Children of God

WHEN HE DID, IT WAS IN SLOW SEQUENCE, EYES LAST: TO THROBBING PAIN in his feet, to the scent of ointment bound to them by clean dressings, to a gabble of languages, to bright daylight filtering through the dirty fabric of a ragged tent.

Lying still, he listened to the conversations just outside—a revolting mix of K’San and Ruanja with random elements of commercial Malanja and snatches of court Palkirn’al. The appalling grammar and sloppy diction instantly put him into a foul humor made worse by the frantic morning hunger of a young male who was only begi

Already on edge, he was startled by a slight motion to his left and came upright, ready to fight—whom he had no idea, why he could only guess. The world was full of enemies and everything good was gone. But the movement was only a woman’s hand pushing a crudely carved bowl toward him. He stared at it, repulsed by the jellied mess it contained, and then followed the hand to the arm to the face, and blinked when he saw his father’s eyes, alive and amused.

The woman was young and visibly pregnant, naked and unveiled. "You look like my daughter," she said, and sat back comfortably, at ease on the ground, and unconcerned to be alone in a tent with him. She gave the bowl another little push.

He turned his head away, mouth twisting with revulsion, but heard the woman’s voice again. "The life you knew is over. You must live in a new way," she said. "Before, everything was decided. Now you must make choices." She spoke in K’San but its precision was polluted by Ruanja’s slurred vowels—a rural domestic’s grating accent. "You may choose to hate the necessity of choosing, or you may value it. Each choice has consequences, so you must choose wisely."

He stared at her and, infuriatingly, she smiled. "For the present, of course, you need only choose between eating this awful-looking stuff or remaining very, very hungry."

He sat up straighter and reached for the bowl, as she knew he would. He was, after all, a normal boy, constantly hungry under the best of circumstances and starving now. He lifted the bowl to his mouth, but reared back from the unfamiliar smell; then tipped it down his throat in ravenous, almost sobbing gulps.

"Good," she said, pleased as she watched him.

"It’s not as bad as I thought it would be," he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

"Think hard about what you just said," she advised. "My experience is that many things are not as bad as I thought they would be." The smell of anger filled the tent, but she did not retract her use of the dominant pronoun in his presence. "Here, each of us makes choices, so each of us must learn to be a sovereign soul: I think, I decide. This is no insult to you or anyone else." She gestured again toward the emptied bowl. "It’s better with salt," she informed him prosaically, "but we don’t have any salt right now."

"What was it?"

"Are you sure that you choose to know?" she asked, ears wide, his father’s eyes entertained. He hesitated, but lifted his chin. "Kha’ani embryos," she told him.

Horrified, his own ears flattened and he nearly vomited, but then he glanced back into those eyes and swallowed hard.

"Good," she said again. "Do you understand? Everything is a choice, even what you eat. Especially what you eat!" She stood and looked down at him, her face a slender version of his own—the Kitheri bloodline visibly governing this generation as it had the last. "Here Jana’ata eat no Runa. In this settlement, we do not repay life with death. So. Choose. Will you live at the expense of others or will you do what you must to live another way?" And permitting him to think for himself, she turned and left the tent.

HE WAS YOUNG AND SOUND, AND HIS FEET HEALED MORE QUICKLY THAN the women’s. Within a day or two, he was able to leave the tent and hobble a little distance up the nearest foothill to a vantage from which he could see the shards and remnants of a civilization. For a few days, solitary and silent, he watched the people in this high, chilly valley. Burning with disgrace, writhing at their debasement, he sought out his foster mother, and raged and raged. She listened without comment until he was done, and then gestured for him to sit by her.

"Do you know what I miss most?" Suukmel Chirot u Vaadai asked serenely. "Table ma

Suukmel said this to amuse Rukuei and the absurdity worked, but Taksayu was unbending. "That person goes about naked because she doesn’t know any better," the Runao sniffed from a nest in the corner. "Raised in the wilderness by foreigners and feral Runa!"

Rukuei hardly knew what to think about that extraordinary statement, which didn’t prevent him from having an opinion. "It is unendurable that a Jana’ata woman should go about utterly unclothed," he declared, "no matter how degraded her upbringing."

"She says that we Jana’ata must learn to live only by our own devices. It may be necessary for us to become completely independent of the Runa, although she herself hopes this shall not come to pass, and does what she can to prevent it," Suukmel informed them. Rukuei and Taksayu both stared. "She’s trying to learn to weave with a foot loom, but she hasn’t managed it yet, and until then, she goes naked as she was bom—"

"Can you imagine!" Taksayu cried. "Jana’ata weaving!"

"Also, she says she simply doesn’t like clothes," Suukmel continued. "But she knows it upsets the rest of us, and she doesn’t like to make a fierno."

"What is a fierno?" Rukuei demanded irritably, the Ruanja word suddenly infuriating him. Of all the differences he had to face among these strangers, the bastardization of language was the most distressing. How can anything make sense if the words you think with are disordered and imprecise? he cried inwardly.

"I asked her that," Suukmel said comfortably. "Fierno means ’a thunderhead’ but the phrase implies being the cause of a big storm. Making a fuss." Rukuei grunted. "It is a nice image," Suukmel offered, knowing Rukuei well. "I like the phrase. It reminds me of my lord husband, prowling the courtyard after some tedious meeting, working himself into a fierno—"

She stopped abruptly, rain falling into her heart. The tent suddenly felt cramped and confining, too filled with people, even though she had only Taksayu and Rukuei with her.

"Perhaps," she said, "walking would be good for me." Taksayu’s ears dropped, and Rukuei looked dubious. "Yes," Suukmel said then, certain because they doubted both her wisdom and her propriety. "Yes, I should like to try a walk."

"HOW CAN THIS HA’ANALA BE MY COUSIN?" RUKUEI ASKED SUUKMEL SEVERAL mornings later, as they broke their fast with a strange but not unpleasant pate provided by the Laaks household. "My father had no brother or sister. And how can that foreigner be Shetri’s brother-in-law?"

There was a momentary stiffening. "Isaac is certainly unusual, but he sings beautifully, don’t you agree?"

The change of subject did not go u

"Awkward?" Suukmel repeated.

She had known this day would come, but had never anticipated that it would be in such circumstances. Pride of lineage was moderated among the unranked children of Hlavin’s harem, but Rukuei knew who his father was, if not what Hlavin had done to reach the paramountcy. Whose disgrace to reveal first? she asked herself. The father’s or the uncle’s? There are no i