Keeper of Dreams (13 page)

“What is this story?” asked the chief. “There are no cats. You’ve seen no cats.”

“I’ve seen the god heaving in his anger,” said Glogmeriss. “I’ve seen how he looms over my people, ready to destroy them all. A flood that will tear their flimsy reed boats to pieces. A flood that will come in a single great wave and then will never go away. Do you think I shouldn’t warn my mother and father, my brothers and sisters, the friends of my childhood?”

“I think you have new brothers and sisters, a new father and mother. The god isn’t angry with
us
. The god isn’t angry with you. We should stay together. Don’t you
want
to stay with us and live and rule over us? You can be our king now, today. You can be king over me, I give you my place!”

“Keep your place,” said Glogmeriss. “Yes, a part of me wants to stay. A part of me is afraid. But that is the part of me that is Glogmeriss, and still a boy. If I don’t go home and warn my people and show them how to save themselves from the god, then I will always be a boy, nothing but a boy, call me a king if you want, but I will be a boy-king, a coward, a child until the day I die. So I tell you now, it is the child who dies in this place, not the man. It was the child Glogmeriss who married Zawada. Tell her that a strange man named Naog killed her husband. Let her marry someone else, someone of her own tribe, and never think of Glogmeriss again.” Glogmeriss kissed his father-in-law and embraced him. Then he turned away, and with his first step along the path leading back to the Derku people, he knew that he was truly Naog now, the man who would save the Derku people from the fury of the god.

Kemal watched the lone man of the Engu clan as he walked away from the beach, as he conversed with his father-in-law, as he turned his face again away from the Gulf of Aden, toward the land of the doomed crocodile-worshippers whose god was no match for the forces about to be unleashed on them. This was the one, Kemal knew, for he had seen the wooden boat—more of a watertight cabin on a raft, actually,
with none of this nonsense about taking animals two by two. This was the man of legends, but seeing his face, hearing his voice, Kemal was no closer to understanding him than he had been before. What can we see, using the TruSite II? Only what is visible. We may be able to range through time, to see the most intimate, the most terrible, the most horrifying, the most inspiring moments of human history, but we only see them, we only hear them, we are witnesses but we know nothing of the thing that matters most: motive.

Why didn’t you stay with your new tribe, Naog? They heeded your warning, and camped always on higher ground during the monsoon season. They lived through the flood, all of them. And when you went home and no one listened to your warnings, why did you stay? What was it that made you remain among them, enduring their ridicule as you built your watertight seedboat? You could have left at any time—there were others who cut themselves loose from their birth tribe and wandered through the world until they found a new home. The Nile was waiting for you. The grasslands of Arabia. They were already there, calling to you, even as your own homeland became poisonous to you. Yet you remained among the Engu, and by doing so, you not only gave the world an unforgettable story, you also changed the course of history. What kind of being is it who can change the course of history, just because he follows his own unbending will?

It was on his third morning that Naog realized that he was not alone on his return journey. He awoke in his tree because he heard shuffling footsteps through the grass nearby. Or perhaps it was something else that woke him—some unhearable yearning that he nevertheless heard. He looked, and saw in the faint light of the thinnest crescent moon that a lone baboon was shambling along, lazy, staggering. No doubt an old male, thought Naog, who will soon be meat for some predator.

Then his eyes adjusted and he realized that this lone baboon was not as close as he had thought, that in fact it was much bigger, much
taller
than he had thought. It was not male, either, but female, and far from being a baboon, it was a human, a pregnant woman, and he knew her now and shuddered at his own thought of her becoming the meal for some cat, some crocodile, some pack of dogs.

Silently he unfastened himself from his sleeping tree and dropped to the ground. In moments he was beside her.

“Zawada,” he said.

She didn’t turn to look at him.

“Zawada, what are you doing?”

Now she stopped. “Walking,” she said.

“You’re asleep,” he said. “You’re in a dream.”

“No,
you’re
asleep,” she said, giggling madly in her weariness.

“Why have you come? I left you.”

“I know,” she said.

“I’m returning to my own people. You have to stay with yours.” But he knew even as he said it that she could not go back there, not unless he went with her. Physically she was unable to go on by herself—clearly she had eaten nothing and slept little in three days. Why she had not died already, taken by some beast, he could not guess. But if she was to return to her people, he would have to take her, and he did not want to go back there. It made him very angry, and so his voice burned when he spoke to her.

“I wanted to,” she said. “I wanted to weep for a year and then make an image of you out of sticks and burn it.”

“You should have,” he said.

“Your son wouldn’t let me.” As she spoke, she touched her belly.

“Son? Has some god told you who he is?”

“He came to me himself in a dream, and he said, ‘Don’t let my father go without me.’ So I brought him to you.”

“I don’t want him, son
or
daughter.” But he knew even as he said it that it wasn’t true.

She didn’t know it, though. Her eyes welled with tears and she sank down into the grass. “Good, then,” she said. “Go on with your journey. I’m sorry the god led me near you, so you had to be bothered.” She sank back in the grass. Seeing the faint gleam of light reflected from her skin awoke feelings that Naog was now ashamed of, memories of how she had taught him the easing of a man’s passion.

“I can’t walk off and leave you.”

“You already did,” she said. “So do it again. I need to sleep now.”

“You’ll be torn by animals and eaten.”

“Let them,” she said. “You never chose me, Derku man, I chose
you
. I invited this baby into my body. Now if we die here in the grass, what is that to you? All you care about is not having to watch. So don’t watch. Go. The sky is getting light. Run on ahead. If we die, we die. We’re nothing to you anyway.”

Her words made him ashamed. “I left you knowing you and the baby would be safe, at home. Now you’re here and you aren’t safe, and I can’t walk away from you.”

“So run,” she said. “I was your wife, and this was your son, but in your heart we’re already dead anyway.”

“I didn’t bring you because you’d have to learn the Derku language. It’s much harder than your language.”

“I would have had to learn it anyway, you fool,” she said. “The baby inside me is a Derku man like you. How would I get him to understand me, if I didn’t learn Derku talk?”

Naog wanted to laugh aloud at her hopeless ignorance. But then, how would she know? Naog had seen the children of captives and knew that in Derku lands they grew up speaking the Derku language, even when both parents were from another tribe that had not one word of Derku language in it. But Zawada had never seen the babies of strangers; her tribe captured no one, went on no raids, but rather lived at peace, moving from place to place, gathering whatever the earth or the sea had to offer them. How could she match even a small part of the great knowledge of the Derku, who brought the whole world within their city?

He wanted to laugh, but he did not laugh. Instead he watched over her as she slept, as the day waxed and waned. As the sun rose he carried her to the tree to sleep in the shade. Keeping his eye open for animals prowling near her, he gathered such leaves and seeds and roots as the ground offered the traveler at this time of year. Twice he came back and found her breath rasping and noisy; then he made her wake enough to drink a little of his water, but she was soon asleep, water glistening on her chin.

At last in the late afternoon, with the air hot and still, he squatted down in the grass beside her and woke her for good, showing her the food. She ate ravenously, and when she was done, she embraced him and called him the best of the gods because he didn’t leave her to die after all.

“I’m not a god,” he said, baffled.

“All my people know you are a god, from a land of gods. So large, so powerful, so good. You came to us so you could have a human baby. But this baby is only half human. How will he ever be happy, living among
us
, never knowing the gods?”

“You’ve seen the Heaving Sea, and you call
me
a god?”

“Take me with you to the land of the Derku. Let me give birth to your baby there. I will leave it with your mother and your sisters, and I will go home. I know I don’t belong among the gods, but my baby does.”

In his heart, Naog wanted to say yes, you’ll stay only till the baby is born, and then you’ll go home. But he remembered her patience as he learned the language of her people. He remembered the sweet language of the night, and the way he had to laugh at how she tried to act like a grown woman when she was only a child, and yet she couldn’t act like a child because she was, after all, now a woman. Because of me she is a woman, thought Naog, and because of her and her people I will come home a man. Do I tell her she must go away, even though I know that the others will think she’s ugly as I thought she was ugly?

And she
is
ugly, thought Naog. Our son, if he
is
a son, will be ugly like her people, too. I will be ashamed of him. I will be ashamed of her.

Is a man ashamed of his firstborn son?

“Come home with me to the land of the Derku,” said Naog. “We will tell them together about the Heaving Sea, and how one day soon it will leap over the low walls of sand and pour into this great plain in a flood that will cover the Derku lands forever. There will be a great migration. We will move, all of us, to the land my father found. The crocodiles live there also, along the banks of the Nile.”

“Then you will truly be the greatest among the gods,” she said, and the worship in her eyes made him proud and ill-at-ease, both at once. Yet how could he deny that the Derku were gods? Compared to her poor tribe, they would seem so. Thousands of people living in the midst of their own canals; the great fields of planted grain stretching far in every direction; the great wall of earth surrounding the Great Derku; the seedboats scattered like strange soft boulders; the children riding their dragonboats through the canals; a land of miracles to her. Where else in all the world had so many people learned to live together,
making great wealth where once there had been only savannah and floodplain?

We live like gods, compared to other people. We come like gods out of nowhere, to carry off captives the way death carries people off. Perhaps that is what the life after death is like—the
real
gods using us to dredge their canals. Perhaps that is what all of human life is for, to create slaves for the gods. And what if the gods themselves are also raided by some greater beings yet, carrying
them
off to raise grain in some unimaginable garden? Is there no end to the capturing?

There are many strange and ugly captives in Derku, thought Naog. Who will doubt me if I say that this woman is my captive? She doesn’t speak the language, and soon enough she would be used to the life. I would be kind to her, and would treat her son well—I would hardly be the first man to father a child on a captive woman.

The thought made him blush with shame.

“Zawada, when you come to the Derku lands, you will come as my wife,” he said. “And you will not have to leave. Our son will know his mother as well as his father.”

Her eyes glowed. “You are the greatest and kindest of the gods.”

“No,” he said, angry now, because he knew very well just exactly how far from “great” and “kind” he really was, having just imagined bringing this sweet, stubborn, brave girl into captivity. “You must never call me a god again. Ever. There is only one god, do you understand me? And it is that god that lives inside the Heaving Sea, the one that brought me to see him and sent me back here to warn my people. Call no one else a god, or you can’t stay with me.”

Her eyes went wide. “Is there room in the world for only one god?”

“When did a crocodile ever bury a whole land under water forever?” Naog laughed scornfully. “All my life I have thought of the Great Derku as a terrible god, worthy of the worship of brave and terrible men. But the Great Derku is just a crocodile. It can be killed with a spear. Imagine stabbing the Heaving Sea. We can’t even touch it. And yet the god can lift up that whole sea and pour it over the wall into this plain.
That
isn’t just a god. That is
God
.”

She looked at him in awe; he wondered whether she understood. And then realized that she could not possibly have understood, because half of
what he said was in the Derku language, since he didn’t even know enough words in
her
language to think of these thoughts, let alone say them.

Her body was young and strong, even with a baby inside it, and the next morning she was ready to travel. He did not run now, but even so they covered ground quickly, for she was a sturdy walker. He began teaching her the Derku language as they walked, and she learned well, though she made the words sound funny, as so many captives did, never able to let go of the sounds of their native tongue, never able to pronounce the new ones.