Children of God

by Mary Doria Russell

  “This is going to be a fierce one,” Tiyat predicted uneasily, standing with her tail braced against a stiffening wind. The lightning in the west was nearly continuous, illuminating the underside of the thunderheads.

  Kajpin stood as well. “Rain falls on everyone,” she said without concern, but then added the more ominous phrase, “lightning strikes some.” Tramping down the hillock to a small dip in the ground, she sat again, lowering her profile, calmly contemplating the soldiers’ ranks before remarking cheerfully, “Glad I’m not wearing armor.”

  “How long do you think before the storm comes?” Nico asked.

  Emilio looked west and shrugged. “An hour. Maybe less.”

  “Do you want me to go to them and ask for Signora Sofia?”

  “No, Nico. Thank you. Wait here, please,” Sandoz said. He joined Tiyat and Kajpin, and repeated, “Wait here.” Then, without looking back, he walked without hurry down the road until he’d halved the distance and stood alone: a small flat-backed figure, silver and black hair lifted and blown by the breeze.

  By this time the vanguard had also come to a halt, and before long these ranks parted to make way for a curtained sedan chair borne from the bivouac by four Runa.

  Emilio tried to prepare himself for the sight of her, the sound of her voice, but gave up and simply watched as the bearers set the chair down gently. With dispatch, they unfurled a temporary shelter like a veranda around the litter, its waterproof fabric the color of marigolds, bright in the sunlight east of the approaching storm. There was a short delay while an ingeniously designed folding chair was brought forward from an equipment wagon, snapped into shape and placed in front of the conveyance. Finally a staircase, hinged at the base of the litter’s entrance, was tipped outward, and he saw a tiny hand as it separated the curtains and took a proffered arm as support in her descent.

  He had expected her to be altered but still lovely; he was not disappointed. The raking scars and the empty socket were a shock, but the harsh suns of Rakhat had rendered her face so finely creased that it seemed made of gauze; the seams of scar tissue were now merely three lines among many, and her remaining eye was lively and observant, and seemed to sweep her surroundings in continual compensation for her halved field of vision. Even the arc of her spine seemed graceful to him: a curve of curiosity, as though she had bent to examine some object on the ground that had caught her attention on her way to the camp chair. She sat, and looked up, her head tilted almost coyly, waiting for him. Delicate as a wren, with her small spare hands in her lap, she had in repose a skeletal purity: elegant and fleshless and still. “Thou art beautiful,” he thought, “comely as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners.… ”

  “Sofia,” he said and held his hands out to her.

  Her’s remained quiet. “It’s been a long time,” she observed coldly, when he drew near. “You might have come to me first.” She held his gaze with her one eye until his own dropped. “Have you seen Isaac?” she asked, when he could look at her again.

  “Yes,” he said. She stiffened slightly and took in a breath, and he understood then that Sofia had believed her son long dead, his name used heartlessly to lure more hostages to the djanada stronghold. “Isaac is well,” he began.

  “Well!” She gave a short laugh. “Not normal, but well, at least. Is he with you?”

  “No—”

  “They are still holding him hostage.”

  “No, Sofia, nothing like that! He is a person of honor among them—”

  “Then why isn’t he here, with you?”

  He hesitated, not wanting to wound her. “He—Isaac prefers to stay where he is. He has invited you to come to him.” He stopped, looking past her to the troops visible beyond the golden tenting. “We can take you to him, but you must come alone.”

  “Is that the game?” she asked, smiling coolly. “Isaac is the bait, and they’d have me.”

  “Sofia, please!” he begged. “The Jana’ata aren’t—. Sofia, you’ve got it all wrong!”

  “I have it wrong,” she repeated softly. “I have it wrong. Sandoz, you’ve been here, what? A few weeks?” she asked lightly, brows up, one twisted by scar tissue. “And now you tell me that I have it all wrong. Wait! There is a word in English for this—now let me think …” She stared at him, unblinking. “Arrogance. Yes. That’s the word. I had almost forgotten it. You have come back, after forty years, and you have taken almost three whole weeks to get to know the situation, and now you propose to explain Rakhat to me.”

  He refused to be intimidated. “Not Rakhat. Just one small settlement of Jana’ata, trying not to starve to death. Sofia, do you realize that the Jana’ata are nearly extinct? Surely you didn’t mean—”

  “Is that what they told you?” she asked. She snorted with derision. “And you believed them.”

  “Dammit, Sofia, don’t patronize me! I know starvation when I see it—”

  “What if they are starving?” she snapped. “Shall I regret that a cannibal starves?”

  “Oh, for crissakes, Sofia, they aren’t cannibals!”

  “And what would you call it?” she asked. “They eat Runa—”

  “Sofia, listen to me—”

  “No, you listen to me, Sandoz,” she hissed. “For nearly thirty years, we-but-not-you fought an enemy whose whole civilization was the purest expression of the most characteristic form of evil: the willingness to erase the humanity of others and turn them into commodities. In life, the Runa were conveniences for the djanada—slaves, assistants, sex toys. In death, raw materials—meat, hides, bones. Labor first, livestock in the end! But the Runa are more than meat, Sandoz. They are a people who have earned their liberty and won it from those who kept them in bondage, generation after generation. God wanted their freedom. I helped them to get it, and I regret nothing. We gave the Jana’ata justice. They reaped precisely what they sowed.”

  “So God wants them extinct?” Emilio cried. “He wants the Runa to turn the planet into a grocery store? God wants a place where no one sings, where everyone is alike, where there is one kind of person? Sofia, this has gone way past an eye for an eye—”

  The sound was like a gunshot, flat and unresonant, and he could feel the exact outline of her hand, stinging and sharp, form on his face.

  “How dare you,” she whispered. “How dare you leave me behind, and come back now—after all this time—and presume to judge me!”

  He stood still, face averted, waiting for the sensation to ease, eyes wide to keep the tears from spilling. Tried to imagine forty years alone and unsupported, without John or Gina, without Vince Giuliani or Edward Behr, or any of the others who’d helped him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I’m sorry! I don’t know what happened here, and I won’t pretend to understand what you have lived through—”

  “Thank you. I am glad to hear it—”

  “But, Sofia, I do know what it is to be a commodity,” he said, cutting her off. “I know what it is to be erased. I also know what it is to be falsely accused, and God help me! I know what it is to be guilty—” He stopped and looked away, but then met her eye and said, “Sofia, I have eaten Runa, and for the same reason the djanada did: because I was hungry and I wanted to live. And I have killed—I killed Askama, Sofia. I didn’t mean it to be her, but I wanted to kill, I wanted someone to die so that I could be free, one way or the other. So you see,” he told her with bleak cheer, “I am the last person to judge anyone else! And I grant you that the Jana’ata you fought got what was coming to them! But, Sofia—you can’t let the Runa kill them all! They’ve paid for their sins—”

  “Paid for their sins!” Incredulous, she stood, and left her chair and walked a step or two, bent and hobbled by a coiled spine. “Did they confess to you, Father? Have you forgiven them, just because they asked you to?” she asked, face twisted with contempt. “Well, some things cannot be absolved! Some things are unforgivable—”

  “You think I don’t know that?” he shouted, his own ange
r rising to meet hers. “No one confesses to me anymore! I left the priesthood, Sofia. I didn’t come here to judge you. I didn’t even come back to rescue you! I came because I was beaten senseless and kidnapped by Carlo Giuliani. I spent a good portion of the voyage from Earth drugged, and all I want to do right now is go home and find out if the woman I nearly married seventeen years ago is still alive—”

  She stared at him but now his eyes did not drop. “You said that you knew what happened to me at Galatna, Sofia, but you don’t know the worst of it: I left the priesthood because I can’t forgive what happened to me there. I can’t forgive Supaari, who did this to me,” he said, holding up his hands. “And I can’t forgive Hlavin Kitheri, and I doubt that I ever will. They taught me to hate, Sofia. Ironic, isn’t it? We heard Kitheri’s songs and risked everything to come here, prepared to love whomever we met and to learn from them! But when Hlavin Kitheri met one of us—. He looked at me, and all he thought—”

  He stopped, spun from her, hardly able to breathe, but turned, trembling, and held her uneasy gaze as he said in a voice soft with outrage, “He looked at me and thought, How nice. Something new to fuck.”

  “It’s over,” she snapped, face white. But he knew it wasn’t, not even for her, not even after all these years. “You work,” she told him. “You concentrate on the task at hand—”

  “Yes,” he agreed willingly, quickly. “And you make loneliness a virtue. You call it self-reliance, right? You tell yourself you need nothing, that you don’t want anyone in your life ever again—”

  “Wall it off!”

  “You think I haven’t tried?” he cried. “Sofia, I keep stacking up the stones, but nothing holds the walls together anymore! Not even anger. Not even hate. I am worn out with hating, Sofia. I’m tired of it. I’m bored by it!” The storm was now only minutes away and the lightning was frighteningly close, but he didn’t care. “I have hated Supaari VaGayjur, and Hlavin Kitheri, and sixteen of his friends but … I can’t seem to hate in the aggregate,” he whispered, hands falling emptily. “That one small island of integrity is still left to me, Sofia. As much as I have hated the fathers, I cannot hate their children. And neither should you, Sofia. You can’t in justice kill the innocent.”

  “No,” she said, curled over her own heart. “There are no innocents.”

  “If I can find you ten, will you spare the others for their sake?”

  “Don’t play games with me,” she said, and motioned for her bearers.

  With one step, he came between her and the chair. “I helped to deliver a Jana’ata baby a few days ago,” he told her conversationally, blocking her way. “Cesarean section. I did what I could. It wasn’t enough. The mother died. I want her baby to live, Sofia. There is very damned little that I am certain of these days, but I’m sure of this one thing: I want that kid to live.”

  “Get out of my way,” she whispered, “or I’ll call my guards.”

  He didn’t move. “Shall I tell you what the baby’s older sister is called?” he asked lightly. “Sofi’ala. Pretty name, isn’t it?” He watched her react, her head jerking as though recoiling from a blow, and he pressed on mercilessly. “The child’s mother was named Ha’anala. Her last words were of you. She said, ‘Take the children to my mother.’ She wanted us to march them to Gayjur! A sort of children’s crusade, I suppose. I didn’t do it. I refused her dying wish because I am afraid to be responsible for the lives of any more children, Sofia. But she was right—those kids have never murdered or enslaved anyone. They are every bit as innocent as the VaKashani children we saw slaughtered.”

  The rain was beginning—heavy drops as warm as tears—wind whipping the fabric of the shelter noisily, almost drowning out his words. “I will stand surety for those kids and their parents, Sofia. Please. Let them live and all the good they do—all the music, the poetry, everything decent they are capable of—all that is to your credit,” he told her, desperate now, taking her stillness for refusal. “If they kill again, I’ll be the goat. Their sins on my head, okay? I’ll stay here and if they kill again, then execute me and let them have one more chance.”

  “Ha’anala’s dead?”

  He nodded, ashamed to weep when Sofia should have mourned. “You taught her well, Sofia,” he said, voice fraying. “She was, by all accounts, a remarkable woman. She founded a sort of utopian society up in the mountains. It’s probably doomed—like all utopias. But she tried! All three of our species live together up there, Sofia—Runa, Jana’ata, even Isaac. She taught them that every soul is a small reflection of God, and that it is wicked to murder because when a life is taken, we lose that unique revelation of God’s nature.”

  He stopped again, hardly able to utter the words. “Sofia, one of the priests I came with—he thinks your foster daughter was a sort of Moses for her people! It took forty years to burn the slavery out of the Israelites. Well, maybe the Jana’ata need forty years to burn the mastery out of them!”

  He shrugged helplessly at her stricken glare. “I don’t know, Sofia. Sean’s probably full of shit. Maybe Abraham was psychotic and schizophrenia ran in his family. Maybe Jesus was just another crazy Jew who heard voices. Or maybe God is real, but He’s evil or stupid, and that’s why so much seems so insane and unfair! It doesn’t matter,” he shouted, trying to make himself heard through the roar of the rain. “It really doesn’t matter. I don’t give a damn about God anymore, Sofia. All I know for certain is I want Ha’anala’s baby to live—”

  She walked out into the rain, its relentless noise drowning all other sound. For a long time, she simply stood in the downpour, listening to its hissing crash, feeling it beat down on her twisted shoulders, work its way through her hair, wash over the ruins of her face.

  When she came back from where she had been in memory, Emilio was waiting for her. Soaked and chilled, she walked slowly to her chair, accepting his offer of an arm to steady her climb. When she reached the platform, she sat as heavily as a tiny woman could.

  The first violence of the storm was passing, the rain now a steady drumming, and for a time they simply gazed out at the drowning landscape. She touched his shoulder and he turned to her. Reaching up, she placed her hand gently over the mark she’d laid there, minutes before, and then lifted a lock of his hair. “You’ve gotten gray, old man,” she said. “You look even worse than I do, and I look awful.”

  His reply was starchy, but the red-rimmed eyes were amused. “Vanity is not among my failings, madam, but I’m damned if I’ll stand here and be insulted.” He made no move to go.

  “I loved you once,” she said.

  “I know. I loved you, too. Don’t change the subject.”

  “You were to marry?”

  “Yes. I left the priesthood, Sofia. I was done with God.”

  “But He wasn’t done with you.”

  “Evidently not,” Emilio said wearily. “Either that, or this has been a run of bad luck of historic proportions.” He walked to the edge of the awning to stare out at the rain. “Even now, I think maybe it’s all a bad joke, you know? This baby I’m so worried about? He could turn out to be such an evil bastard that everyone will wish he’d died in his mother’s womb, and I’ll go down in Rakhati history as Sandoz the Idiot, who saved his life!” Braced hands limp at his sides, he snorted at his own absurd grandiosity. “Probably he’ll just be another poor clown doing the best he can, trying to get things right more often than not.”

  Then, without warning, his posture shifted. He became, somehow, taller, rangier, and Sofia Mendes heard once more the beloved Texas twang of D. W. Yarbrough, the long-dead priest who’d taught them both so much. “Miz Mendes,” Emilio drawled, defeated but not without humor, “the whole damn thing beats the livin’ shit outta me.”

  TALKED OUT, EMILIO SAT ON THE GROUND NEXT TO HER, AND TOGETHER they watched rain turn the world to mud. Before long, she realized he had fallen asleep, propped against the supports of her chair, the crippled hands lax in his lap. Mind empty, she listened to his soft snore
and might have slept herself if she had not been disturbed by a huge and sodden young man, clutching a cloth cap and stooping to peer under the awning.

  “Signora? Is everything going to be all right now?” he asked anxiously.

  “And who are you?” she asked very quietly, glancing significantly at Emilio.

  “My name is Niccolo d’Angeli. ‘D’Angeli’ means from the angels,” the young giant whispered. “That’s where I came from, before the home. The angels left me there.” She smiled, and he took that for a good sign. “So everything will be all right?” he asked again coming in, out of the rain. “The Jana people can live up there, if they don’t bother anyone, right?” She didn’t answer so he said, “That would be fair, I think. Is Don Emilio all right? Why is he sitting there like that?”

  “He’s asleep. He must have been very tired.”

  “He has nightmares. He’s afraid to sleep.”

  “Are you a friend of his?”

  “I’m his bodyguard. I think his friends are all dead.” Nico gave this some consideration, but looked unhappy. Then, visibly struck by a thought, he brightened. “You’re his friend, and you’re not dead.”

  “Not yet,” Sofia confirmed.

  Nico stepped to the edge of the shelter and watched the lightning play for a while. “I like the storms here,” he remarked. “They remind me of the last act of Rigoletto.” She had been thinking, He is retarded. But this gave her pause. “We found your son, signora,” said Nico, facing her again. “He wants you to visit him, but I think he should put some clothes on first. Did I say something wrong?”

  She wiped one eye. “No.” She smiled then and confided, “Isaac has never liked clothes.”