Earthborn

"There are four of us," said Khimin. "We can carry him."

"I've heard that Shedemei the schoolmaster is a healer," said Mon.

"Now we need help from a woman we referred to as a criminal mixer of species," said Aronha bitterly. "In our time of need, it doesn't cross our minds to turn to our own Assembly of the Ancient Ways. We know, we always knew, that the only help we can count on will be found among the Kept."

Shame tasted foul in their mouths as they made a litter for Akma out of their coats and staves, then lifted the staves to their shoulders to carry him. As they neared more settled country, people ran out to see them, these four men carrying what seemed to be a corpse on their shoulders, as if to take him to be buried.

"Go," Aronha said to them-said to everyone who came out to meet them. "Go and tell everyone that the Keeper sent a messenger to strike down the Motiaki and stop them from telling their lies. We are the sons of Motiak, and we return in shame to our father. Go and tell everyone that Akma, the son of Akmaro, has been struck down by the messenger of the Keeper, and whether he will live or die no one can say!"

Over and over he said these things, and every time that the words were said to one of the Kept, the response was the same: not rejoicing, not gloating, not condemnation, but tears and embraces and then, inevitably, the most unbearable thing of all: "Can we help you? Can we carry Akma for a little way? Oh, his father and mother will weep to see him like this! We will pray to the Keeper to let them see their son alive again! Let us help you!" They brought water to them, brought them food, and not once did any of the Kept reprove them. Others were not so kind. Men and women who had no doubt cheered for Akma and the sons of Motiak during their speeches now shouted bitter denunciations, calling them liars, frauds, heretics. "Arondi! Mondi! Ominerdi! Khimindi!" How bitter it was that while they really were rebelling against their father, no one dared to put the term for traitor in their names; but now that they had ended their rebellion and confessed their wrongdoing, the epithet was heaped upon them.

"It's what we deserve," Mon said, when Ominer began to point out the hypocrisy of their accusers.

And then, gallingly, they had to watch and listen as the Kept took the shouters aside and rebuked them. "Don't you see that they're filled with grief? Can't you see that Akma is nearly dead? They're doing you no harm now, let them pass, give them peace."

Thus the Kept became their protectors on their journey. And many of them were diggers. Mon was not content to let Aronha's speeches be all they heard. To the diggers, Mon added his own message. "Please, go and find the earth people who are on the road, leaving Darakemba. Tell them that we beg them to come home. Tell them that they are better citizens of Darakemba than the sons of Motiak. Don't let them leave."

They slept beside Akma that night on the road, and late the next day they reached Darakemba. Word had gone ahead of them, and when they got to Akma's house, a huge crowd parted to let them through, and Akmaro and Chebeya stood in the doorway to receive the almost-living body of their son. Inside the house the king their father waited, and their sister Edhadeya, and they wept at how lovingly their father and sister embraced them, and wept again as Akmaro and Chebeya knelt over the ruins of their son.

On the road, the being of light appeared. The earth trembled. Akma should have been surprised but he was not. It was the strangest thing, that it did not feel strange to him. As the messenger spoke, what kept ru

As soon as he noticed his own lack of surprise, he wondered at it. He couldn't have been expecting anything like this. He didn't know that any being like this existed. Certainly in his scholarship he had never come up with any such thing. Besides, experience proved nothing. This could be nothing more than a hallucination shared by a group of five men who were in desperate need of some affirmation of their importance to the universe. Instead of proving that there really was a Keeper of Earth, this experience might prove nothing more than the inescapable unconscious power of childhood belief, even over men who thought they had outgrown it.

But as the messenger kept speaking (and how can I hear every word and still have time to think all these thoughts? What extraordinary clarity of mind. I'd like to tell Bego about this phenomenon. What did the king end up doing to Bego, anyway? Look at this-I go off on a tangent, wondering about Bego, and yet I haven't missed a word of the message) Akma knew that this was not a shared hallucination, or that if it was, it was a hallucination induced by the Keeper of Earth, because this was definitely sent from outside himself. Why did he know that? It was as Edhadeya said, you simply know the difference when it has happened to you. Only it isn't the being of light that's doing it. No, that's just a show, just a spectacle. It isn't having my eyes dazzled or the earth shaking under my feet or great roaring noises or smoke or a strange-sounding voice that makes me sure. I simply... know.

And then he thought: I always knew.

He remembered back to the time when he was in the greatest terror of his life-when the sons of Pabulog first threw him down and began to torture him and humiliate him. He couldn't have put it into words at the time, but underneath the fear for his life, there was shame at his helplessness; and underneath that there was steely courage that made him try not to beg for mercy, that sustained him through it all and allowed him to walk, naked and smeared with mud and filth and ruined food, back to his people. He knew at the time what that strength was-it was the absolute certainty of the love of his parents (and the memory of it stabbed him; I had their love, I still have their love, it was as firm as I believed even as a little boy, my faith was not misplaced, and look what I've done to them), a sense of the unbreakable cords that bound them together, almost as if he had the raveling skill of his mother without ever having noticed it consciously.

And yet underneath that there was something else. A sense that someone was watching everything that happened, watching and saying, What these boys are doing to you is wrong. The love your parents have for you is right. Your weeping, your shame, they are not flaws in you, you can't help it. Your effort at courage is worthy. It is right for you to go back to your people. A constant judge, assessing the moral value of what he was doing. How could he now remember something that he hadn't noticed at the time? And yet he knew without doubt that this watcher had been there at the time, and that he had loved this voice inside him, because when he did well it said so.

The messenger was saying, "The Keeper has heard the pleas of the Kept, and also the plea of your father, the true servant of the Keeper." How long had the speech gone on? Not long at all; it was barely begun, really, he could tell. It was as if he knew every word the messenger would say and how long was allotted to each part of the message, so that his mind could divide its attention between little slices required to hear and understand the words, and great long passages of time between those slices in which he could search out this mystery, this observer that he had had within him all these years and never noticed.

He saw himself sitting on a hillside watching Father teach the Pa-bulogi. He felt the rage inside his boyish heart, heard himself vowing revenge. But on whom? Now he could see what he had not seen then: What he was raging at was not the Pabulogi at all, and not even his father for teaching them. No, the betrayal that stung him to the heart was against all of them and none of them-it was asainst the Keeper of Earth for daring to save the people without using Akma as his instrument.