Children of God

"Yes," she called, elated, for a moment knowing everything hidden in his strange, secret heart. "Clarity!"

He swayed slightly: naked, tall and tailless. Ha’anala followed his gaze to the vast sky. "Red is harmless," he declared with fragile bravery, not knowing himself how wrong he was. After a time, blinking, and begi

"I know, Isaac," Ha’anala replied as she walked toward him—Sofia and the Runa forgotten, all her life before now lost to view. "I understand."

He fell silent, which was no surprise, but as Ha’anala drew close her own quiet became speechlessness. Isaac was the color of blood, his poor pale skin blistered and swollen. What could have done this to him? she wondered, ears flattened. He sat abruptly next to his two possessions, the computer tablet and his fraying blue shawl, but did not draw the cloth over his head and shoulders as was his custom even in the forest, where the canopy had shielded him from the suns’ power. "Tha’s all," she heard him say, the muttered words slurred.

Not knowing what else to do, she felt compelled to ask, "Sipaj, Isaac, are you not hungry?" And cursed herself for uselessness.

"Listen," he said, trembling, the tension in his narrow, nearly hairless body visible. "Music." She didn’t move, paralyzed by the oozing sores, the smell of corruption…. "Listen!" he insisted.

Thus commanded, she went motionless, ears high and open. Above her, she heard the slow beat of some large thing’s wings as it climbed to meet a thermal that would lift it out over the rim of the escarpment. Below, at the base of the cliff, the crash of water and alarming bellows that diminished into comic squeals or a ponderous trill of grunts. Westward, the fluting whistles of some kind of herd keeping itself gathered as its long-necked members grazed, heads to the ground. Nearby, tiny scratchings, wind hissing in grass. A soft popping noise that drew her eye: seedpods cracking open as some critical shift in temperature or humidity swelled or shrank their cells.

"God’s music," she breathed, her own heartbeat loud in her ears.

"No," said Isaac. "Listen. There are others who sing."

Others! she thought then, hearing the notes of the evening chant, thin and distant, coming in fragments with the fitful wind. Others who sing. Djanada—Jana’ata!

Isaac thrust his thin arms out to support the treacherous weight of his head and shoulders, which seemed to him to have become heavier just now, and leaned at the edge of the precipice. Seeing him rapt and heedless of his wounded skin, Ha’anala crept nearer the brink, listening to a well-known melody sung uncertainly by two voices, their harmony unfamiliar but beautiful. A mixed multitude, Ha’anala thought, looking down on them. Jana’ata and Runa, but a puzzling collection of ages and sexes. Djanada babies riding the backs not of their own fathers but of female Runa, who were huddled together, ears clamped against the song. A few veiled and robed persons. Then she spotted the singers—a man wearing metal clothing, and a boy a little younger than Ha’anala herself.

Momentary mourning came like a cloudburst: she wanted to be here alone with Isaac, to be as solitary as two stones, side by side. She wanted to ask him one question each day, and to take the whole of the world’s turning to think about his answer. She wanted to know what he had heard as he walked. Was there a kind of poetry in his legs too? Did the wind roar wordlessly in his small ears?

Not yet! she thought, anguished. I don’t want any others!

WHICH WAS THE VERY THOUGHT PRESENTLY PASSING THROUGH THE mind of Shetri Laaks, who had caught the scent of a female, and looked up just in time to catch a glimpse of yet another refugee peering down at him from the escarpment that divided the grasslands.

No more! he thought, appealing to any deity who’d listen. I don’t want any others!

As if in accordance with his prayer, the girl’s unveiled head disappeared. Even so, Shetri Laaks was thrown sufficiently off balance by her unwelcome appearance to stumble over the evening chant’s concluding verse, thus earning another of his nephew Athaansi’s insolent smirks. I never wanted any of this, you superior young stud, Shetri wanted to snarl at Athaansi. Take the damned armor and my obstinate sister and the wretched chants and just go on by yourselves, and may Sti dance on your bones!

To date, Shetri Laaks had sung the evening chant all of ten times. This was, not coincidentally, the exact number of days he had been taking his little mob of women and children north.

No matter what his resentful young nephew thought, Shetri Laaks had never aspired to anything but the quiet life of an apothecary specializing in the Sti canon. Indeed, until informed by a novice that his second-born sister, Ta’ana Laaks u Erat, and her entire household had just appeared at the gate, Shetri Laaks had been only vaguely aware of the revolt in the south, and had certainly never expected to be affected by it—only draft Runa were allowed anywhere nearby. Adepts like Shetri lived simply, their provisions periodically supplied by their natal families, occasionally supplemented by the offerings of those hoping to have ailments declared uninheritable or injuries deemed minor enough to be treated without iniquity. Now and then, widows bought the right to prepare for a serene death by witnessing the water ritual. Otherwise, the adepts were left alone, and that had suited Shetri admirably.

"Our brother Nra’il has been killed in combat," Ta’ana had informed him without preamble when he presented himself to her in the visitors’ shelter ten days earlier. "All his people are murdered. My husband, as well."

Shetri had stared dumbly for a time, still hoping that his sister and her entourage would prove an unusually convincing hallucination. Why are you telling me this? he thought. Go away.

"I ca

"Not possible," he’d muttered, barely able to speak. He held up his claws, stained with pigment from the spoiled rite Ta’ana had called him away from. He had only recently mastered the full body of the canon, and hadn’t built tolerance to the inhalants used during the water ritual. "The drugs will be in effect for days," he told her, blinking. She smelled of smoke and was wearing a smudged veil that fell to her feet; it was shot through with silver threads and its hem was embroidered with a lattice pattern that seemed to Shetri to be crawling. "There are visual disturbances," he reported.

"It is your duty," she repeated.

"And what of the duty of your husband’s brother?"

"Dead," she said, not burdening him with superfluous detail or herself with the telling of it: her calm was brittle. "You are my son’s regent now. There is no one else. The armor is yours until Athaansi is trained."

"I’m old enough," Athaansi had snarled with a fifteen-year-old’s reflexive ferocity. "This is insult. I will fight you, Uncle!"

Ta’ana whirled and cuffed the boy violently, stu

So he had pulled off and laid aside his plain gray robe and called upon skills indifferently learned during his days of training as a young reshtar of barely respectable rank. Whether it was the drug or genuine forgetfulness, he couldn’t picture how to put on the armor. Athaansi, red-eyed and humiliated, found solace in contempt, turning the shin plates right side up for his hapless uncle, to the silent amusement of the Runa valet who fastened the buckles.