Children of God

"I wonder if you would take me to your place on the hillside this morning?" she asked lightly, rising from a badly made cushion that was nonetheless fragrant with mountain moss. She moved to the tent opening, letting her eyes become accustomed to the light, looking up at the colorful shapes that she had initially taken for unusually designed city walls ringing the valley.

Rukuei stared up at her. "Is it worse than awkward?" he asked, getting to his feet as well.

"I believe with practice I shall learn to see things at a distance, instead of merely imagining them," she said, confirming his suspicions. "Shetri tells me those are not ramparts but mountains! He says it takes some six day’s constant climbing to reach the peaks. How far is it to the place you go to?"

"Far enough for privacy," Rukuei told her.

They left the tent and began the ascent, taking care with the loose rocks that made the climb a scramble. Suukmel coped with the disorientation by keeping her eyes down, not in submission but to focus on the relatively solid ground nearby. Glancing up every few moments, she tried to estimate the size of things, but she was constantly surprised when she found some «tree» was only a shrub much nearer than she had thought, or when a bright color she believed to be some far-off person’s cloak suddenly took flight and darted into the thin air.

"Things are not always what they seem," she said aloud, as Rukuei showed her how to sit on a fallen tupa’s trunk. As she caught her breath, she looked out over the valley, trying to reconcile what her eyes told her with what she knew was there. "The tents look lovely in this light, don’t they? Like jewels in the sun. Which is real, I wonder? The beauty of the tents at a distance or—"

"The wretchedness they conceal," Rukuei finished for her, and settled himself. "Tell me what is so terrible that it must be heard up here, my lady."

It seemed at first some epic poem of heroes and monsters, of prisons and escapes, of triumph and tragedy. She told of the crushing sameness of unvarying tradition, of a world in which nothing mattered but what had been decided uncounted generations earlier. And she tried to explain the despair of knowing that nothing could change, the fear that something would: the terror of the unknown and the secret wish for it, in so many hearts.

Caught up in this romance, it was a long time before Rukuei realized that the nameless one was Supaari VaGayjur; that this traitor was his own uncle by marriage, having sired a daughter out of Jholaa Kitheri; that this daughter was now grown and pregnant with her second child by Shetri Laaks; that Ha’anala’s eyes were like his own because they shared a grand-sire. It was even longer before he could take in what Suukmel told of how Hlavin Kitheri had seized the paramountcy—

"Are you saying that my father killed them?" Rukuei cried. "Killed them all? His own kin?" He stood and strode away, not tall but gangling. So young, Suukmel thought. So young…. "I don’t believe you!" he insisted, sweeping out a circle of defense. "This is impossible. He would never have—"

"He did. He did, beloved! Try to understand!" she cried, as desperate as he. "Your father was like lightning in the night—beautiful and dangerous and sudden. They forced it on him! They were killing him! They had shut him up behind walls greater than those mountains," she said, waving her arm at the huge stone crags she only half understood. "They had silenced him, and he was dying, Rukuei! He was dying of the silence! Think of the music he wrote for you and the other children! Hear it in your heart! Know that it would have died in him if he hadn’t—"

Rukuei sank to the ground like the child he was. The constant wind sweeping the valley was loud in their ears, and brought the shrieking laughter of small children chasing one another through the village of tents, the calls of women, the songs of men, the ordinary bustle of a village going about the tasks of everyday life. Deaf to this cheerful noise, he saw in the distance what Suukmel was blind to: destitution, bare subsistence, naked poverty, the words for which did not yet exist in any Rakhati language because such conditions had never before existed on Rakhat.

"How?" he cried. "How could it have come to this?" Suukmel went to him and knelt at his side. He wrenched away, ashamed and angry, and stood again on feet still swollen and sore, and left his foster mother without a glance, for he was his father’s son and felt the charge build within him and looked now only for someone to strike. Striding down the shattered stone of the hillside, heedless of the falls he took and the cuts he added to his battered young body, he followed the sound of his cousin’s voice to a small crowd of Runa and Jana’ata, her odd accent notable among the gabble as she helped build a barrier—who knew why—across a small swift river that cut through the valley center.

"No, don’t try to pick them up! Just kick the stones along!" Rukuei heard her call merrily to her husband, Shetri, who was staggering clumsily with a small boulder in his arms. "Look at Sofi’ala! Roll them!" Their first-born daughter was doing just this with a little rock, the child bent comically in half, short tail in the air, tiny face stiff with concentration. "See how my darling is working!" Ha’anala cried, naked and grunting like a stevedore. "Good girl, helping others!"

Outraged, Rukuei strode up behind Ha’anala and gripped her ankle, hauling her around, pulling her off balance. "You are Kitheri!" he screamed at her, at his father, at himself. "How can you degrade yourself this way? You drag your own child down! How dare you—"

In the space of a breath, the indifferent soldier Shetri Laaks was on top of the boy, and would have torn his throat out, had not Ha’anala stopped him with a shouted warning. She took her husband’s shoulders and moved him aside and knelt down to look questioningly at Rukuei with eyes she had no right to—eyes that should be dead.

"We are close kin," Rukuei snarled, glaring at her from the stony ground where he had stumbled under Shetri’s weight. "Your dam was my sire’s sister!" Her face brightened, confused but happy. He wanted nothing more in all the world than to smash that happiness. "My father killed yours," he told her with blunt brutality, "twice-twelve days past."

He was delighted by the silence his words imposed, glad to make someone else gasp with loss, joyful to see her face go slack with pain. "Your father did not die alone. The plain of Inbrokar is heaped with dead, and when I last saw him, my father lay next to yours. Killed by such as these!" he howled, arm flung wide with indictment, at all the Runa who surrounded them. "You speak of choices. So choose, woman! Who shall die to restore the honor of the dead?"

There was no sound but their own breath, and the wind, and the far, thin bugling of some mountain animal heedless of the moment, and the high wail of Isaac, spi

Ha’anala rested a hand on her belly and got to her feet, and he saw here in full daylight that she was not sleek with her pregnancy, but raw-boned and tired. Wearily, she looked around at the Jana’ata who had chosen to remain in the N’Jarr valley.

"My choices are the same as yours," she told them. "Survival or revenge. I choose to live." She stared down at Rukuei, and pointed to a stony trail that led east, to a pass between two mountains. "There are others like you, who choose death. Three days’ walk that way. Ask for my husband’s nephew, Athaansi Erat. They eat well in his camp," she said, raising her voice so all could hear her. "Or should I say, they eat plenty. Everything they choose is death. They avenge their losses and pay death with death, and they will die bloody but with full stomachs. You will be welcomed there, cousin. I shall honor the dead by living, and by teaching those who will listen that there is valor in this choice."