Earthborn (Homecoming)

by Orson Scott Card

  He led her back to her bed; “Come on, I didn’t mean it, I was just angry.”

  “So was I, only I was right to be angry,” she said.

  “That’s true, you were, and I apologize. I didn’t mean it.”

  “Please don’t go.”

  “I will go, because it’s the right thing to do. And you will stop pestering me about it, because I shouldn’t have to feel guilty about doing my duty as king.”

  “I won’t sleep while you’re gone. You’ll be lucky if I’m not dead of weakness and exhaustion when you return.”

  “Three days? Try to stay alive for three days.”

  “You don’t take my sickness seriously at all, Tidaka,” she said.

  “I take it seriously,” said Motiak, “but I never have and never will let it stop me from doing my duty. It’s one of the tragedies of royal life, Dudagu. If you died while I was away, doing my duty, I would grieve. But if I failed in my duty because you were dying, I would be ashamed. For my kingdom’s sake, I would rather have my people grieve with me than have my people ashamed of me.”

  “You have no heart,” she said.

  “No, I have a heart,” said Motiak. “I just can’t always do what it tells me to do.”

  “I’ll hate you forever. I’ll never forgive you.”

  “But I’ll love you,” he answered mildly. And then, when the door was closed behind him and she couldn’t hear, he muttered, “I might even forgive you for making my home life so . . . unrestful.”

  He left his house in the company of two captains—as tradition required, one was an angel, the other a human. Outside, spies and soldiers were ready—only a dozen spies and thirty soldiers, but it was best to be prepared. In these tumultuous times, one never knew when a party of Elemaki might penetrate deeply into Darakemba. And before the journey was done, they would be far upriver, much closer to the border.

  On the way out of the city, they were joined by Akmaro, Chebeya, Edhadeya, and Shedemei. Motiak greeted his daughter with an embrace, and met Shedemei with short courtesy; it was easy to assume a level of intimacy as if he had long known her. “Someday you must tell me where you’re from,” he said. “Show me on a map, that is. I have the original maps that Nafai drew, showing the whole gornaya. I won’t have heard of your city, but I can add it to the map.”

  “It would do no good,” said Shedemei. “It doesn’t exist now.”

  “A grief that can hardly be imagined,” said Motiak.

  “It was for a while,” said Shedemei. “But I’m alive, and my work requires all my concentration.”

  “Still, I’d like to see where your city was. People often build again on the same site. If there was a reason to build a city there once, another people will think of the same reason again.” Polite conversation; they all knew what was really on Motiak’s mind. But there was no use talking about it all the time; it wasn’t as if they could do much. And it was Motiak’s duty to make sure they were as comfortable as he could make them. That was one of the chief annoyances of being king. No matter where he was, no matter who was with him, he was always host, always responsible for everyone else’s well-being.

  Out on the road, their reason for this journey was immediately apparent. The encampment of emigrating diggers wasn’t large, but then it wasn’t meant to be. Quiet humans and angels manned the booth where food and water were distributed; lidded jars with thongs to loop around the neck would serve to help the diggers on their way. They would also mark them as emigrants, so that any who saw them on the road would know they were leaving Darakemba. They had taken the invitation of the Ancients; they had decided to live where they were not hated. But it gave them no joy. Motiak hadn’t spent that much of his life around earth people that he could easily read the expressions on their strange faces. But it took no great experience to see the dejection in the slope of their backs, the way they tended to walk now on two feet, now touching a hand to the ground, as if in being called animals they had begun somehow to discover it was true, so now it took all their remaining strength just to keep from setting down the other hand to make it a foot again, as it had been for an ancient ancestor scurrying through the alleys of a human city, looking for something edible or wet or shiny.

  Motiak led his party onto the road; the diggers moved aside. “No,” he said, “the road is wide enough. We can share it.”

  They stayed motionless at the verge, watching him.

  “I am Motiak,” he said. “Don’t you understand that you are citizens? You don’t have to go. I’ve opened up the public larders in every city. You can wait this out. It will pass.”

  Finally one of them spoke. “When we go there, we see the hatred in their eyes, sir. We know you meant well for us, setting us free. We don’t hate you.”

  “It’s not the hunger,” said another. “You know it’s not that.”

  “Yes it is,” said a woman, holding three small children near her. “And the beatings. You won’t live forever, sir.”

  “Whatever else might be true of my sons,” said Motiak, “they will never permit the persecution.”

  “Oh, they’ll starve us out, but not let us be hit?” the woman scoffed. “Stand up, you,” she said to her children. “This is the king, here. This is majesty.”

  Motiak’s angel captain made a motion as if to punish her for impudence, but Motiak waved him back with a tiny gesture. The irony in her voice could not overmatch the bitterness in his heart. She was right, to jeer at majesty. A king has no more power than the willing obedience of the great mass of the people gives him. A king who is worse than his people is a poisonous snake; a king who is better is last year’s snakeskin, discarded in the grass.

  Pabul was at the Ancient Ways booth. He had asked if he might come along, if only because he felt somewhat responsible for the troubles with his decision in Shedemei’s trial the year before. “These so-called Ancients, they’re a loathsome bunch,” he said, “but they’re not breaking any law. They don’t foul the water or poison the food. It’s fresh enough, and the rations they give the earth people are adequate for a day’s journey.” He hesitated, considering whether to say the next thing, then decided and spoke. “You could forbid the diggers to leave.”

  Motiak nodded. “Yes—I could require the most helpless and obedient of my citizens to stay and suffer further humiliation and abuse, from which I’m powerless to protect them, I could do that.”

  Pabul made no more argument along that line.

  They walked all day, briskly because they were all healthy: They made a point of staying fit; Motiak and Pabul because their offices were fundamentally military ones and they might find themselves in the field at any time; Akmaro and Chebeya, Edhadeya and Shedemei because they were of the Kept and labored with their own hands, permitting themselves no excess of food or unproductive leisure. So they overtook group after group of diggers, and to each of them Motiak said the same thing. “Please stay. I wish you would stay. Trust in the Keeper to heal the wound in this land.” And the answer was always the same: For you we would stay, Motiak, we know you wish us well; but there’s no future here for me, for my children.

  “It’s misleading,” Akmaro said that afternoon. “We see here the ones that are on the road. Most are staying.”

  “So far,” said Motiak.

  “Our resources are stretched to the limit, but all the diggers that the Kept can hire are earning wages; their children are still in school; there are even towns and villages where Akma and your sons have no influence and the people treat each other civilly, without boycotts or any sign of hate.”

  “How many such towns, Akmaro?” asked Motiak. “One in a hundred?”

  “One in fifty,” said Akmaro. “Or one in forty.”

  Motiak had no need to answer that.

  He thought back to the morning’s conversation with his wife. The callousness with which she said to let the diggers go and then the problem would be solved. Is that any more monstrous than my cruel thought that I might wish to see my sons i
n graves before I die? Yet I would not have shrunk from letting them all take weapons in their hands and go out into battle, if an enemy attacked us. They might have died then, in the violence of war, and when they saw me mourning no man or woman in the kingdom would have said, If he really loved them he wouldn’t have put them in the way of death.

  He framed the idea in words and said them aloud, so Akmaro, still walking beside him, could hear. “There are things that parents must value even above their children’s lives.”

  Akmaro needed no explanation to understand where Motiak’s thoughts had turned. “That’s hard,” he said. “All of nature has written into our minds the idea that children matter more than anything.”

  “But civilization means rising above even that,” said Motiak. “We feel our self to be the town, the tribe, the city, the nation—”

  “The children of the Keeper—”

  “Yes, we see that as the self that must be preserved at all costs, so that nearer things are less valuable. Does it mean we’re monsters, that we hate our grown children if we send them off to war to kill and die so they can protect our neighbors’ little ones?”

  “ ‘The survival of the family is best enhanced when the family is subsumed in a larger society,’” Akmaro recited. “ ‘One family breaks and bleeds, but the larger organism heals. The wound is not fatal.’ Edhadeya has been teaching me the things that are taught in Rasaro’s House.”

  “She spends more time in your house than mine,” said Motiak.

  “She finds more comfort from Chebeya than from her stepmother,” said Akmaro. “I don’t think that’s surprising. Besides, she spends most of her time with Shedemei.”

  “Strange woman,” said Motiak.

  “When you know her better,” said Akmaro, “you’ll begin to realize that she’s even stranger than you thought at first.” Then, suddenly, Akmaro’s demeanor changed; in a softer voice he said, “I didn’t realize that your captain of soldiers was so close behind us.”

  “Is he?” asked Motiak.

  “Were you overheard, do you think? When you said, ‘There are things that parents must value even above their children’s lives’?”

  Motiak glanced at Akmaro in alarm. They both understood that inadvertently, Motiak had placed their sons in great danger. “It’s time that we stopped for our noon meal.”

  While the soldiers broke out the food that they were carrying, and all but two of the spies settled to the ground to eat, Motiak took Edhadeya aside. “I’m sorry to separate you from the group, but I have an urgent errand for you.”

  “And you can’t send a spy?” she said.

  “I most certainly cannot,” he said. “I chanced to say something unfortunate just now, and I was overheard; but even if I hadn’t been, the idea is bound to occur to one of my men, seeing how unhappy I am. You must go and find your brothers and warn them that it’s possible, even likely, that some soldier, thinking to do me a great service, will attempt to relieve me of some of my family burdens.”

  “Oh, Father, you don’t think they would raise a hand against the royal blood?”

  “Kings’ sons have died before,” said Motiak. “My soldiers know that what my boys are doing now is killing me. I fear the loyalty of my most loyal men as much as I fear the disloyalty of my sons. Go to them, tell them my warning.”

  “Do you know what they’ll say, Father? That you’re threatening them, that you’re trying to scare them into stopping their public speaking.”

  “I’m trying to save their lives. Tell them at least to keep their travel secret. Tell no one where they’re going next, tell no one when they plan to leave. Go suddenly, arrive unexpectedly. They must, or somewhere on the road someone will be lying in wait for them. And not diggers—I’m talking about humans and angels. Will you do this?”

  She nodded.

  “I’ll send two angels with you for safety, but when you get near, you must order them to stay behind so you can talk to your brothers alone.”

  She nodded; she got up to go.

  “Edhadeya,” said Motiak. “I know that I’m asking you to do a hard thing, to go and see them. But whom else can I send? Akmaro? Pabul? Akma will allow you to come close and speak to your brothers in privacy.”

  “I can bear it,” said Edhadeya. “I can bear it better than watching these weary people leave their homeland.”

  As she walked away, Motiak saw that she was heading straight for Shedemei. He called out to her. She came back.

  “I don’t think you should talk about this to strangers,” he said.

  “I wasn’t going to,” she said, looking peeved. Again she left; again she headed straight for Shedemei, and this time spoke to her. Shedemei nodded, then shook her head no; only then did Edhadeya take her leave of the whole group, with two angels flying reconnaissance for her as she went.

  Motiak was furious even though he knew his anger was foolish. Chebeya noticed at once that he was out of sorts and came to him. “What happened with Edhadeya?” she asked.

  “I told her not to tell strangers what her errand was, and she went straight to this Shedemei.”

  Chebeya laughed ruefully. “Oh, Motiak, you should have been more specific than that. Shedemei isn’t a stranger to anyone here but you.”

  “Edhadeya knew what I meant.”

  “No she didn’t, Motiak. If she had known, she would have obeyed you. Not all your children are in revolt. Besides, Shedemei isn’t Bego or . . . Akma. She’s only going to lead Edhadeya closer to the Keeper and to you.”

  “I want to talk to her, this Shedemei. It’s time I got to know her.”

  A moment later Shedemei sat beside him in the shade, with Akmaro, Pabul, and Chebeya gathered round, the soldiers well back and out of earshot. “Enough of the evasions,” said Motiak. “It was fine for you to be vague and mysterious until my daughter started confiding my secret errands to you.”

  “What secret errands?” said Shedemei.

  “The reason I was sending her back to Darakemba.”

  “She told me nothing about that,” said Shedemei.

  “Are you going to pretend that you don’t know what’s she’s doing?”

  “Not at all,” said Shedemei. “I know exactly what she’s doing. But she didn’t tell me.”

  “Enough of the riddles! Who are you!”

  “When I can see that it’s any of your business to know, Motiak, I’ll tell you. Until then, all you need to know is that I serve the Keeper as best I can, and so do you, and that makes us friends whether you like it or not.”

  No one had ever spoken to him with such impudence before. Only Chebeya’s gentling touch on his elbow restrained him from embarrassing himself with words he would soon regret. “I try to be a decent man and not abuse my power as king, but I have my limits!”

  “On the contrary,” said Shedemei. “There is no limit to your decency. It is complete. Akma and your boys wouldn’t have done half so well if that weren’t true.”

  Motiak studied her face, still angry, still baffled. “I’m supposed to be the king, and nobody will tell me anything.”

  “If it’s any help to you,” said Shedemei, “I don’t know anything that would help you, because it doesn’t help me, either. I’m as eager as you are to put an end to this nonsense. I see as clearly as you do that if Akma succeeds in all that he plans to do, your kingdom will lie in ruins, your people scattered and enslaved, and this great experiment in freedom and harmony will be, not even a memory, but a legend and then a myth and then a fantasy.”

  “It’s been a fantasy all along.”

  “No, that’s not true,” said Akmaro, leaping in to stop Motiak from wallowing in bitterness, as he so often had in recent weeks and months. “Don’t start to use Akma’s lies to excuse your own lack of understanding. You know that the Keeper of Earth is real. You know that the dreams he sends are true. You know that the future he showed to Binaro was a good one, full of hope and light, and you chose it, not out of fear of the Keeper, but out of love for
his plan. Don’t lose sight of that.”

  Motiak sighed. “It’s nice at least that I don’t have the burden of carrying a conscience around with me. Akmaro stores a much larger one than I could lift myself, and trots it out whenever it’s needed.” He laughed. So did they. For a moment, and then the laughter died in reflective silence. “My friends, I think we have seen how powerless I am. Even if I were like the late unlamented Nuab among the Zenifi, willing to kill whoever crossed me, he didn’t have to face a determined enemy like Akma.”

  “Khideo’s sword almost got him,” Akmaro pointed out.

  “Khideo didn’t go around like Akma, telling the people exactly what the worst among them want to hear. Nuab didn’t have his sons in unison against him so that the people would see them as the future and him as the past and ignore him as if he were already dead. Don’t you think it’s ironic, Akmaro, that what you did to that monster Pabulog, stealing his sons away from him, should end up happening to me?”

  Akmaro laughed one bitter bark of a laugh. “You think I haven’t seen the parallel? My son thinks he hates me, but his actions have been a perverse echo of mine. He even grew up to be the leader of a religious movement, and spends his life preaching and teaching. I should be proud.”

  “Yes, we’re all such failures,” said Chebeya nastily. “We can sit around here moaning about our helplessness. Shedemei, who supposedly knows all the secrets of the universe, can’t think of a single useful thing to do. The king whines about how powerless kings are. My husband, the high priest, moans about what a failure he is as a father. While I have to sit here watching the threads that bind this kingdom together unraveling, watch the people forming themselves into tribes that are bound only by hate and fear, and all the while I know that those who have been trusted with all the power that there is in this land are doing nothing but feeling sorry for themselves!”

  Her virulence startled them all.

  “Yes,” said Motiak, “so we’re a helpless pathetic bunch. What exactly is your point?”