"Who is Nenyi?" Isika asked. "I've heard you speak of the Uncreated One, but I don't understand who that is."
"Nenyi is the Uncreated One, the Life-giver, Mother and Father to the world. He gave the Maweel the tasks of removing poison, healing the land and its people, doing right, enjoying the gifts, rescuing those who need us, and always fighting Mugunta and the Great Waste. We rescue the outcast because these ways are in our bones, imprinted in us. Azariyah, our city, is a home for many who were once cast out from their own homes. And we have allies against the Great Waste, just across this lake. The Hadem; people who are white like Gavi, who hold back the Great Waste with all their might, though they have a different way."
"There are others who look like Gavi?" Ben asked. "Not Workers?"
Jabari looked surprised. "Of course. Throughout the great lands, until the sea itself, there are many kinds of people, stretching as far as we can imagine. Some say there are people across the oceans as well. We don't have as many allies as we would like, because the Great Waste is very strong. But the Hadem are some of our oldest friends. They hold the sea people back, the ones who steal our children, selling them to other kingdoms." He sighed. "Another of Mugunta's works."
Isika's eyes were wide. Jabari's words stirred her heart, like the shape of a story she had once known. She looked at Jabari and Benayeem sitting side by side and thought they could be brothers, or at least cousins. They both had high foreheads and dark skin. Benayeem was a shade or two lighter than Jabari, who was a shade lighter than Isika. Ben's eyes were wide set like Jabari's. Jabari's cheekbones were higher and more pronounced, his lips fuller, his jaw stronger. He was taller, but Benayeem hadn't finished growing yet.
"Do you think we could have come from the Maweel long ago?" Isika asked. Ibba and Benayeem looked at her. Jabari stared at the stone in his hand.
"It seems possible," he said.
That night they camped for the last time. Jabari said they would reach Azariyah by the next evening. Ben lay awake under the stars, torn about the thought of reaching the city. He liked this companionship, the friendships they had made here. He liked the peace of the wilderness, the music inside him quieted with the breezes of many leaves. In a city, he knew, the clamor would rise again, the bells gonging the wrongness of tiny things. It was a compass, he was finally coming to understand, his own body the instrument that rang out when wrong things were done or when the whole world rejoiced with rightness. But it was overwhelming. Sometimes the things he perceived were so powerful that they kept him from thinking clearly. He didn't know how to control it. Maybe there would be someone in the city who could help, he thought, as he traced the brilliant stars with his eyes. All around the fire, the others breathed softly, none of them awake or troubled.
He must have dozed, because when the horrible ringing began, he jolted awake. He sat up, looking for the source of the noise, but realized quickly that it was inside him. Gongs clashed in jarring discord, wrong, wrong, wrong. Ben cowered in the darkness. He wanted to slip away from the source of whatever the dissonance was, like he had in his village, turning and running, head bent against the horrible noise until he found a cool, dark place. He looked around wildly for a way to run, then stopped himself.
This was a warning. Something was wrong. He needed to calm himself and find out what it was. He took deep breaths, searching for the source of the clamoring. He found it and turned to where his sister slept behind him. Isika. Figures crept from the shadows toward her, one with a cloth in his hand, stretching for her face.
"No!" Ben shouted, using all his strength. "Wake up, Isika!"
CHAPTER 20
"Jabari!" Ben shouted, and as one, he and Jabari were on their feet.
Jabari grabbed his bow, but Ben ran empty-handed toward Isika. She sat sleepily as the man above her hesitated. When Ben was two steps away, a spear whistled through the air from behind him, not from Jabari but Gavi. The spear went wide, missing the man, but giving a clear message, and the man backed up a step. Isika blinked at him.
"Hyder?" she said. Then her eyes landed on the second shape, just beyond the light of the fire. "Jak?" She scrambled up off the ground and held her blanket out in front of her. "What are you doing here?"
"Poison-landers," Jabari breathed, his face hard. "Why do you trespass in Maween?"
"We don't want to do harm," Hyder said. He was a short, broad-shouldered man, very like his son, Jak, the boy from the village who had bullied Ben all his life. "Nirloth, the priest of our village, sent us to retrieve these waybreakers and bring them back for punishment. It's the only way to get out from under the wrath of the goddesses."
"How did you find us?" Isika cried.
"The goddesses give help to their priests, or didn't you know that?" Hyder sneered. "They want you, so they came to Nirloth to tell where you could be found."
Ben froze, shocked. Not retrieved as children, but as criminals. Not because his father wanted them, but as more sacrifices to appease the endless hunger of the goddesses. His head spun with pitch of the horrible music, telling him how wrong it was.
"No," he said. He stood very tall and looked at his former bully and the man who was the bully's father, the coward who had tried to take them in the night. In the shadows, more men moved. Of course there would be more, two men were not enough to take three children over the miles they had crossed. "We won't go."
"You can't escape the goddess, Fate, boy," Hyder said. He smiled without humor. "She will never let you go."
Ben remembered the ugly, blank stare of the goddess in the temple. He remembered wiping the dust off her head, bird droppings off her hands. He had given her fresh flower petals, dabbed perfume on her feet. He had burned incense for her, rung the bells to wake her.
"I know Fate," he said. "Better than you. We won't go with you." He sensed Gavi and Jabari, alert and aware beside him. Ibba sat on the ground near the fire, her eyes wide with fear. Isika still stood with her blanket held out in front of her, her head bowed. How many men were in the shadows?
"Capture them," Hyder growled, and then many things happened at once. As he lunged toward Isika, she threw the blanket she held into his face, and Ben tackled him. Jak lunged at Ibba and she screamed. By the time he had her by the shoulders, Gavi was there. He delivered a swift kick to the back of the boy's knees and Jak fell. Gavi sent another swift kick to his head that toppled him. Ibba jumped back as he fell, looking up at Gavi, hands over her mouth.
Ben didn't hear what she said, though, because he felt someone behind him. He turned. It was a large man, a stone smith from his village. The man looked stunned by what was happening, but determined to capture Ben. Ben evaded his large hands and ducked under him to leap away. Jabari took Ben's place and punched the man twice in the face, rapidly. The man backed away, a hand to his bleeding nose. Two more men lay on the ground near Jabari, holding their faces. These men weren't fighters, they were Workers.
Hyder had extricated himself from the blanket, and he held up a hand.
"Enough!" he roared. "We were not instructed to fight, only to bring the waybreakers home. We weren't aware that your new companions were your guards, Isika. Or should I say, Lady Isika?" His voice dripped with sarcasm. Isika flinched.
"We're not going to fight to take you, we don't have the skills these boys have. But Isika, Benayeem, I appeal to you as daughter and son of the temple that you serve. Come and receive your punishment. Take the curse from our village and onto yourselves where it belongs."
Ben squared his shoulders and stared back at Hyder. He knew the answer he needed to give, without any whispering doubt. The man's spirit was full of sincerity, but beyond, in the mind of the goddess, he saw evil. Beside Hyder, though, Isika drooped, curled on herself. He knew she was crying, and he knew he needed to give the answer in his heart, because she might falter now, within reach of the poison of shame.
"No," he said. "We will never go back with you. Your goddesses will never have us now. They have no part of us."
&nb
sp; Hyder stared back at Ben and hatred broke over his face.
"Very well," he said. "I see the way Workers are repaid when they take garbage from the roadside. Nirloth is a fool and your mother was evil to deceive him."
Beside Ben, Isika flinched. He put a hand on her arm to keep her from speaking, sure that if she did she would offer to go back.
Hyder turned, gesturing to the others, who slowly picked themselves up and limped away. Just before they left the clearing, he turned to Jabari.
"We have known of your lands and ignored you. You can count us as enemies now. Never assume that your borders are safe. We're not fighters, but the goddesses are good teachers."
Jabari's eyes flashed, but the men disappeared into the night. Isika collapsed on the ground with her head in her hands. Slowly, the drums in Ben's heart ceased their clamor and his body returned to stillness. He helped the quiet come back by gazing at the stars, vaguely aware of Ibba beside Isika, stroking their older sister's back as she cried. The stars were lovely and pure in the sky, in the right places. Calm filled Ben. Jabari and Gavi quietly sorted blankets and picked up pots that had fallen over in the scuffle. As the cold purity of the stars soothed him, Ben felt for the first time that he was the ruler of himself. He smiled at the sky.
It was mid afternoon the next day when they came to the first houses in the city. Isika was heartbroken by last night's argument. She couldn't help thinking of people like Jerutha and her unborn baby, people who were good and true, even if they were poisoned, people who would bear the brunt of the punishment for Isika's wrong. She had been ready to turn and go with the men from the Worker village. She didn't know how Ben had found the courage to deny them, but she was glad for it, because they were still on their way to Kital. The fight had left her feeling nervous and sad, and as they came to the outskirts of the city, her stomach seemed to be filled with small restless creatures.
The sight of the first homes calmed her; they were pleasant and common. The houses were short and wide, with flat roofs where laundry hung in colorful lines. People came out of their homes as the little group passed, shouting greetings to Jabari and Gavi, looking at Isika and her siblings with curiosity. As they walked farther into the city, the path beneath them became a true road, paved with wide stones. Many different kinds of trees lined the road, and houses grew closer together as the travelers traipsed farther into the city.
Isika took a longer look at one house. It was made of earth painted a bright white, with intricate holes cut into mud work edging the flat roof. Three girls sat on a wide porch with cups in their hands. Two of the girls were black, their hair done in what looked like hundreds of tiny braids, and one was white, with freckles and straight brown hair that was braided as well, though she had fewer braids. All three girls had beads in their hair. Flowers climbed the walls of the house, and a vegetable garden grew in the yard before the house.
Isika stopped walking to look. The plants were a riot of color; tomatoes, orange flowers, and beans tangled in and around each other, and Isika sighed as she thought of her mother in the garden. At a word from a tall woman who leaned against the doorway, one of the children ran to the garden. She picked a few tomatoes and held them out to Isika.
Isika laughed and shook her head, but the girl continued to hold them out to her expectantly, so she took the handful of tomatoes, giving them to Gavi when she caught up to him.
"That was kind," she said, "but I didn't mean for her to give them to me. I only wanted to look."
"It is our way," he said. "She had plenty to share."
The buildings grew taller as they came into the city, some stacked in two floors. Ibba's eyes were round as she skipped along beside Jabari. There were children everywhere.
"There's no school today," Gavi said, when Isika commented on it. "So they're free to roam."
"They can go wherever they want?"
"Yes, of course. If they tell their parents."
Isika had grown used to how much Gavi and Jabari looked into her eyes, but she was taken aback by all the eyes she met as they walked along the wide road. She was the girl who had always wanted to stare into people's faces, but the sheer number of eyes that looked into hers overwhelmed her. She reminded herself that eyes couldn't steal anything from her, couldn't really see her soul. Her feelings had been mixed as she eased into the new way, old fears rising in her suddenly and without warning. She took a deep breath and held her head up. She had nothing to fear from meeting people's eyes. They were only parts of the face after all.
Stone pots of flowers and fragrant herbs were clustered around some of the houses. Everywhere Isika looked, the only walls were the walls of the houses. Sometimes there were short fences, spindly things that a child could step over. Most of the doors were flung open. People sat together outside, on porches or their front steps, eating and talking. Flowering trees lined the streets. Isika had never seen a place so lovely, so welcoming. She felt longing that threatened to bring her to tears. She wanted to belong to this place, but she was a stranger here, a poison-lander.
She saw many people who must have been rescued, white-skinned like Gavi and the people of the Worker village. And she saw children who looked like they came from other places entirely, with light brown skin and deep-set eyes, strong brows and long bones, or long eyes and high cheekbones. The people were dazzling in their sheer numbers and differences, they wore colorful clothing of many shades; reds, blues, greens. Some people wore sashes or scarves wrapped around their heads, and Isika saw long robes and dresses, or simple pants and tunics like the clothes she wore. It was beautiful, but overwhelming, and Isika felt her heart speeding up as she grew apprehensive.
A strong breeze whipped at the edges of her tunic, and Isika looked up and caught her breath. The Othra. They had returned. Isika waved at them, her heart full of happiness at seeing the familiar birds. Nirral soared down and touched his talons to her shoulder for just a moment, not quite landing on her but flapping his wings near her face, surrounding her with warmth and peace. Some of her nervousness and the sadness from the night before disappeared. The Othra followed them, flying overhead, and people came out of their houses to lay food down for them. The birds descended and ate bright fruits and bread, then flew in a storm of wings, their feathers flashing all colors.
Ahead, a building rose above the others. Isika drew a breath. It was large and imposing and lovely, sculpted out of brilliant white stone. It looked as though it had grown out of the earth, with tall towers that reached toward the sky from its walls, a bell on the top of the tallest tower. Gently pointed bulbs crowned some of the towers, and holes were cut out of the upper edges of the walls, curves and flourishes like the ones Isika had seen on the walls of the houses. The building had a long, wide doorway in its center, and from there fell back into walls with windows and towers on either side. Ibba breathed a small sigh and put her hand into Isika's.
"It's beautiful," Ibba said. "Are we going there?"
Jabari nodded. "That's the palace where the elders live. They'll know how to find Kital."
They reached the beautiful palace more quickly than Isika had expected. Her heart beat hard in anticipation of seeing her brother, and her hands trembled. The palace was even more beautiful as they drew near; its walls were stippled with the texture of many carvings, making it look like a living thing. Bright flowers spilled out the open windows of clear glass, and ponds filled with bright fish flanked the steps they climbed. Two guards stood at the door, swords sheathed by their sides. Isika glanced at the shimmering swords, feeling weaponless and a little afraid, but the guards smiled at Jabari and Gavi and bowed to them, then motioned them through. Isika frowned, a tendril of doubt sneaking into her mind.
"Why did they bow?" Benayeem asked as they passed by the guards last, and Isika shook her head.
"I don't know," she said.
As soon as she stepped into the palace, she felt it sigh. She stopped, shocked. The building itself seemed to hum and settle. She looked around and sa
w that no one else said anything, so she shrugged it off. They walked through a hall that had lofty, airy ceilings and murals covering the walls. Isika wanted to stop and look at every panel, every picture, but Jabari strode toward a large pair of open doors at the end of the hallway. And Isika was fine with going quickly, because her heart hurt with longing for Kital. She would find time to look at these paintings later. At the doorway, Gavi glanced at them with an apology in his eyes, then, as Isika's heart sped up again, he and Jabari walked through.
CHAPTER 21
It wasn't long before Isika understood Gavi's look. The huge doors opened up to a long room flanked with pillars made of the same white stone as rest of the building. The tops of the pillars disappeared into the ceiling, far above where Isika stood. Her first impression of the room was light and color. Tall, arched windows lined the walls, fabric and tapestries hung from every available surface. The afternoon light streamed through the windows, illuminating a large table on a raised platform at the farthest end of the room. Two men and two women stood around the table, animatedly discussing something in front of them. Both men and one of the women had rich black skin, and the second woman was white.
All four wore long, colorful robes, with embroidery that sparkled in the light from the windows. The scene was rich and beautiful, and Isika drew in her shoulders, transfixed and nervous at the same time. The people looked up as Isika and the others came nearer. One of the men, who wore a thin silver circlet around his head, turned to them with his hands outstretched.
"Jabari! Gavi! Welcome back, sons of my heart!"
Both Jabari and Gavi put hands over their hearts and bowed from the waist.
"Our hearts have come home, Father and Mother, Elders of our land," they said.
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