Brothers of Earth

by C. J. Cherryh

  He found surprisingly little difficult about the answer. At the moment he was not even afraid. "I owe Kta," he said. "He never objected to my company, living. And that, among nemet, seems to have been a rare friendship."

  Ylith seemed a little surprised. "Well," she said, rising and smoothing her skirts. "I will let you return to your sleep,

  t'Morgan. I will honor some of your requests. Nethim will give her honor at my request."

  "I am grateful for that, at least, Methi."

  "Do you want for anything?"

  "To speak with Kta," he said, "that most of all."

  "That," she said, "will not be permitted."

  XIX

  Keys rattled. Kurt stirred out of the torpor of long waiting. Suddenly he realized it was not breakfast. Too many people were in the hall; he heard their moving, the insertion of the key. Another of the moods of Ylith-methi, he reckoned.

  Or it was an execution detail, and he was about to learn what had become of Kta.

  Lhe led them, Lhe with fatigue marks under his eyes and his normally impeccable hair disarranged. A tai, a short sword, was through his belt.

  "Wait down the hall," he said to the others.

  They did not want to go. He repeated the order, this time with wildness in his voice, and they almost fled his presence.

  No! Kurt started to protest, rising off his cot, but they were gone. Lhe closed the door and stood with his hand clenched on the hilt of the tai.

  "I am t'Nethim," said Lhe. "My father's business is with Vel t'Elas. Mine is with you. Mim t'Nethim was my cousin."

  Kurt recovered his dignity and bowed slightly, ignoring the threat of the fury that trembled in Lhe's nostrils. After such a point, there was little else to do. "I honored her," he said, "very much."

  "No," said Lhe. "That you did not."

  "Please. Say the rites for her."

  "We have said rites, with many prayers for the welfare of her soul. Because of Mim • t'Nethim we have spoken well of Elas to our Guardians for the first tune in centuries: even in ignorance, they sheltered her. But other things we will not forgive. There is no peace between the Guardians of Nethim and you, human. They do not accept this disgrace."

  "Mim thought them in harmony with her choice," said Kurt. "There was peace in Mim. She loved Nethim and she loved Bias."

  It did not greatly please Lhe, but it affected him greatly. His lips became a hard line. His brows came as near to meeting as a nemet's might.

  "She was consenting?" he asked. "Elas did not command this of her, giving her to you?"

  "At first they opposed it, but I asked Mim's consent before I asked Elas. I wished her happy, t'Nethim. If you are not offended to hear it, I loved her."

  A vein beat ceaselessly at Lhe's temple. He was silent a moment, as if gathering the self-control to speak. "We are offended. But it is clear she trusted you, since she gave you her true name in the house of her enemies. She trusted you more than Elas."

  "No. She knew I would keep that to myself, but it was not fear of Elas. She honored Elas too much to burden their honor with knowing the name of her house."

  "I thank you, that you confessed her true name to the Methi so we could comfort her soul. It is a great deal," he added coldly, "that we thank a human."

  "I know it is," said Kurt, and bowed, courtesy second nature by now. He lifted his eyes cautiously to Lhe's face; there was no yielding there.

  Scurrying footsteps approached the door. With a timid knock, a lesser guardsman cracked the door and awkwardly bowed his apology. "Sir. Sir. The Methi is waiting for this human. Please, sir, she has sent t'Iren to ask about the delay."

  "Out," Lhe snapped. The head vanished out of the doorway. Lhe stood for a moment, fingers white on the hilt of the tai. Then he gestured abruptly to the door. "Human. You are not mine to deal with. Out."

  The summons this time was to the fortress rhmei, into a gathering of the lords of Indresul, shadowy figures in the firelit hall of state. Ylith waited beside the hearthflre itself, wearing again the wide-winged crown, a slender form of color and light in the dim hall, her gown the color of flame and the light glancing from the metal around her face.

  Kurt went down to his knees and on his face without being forced; despite that a guard held him there with the butt of a spear in his back.

  "Let him sit," said Ylith. "He. may look at me."

  Kurt sat back on his heels, amid a great murmuring of the Indras lords. He realized to his hurt that they murmured against that permission. He was not fit to meet their Methi as even a humble chan might, making a quick and dignified obeisance and rising. He laced his hands in his lap, proper for a man who had been given no courtesy of welcome, and kept his head bowed despite the permission. He did not want to stir their anger. There was nowhere to begin with them, to whom he was an animal; there was no protest and no action that would make any difference to them.

  "T'Morgan," Ylith insisted softly.

  He would not, even for her. She let him alone after that, and quietly asked someone to fetch Kta.

  It did not take long. Kta came of his own volition, as far as the place where Kurt knelt, and there he too went to his knees and bowed his head, but he did not make the full prostration and no one insisted on it. He was at least without the humiliation of the iron band that Kurt still wore on his ankle.

  If they were to die, Kurt thought wildly, irrationally, he would ask them to remove it. He did not know why it mattered, but it did; it offended his pride more than the other indignities, to have something locked on his person against which he had no power. He loathed it.

  "T'Elas," said the Methi, "you have had a full day to reconsider your decision."

  "Great Methi," said Kta in a voice faint but steady, "I have given you the only answer I will ever give."

  "For love of Nephane?"

  "Yes."

  "And for love of the one who destroyed your hearth?"

  "No. But for Nephane."

  "Kta t'Elas," said the Methi, "I have spoken at length with Vel t'Elas. They would take you to the hearth of your Ancestors, and I would permit that, if you would remember that you are Indras."

  He hesitated long over that. Kurt felt the anxiety in him, but he would not offend Kta's dignity by turning to urge him one way or the other.

  "I belong to Nephane," said Kta.

  "Will you then refuse me, will you directly refuse me, t'Elas, knowing the meaning of that refusal?"

  "Methi," pleaded Kta, "let me be, let me alone in peace. Do not make me answer you."

  "Then you were brought up in reverence of Indras law and the Ind."

  "Yes, Methi."

  "And you admit that I have the authority to require your obedience? That I can curse you from hearth and from city, from all holy rites, even that of burial? That I have the power to consign your undying soul to perdition to all eternity?"

  "Yes," said Kta, and his voice was no more than a whisper in that deathly silence.

  "Then, t'Elas, I am sending you and the human t'Morgan to the priests. Consider, consider well the answers you will give them."

  The temple lay across a wide courtyard, still within the walls of the Indume, a cube of white marble, vast beyond all expectation. The very base of its door was as high as the shoulder of a man, and within the triangular rhmei of the temple blazed the phusmeha of the greatest of all shrines, the hearthfire of all mankind.

  Kta stopped at the threshold of the inner shrine, that awful golden light bathing his sweating face and reflecting in his eyes. He had an expression of terror on his face such as Kurt had never seen in him. He faltered and would not go on, and the guards took him by the arms and led him forward into the shrine, where the roar of the fire drowned the sound of their steps.

  Kurt started to follow him, in haste. A spearshaft slammed across his belly, doubling him over with a cry of pain, swallowed in the noise.

  When he straightened in the hands of the guards, barred from that holy place, he saw Kta at the side of the hearth-
fire fall to his face on the stone floor. The guards with him bowed and touched hands to lips in reverence, bowed again and withdrew as white-robed priests entered the hall from beyond the fire.

  One was the elderly priest who had defended him to the Methi, the only one of all of them in whom Kurt had hope.

  He jerked free, cried out to the priest, the shout also swallowed in the roar. Kta had risen and vanished with the priests into the light.

  His guards recovered Kurt, snatching him back with violence he was almost beyond feeling.

  "The priest," he kept telling them. "That priest, the white-haired one, I want to speak with him. Can I not speak with him?"

  "Observe silence here," one said harshly. "We do not know the priest you mean."

  "That priest!" Kurt cried, and jerked loose, threw a man skidding on the polished floor and ran into the rhmei, flinging himself facedown so close to the great fire bowl that the heat scorched his skin.

  How long he lay there was not certain. He almost fainted, and for a long time everything was red-hazed and the air was too hot to breathe; but he had claimed sanctuary, as Mother Isoi had claimed it first in the Song of the Ind, when Phan came to kill mankind.

  White-robed priests stood around him, and finally an aged and blue-veined hand reached down to him, and he looked up into the face he had hoped to find.

  He wept, unashamed. "Priest," he said, not knowing how to address the man with honor, "please help us."

  "A human," said the priest, "ought not to claim sanctuary. It is not lawful. You are a pollution on these holy stones. Are you of our religion?"

  "No, sir," Kurt said.

  The old man's lips trembled. It might have been the effect of age, but his watery eyes were frightened.

  "We must purify this place," he said, and one of the younger priests said, "Who will go and tell this thing to the Methi?"

  "Please," Kurt pleaded, "please give us refuge here."

  "He means Kta t'Elas," said one of the others, as if it Was a matter of great wonder to them.

  "He is house-friend to Elas," said the old man.

  "Light of heaven," breathed the younger. "Elas... with this?"

  "Nethim," said the old man, "is also involved."

  "Ai," another murmured.

  And together they gathered Kurt up and brought him with them, talking together, their steps beginning to echo now that they were away from the noise of the fire.

  Ylith turned slowly, the fine chains of her headdress gently swaying and sparkling against her hair, and the light of the hearthfire of the fortress leaped flickering across her face. With a glance at the priest she settled into her chair and sat leaning back, looking down at Kurt.

  "Priest," she said at last, "you have reached some conclusion, surely, after holding them both so long a time." "Great Methi, the College is divided in its opinion." "Which is to say it has reached no conclusion, after three days of questioning and deliberation." "It has reached several conclusions, however-" "Priest," exclaimed the Methi in irritation, "yea or nay?" The old priest bowed very low. "Methi, some think that the humans are what we once called the god-kings, the children of the great earth-snake Yr and of the wrath of Phan when he was the enemy of mankind, begetting monsters to destroy the world."

  "This is an old, old theory, and the god-kings were long ago, and capable of mixing blood with man. Has there ever been a mixing of human blood and nemet?"

  "None proved, great Methi. But we do not know the origin of the Tamurlin, and he is most evidently of their kind. Now you are asking us to resolve, as it were, the Tamurlin question immediately, and we do not have sufficient knowledge to do so, great Methi."

  "You have him, I sent him to you for you to examine. Does he tell you nothing?" "What he tells us is unacceptable." "Does he lie? Surely if he lies, you can trap him." "We have tried, great Methi, and he will not be moved from what he says. He speaks of another world and another sun. I think he believes these things." "And do you believe them, priest?"

  The old man bowed his head, clenching his aged hands. "Let the Methi be gracious; these matters are difficult or you would not have consulted the College. We wonder this: if he is not nemet, what could be his origin? Our ships have ranged far over all the seas, and never found his like. When humans will to do it, they come to us, bringing machines and forces our knowledge does not understand. If he is not from somewhere within our knowledge, then- forgive my simplicity-he must still be from somewhere. He calls it another earth. Perhaps it is a failure of language, a misunderstanding, but where in all the lands we know could have been his home?"

  "What if there was another? How would our religion encompass it?"

  The priest turned his watery eyes on Kurt, kneeling beside him. "I do not know," he said.

  "Give me an answer, priest. I will make you commit yourself. Give me an answer."

  "I...would rather believe him mortal than immortal, and I cannot quite accept that he is an animal. Forgive me, great Methi, what may be heresy to wonder, but Phan was not the eldest born of Ib. There were other beings, whose nature is unclear. Perhaps there were others of Phan's kind. And were there a thousand others, it makes the yhia no less true."

  "This is heresy, priest."

  "It is," confessed the priest. "But I do not know an answer otherwise."

  "Priest, when I look at him, I see neither reason nor logic. I question what should not be questioned. If this is Phan's world, and there is another, then what does this foretell, this... intrusion... of humans into ours? There is power above Phan's, yes; but what can have made it necessary that nature be so upset, so inside out? Where are these events tending, priest?"

  "I do not know. But if it is Fate against which we struggle, then our struggle will ruin us."

  "Does not the yhia bid us accept things only within the limits of our own natures?"

  "It is impossible to do otherwise, Methi."

  "And therefore does not nature sometimes command us to resist?"

  "It has been so reasoned, Methi, although not all the College is in agreement on that."

  "And if we resist Fate, we must perish?"

  "That is doubtless so, Methi."

  "And someday it might be our fate to perish?"

  "That is possible, Methi."

  She slammed her hand down on the arm of her chair. "I refuse to bow to such a possibility. I refuse to perish, priest, or to lead men to perish. In sum, the College does not know the answer."

  "No, Methi, we must admit we do not."

  "I have a certain spiritual authority myself."

  "You are the viceroy of Phan on earth."

  "Will the priests respect that?"

  "The priests," said the old man, "are not anxious to have this matter cast back into then: hands. They will welcome your intervention in the matter of the origin of humans, Methi."

  "It is," she said, "dangerous to the people that such thoughts as these be heard outside this room. You will not repeat the reasoning we have made together. On your life, priest, and on your soul, you will not repeat what I have said to you."

  The old priest turned his head and gave Kurt a furtive, troubled look. "Let the Methi be gracious, this being is not deserving of punishment for any wrong."

  "He invaded the Rhmei of Man."

  "He sought sanctuary."

  "Did you give it?"

  "No," the priest admitted.

  "That is well," said Ylith. "You are dismissed, priest."

  The old man made a deeper bow and withdrew, backing away. The heavy tread and metal clash of armed men accompanied the opening of the door. The armed men remained after it was closed. Kurt heard and knew they were there, but he must not turn to look; he knew his time was short. He did not want to hasten it. The Methi still looked down on him, the tiny chains swaying, her dark face soberly thoughtful.

  "You create difficulties wherever you go," she said softly.

  "Where is Kta, Methi? They would not tell me. Where is he?"

  "They returned
him to us a day ago."

  "Is he... ?"

  "I have not given sentence." She said it with a shrug, then bent those dark eyes full upon him. "I do not really wish to kill him. He could be valuable to me. He knows 'it. I could hold him up to the other Indras-descended of Nephane and say, look, we are merciful, we are forgiving, we are your people. Do not fight against us."