Children of God

by Mary Doria Russell

  “Those Kitheri eyes! She’s a beauty, like her mother,” the Runa midwife observed guilelessly, happy now that the Jana’ata had calmed himself. “But she has your nose, lord.”

  He laughed in spite of everything and, careless of his robes, shifted on the damp clay tiles that were still shining from the morning’s drizzle, so that he could rest the baby in his lap. Aching, he ran a hand along the velvety softness of her cheek, his stubby fingertips feeling strangely naked, and as unprotected as his daughter’s throat. I was not meant to breed, he thought. Her twisted foot is a sign. I have done everything wrong.

  With all his considerable courage, his own throat tight, Supaari fumbled at the wrappings that concealed her, forcing himself to look at what had destined this child to die in infancy, taking all his hopes with her into darkness. What he saw pulled the breath from him.

  “Paquarin,” he said very carefully, in a voice he hoped would not alarm her. “Paquarin, who has seen the child, besides you and me?”

  “The ranking uncles, lord. Then they told the Paramount, but he didn’t come to inspect her. Such a pity! The lady tried to kill the little one already,” Paquarin reported thoughtlessly. But hearing her own words, she realized she’d done wrong. Jholaa wanted the baby dead even before its deformity was discovered. The Runao began to sway from side to side, but stopped suddenly. “The lady Jholaa says, Better to die at birth than to live unmarriageable,” she told Supaari then, and truthfully, although Jholaa had said it some years ago. Pleased with her own cleverness in stitching this into the present, Paquarin rattled on righteously, “So it must be done. No one will have a cripple. But it isn’t right for the dam to do it. It’s the sire’s duty, lord. This helpful one saved the child for your honor.”

  Still stunned, only half-hearing Paquarin’s chatter, Supaari looked at the midwife for a long while. Finally, making his face kindly and reassuring, he asked, “Paquarin, can you tell me, please—which foot is deformed? The right? Or the left?”

  Embarrassed, she flattened her ears and she swayed again, more rapidly, and fell into her native Ruanja. “Someone isn’t certain. Someone begs pardon. Runa don’t know of such things. It’s for the lords to decide.”

  “Thank you, Paquarin. You are good to save the child for me.” He handed the infant to the midwife, each movement as controlled and careful as those he would have performed in the next morning’s ritual. “It is best to say nothing to anyone else of my visit to the child,” he told her. To be sure she understood, he said directly, in Ruanja, “Sipaj, Paquarin: someone desires your silence.”

  Eyes closed, ears folded back in terror, Paquarin offered her throat, expecting he would kill her to obtain it, but he smiled and reached out to calm her with a hand on her head, as a Runa father might, and assured her once again that she was good. “Will you stay with her tonight, Paquarin?” he suggested. He did not offer money, knowing that natural affection would keep her in the courtyard: this woman’s line was bred to loyalty.

  “Yes, lord. Someone thanks you. The poor mite shouldn’t be alone on her only night. Someone’s heart was sad for her.”

  “You are good, Paquarin,” he told her again. “She shall have a short life, perhaps, but a proper and honorable one, shall she not?”

  “Yes, lord.”

  He left Paquarin in midcurtsy and moved without unseemly haste through the nursery. Heard the laughter and scuffling of Ljaat-sa Kitheri’s half-grown grandchildren, and decided that the boys’ noisy wrestling was the only sign of genuine life in this dead and stifling place, and wished them luck in killing their fathers early. Walked down narrow corridors, past empty staterooms, hearing muffled snatches of conversation behind closed and curtained doors. Strode past placid Runa porters standing vigil at each doorway, well suited to their job, too phlegmatic to notice boredom. Nodded to them as they opened the inner gates and the outer portcullis and saluted his passing. Escaped, at last, onto the quiet street.

  There was no sense of release, even beyond the compound. No feeling of being under the sky, inside the wind. Supaari glared up at the pierced-wood balconies and the overhanging eaves, seemingly designed to prevent the rain from ever washing the streets clean. Why does no one sweep here? he wondered irritably, ankle-deep in blown litter, outraged by the compacted, cluttered heaviness of the place. Inbrokar was chained and hobbled by every moment of its convoluted, incestuous history. Nothing is made here, he realized for the first time. It was a city of aristocrats and advisers, of agents and analysts, forever ranking and comparing, manuevering endlessly in feverish self-promotion and predatory competition. Madness, to believe he could ever have begun something here. Folly, to rage against this city’s perpetual self-imposed darkness, its fibrous, matted preoccupation with position and degree.

  Moving through a city he had once found beautiful, he was greeted here and there with counterfeit deference by various Kitheri friends, acquaintances, hangers-on. Their condolences came rather too soon, the child brought to light this very day and its birth unheralded, but they were as properly composed as their authors’ faces. How long has this been planned? Supaari wondered. How many had been alerted to this delicious and elaborate joke, waiting out his wife’s pregnancy, as anxious as he had been for the appearance of an infant he was meant to kill?

  It occurred to him then that the luxurious thoroughness of the plot stank of the Reshtar’s subtle sensibility. Who had spoken first of swapping Sandoz for Jholaa? he wondered, stumbling a little at the thought. Had Hlavin Kitheri steered him toward the arrangement from the start? Staggered, Supaari leaned against a wall and tried to reconstruct the negotiations, carried out in language as ornate as the Reshtar’s palace, in the company of poets and singers who shared Hlavin’s voluptuous exile and who had seemed as eager to see the merchant elevated as Supaari himself was to be ennobled. Who gained? he asked himself, standing blindly in the street, oblivious to passersby. Who profited? Hlavin. His brothers. Their friends. Hlavin must have known Jholaa was too old, must have suggested to Dherai and Bhansaar how amusing it would be if the Darjan lineage were extinguished in its infancy, by its own deluded founder—

  Lightheaded with humiliation, Supaari fought nausea and, dearly bought illusions gone, knew with a strange certainty that sickness was not normal for Sandoz’s kind. Courteous and desiring to please, Supaari knew that he himself had invited Hlavin Kitheri’s contempt as unknowingly as Sandoz had invited …

  Who shall pay for this? he thought. And, fury rising to fill the place of shame, he told himself with ugly irony that this was an unfortunate commercial phrasing.

  Seething, he turned back toward the Kitheri lair, his mind black with thoughts of bloody revenge, of challenges and ha’aran duels. But there was no recourse. Wait until the morning and, before witnesses, expose Kitheri duplicity—and listen to the laughter as the plot became merely a joke, played out publicly. Save the child’s life now—and listen to the laughter again someday, when marriage contracts were made to be broken. Alive, beautiful and enchanting, the daughter would end as the mother had: a prop in an elaborate comedy, used to humiliate him for the amusement of the gentry.

  It’s not that personal, he thought, slowing down, in sight now of the Kitheri compound. It’s not about me. It’s simply my category that is to be kept in place. They need us where we are. Third-born merchants. The Runa. We feed and clothe and shelter them. We provide their needs and their wants and their whims and their desires. We are the foundation of their palace and they dare not let one stone shift, or the whole of it will fall around them.

  He leaned against a neighbor’s wall, staring at the palisaded enclosure of the family that had ruled Inbrokar for generations, and came finally to a cool familiar place in his heart, where decisions were made without anger or wishes.

  From long experience, he knew the Pon river barge schedule out of Inbrokar’s docks. Supaari VaGayjur considered the bargain he had made and fell back on a merchant’s honor. He had kept his part of the agreement. He owed these
people nothing.

  I will take what is mine, he thought, and go.

  “FRANKLY, HLAVIN, I EXPECTED MORE OF HIM,” REMARKED IRA’IL VRO to the Reshtar of Galatna. Alerted by informants, they had watched Supaari return to the Kitheri compound, moving to a corner tower to observe as the merchant spoke to the midwife in the back courtyard and then left with her and the child. Ira’il faced Hlavin Kitheri, only to confront an unnerving stare. “You must be so disappointed …” Ira’il said, voice trailing off uncertainly.

  Confused, he inhaled guardedly to catch Kitheri’s scent. There was no whiff of anger, but Ira’il turned back to the tower window to cover his unease. He could, by shifting his eyes a bit, pick out the treasury and provincial revenue offices, the state archives and libraries, the arena located only steps from the High Court. The baths, the embassies; the towering stone pillars, with their silvery cloisonné of radio transmission equipment, rising from the General Command. He knew all the landmarks now and admired the cityscape: a timeless celebration of stability and unchanging balance—

  Balance! This was the very thing Ira’il lacked when dealing with the Kitheri Reshtar. Hlavin was third-born and Ira’il a first, but the Kitheri outranked every other family in the Principality of Inbrokar, so using the Reshtar’s name in direct address or deciding who held right to the personal pronoun was a complicated and dangerous task. Without a Runa protocol specialist to advise him, Ira’il felt constantly on the verge of toppling into some unforgivable error.

  To make matters worse, Ira’il had no idea why he’d been chosen to accompany the Reshtar from Gayjur to Inbrokar when Hlavin’s exile was suspended for the birth of his sister’s child. Granted, Ira’il had so admired the Reshtar’s extraordinary poetry that he had defied his own family and renounced his right to transmit the Vro patrimony, in order to join the glittering society of Galatna Palace. But other men had done the same, and Ira’il himself was a poor singer who knew just enough about poetry to understand that his own verse would never rise above cliché. The only time he came to the Reshtar’s attention was when he uttered some regrettably obvious praise for another man’s lovely metaphor, or hit the wrong note in a chorus. So he had been content to sit at the edges of the Reshtar’s court, feeling honored simply to be in the company of such artists. Someone, after all, had to be the audience.

  Then, inexplicably, Hlavin Kitheri had reached out and pulled Ira’il Vro from obscurity, inviting him to attend the inauguration ceremonies of the extraordinary new Darjan lineage that the Reshtar had permitted to come into existence.

  “Oh, but you must be there, Ira’il,” the Reshtar had insisted when Ira’il had stammered a demurral, “to see the jest played out in full! I promise, you shall be the only one aside from me who will understand the whole of it.”

  Ira’il could only presume that the Reshtar enjoyed his company—a startling notion, but irresistibly flattering.

  Everything about this excursion had been startling, really. Entering Inbrokar for the first time, Ira’il had been amazed by the Kitheri palace, here in the center of the capital. It was architecturally impressive but oddly quiet—very nearly empty, except for the family itself and its domestic staff. Ira’il had expected something more exciting, more alive at the very heart of his culture.… He turned away from the city and looked down at the kitchen yard and the Runa gate through which the merchant had just left. “One might have expected a glorious duel,” he told the Reshtar then, hoping that Hlavin would forget the earlier use of dominant language. “The peddler could have taken Dherai. You’d have moved up to second.”

  “I think he did,” the Reshtar said serenely.

  “Apologies,” Ira’il Vro said, flustered into another gaffe. “I’m not sure I follow—. Apologies! One doesn’t understand—”

  Of course not, you dolt, Hlavin Kitheri thought, gazing at the other man with something approaching affection, for he did enjoy Vro’s company immensely—particularly the idiot’s clumsy slights and graceless attempts at recovery. There were wondrously comic elements to this entire drama, and it had been fascinating to set it in motion. Supaari means to leave the city, the Reshtar had realized as his ludicrous brother-in-law stole away with his prize like a skulking scavenger, and the radiance that filled Hlavin Kitheri’s soul rivaled those moments when the resolution of an improvised song came to him in midperformance. I could not have planned it more perfectly, he thought.

  “I think the peddler killed my honored brother Dherai,” the Reshtar said then, voice musical and clear, his limpid lavender eyes celestial. “And Bhansaar! And their brats. And then—in a delirium of bloodjoy, drunk on the dense, hot odor of vengeance—he killed Jholaa and my father, as well.”

  Ira’il opened his mouth to protest: No, he’s just left.

  “I think that is what happened,” the Reshtar said again, placing a brotherly arm across the other man’s shoulders and laying his tail cozily atop Vro’s own. “Don’t you?”

  Inbrokar

  During the Reign of Ljaat-sa Kitheri

  THERE WERE QUESTIONS THAT COULD NOT BE ASKED, AND THE MOST powerful of these was, “Why?”

  “What?” and “When?” were necessary, of course. “Where?” was usually safe. “How?” was permissible, although it often led to trouble. But “Why?” was so hazardous that Selikat beat him when he used the word. Even as a child, Hlavin had understood that this was her duty. She beat him for his own good: she feared for him, and did not want the best of her students to be made an example of. Better a tutor’s whip than the slow and public extraction of instructive consequences, should any younger brother breathe treason.

  “Am I a tailor’s dummy then?” he had demanded at the age of twelve, still fearless and unsubtle. “If Bhansaar dies, they’ll throw the cloak of office over me, and snap! I am Judgment! Is that how it works, Selikat?”

  The tutor hesitated. It was a Reshtar’s fate to observe his elders’ ascendance, all the while knowing that if either proved out sterile or died before breeding, the extra son would step into the vacated position and be accorded the assumption of competence. Not tall but neat and agile, Hlavin was already physically as adept as Dherai, who was destined to be his nation’s champion, should any challenge to the Patrimony be made. And even Jholaa was brighter than Bhansaar, who could remember all that he was taught and apply it, but rarely drew an inference or came to a conclusion on his own, and who would nevertheless preside one day over Inbrokar’s highest court.

  “The oldest songs explain it, sir,” the Runao told him, her eyes closing and her voice taking on the rhythm if not the melody of the chants. “Ingwy, who loves order, spoke to the first brothers, Ch’horil and Srimat. ‘When women gather, Chaos dances. Therefore, separate Pa’au and Tiha’ai, the fierce sisters you have married, and keep them apart and captive.’ With trickery and cunning, Ch’horil and Srimat conspired with other men until all had subdued their wives and daughters. But when they themselves did the culling and the butchering, the men, too, became blood-drunk and fought. ‘We cannot wall ourselves up,’ they said. So Ingwy commanded, ‘Let those who are wise decide who among you is too fierce to live, and let those who are strong kill the fierce ones condemned by the wise.’ And because Ch’horil the Elder was strong and Srimat the Younger was wise, from that time on, the first-born males of each sept were charged with combat and ritual killing, the second-born with adjudication and decision.”

  “And do you believe that?” Hlavin asked her bluntly.

  Her eyes opened. “It all happened long before the Runa were domesticated,” Selikat replied, dropping her tail with a soft and possibly ironic thud. “In any case, of what importance is the belief of an insignificant tutor, my lord?”

  “You are not insignificant. You are tutor to the Kitheri Reshtar. Tell me what you think,” the child ordered, imperious even then, when it seemed that nothing more awaited him than an exile designed to distract him from futile resentment and dangerous questions.

  Selikat drew herself up,
a person of some dignity. “Stability and order have always been paid for with captivity and blood,” the Runao told her charge, calm eyes steady. “The songs tell also of the Age of Constancy, when everything was as it should be and each man knew his place and his family’s. There was respect for those above and courtesy from those below. All elements were in balance: Stewardship triumphant and Chaos contained—”

  “Yes, yes: ‘Ferocity controlled, like a woman in her chamber.’ Or a Reshtar in exile,” the boy said. She had beaten him regularly, but he was still impulsive, and perilously cynical. “Were things ever truly so neat, Selikat? Even when men keep their place, the ground can split, swallowing towns. What of balance then? Floods can drown half the population of a low-lying province. A city can lie under ash in less time than it takes to sleep off a meal!”

  “True,” Selikat conceded. “And worse: there are those who secretly nurture disputes, unleashing vendettas whenever circumstance favors them. Jealousy exists, and self-seeking; competition for its own sake. And aggression and anger: the blind, deaf rage to settle something, once and for all.”

  The Runao stopped, deferential, but the beneficiary of generations of selective breeding and absolute mistress of her field of knowledge. All her life, she had lived among people endowed with a predator species’ anatomy, reflexes, instincts: the grasping feet, the slicing claws, the powerful limbs; the patience to stalk, the cleverness to ambush, the quickness to kill. Selikat had seen what was done to freethinkers, and she did not wish that fate for Hlavin.