Children of God

"Someone is unsure," Joseba said honestly. "Sometimes, there’s no choice. Sometimes the choices aren’t thought of. People can get used to anything." Puska lifted her chin, and then let her tail drop, unable to imagine how that vanished world had functioned. "Yet," Joseba pointed out, "there were some Runa who remained with the Jana’ata—"

"Sipaj, Hozei: those people were traitors," Puska told him with flat conviction. "You must understand that. They became very wealthy, selling the corpses of dead soldiers to the djanada, who would pay anything for even small scraps of meat. But those Runa paid in kind for their treachery: eventually the djanada ate them, too."

"Sipaj, Puska, someone is sorry to keep asking—"

"There is no need for apology. Someone is content to answer."

"There were Runa who stayed with the djanada, even after the war. Even now." He watched her carefully as he asked this, but Puska did not sway. "They have said to us that they loved the Jana’ata."

"That is sometimes so. The Runa are a noble people," she said. "We repay kindness with kindness."

"Do you believe those Runa wrong to live with the Jana’ata? Are they traitors, like the black marketeers?"

"Not traitors. Dupes. In the end, they’ll be eaten. The djanada can’t help it. It’s the way they are. The djanada are guilty in their genes, in their whole way of life," she told him calmly.

It was then that he recalled the chorale. "Sipaj, Puska, someone wishes to understand this clearly. You are patient and someone is grateful. It is said in the north that Hlavin Kitheri had begun to emancipate the Runa—"

For the first time, Puska became upset, rising and begi

She was looking directly into his eyes now. "Sipaj, Hozei, the Runa did everything for the djanada. They kept us enslaved and fed us only enough to make us good slaves. Until your people came and showed us that we could feed ourselves as much as we needed, our minds were kept small and slow so that we’d accept our slavery. Hear me, Hozei! Never again. Those times are gone forever. We will never be slaves again. Never."

He stood his ground, but it was not easy: a Runao risen up in righteous anger was a formidable menace. "Sipaj, Puska," he said when she had brought herself to quietness, "you grew up with Ha’anala. Did you ever wonder about her? Was she crazy, too?"

There was a silence before Puska said, "Someone thought of Ha’anala. She was not crazy. But she left the people to go with the crazy ones! So someone’s heart was confused. Supaari was one of the people, but Ha’anala never came home."

"Did you know where she went, after she left Trucha Sai?"

"She went north." There was an uncomfortable silence before Puska admitted, "Someone thought she might be in Inbrokar."

"During the siege?" he asked. Puska raised her chin in affirmation. "Puska, what did you hope for Ha’anala?"

"That she would come home," Puska said firmly.

"And when she didn’t?"

The swaying began at last, and when Puska spoke, it was not to answer his question but her own conscience. "The djanada changed first. They gave us no choice! The djanada made us fierce." Not looking at him, she added, "To be hungry is a terrible thing. Someone hoped that Ha’anala would die quickly."

"And when Inbrokar fell, how many died quickly?"

She looked away, but Puska VaTrucha-Sai was a woman of courage and, once again, she left the safety of the herd. "They were as grass to me," she said. "I did not count them."

32

City of Inbrokar

2072, Earth-Relative

"THEY’RE OUTSIDE THE NEW WALLS NOW," TAKSAYU REPORTED, HER words echoing hollowly down the stone throat of the wind tower in the embassy courtyard.

"And my lord husband?" Suukmel Chirot u Vaadai called from below, looking up at Taksayu’s gown and slippered feet. "And the Paramount? Can you see them?"

"There!" Taksayu said, after a time, arm extended southward, toward a flash of armor. "The Paramount wears a gold ventral plate and caudal guard. And—yes, silver arm and thigh plates. The ambassador is to his left, all in silver. They are at the head of the war party, with the nobles behind them."

"And the others?" Suukmel asked, looking up at her Runa—what? she wondered. Not maid, any longer. Companion, often. Ally, perhaps? There was no word in K’San for Taksayu now. "How many are there?"

So many, Taksayu was thinking, with an illicit thrill. We are so many! How could she describe this to a woman who’d never seen beyond the curtains of her conveyance or the walls of her compound? All her life, the lady Suukmel had held in her mind the subtle structure of power and relationship, the delicate web of Jana’ata politics, but this was not abstraction. It was physical might. "The rebels are as the hairs of a body," Taksayu ventured. "As the leaves of a marhlar, Mistress: too many to count."

"I’m coming up," Suukmel declared. The city was ruled by rumor now that the power grid for the radio system had failed, and Suukmel was starved for information. Ignoring Taksayu’s protests, she forced herself to climb the internal spiral of the wind tower to see the gathered multitude herself, but when she arrived at Taksayu’s side and lifted her veil, she was staggered.

"Are you ill?" Taksayu cried, gripping Suukmel’s arms, afraid the reeling woman would fall.

"No! Yes! I’m not—" Suukmel dropped her veil, and closed her eyes behind it. Beyond the distance of a hallway or the length of a banquet room, all the colors seemed to blur. "Explain this," Suukmel said, steadying. She lifted her veil again. "Tell me what I am seeing. Everything is confused."

Taksayu did her best, pointing out landmarks Suukmel knew by reputation and familiar objects. Buildings looked like toys, and a’aja trees like those that shaded Suukmel’s own courtyard seemed to be twigs or seedlings, or could not be picked out at all in the nonsense of shapes. The Runa were nothing but dots of color, like knots in a patternless carpet. Enraged and nauseated by the senseless jumble, Suukmel gave up and retreated down the ramp to her refuge at its base.

It was her last bastion of privacy, this small stone room; the embassy was packed with refugees. Following Hlavin Kitheri’s example, Ma Gurah Vaadai had done his best to take in as many people as could be fed, but it was Suukmel who had to live with the consequences. Nonessential Runa had been slaughtered to stave off starvation; there were very few domestics left in the city, and those few were so overworked that one could understand why so many left to join the rebels. Not even the Paramount’s reforms had prepared Jana’ata women for life in close quarters among strangers. No one knew who held rank anymore. Snarling squabbles were as constant as the rain, and all too often escalated to slashed faces and bleeding bellies—

"That must be the foreigner Fia!" Taksayu cried, her arm flung out over the tower’s stone edge.

"Truly?" Suukmel breathed, moving back to the tower ramp and looking up, throat stretched. "What does it look like?"

"Very small—like a child! How can it breathe? It has no nose! And no tail." Taksayu shuddered. "It must be deformed. Hair only on part of its head." Taksayu was briefly distracted by the idea of the Paramount mounting such a freak. "A monster," she confirmed, "as our lord the ambassador has always said."