Children of God

by Mary Doria Russell

  2072, Earth-Relative

  IT WAS NOT COWARDICE OR WEAKNESS THAT UNDERMINED RUKUEI’S bright, fierce resolve to return to the south and fight on. It was the unanswerable question he heard in his dead father’s voice, melodic with irony: “And whom shall you challenge? Some Runa horde?”

  Had his mother been of first rank, or even second, Rukuei would now be Paramount Presumptive, but she was only a third. Was a concubine’s child entitled to fight as his people’s champion? There were no ranked half-brothers to inherit in their own right, nor any uncles to serve as regent while he was trained, if the law held the patrimony his. Who then is Paramount? Rukuei asked himself, no longer seeing the exhausted women and children around him, or the stranger with the baby or the freakish foreigner, or the eroded hills and gorges revealed as he and the others followed Shetri Laaks through a labyrinth of ravines.

  Blackened stones, whitened bones: color is gone from the world, Rukuei thought, oblivious to the tilted, fractured strata—ocher and jade and cobalt in the late light of second sundown. Dance is gone, and beauty, and law and music, he thought. Smoke remains, and hunger.

  Beyond fatigue, Rukuei found one certainty to grip. He was now the eldest male of his sept, and the responsibility for decision was his. Suukmel and the other women and children could go no farther. We will remain with these people until the lady Suukmel is ready to travel again, he thought as his little band trudged the last cha’ar to the strangers’ encampment.

  It was beyond thinking where they would go then—just as the place they were led to was now beyond seeing. Already blind, he let himself be guided by strong, gentle hands to a place that smelled of unfamiliar bodies. Too tired to eat, he plunged into a sleep so deep it was all but unconsciousness, and did not awaken for many hours.

  WHEN HE DID, IT WAS IN SLOW SEQUENCE, EYES LAST: TO THROBBING PAIN in his feet, to the scent of ointment bound to them by clean dressings, to a gabble of languages, to bright daylight filtering through the dirty fabric of a ragged tent.

  Lying still, he listened to the conversations just outside—a revolting mix of K’San and Ruanja with random elements of commercial Malanja and snatches of court Palkirn’al. The appalling grammar and sloppy diction instantly put him into a foul humor made worse by the frantic morning hunger of a young male who was only beginning to put on the height and muscle of manhood.

  Already on edge, he was startled by a slight motion to his left and came upright, ready to fight—whom he had no idea, why he could only guess. The world was full of enemies and everything good was gone. But the movement was only a woman’s hand pushing a crudely carved bowl toward him. He stared at it, repulsed by the jellied mess it contained, and then followed the hand to the arm to the face, and blinked when he saw his father’s eyes, alive and amused.

  The woman was young and visibly pregnant, naked and unveiled. “You look like my daughter,” she said, and sat back comfortably, at ease on the ground, and unconcerned to be alone in a tent with him. She gave the bowl another little push.

  He turned his head away, mouth twisting with revulsion, but heard the woman’s voice again. “The life you knew is over. You must live in a new way,” she said. “Before, everything was decided. Now you must make choices.” She spoke in K’San but its precision was polluted by Ruanja’s slurred vowels—a rural domestic’s grating accent. “You may choose to hate the necessity of choosing, or you may value it. Each choice has consequences, so you must choose wisely.”

  He stared at her and, infuriatingly, she smiled. “For the present, of course, you need only choose between eating this awful-looking stuff or remaining very, very hungry.”

  He sat up straighter and reached for the bowl, as she knew he would. He was, after all, a normal boy, constantly hungry under the best of circumstances and starving now. He lifted the bowl to his mouth, but reared back from the unfamiliar smell; then tipped it down his throat in ravenous, almost sobbing gulps.

  “Good,” she said, pleased as she watched him.

  “It’s not as bad as I thought it would be,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Think hard about what you just said,” she advised. “My experience is that many things are not as bad as I thought they would be.” The smell of anger filled the tent, but she did not retract her use of the dominant pronoun in his presence. “Here, each of us makes choices, so each of us must learn to be a sovereign soul: I think, I decide. This is no insult to you or anyone else.” She gestured again toward the emptied bowl. “It’s better with salt,” she informed him prosaically, “but we don’t have any salt right now.”

  “What was it?”

  “Are you sure that you choose to know?” she asked, ears wide, his father’s eyes entertained. He hesitated, but lifted his chin. “Kha’ani embryos,” she told him.

  Horrified, his own ears flattened and he nearly vomited, but then he glanced back into those eyes and swallowed hard.

  “Good,” she said again. “Do you understand? Everything is a choice, even what you eat. Especially what you eat!” She stood and looked down at him, her face a slender version of his own—the Kitheri bloodline visibly governing this generation as it had the last. “Here Jana’ata eat no Runa. In this settlement, we do not repay life with death. So. Choose. Will you live at the expense of others or will you do what you must to live another way?” And permitting him to think for himself, she turned and left the tent.

  HE WAS YOUNG AND SOUND, AND HIS FEET HEALED MORE QUICKLY THAN the women’s. Within a day or two, he was able to leave the tent and hobble a little distance up the nearest foothill to a vantage from which he could see the shards and remnants of a civilization. For a few days, solitary and silent, he watched the people in this high, chilly valley. Burning with disgrace, writhing at their debasement, he sought out his foster mother, and raged and raged. She listened without comment until he was done, and then gestured for him to sit by her.

  “Do you know what I miss most?” Suukmel Chirot u Vaadai asked serenely. “Table manners.” Rukuei pulled away from her embrace to gape at her. Suukmel smiled, and drew him close again. “No one knows how to eat this stuff properly. I’ve spilled kha’ani egglings on myself three times already. How can one maintain any dignity with albumin all over one’s fur? No wonder Ha’anala goes naked!”

  Suukmel said this to amuse Rukuei and the absurdity worked, but Taksayu was unbending. “That person goes about naked because she doesn’t know any better,” the Runao sniffed from a nest in the corner. “Raised in the wilderness by foreigners and feral Runa!”

  Rukuei hardly knew what to think about that extraordinary statement, which didn’t prevent him from having an opinion. “It is unendurable that a Jana’ata woman should go about utterly unclothed,” he declared, “no matter how degraded her upbringing.”

  “She says that we Jana’ata must learn to live only by our own devices. It may be necessary for us to become completely independent of the Runa, although she herself hopes this shall not come to pass, and does what she can to prevent it,” Suukmel informed them. Rukuei and Taksayu both stared. “She’s trying to learn to weave with a foot loom, but she hasn’t managed it yet, and until then, she goes naked as she was born—”

  “Can you imagine!” Taksayu cried. “Jana’ata weaving!”

  “Also, she says she simply doesn’t like clothes,” Suukmel continued. “But she knows it upsets the rest of us, and she doesn’t like to make a fierno.”

  “What is a fiemo?” Rukuei demanded irritably, the Ruanja word suddenly infuriating him. Of all the differences he had to face among these strangers, the bastardization of language was the most distressing. How can anything make sense if the words you think with are disordered and imprecise? he cried inwardly.

  “I asked her that,” Suukmel said comfortably. “Fierno means ‘a thunderhead’ but the phrase implies being the cause of a big storm. Making a fuss.” Rukuei grunted. “It is a nice image,” Suukmel offered, knowing Rukuei well. “I like the phrase. It r
eminds me of my lord husband, prowling the courtyard after some tedious meeting, working himself into a fierno—”

  She stopped abruptly, rain falling into her heart. The tent suddenly felt cramped and confining, too filled with people, even though she had only Taksayu and Rukuei with her.

  “Perhaps,” she said, “walking would be good for me.” Taksayu’s ears dropped, and Rukuei looked dubious. “Yes,” Suukmel said then, certain because they doubted both her wisdom and her propriety. “Yes, I should like to try a walk.”

  “HOW CAN THIS HA’ANALA BE MY COUSIN?” RUKUEI ASKED SUUKMEL SEVERAL mornings later, as they broke their fast with a strange but not unpleasant pâté provided by the Laaks household. “My father had no brother or sister. And how can that foreigner be Shetri’s brother-in-law?”

  There was a momentary stiffening. “Isaac is certainly unusual, but he sings beautifully, don’t you agree?”

  The change of subject did not go unnoticed. “Is it so awkward, what I have asked?”

  “Awkward?” Suukmel repeated.

  She had known this day would come, but had never anticipated that it would be in such circumstances. Pride of lineage was moderated among the unranked children of Hlavin’s harem, but Rukuei knew who his father was, if not what Hlavin had done to reach the paramountcy. Whose disgrace to reveal first? she asked herself. The father’s or the uncle’s? There are no innocents in this except the children of dead men: Ha’anala and Rukuei.

  “I wonder if you would take me to your place on the hillside this morning?” she asked lightly, rising from a badly made cushion that was nonetheless fragrant with mountain moss. She moved to the tent opening, letting her eyes become accustomed to the light, looking up at the colorful shapes that she had initially taken for unusually designed city walls ringing the valley.

  Rukuei stared up at her. “Is it worse than awkward?” he asked, getting to his feet as well.

  “I believe with practice I shall learn to see things at a distance, instead of merely imagining them,” she said, confirming his suspicions. “Shetri tells me those are not ramparts but mountains! He says it takes some six day’s constant climbing to reach the peaks. How far is it to the place you go to?”

  “Far enough for privacy,” Rukuei told her.

  They left the tent and began the ascent, taking care with the loose rocks that made the climb a scramble. Suukmel coped with the disorientation by keeping her eyes down, not in submission but to focus on the relatively solid ground nearby. Glancing up every few moments, she tried to estimate the size of things, but she was constantly surprised when she found some “tree” was only a shrub much nearer than she had thought, or when a bright color she believed to be some far-off person’s cloak suddenly took flight and darted into the thin air.

  “Things are not always what they seem,” she said aloud, as Rukuei showed her how to sit on a fallen tupa’s trunk. As she caught her breath, she looked out over the valley, trying to reconcile what her eyes told her with what she knew was there. “The tents look lovely in this light, don’t they? Like jewels in the sun. Which is real, I wonder? The beauty of the tents at a distance or—”

  “The wretchedness they conceal,” Rukuei finished for her, and settled himself. “Tell me what is so terrible that it must be heard up here, my lady.”

  It seemed at first some epic poem of heroes and monsters, of prisons and escapes, of triumph and tragedy. She told of the crushing sameness of unvarying tradition, of a world in which nothing mattered but what had been decided uncounted generations earlier. And she tried to explain the despair of knowing that nothing could change, the fear that something would: the terror of the unknown and the secret wish for it, in so many hearts.

  Caught up in this romance, it was a long time before Rukuei realized that the nameless one was Supaari VaGayjur; that this traitor was his own uncle by marriage, having sired a daughter out of Jholaa Kitheri; that this daughter was now grown and pregnant with her second child by Shetri Laaks; that Ha’anala’s eyes were like his own because they shared a grandsire. It was even longer before he could take in what Suukmel told of how Hlavin Kitheri had seized the paramountcy—

  “Are you saying that my father killed them?” Rukuei cried. “Killed them all? His own kin?” He stood and strode away, not tall but gangling. So young, Suukmel thought. So young.… “I don’t believe you!” he insisted, sweeping out a circle of defense. “This is impossible. He would never have—”

  “He did. He did, beloved! Try to understand!” she cried, as desperate as he. “Your father was like lightning in the night—beautiful and dangerous and sudden. They forced it on him! They were killing him! They had shut him up behind walls greater than those mountains,” she said, waving her arm at the huge stone crags she only half understood. “They had silenced him, and he was dying, Rukuei! He was dying of the silence! Think of the music he wrote for you and the other children! Hear it in your heart! Know that it would have died in him if he hadn’t—”

  Rukuei sank to the ground like the child he was. The constant wind sweeping the valley was loud in their ears, and brought the shrieking laughter of small children chasing one another through the village of tents, the calls of women, the songs of men, the ordinary bustle of a village going about the tasks of everyday life. Deaf to this cheerful noise, he saw in the distance what Suukmel was blind to: destitution, bare subsistence, naked poverty, the words for which did not yet exist in any Rakhati language because such conditions had never before existed on Rakhat.

  “How?” he cried. “How could it have come to this?” Suukmel went to him and knelt at his side. He wrenched away, ashamed and angry, and stood again on feet still swollen and sore, and left his foster mother without a glance, for he was his father’s son and felt the charge build within him and looked now only for someone to strike. Striding down the shattered stone of the hillside, heedless of the falls he took and the cuts he added to his battered young body, he followed the sound of his cousin’s voice to a small crowd of Runa and Jana’ata, her odd accent notable among the gabble as she helped build a barrier—who knew why—across a small swift river that cut through the valley center.

  “No, don’t try to pick them up! Just kick the stones along!” Rukuei heard her call merrily to her husband, Shetri, who was staggering clumsily with a small boulder in his arms. “Look at Sofi’ala! Roll them!” Their firstborn daughter was doing just this with a little rock, the child bent comically in half, short tail in the air, tiny face stiff with concentration. “See how my darling is working!” Ha’anala cried, naked and grunting like a stevedore. “Good girl, helping others!”

  Outraged, Rukuei strode up behind Ha’anala and gripped her ankle, hauling her around, pulling her off balance. “You are Kitheri!” he screamed at her, at his father, at himself. “How can you degrade yourself this way? You drag your own child down! How dare you—”

  In the space of a breath, the indifferent soldier Shetri Laaks was on top of the boy, and would have torn his throat out, had not Ha’anala stopped him with a shouted warning. She took her husband’s shoulders and moved him aside and knelt down to look questioningly at Rukuei with eyes she had no right to—eyes that should be dead.“We are close kin,” Rukuei snarled, glaring at her from the stony ground where he had stumbled under Shetri’s weight. “Your dam was my sire’s sister!” Her face brightened, confused but happy. He wanted nothing more in all the world than to smash that happiness. “My father killed yours,” he told her with blunt brutality, “twice-twelve days past.”

  He was delighted by the silence his words imposed, glad to make someone else gasp with loss, joyful to see her face go slack with pain. “Your father did not die alone. The plain of Inbrokar is heaped with dead, and when I last saw him, my father lay next to yours. Killed by such as these!” he howled, arm flung wide with indictment, at all the Runa who surrounded them. “You speak of choices. So choose, woman! Who shall die to restore the honor of the dead?”

  There was no sound but their own breat
h, and the wind, and the far, thin bugling of some mountain animal heedless of the moment, and the high wail of Isaac, spinning and spinning on the edge of the crowd.

  Ha’anala rested a hand on her belly and got to her feet, and he saw here in full daylight that she was not sleek with her pregnancy, but raw-boned and tired. Wearily, she looked around at the Jana’ata who had chosen to remain in the N’Jarr valley.

  “My choices are the same as yours,” she told them. “Survival or revenge. I choose to live.” She stared down at Rukuei, and pointed to a stony trail that led east, to a pass between two mountains. “There are others like you, who choose death. Three days’ walk that way. Ask for my husband’s nephew, Athaansi Erat. They eat well in his camp,” she said, raising her voice so all could hear her. “Or should I say, they eat plenty. Everything they choose is death. They avenge their losses and pay death with death, and they will die bloody but with full stomachs. You will be welcomed there, cousin. I shall honor the dead by living, and by teaching those who will listen that there is valor in this choice.”

  Isaac’s wail fell off to a moaning that was joined by the keening of a bereft Jana’ata man-child. Sitting at his side, Ha’anala rested her head against Rukuei’s, putting a thin arm around his shoulders and holding him near. “Our fathers are dead,” she whispered as the boy wept. “We are not. Live with me, cousin. Live …”

  Mesmerized by the drama, the villagers stood swaying or staring until Shetri shepherded them away. Finally, there was no one left but the two cousins, and Isaac, whose spinning gradually slowed.

  Older now and steadier, less vulnerable to turmoil if it was quickly brought under control, Isaac did not understand or even notice the emotions at work on his sister and her cousin. But he did what he could to bring clarity.

  “I have something to say,” he announced in a loud, flat voice. He would not look at Rukuei, and certainly would not approach someone so demonstrably unpredictable, but Isaac told him, “Your work is to learn songs.” He waited a moment and then added, “And to teach them.”