Earthborn (Homecoming) (45 page)

“Oh, Father, you don’t think they would raise a hand against the royal blood?”

“Kings’ sons have died before,” said Motiak. “My soldiers know that what my boys are doing now is killing me. I fear the loyalty of my most loyal men as much as I fear the disloyalty of my sons. Go to them, tell them my warning.”

“Do you know what they’ll say, Father? That you’re threatening them, that you’re trying to scare them into stopping their public speaking.”

“I’m trying to save their lives. Tell them at least to keep their travel secret. Tell no one where they’re going next, tell no one when they plan to leave. Go suddenly, arrive unexpectedly. They must, or somewhere on the road someone will be lying in wait for them. And not diggers—I’m talking about humans and angels. Will you do this?”

She nodded.

“I’ll send two angels with you for safety, but when you get near, you must order them to stay behind so you can talk to your brothers alone.”

She nodded; she got up to go.

“Edhadeya,” said Motiak. “I know that I’m asking you to do a hard thing, to go and see them. But whom else can I send? Akmaro? Pabul? Akma will allow
you
to come close and speak to your brothers in privacy.”

“I can bear it,” said Edhadeya. “I can bear it better than watching these weary people leave their homeland.”

As she walked away, Motiak saw that she was heading straight for Shedemei. He called out to her. She came back.

“I don’t think you should talk about this to strangers,” he said.

“I wasn’t going to,” she said, looking peeved. Again she left; again she headed straight for Shedemei, and this time spoke to her. Shedemei nodded, then shook
her head no; only then did Edhadeya take her leave of the whole group, with two angels flying reconnaissance for her as she went.

Motiak was furious even though he knew his anger was foolish. Chebeya noticed at once that he was out of sorts and came to him. “What happened with Edhadeya?” she asked.

“I told her not to tell strangers what her errand was, and she went straight to this Shedemei.”

Chebeya laughed ruefully. “Oh, Motiak, you should have been more specific than that. Shedemei isn’t a stranger to anyone here but you.”

“Edhadeya knew what I meant.”

“No she didn’t, Motiak. If she had known, she would have obeyed you. Not all your children are in revolt. Besides, Shedemei isn’t Bego or . . . Akma. She’s only going to lead Edhadeya closer to the Keeper and to you.”

“I want to talk to her, this Shedemei. It’s time I got to know her.”

A moment later Shedemei sat beside him in the shade, with Akmaro, Pabul, and Chebeya gathered round, the soldiers well back and out of earshot. “Enough of the evasions,” said Motiak. “It was fine for you to be vague and mysterious until my daughter started confiding my secret errands to you.”

“What secret errands?” said Shedemei.

“The reason I was sending her back to Darakemba.”

“She told me nothing about that,” said Shedemei.

“Are you going to pretend that you don’t know what’s she’s doing?”

“Not at all,” said Shedemei. “I know exactly what she’s doing. But she didn’t tell me.”

“Enough of the riddles! Who are you!”

“When I can see that it’s any of your business to know, Motiak, I’ll tell you. Until then, all you need to know is that I serve the Keeper as best I can, and so do you, and that makes us friends whether you like it or not.”

No one had ever spoken to him with such impudence before. Only Chebeya’s gentling touch on his elbow restrained him from embarrassing himself with words he would soon regret. “I try to be a decent man and not abuse my power as king, but I have my limits!”

“On the contrary,” said Shedemei. “There is
no
limit to your decency. It is complete. Akma and your boys wouldn’t have done half so well if that weren’t true.”

Motiak studied her face, still angry, still baffled. “I’m supposed to be the king, and nobody will tell me anything.”

“If it’s any help to you,” said Shedemei, “I don’t know anything that would help you, because it doesn’t help
me,
either. I’m as eager as you are to put an end to this nonsense. I see as clearly as you do that if Akma succeeds in all that he plans to do, your kingdom will lie in ruins, your people scattered and enslaved, and this great experiment in freedom and harmony will be, not even a memory, but a legend and then a myth and then a fantasy.”

“It’s been a fantasy all along.”

“No, that’s not true,” said Akmaro, leaping in to stop Motiak from wallowing in bitterness, as he so often had in recent weeks and months. “Don’t start to use Akma’s lies to excuse your own lack of understanding. You know that the Keeper of Earth is real. You know that the dreams he sends are true. You know that the future he showed to Binaro was a good one, full of hope and light, and you chose it, not out of fear of the Keeper, but out of love for his plan. Don’t lose sight of that.”

Motiak sighed. “It’s nice at least that I don’t have the burden of carrying a conscience around with me. Akmaro stores a much larger one than I could lift myself, and trots it out whenever it’s needed.” He laughed. So did they. For a moment, and then the laughter died in reflective silence. “My friends, I think we have seen how powerless I am. Even if I were like
the late unlamented Nuab among the Zenifi, willing to kill whoever crossed me, he didn’t have to face a determined enemy like Akma.”

“Khideo’s sword almost got him,” Akmaro pointed out.

“Khideo didn’t go around like Akma, telling the people exactly what the worst among them want to hear. Nuab didn’t have his sons in unison against him so that the people would see them as the future and him as the past and ignore him as if he were already dead. Don’t you think it’s ironic, Akmaro, that what you did to that monster Pabulog, stealing his sons away from him, should end up happening to me?”

Akmaro laughed one bitter bark of a laugh. “You think I haven’t seen the parallel? My son thinks he hates me, but his actions have been a perverse echo of mine. He even grew up to be the leader of a religious movement, and spends his life preaching and teaching. I should be proud.”

“Yes, we’re all such failures,” said Chebeya nastily. “We can sit around here moaning about our helplessness. Shedemei, who supposedly knows all the secrets of the universe, can’t think of a single useful thing to do. The king whines about how powerless kings are. My husband, the high priest, moans about what a failure he is as a father. While I have to sit here watching the threads that bind this kingdom together unraveling, watch the people forming themselves into tribes that are bound only by hate and fear, and all the while I know that those who have been trusted with all the power that there
is
in this land are doing nothing but feeling sorry for themselves!”

Her virulence startled them all.

“Yes,” said Motiak, “so we’re a helpless pathetic bunch. What exactly is your
point?”

“You’re angry at us because we can’t do anything,” said Akmaro. “But that’s the cause of our grief—we
can’t.
You might as well be angry at the riverbank because it can’t stop the water from flowing by.”

“You foolish men of power!” cried Chebeya.
“You’re so used to governing with laws and words, soldiers and spies. Now you rage or have your feelings hurt because all your usual tools are useless. They were
always
useless. Everything
always
depended on the relationship between each individual person in this kingdom and the Keeper of Earth. Very few of them understand anything about the Keeper’s plan, but they know goodness when they see it, and they know evil—they know what builds and what tears down, what brings happiness and what brings misery. Trust them!”

“Trust them?” said Motiak. “With Akma leading them to deny the most common decency?”

“Who are these people that Akma leads? You see them as crowds that flock to him and feel as though they had all betrayed you. But their reasons for following Akma are as individual as they are. Yes, some of them hate all diggers with an unreasoning passion—but they were always around, weren’t they? I don’t think their numbers have increased, not by one; in fact, after the persecutions I think there were
fewer
who really hated the diggers, because many people learned to feel compassion for them. Akma knows this—he
knows
that they don’t want to be like the thugs who tormented children. So he tells them that the problem wasn’t their fault, or even the diggers’ fault, it’s just the natural way of things, it can’t be helped, we’re all victims of the way nature works, it’s all the will of the Keeper, we need to give in and move the diggers humanely out of sight so all this ugliness will go away. Most of the people who follow him are just trying to make the problem go away. If they simply let things happen, they think, peace will come again. But they’re ashamed! I see it, why can’t you? They know it’s wrong. But it’s inevitable, so why fight it? Even the king, even the high priest of the Kept can’t do a thing about it!”

“That’s right,” growled Motiak. “We can’t!”

“That’s what Akma’s saying to them.”

“He’s not saying it,” said Motiak. “He’s showing it.”

“But they don’t want it to be true. Oh, I’m not saying they’re all decent people, or even most of them. There are plenty of them who are looking only for their own advantage. Better invest my time and wealth in making friends with Motiak’s sons. But if they once thought that Akma would fail, they’d be right back with you, pretending to have been among the Kept all along, joking with you about how every family has problems with sons who are coming of age. They don’t care whether the diggers come or go. In fact they miss the lower wages they were able to pay them. The people are not evil, Motiak. A large number of them are decent but they have no hope. Another large portion don’t care that much about decency but they’d be just as happy to have the Kept in charge of things, they don’t much care as long as they can prosper. And you know that the Kept are still a very large core of dedicated believers who love the Keeper’s plan and are striving to save it at great cost to themselves, and with unflinching courage. These three groups, together, are the vast majority of your people. Not perfect, certainly, but good enough to be worth reigning over. Except that Akma’s voice seems to be the only one that’s heard.”

It was Shedemei who answered her tirade. “Yes, but that’s not for our lack of trying. The king has pleaded, you and your husband have spoken publicly and constantly, Pabul here has searched the law for ways to help and his court has been firm on the side of decency—I’ve even done all that I could do, that would not be coercive.”

“So it all comes down to Akma and my sons,” said Motiak.

“No,” said Chebeya. “It all comes down to Akma. Those boys of yours would never be doing this either, Motiak, if it weren’t for Akma.”

“That was the meaning of the dream the Keeper sent me,” said Akmaro. “It all comes down to Akma, and none of us has the slightest power to reach him. We’ve all tried—well, Pabul couldn’t, because Akma
would never let him come close. But the rest of us have tried, and we can’t bend him, and as long as we can’t stop Akma, we can’t waken the decency of the people, so what does it matter?”

“You’re not suggesting,” said Motiak, “that I arrange the assassination of your own son?”

“No!” Chebeya cried. “See how you think of power as a matter of weapons, Motiak? And you, Akmaro, it’s words, words, teaching, talking, that’s what power means to you. But this problem is beyond what you can solve with your ordinary tools.”

“What then?” said Shedemei. “What tools should we use?”

“No tools at all!” cried Chebeya. “They don’t work!”

Shedemei extended her open hands. “There I am,” she said, “unarmed, my hands are empty. Fill them! Show me what to do and I’ll do it! So will any of us!”

“I can’t show you because I don’t know. I can’t give you tools because there are no tools. Don’t you see? What Akma is wrecking—
it’s not our plan.”

“If you’re saying we should just leave it up to the Keeper,” said Akmaro, “then what’s the point of anything? Binaro said it—we’re the Keeper’s hands and mouths in this world.”

“Yes, when the Keeper needs action or speech, we’re the ones to do it. But that’s not what’s needed now!”

Akmaro reached out and took his wife’s hands in his. “You’re saying that we shouldn’t just leave things up to the Keeper. You’re saying we should demand that the Keeper either do something or show us what to do.”

“The Keeper knows that,” said Shedemei. “She hardly needs us to tell her what should be obvious.”

“Maybe she needs us to admit that it’s up to her. Maybe she needs us to say that
whatever
she decides, we will abide by it. Maybe it’s time for Akma’s father to say to the Keeper, Enough. Stop my son.”

“Do you think I haven’t begged the Keeper for answers?” Akmaro said, offended.

“Exactly,” said Chebeya. “I’ve heard you, talking to the Keeper, saying, ‘Show me what to do. How can I save my son? How can I bring him back from these terrible things?’ Doesn’t it occur to you that the only reason the Keeper hasn’t stopped Akma up to now is for your sake?”

“But I
want
him to stop.”

“That’s right!” cried Chebeya. “You want
him
to stop. That’s what you plead for, over and over. I’ve seen the connection between you. Even though it’s rage on his part and agonized frustration on yours, the ties of love between you are stronger than I’ve ever seen between any two people in my life. Think what that means—in all your pleas, you are really asking the Keeper to spare your son.”

“Your son too,” said Akmaro softly.

“I’ve shed the same tears as you, Kmadaro,” she said. “I’ve said the same prayers to the Keeper. But it’s time to utter a new prayer. It’s time to say to the Keeper that we value her children more than we value ours. It’s time for
you
to beg the Keeper of Earth to stop our son. To set the people of Darakemba free from his foul, foul influence.”

Motiak couldn’t see what her point was. “I just sent Edhadeya to try to warn my boys to be careful—are you saying I should have sent soldiers to assassinate Akma?”