to everyone who came out to meet them. “Go and tell everyone that the Keeper sent a messenger to strike down the Motiaki and stop them from telling their lies. We are the sons of Motiak, and we return in shame to our father. Go and tell everyone that Akma, the son of Akmaro, has been struck down by the messenger of the Keeper, and whether he will live or die no one can say!”

Over and over he said these things, and every time that the words were said to one of the Kept, the response was the same: not rejoicing, not gloating, not condemnation, but tears and embraces and then, inevitably, the most unbearable thing of all: “Can we help you? Can we carry Akma for a little way? Oh, his father and mother will weep to see him like this! We will pray to the Keeper to let them see their son alive again! Let us help you!” They brought water to them, brought them food, and not once did any of the Kept reprove them.

Others were not so kind. Men and women who had no doubt cheered for Akma and the sons of Motiak during their speeches now shouted bitter denunciations, calling them liars, frauds, heretics. “Arondi! Mondi! Ominerdi! Khimindi!” How bitter it was that while they really were rebelling against their father, no one dared to put the term for traitor in their names; but now that they had ended their rebellion and confessed their wrongdoing, the epithet was heaped upon them.

“It’s what we deserve,” Mon said, when Ominer began to point out the hypocrisy of their accusers.

And then, gallingly, they had to watch and listen as the Kept took the shouters aside and rebuked them. “Don’t you see that they’re filled with grief? Can’t you see that Akma is nearly dead? They’re doing you no harm now, let them pass, give them peace.”

Thus the Kept became their protectors on their journey. And many of them were diggers. Mon was not content to let Aronha’s speeches be all
they
heard. To the diggers, Mon added his own message. “Please, go and find the earth people who are on the road, leaving Darakemba. Tell them that we beg them to come home. Tell them that they are better citizens of Darakemba than the sons of Motiak. Don’t let them leave.”

They slept beside Akma that night on the road, and late the next day they reached Darakemba. Word had gone ahead of them, and when they got to Akma’s house, a huge crowd parted to let them through, and Akmaro and Chebeya stood in the doorway to receive the almost-living body of their son. Inside the house the king their father waited, and their sister Edhadeya, and they wept at how lovingly their father and sister embraced them, and wept again as Akmaro and Chebeya knelt over the ruins of their son.

On the road, the being of light appeared. The earth trembled. Akma should have been surprised but he was not. It was the strangest thing, that it did not feel
strange to him. As the messenger spoke, what kept running through Akma’s mind was the thought, What took you so long?

As soon as he noticed his own lack of surprise, he wondered at it. He couldn’t have been expecting anything like this. He didn’t know that any being like this existed. Certainly in his scholarship he had never come up with any such thing. Besides, experience proved nothing. This could be nothing more than a hallucination shared by a group of five men who were in desperate need of some affirmation of their importance to the universe. Instead of proving that there really was a Keeper of Earth, this experience might prove nothing more than the inescapable unconscious power of childhood belief, even over men who thought they had outgrown it.

But as the messenger kept speaking (and how can I hear every word and still have time to think all these thoughts? What extraordinary clarity of mind. I’d like to tell Bego about this phenomenon. What did the king end up doing to Bego, anyway? Look at this—I go off on a tangent, wondering about Bego, and yet I haven’t missed a word of the message) Akma knew that this was not a shared hallucination, or that if it was, it was a hallucination induced by the Keeper of Earth, because this was definitely sent from outside himself. Why did he know that? It was as Edhadeya said, you simply know the difference when it has happened to you. Only it isn’t the being of light that’s doing it. No, that’s just a show, just a spectacle. It isn’t having my eyes dazzled or the earth shaking under my feet or great roaring noises or smoke or a strange-sounding voice that makes me sure. I simply . . . know.

And then he thought: I
always
knew.

He remembered back to the time when he was in the greatest terror of his life—when the sons of Pabulog first threw him down and began to torture him and humiliate him. He couldn’t have put it into words at the time, but underneath the fear for his life,
there was shame at his helplessness; and underneath that there was steely courage that made him try not to beg for mercy, that sustained him through it all and allowed him to walk, naked and smeared with mud and filth and ruined food, back to his people. He knew at the time what
that
strength was—it was the absolute certainty of the love of his parents (and the memory of it stabbed him; I had their love, I still have their love, it was as firm as I believed even as a little boy, my faith was not misplaced, and look what I’ve done to them), a sense of the unbreakable cords that bound them together, almost as if he had the raveling skill of his mother without ever having noticed it consciously.

And yet underneath
that
there was something else. A sense that someone was watching everything that happened, watching and saying, What these boys are doing to you is wrong. The love your parents have for you is right. Your weeping, your shame, they are not flaws in you, you can’t help it. Your effort at courage is worthy. It is right for you to go back to your people. A constant judge, assessing the moral value of what he was doing. How could he now remember something that he hadn’t noticed at the time? And yet he knew without doubt that this watcher had been there at the time, and that he had loved this voice inside him, because when he did well it said so.

The messenger was saying, “The Keeper has heard the pleas of the Kept, and also the plea of your father, the true servant of the Keeper.” How long had the speech gone on? Not long at all; it was barely begun, really, he could tell. It was as if he knew every word the messenger would say and how long was allotted to each part of the message, so that his mind could divide its attention between little slices required to hear and understand the words, and great long passages of time between those slices in which he could search out this mystery, this observer that he had had within him all these years and never noticed.