Earthborn

by Orson Scott Card

  It sounded awful even to imagine it. It was frightening that Didul, who could remember having actually seen it, could be so complacent about it.

  "Of course, along about then Father realized that the talk was turning to who else they ought to burn, and the priests would be an obvious target, so Father said a few quiet words in the priest-language and he led us to safety."

  "Why didn't you go back to the city? Was it destroyed?"

  "No, but Father says the people there weren't worthy to have true priests who knew the secret language and the calendar and everything. You know. Reading and writing."

  Akma was puzzled. "Doesn't everybody learn how to read and write?"

  Didul suddenly looked angry. "That's the most terrible thing your father did. Teaching everybody to read and write. All the people who believed his lies and sneaked out of the city to join him, even if they were just peasants which they mostly were, even if they were turkey-herds. Everybody. He took solemn vows, you know. When he was made a priest. Your father took those vows, never to reveal the secrets of the priesthood to anybody. And then he taught everybody"

  "Father says all the people should be priests."

  "People? Is that what he says?" Didul laughed. "Not just people, Akma. It isn't just people that he was going to teach to read."

  Akma imagined his father trying to teach the taskmaster to read. He tried to picture one of the diggers bowed over a book, trying to hold a stylus and make the marks in the wax of the tablets. It made him shudder.

  "Hungry?" asked Didul. Akma nodded.

  "Come eat with me and my brothers." Didul led him into the shade of a copse behind the hill of the commons.

  Akma knew the place-until the diggers came and enslaved them, it was the place where Mother used to gather the children to teach them and play quiet games with them while Father taught the adults at the hill. It gave him a strange feeling to see a large basket of fruit and cakes and a cask of wine there, with diggers serving the food to three humans. Diggers didn't belong in that place where his mother had led the children in play.

  But the humans did. Or rather, they would belong wherever they were. One was little, barely as old as Akma. The other two were both older and larger than Didul-men, really, not boys. One of the older ones looked much like Didul, only not as beautiful. The eyes were perhaps too close together, the chin just a bit too pronounced. Didul's image, but distorted, inferior, unfinished.

  The other man-sized boy was as unlike Didul as could be imagined. Where Didul was graceful, this boy was strong; where Didul's face looked open and light, this one looked brooding and private and dark. His body was so powerful-looking that Akma marveled that he could pick up any of the fruit without crushing it.

  Didul obviously saw which of his brothers it was that had drawn Akma's attention. "Oh, yes. Everybody looks at him like that. Pabul, my brother. He leads armies of diggers. He's killed with his bare hands."

  Hearing his words, Pabul looked up and glowered at Didul.

  "Pabul doesn't like it when I tell about that. But I saw him once take a full-grown digger soldier and break his neck, just like a rotten dry branch. Snap. The beast peed all over everything."

  Pabul shook his head and went back to eating.

  "Have some food," said Didul. "Sit down, join us. Brothers, this is Akma, the son of the traitor."

  The older brother who looked like Didul spat.

  "Don't be rude, Udad," said Didul. "Tell him not to be rude, Pabul."

  "Tell him yourself," said Pabul quietly. But Udad reacted as if Pabul had threatened to kill him-he immediately fell silent and began concentrating on his eating.

  The younger brother gazed steadily at Akma, as if evaluating him. "I could beat you up," he said finally.

  "Shut up and eat, Monkey," said Didul. "This is the youngest, Muwu, and we're not sure he's human."

  "Shut up, Didul," said the little one, suddenly furious, as if he knew what was coming.

  "We think Father got drunk and mated with a she-digger to spawn him. See his little rat-nose?"

  Muwu screamed in fury and launched himself at Didul, who easily fended him off. "Stop it, Muwu, you'll get mud in the food! Stop it!"

  "Stop it," said Pabul quietly, and Muwu immediately left off his assault on Didul.

  "Eat," said Didul. "You must be hungry."

  Akma was hungry, and the food looked good. He was seating himself when Didul said, "Our enemies go hungry, but our friends eat."

  That reminded Akma that his mother and father were also hungry, as was his sister Luet. "Let me take some back to my sister and my parents," he said. "Or let them all come and eat with us."

  Udad hooted. "Stupid," murmured Pabul.

  "You're the one I invited," said Didul quietly. "Don't embarrass me by trying to trick me into feeding my father's enemies."

  Only then did Akma understand what was happening here. Didul might be beautiful and fascinating, full of stories and friendliness and wit-but he didn't actually care about Akma. He was only trying to get Akma to betray his family. That was why he kept saying those things about Father, about how he was a traitor and all. So that Akma would turn against his own family.

  That would be like... like becoming a friend to a digger. It was unnatural and wrong and Akma understood now that Didul was like the jaguar, cunning and cruel. He was sleek and beautiful, but if you let him come near enough, he would leap and kill. "I'm not hungry," said Akma. "He's lying," said Muwu. "No I'm not," said Akma.

  Pabul turned to face him for the first time. "Don't contradict my brother," he said. His voice sounded dead, but the menace was clear. "I was just saying that I wasn't lying," said Akma. "But you are lying," said Didul cheerfully. "You're starving to death. Your ribs are sticking out of your chest so sharp you could cut yourself on them." He laughed in delight and held out a maizecake. "Aren't you my friend, Akma?"

  "No," said Akma. "You're not my friend, either. You only came to me because your father sent you."

  Udad laughed at his brother. "Well aren't you the clever one, Didul. tom could make friends with him, said you. You could win him over the first day. Well, he saw right through you."

  Didul glared at him. "He might not have till you spoke up." Akma stood up, furious now. "You mean this was a game?"

  "Sit down," said Pabul. "No," said Akma.

  Muwu giggled. "Break his leg, Pabul, like you did that other one." Pabul looked at Akma as if considering it.

  Akma wanted to plead with him, to say, Please don't hurt me. But he knew instinctively that the one thing he couldn't do with someone like this was to act weak. Hadn't he seen his father stand before Pabulog himself and face him down, never showing a moment's fear? "Break my leg if you want," said Akma. "I can't stop you, because I'm half your size. But if you were in my place, Pabul, would you sit down and eat with your father's enemy?"

  Pabul cocked his head, then beckoned with a lazy hand. "Come here," he said.

  Akma felt the threat receding as Pabul calmly awaited his approach. But the moment Akma came within reach, Pabul's once-lazy hand snaked out and took him by the throat and dragged him down to the ground, choking. Struggling for breath, Akma found himself staring into the hooded eyes of his enemy. "Why don't I kill you now, and toss your body at your father's feet?" said Pabul mildly. "Or maybe just toss little bits of your body. Just one little bit each day. A toe here, a finger there, a nose, an ear, and then chunks of leg and arm. He could build you back together and when he got all the parts, everybody'd be happy again, right?"

  Akma was almost sick with fear, believing Pabul perfectly capable of such a monstrous act. Thinking of the grief that his parents would feel when they saw his bloody body parts took his mind off the great hand that still gripped his throat, loosely enough now that he could breathe.

  Udad laughed. "Akmaro's supposed to be so thick with the Keeper of Earth, maybe he can get the old invisible dreamsender to work a miracle and turn all those body parts back into a real boy. Other gods do mi
racles all the time, why not the Keeper?"

  Pabul didn't even look up when Udad spoke. It was as if his brother didn't exist.

  "Aren't you going to plead for your life?" asked Pabul softly. "Or at least for your toes?"

  "Get him to plead for his little waterspout," suggested Muwu.

  Akma didn't answer. He kept thinking of how his parents would grieve-how they must even now be filled with terror for him, wondering where this boy had led him. Mother had tried to warn him, sending Luet. But Didul had been so beautiful, and then so friendly and charming and... and now the price of it was this hand at his throat. Well, Akma would bear it in silence as long as he could. Even the king finally screamed when they tortured him, but Akma would last as long as he could.

  "I think you need to accept my brother's invitation now," said Pabul. "Eat."

  "Not with you," whispered Akma.

  "He's a stupid one," said Pabul. "We'll have to help him. Bring me food, boys. Lots of food. He's very, very hungry."

  In moments, Pabul had forced open his mouth and the others were jamming food into it, far faster than Akma could chew it or swallow it. When they saw that he was breathing through his nose, they began to jam crumbs into his nostrils, so that he had to gasp for breath and then choked on the crumbs that got down his windpipe. Pabul let go of his throat and jaw at last, but only because, coughing, Akma was now so helpless that they could do whatever they wanted to him, which involved tearing open his clothing and smearing fruit and crumbs all over his body.

  Finally the ordeal was over. Pabul delegated Didul, and Didul in turn assigned his older brother Udad to take the ungrateful, traitorous, and ill-mannered Akma back to his work. Udad seized Akma's wrists and yanked so harshly that Akma couldn't walk, but ended up being dragged stumbling over the grassy ground to the top of the hill. Udad then threw him down the hill, and Akma tumbled head over heels as Udad's laughter echoed behind him.

  The taskmaster refused to let any of the humans stop their work to help him. Shamed and hurt and humiliated and furious, Akma rose to his feet and tried to clean off the worst of the food mess, at least from his nostrils and around his eyes.

  "Get to work," demanded the taskmaster.

  Udad shouted from the top of the hill. "Next time maybe we'll bring your sister along for a meal!"

  The threat made Akma's skin crawl, but he showed no sign of having heard. That was the only resistance left to him, stubborn silence, just like the adults.

  Akma took his place and worked the rest of the daylight hours. It wasn't until the sky was darkening and the taskmaster finally let them go that he was finally able to go to his mother and father tell them what happened.

  They spoke in the darkness, their voices mere whispers, for the diggers patrolled the village at night, listening to hear any kind of meeting or plot-or even prayer to the Keeper of Earth, for Pabulog had declared that it was treason, punishable by death, since any prayer by a follower of the renegade priest Akmaro was an affront to all the gods.

  So as Mother scrubbed the dried-on fruit from his body, weeping softly, Akma told Father all that was said and all that was done.

  "So that's how Nuak died," said Father. "He was once a good king. But he was never a good man. And when I served him, I wasn't a good man either."

  "You were never really one of them," said Mother.

  Akma wanted to ask his father if everything else Pabulog's sons said was true, too, but he dared not, for he wouldn't know what to do with the answer. If they were right, then his father was an oathbreaker and so how could Akma trust anything he said?

  "You can't leave Akma like this," said Mother softly. "Don't you know how far they've torn him from you?"

  "I think Akma is old enough to know you can't believe a liar."

  "But they told him you were a liar, Kmaro," she said. "So how can he believe you?"

  It amazed Akma how his mother could see things in his mind that even he himself had barely grasped. Yet he also knew it was shameful to doubt your own father, and he shuddered at the look on his father's face.

  "So they did steal your heart from me, is that it, Kmadis?" He called him dis, which meant beloved child; not ha-, which meant honored heir, the name he used when he was especially proud of Akma. Kmaha-that was the name he wanted to hear from his father's lips, and it remained unspoken. Ha-Akma. Honor, not pity.

  "He stood against them," Mother reminded him. "And suffered for it, and he was brave."

  "But they sowed the seed of doubt in your heart, didn't they, Kmadis?"

  Akma couldn't help it. It was too much for him. He cried at last.

  "Set his mind at rest, Kmaro," said Mother.

  "And how will I do that, Chebeya?" asked Father. "I never broke my oath to the king, but when they drove me out and tried to have me killed, then yes, I realized that Binaro was right, the only reason to keep the common people from learning to read and write and speak the ancient language was to preserve the priests' monopoly on power. If everyone could read the calendar, if everyone could read the ancient records and the laws for themselves, then why would they need to submit to the power of the priests? So I broke the covenant and taught reading and writing to everyone who came to me. I revealed the calendar to them. But it isn't evil to break an evil covenant." Father turned to Mother. "He isn't understanding this, Chebeya."

  "Sh," she said.

  They fell silent, only the sound of their breathing filling their hut. They could hear the pattering feet of a digger running through the village.

  "What do you suppose his errand is?" Mother whispered.

  Father pressed a finger to her lips. "Sleep," he said softly. "All of us, sleep now."

  Mother lay down on the mat beside Luet, who had long since dropped off to sleep. Father lay down beside Mother and Akma settled in on the other side of him. But he didn't want Father's arm cast over him. He wanted to sleep alone, to absorb his shame. The worst of his humiliations wasn't the gagging and choking, it wasn't the smearing with fruit, it wasn't tumbling down the hill, it wasn't facing all the people in tattered clothing, covered with filth. The worst humiliation was that his father was an oathbreaker, and that he had had to learn it from Pabulog's sons.

  Everyone knew that an oathbreaker was the worst kind of person. He would say one thing, but no one could count on him to do it. So you could do nothing with him. You could never trust him when you weren't there to watch. Hadn't Mother and Father taught him from earliest infancy that when he said he would do a thing, he had to do it, or he had no honor and could not be trusted?

  Akma tried to think about what Father said, that to break an evil covenant was good. But if it was an evil oath, why would you swear to it in the first place? Akma didn't understand. Was Father evil once, when he took the evil oath, and then he stopped being evil? How did someone stop being evil once he started? And who decided what evil was, anyway?

  That soldier Didul told him about-Teonig?-he had the right idea. You kill your enemy. You don't sneak around behind his back, breaking promises. None of the children would ever tolerate a sneak. If you had a quarrel, you stood up and yelled at each other, or wrestled in order to bend the other to your will. You could argue with a friend that way, and still be a friend. But to go behind his back, then you weren't a friend at all. You were a traitor.

  No wonder Pabulog was angry at Father. That's what brought all this suffering down on us. Father was a sneak, hiding in the wilderness and breaking promises.

  Akma started to cry. These were terrible thoughts, and he hated them. Father was good and kind, and all the people loved him. How could he be an evil sneak? Everything the sons of Pabulog said had to be lies, had to be. They were the evil ones, they were the ones who had tormented him and humiliated him. They were the liars.

  Except that Father admitted that what they said was true. How could bad people tell the truth, and good people break oaths? The thought still spun crazily in Akma's head when he finally drifted off to sleep.

  TWO - T
RUE DREAMS

  Mon climbed to the roof of the king's house to watch the setting of the dry sun, as it tunneled down between the mountains at the northern end of the valley. Bego, the royal librarian, told him once that when the humans first arrived on Earth, they believed that the sun set in the west and rose in the east. "This is because they came from a place with few mountains," said Bego. "So they couldn't tell north from west."

  "Or up from down?" Aronha had asked snidely. "Were humans completely stupid before they had angels to teach them?"

  Well, that was Aronha, always resentful of Bego's great learning. Why shouldn't Bego be proud of being a skyman, of the wisdom the sky people had accumulated? All through their hours at school, Aronha was always pointing out that the humans had brought this or that bit of wisdom to the sky people. Why, to hear Aronha go on about it, you'd think the sky people would still be sleeping upside down in the trees if it weren't for the humans!

  As for Mon, he never ceased envying the wings of the sky people. Even old Bego, who was so stout he could hardly glide down from an upper story to the ground-Mon yearned for even those old leathery wings. His greatest disappointment of childhood was when he learned that humans never grew up to be angels, that if wings weren't there, furry and useless, pressed against your body when you were born, they would never grow later. You would be cursed forever with naked useless arms.

  At nine years old, all Mon could do was climb to the roof at sunset and watch the young sky people-the ones his own age or even younger, but so much more free-as they frolicked over the trees by the river, over the fields, over the roofs of the houses, soaring, dipping, rising, madly tussling in the air and dropping like stones until perilously near the earth, then spreading their wings and swooping out of the fall, hurtling down the streets between the houses like arrows as earthbound humans raised their fists and hollered about young hooligans being a menace to hardworking people just minding their own business. Oh, that I were an angel! cried Mon within his heart. Oh, that I could fly and look down on trees and mountains, rivers and fields! Oh, that I could spy out my father's enemies from far away and fly to him to give warning!