Earthborn (Homecoming) (44 page)

Dudagu didn’t want her husband to go. “I hate it when you’re gone for so many days.”

“I’m sorry, but no matter how ill you are right now, I’m still the king,” said Motiak.

“That’s right, so you have people to find out things and report to you and you don’t have to go and see for yourself!”

“I’m king of the earth people of Darakemba as surely as I’m king of the sky and middle people. They need to see that I don’t want them to leave.”

“You issued that decree, didn’t you? Forbidding people to organize boycotts of the diggers?”

“Oh, yes. I decreed, and immediately Akma and the royal boys went about declaring that in compliance with the law, they no longer advocated a boycott and urged people
not
to stop hiring diggers or buying goods made by diggers. Thus I can’t arrest them while their boycott message is
still
being spread by their pretence of discontinuing it.”

“I still think you should make them come home and stop letting them speak.”

“It wouldn’t change the fact that people know what they believe, what they want. Believe it or not, Dudagu, despite your high opinion of my powers, I’m helpless.”

“Punish them if they boycott the diggers! Confiscate their property! Cut off a finger!”

“And how would I prove that they’re boycotting? All they have to say is, ‘I was never satisfied with his work and so I hire other people now. It has nothing to do with what species he belongs to—don’t I have the freedom to decide whom to hire?’ Sometimes it might even be true. Should I punish them then?”

Dudagu thought about this for a few moments. “Well, then, if the diggers are leaving, let them go! If they all leave, then the problem is solved.”

Motiak looked at her in silence until she finally realized something was wrong and looked at him and saw the cold rage in his face.

She gasped. “Did I say something wrong?”

“When someone in my kingdom decides that some of my citizens are not welcome, and drives them out against my will, don’t you dare to tell me that once they’re all gone, the problem is solved. Every earth person who leaves Darakemba makes this nation that much more evil and I’m beginning to hate being their king.”

“I don’t like the sound of
that”
she said. “You wouldn’t do anything stupid like abdicating, would you?”

“And put Aronha in charge years ahead of schedule? Watch as he re-establishes this Ancient Ways abomination as the official religion of the empire? I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. No, I’ll be king until the last breath is dragged out of my body. I only hope that I have the strength never to hope that all my sons die before me.”

Dudagu fairly flew off the bed, to stand before him in tiny, majestic rage. “Don’t you ever say such a
monstrous thing again! Three of them aren’t my sons, I know that, and I know they hate me and think I’m useless but they’re still your sons, and that’s still more sacred than anything else in the world, and no decent man would ever wish his sons to die before him even if he
is
the king and they
are
wretched traitorous snots like my Khimin turned out to be.” She burst into tears.

He led her back to her bed; “Come on, I didn’t mean it, I was just angry.”

“So was I, only I was
right
to be angry,” she said.

“That’s true, you were, and I apologize. I didn’t mean it.”

“Please don’t go.”

“I will go, because it’s the right thing to do. And you will stop pestering me about it, because I shouldn’t have to feel guilty about doing my duty as king.”

“I won’t sleep while you’re gone. You’ll be lucky if I’m not dead of weakness and exhaustion when you return.”

“Three days? Try to stay alive for three days.”

“You don’t take my sickness seriously at all, Tidaka,” she said.

“I take it seriously,” said Motiak, “but I never have and never will let it stop me from doing my duty. It’s one of the tragedies of royal life, Dudagu. If you died while I was away, doing my duty, I would grieve. But if I failed in my duty because you were dying, I would be ashamed. For my kingdom’s sake, I would rather have my people grieve with me than have my people ashamed of me.”

“You have no heart,” she said.

“No, I
have
a heart,” said Motiak. “I just can’t always do what it tells me to do.”

“I’ll hate you forever. I’ll never forgive you.”

“But I’ll love
you
,” he answered mildly. And then, when the door was closed behind him and she couldn’t hear, he muttered, “I might even forgive you for making my home life so . . . unrestful.”

He left his house in the company of two captains—as tradition required, one was an angel, the other a human. Outside, spies and soldiers were ready—only a dozen spies and thirty soldiers, but it was best to be prepared. In these tumultuous times, one never knew when a party of Elemaki might penetrate deeply into Darakemba. And before the journey was done, they would be far upriver, much closer to the border.

On the way out of the city, they were joined by Akmaro, Chebeya, Edhadeya, and Shedemei. Motiak greeted his daughter with an embrace, and met Shedemei with short courtesy; it was easy to assume a level of intimacy as if he had long known her. “Someday you must tell me where you’re from,” he said. “Show me on a map, that is. I have the original maps that Nafai drew, showing the whole gornaya. I won’t have heard of your city, but I can add it to the map.”

“It would do no good,” said Shedemei. “It doesn’t exist now.”

“A grief that can hardly be imagined,” said Motiak.

“It was for a while,” said Shedemei. “But I’m alive, and my work requires all my concentration.”

“Still, I’d like to see where your city was. People often build again on the same site. If there was a reason to build a city there once, another people will think of the same reason again.” Polite conversation; they all knew what was really on Motiak’s mind. But there was no use talking about it all the time; it wasn’t as if they could do much. And it was Motiak’s duty to make sure they were as comfortable as he could make them. That was one of the chief annoyances of being king. No matter where he was, no matter who was with him, he was always host, always responsible for everyone else’s well-being.

Out on the road, their reason for this journey was immediately apparent. The encampment of emigrating diggers wasn’t large, but then it wasn’t meant to be. Quiet humans and angels manned the booth where food and water were distributed; lidded jars with
thongs to loop around the neck would serve to help the diggers on their way. They would also mark them as emigrants, so that any who saw them on the road would know they were leaving Darakemba. They had taken the invitation of the Ancients; they had decided to live where they were not hated. But it gave them no joy. Motiak hadn’t spent that much of his life around earth people that he could easily read the expressions on their strange faces. But it took no great experience to see the dejection in the slope of their backs, the way they tended to walk now on two feet, now touching a hand to the ground, as if in being called animals they had begun somehow to discover it was true, so now it took all their remaining strength just to keep from setting down the other hand to make it a foot again, as it had been for an ancient ancestor scurrying through the alleys of a human city, looking for something edible or wet or shiny.

Motiak led his party onto the road; the diggers moved aside. “No,” he said, “the road is wide enough. We can share it.”

They stayed motionless at the verge, watching him.

“I am Motiak,” he said. “Don’t you understand that you are citizens? You don’t have to go. I’ve opened up the public larders in every city. You can wait this out. It will pass.”

Finally one of them spoke. “When we go there, we see the hatred in their eyes, sir. We know you meant well for us, setting us free. We don’t hate
you
.”

“It’s not the hunger,” said another. “You know it’s not that.”

“Yes it is,” said a woman, holding three small children near her. “And the beatings. You won’t live forever, sir.”

“Whatever else might be true of my sons,” said Motiak, “they will never permit the persecution.”

“Oh, they’ll starve us out, but not let us be hit?” the woman scoffed. “Stand up, you,” she said to her children. “This is the king, here. This is
majesty
.”

Motiak’s angel captain made a motion as if to punish
her for impudence, but Motiak waved him back with a tiny gesture. The irony in her voice could not overmatch the bitterness in his heart. She was right, to jeer at majesty. A king has no more power than the willing obedience of the great mass of the people gives him. A king who is worse than his people is a poisonous snake; a king who is better
is
last year’s snakeskin, discarded in the grass.

Pabul was at the Ancient Ways booth. He had asked if he might come along, if only because he felt somewhat responsible for the troubles with his decision in Shedemei’s trial the year before. “These so-called Ancients, they’re a loathsome bunch,” he said, “but they’re not breaking any law. They don’t foul the water or poison the food. It’s fresh enough, and the rations they give the earth people are adequate for a day’s journey.” He hesitated, considering whether to say the next thing, then decided and spoke. “You could forbid the diggers to leave.”

Motiak nodded. “Yes—I could require the most helpless and obedient of my citizens to stay and suffer further humiliation and abuse, from which I’m powerless to protect them, I could do that.”

Pabul made no more argument along that line.

They walked all day, briskly because they were all healthy: They made a point of staying fit; Motiak and Pabul because their offices were fundamentally military ones and they might find themselves in the field at any time; Akmaro and Chebeya, Edhadeya and Shedemei because they were of the Kept and labored with their own hands, permitting themselves no
excess
of food or unproductive leisure. So they overtook group after group of diggers, and to each of them Motiak said the same thing. “Please stay. I wish you would stay. Trust in the Keeper to heal the wound in this land.” And the answer was always the same: For you we would stay, Motiak, we know you wish us well; but there’s no future here for me, for my children.

“It’s misleading,” Akmaro said that afternoon. “We
see here the ones that are on the road. Most are staying.”

“So far,” said Motiak.

“Our resources are stretched to the limit, but all the diggers that the Kept can hire are earning wages; their children are still in school; there are even towns and villages where Akma and your sons have no influence and the people treat each other civilly, without boycotts or any sign of hate.”

“How many such towns, Akmaro?” asked Motiak. “One in a hundred?”

“One in fifty,” said Akmaro. “Or one in forty.”

Motiak had no need to answer that.

He thought back to the morning’s conversation with his wife. The callousness with which she said to let the diggers go and then the problem would be solved. Is that any more monstrous than my cruel thought that I might wish to see my sons in graves before I die? Yet I would not have shrunk from letting them all take weapons in their hands and go out into battle, if an enemy attacked us. They might have died then, in the violence of war, and when they saw me mourning no man or woman in the kingdom would have said, If he really loved them he wouldn’t have put them in the way of death.

He framed the idea in words and said them aloud, so Akmaro, still walking beside him, could hear. “There are things that parents must value even above their children’s lives.”

Akmaro needed no explanation to understand where Motiak’s thoughts had turned. “That’s hard,” he said. “All of nature has written into our minds the idea that children matter more than anything.”

“But civilization means rising above even that,” said Motiak. “We feel our self to be the town, the tribe, the city, the nation—”

“The children of the Keeper—”

“Yes, we see that as the self that must be preserved at all costs, so that nearer things are less valuable. Does it mean we’re monsters, that we hate our grown
children if we send them off to war to kill and die so they can protect our neighbors’ little ones?”

“ ‘The survival of the family is best enhanced when the family is subsumed in a larger society,’” Akmaro recited. “ ‘One family breaks and bleeds, but the larger organism heals. The wound is not fatal.’ Edhadeya has been teaching me the things that are taught in Rasaro’s House.”

“She spends more time in your house than mine,” said Motiak.

“She finds more comfort from Chebeya than from her stepmother,” said Akmaro. “I don’t think that’s surprising. Besides, she spends most of her time with Shedemei.”

“Strange woman,” said Motiak.

“When you know her better,” said Akmaro, “you’ll begin to realize that she’s even stranger than you thought at first.” Then, suddenly, Akmaro’s demeanor changed; in a softer voice he said, “I didn’t realize that your captain of soldiers was so close behind us.”

“Is he?” asked Motiak.

“Were you overheard, do you think? When you said, ‘There are things that parents must value even above their children’s lives’?”

Motiak glanced at Akmaro in alarm. They both understood that inadvertently, Motiak had placed their sons in great danger. “It’s time that we stopped for our noon meal.”

While the soldiers broke out the food that they were carrying, and all but two of the spies settled to the ground to eat, Motiak took Edhadeya aside. “I’m sorry to separate you from the group, but I have an urgent errand for you.”

“And you can’t send a spy?” she said.

“I most certainly cannot,” he said. “I chanced to say something unfortunate just now, and I was overheard; but even if I hadn’t been, the idea is bound to occur to one of my men, seeing how unhappy I am. You must go and find your brothers and warn them that it’s possible, even likely, that some soldier, thinking
to do me a great service, will attempt to relieve me of some of my family burdens.”