Earthborn (Homecoming) (48 page)

“Well, what did she want?” asked Aronha.

Mon’s reverie had carried him back to where his brothers and Akma were speaking with the leaders of the local Assembly of the Ancient Ways. This was the part of founding a religion that bothered Mon the most. While they got plenty of donations from rich and educated people, the ones who actually were willing to take the time to govern the assembly weren’t people that Mon much cared for. A lot of them were former priests who had lost their jobs back at the time of the reforms—an arrogant bunch that thought themselves a sort of wronged aristocracy, full of grievance and conceit. Others, though, were the kind of digger-hating bigots that, in Mon’s opinion, were almost certainly the very men who either carried out or ordered the cruel mistreatment of the Kept during the persecutions. It made his skin crawl to have to associate with them. Aronha had privately confessed to Mon that he hated dealing with these people, too. “Whatever else we might say about Akmaro,” Aronha commented
then, “he certainly attracts a better grade of priest.” They could never say this in front of Akma, however, since he still became very upset at any reminder of Luet’s marriage to the priest Didul, and to praise the priests of the Kept as a class would surely cause an eruption of Akma’s temper.

“She had a warning from Father,” said Mon.

“Oh, is he starting to threaten us now?” asked Akma. He had his arm across the shoulder of a young thug who might well have been one of those who broke the bones or tore the wings of children.

“Let’s talk about it when we’re alone,” said Mon.

“Why, do we have something to hide from our priests?” asked Akma.

“Yes,” said Mon coldly.

Akma laughed. “He’s joking, of course.” But a few minutes later, Akma had managed to get rid of the young man and he and the Motiaki withdrew to a place near the riverbank. “Don’t ever do that to me again, please,” said Akma. “The day will come when we can use the machinery of state to support our assembly, but for right now we need the help of these people and it doesn’t help when you make them feel excluded.”

“Sorry,” said Mon. “But I didn’t trust him.”

Akma smiled. “Of course you didn’t. He’s a contemptible sneak. But he’s a
vain
contemptible sneak and I had to work pretty hard to keep him from going away angry.”

Mon patted Akma’s arm. “As long as you bathe after touching him, I’m sure everything will be fine.” Then he told them what Edhadeya had said.

“He’s obviously trying to hamper us,” said Ominer angrily. “Why should we believe anything he says?”

“Because he’s the king,” said Aronha, “and he wouldn’t lie about something like this.”

“Why not?” demanded Ominer.

“Because it shames him to admit he may not be able to control his soldiers,” said Aronha. “I wish we didn’t have to hurt Father so badly. If only he’d understand
that we’re doing this for the sake of the kingdom.”

“We can’t change our whole schedule around,” said Ominer. “People are expecting us.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” said Mon. “We’ll draw a crowd whenever and wherever we show up. It might add a bit of mystery, for that matter, no one ever knowing where we’ll be speaking next. Add to the excitement.”

“It makes us look like cowards,” said Ominer.

Khimin piped up. “Not if we announce that we have to do this because we’ve got good information that some of the king’s men are out to kill us!”

“No!” Aronha said firmly. “We will
never
do that. People would take that as an accusation against the king, and it would be dishonorable for us to accuse him when he was the very one who sent us warning to try to protect us.”

Akma clapped Khimin on the back. “There you go, Khimin. When Aronha decides that something is dishonorable, we can’t do it even if it
would
have been a pretty effective ploy.”

“Don’t make fun of my sense of honor, Akma,” said Aronha.

“I wasn’t,” said Akma. “I admire you for it.”

Mon suddenly had an irresistible impulse to make trouble. “That’s the way that Aronha most resembles Father. The only reason we’ve had any success at all is that Father is so honorable.”

“Then that makes honor a weakness, doesn’t it?” asked Ominer.

Aronha answered him with withering contempt. “In the short run, dishonor gives an advantage; in the long run, a dishonorable king loses the love of his people and ends up the way Nuab did. Dead.”

“They tortured him to death with fire, didn’t they?” asked Khimin.

“Try not to sound so delighted at the thought of it,” said Akma. “It makes other people uneasy.”

But what Mon noticed, what disturbed him in all
this, was the fact that Akma seemed to draw closer to Ominer the more he said things that should have made a decent person recoil from him. Ominer said that honor was a weakness; now, though he said not a word about it, Akma had his arm around Ominer’s shoulders and Ominer was all smiles. This is wrong. There’s something seriously wrong. Akma wasn’t like this, not even as recently as last year, before all this began. I remember when he would have been adamant about honor and decency as Aronha was. What is it, are the vile people we associate with now beginning to influence him? Or is it simply a natural consequence of having the adulation of so many thousands of people?

Whatever it was that was happening to Akma, Mon hated it. This couldn’t be the real Akma emerging; it was more as if Akma were beginning to take on this cynical, amoral posture because he thought it was what he had to become in order to have his victory. Or perhaps it was a true part of Akma that never came out until he began to think that he was so important and powerful that he didn’t have to be decent to other people anymore. How much of his bantering with Aronha is really joking these days, Mon wondered, and how much of it is real contempt for Aronha’s kingly bearing?

I mustn’t think these things, Mon reminded himself. It’s the Keeper trying to win me away from my brothers.

No, it’s
not
the Keeper because there
is
no Keeper. . . .

Mon excused himself from them because he needed to sleep. The others all took it as a signal. The conversation turned to empty playful chatter as they walked back to the house where they were staying. The place was far too small for five grown men to stay—half the family that lived there had been farmed out to neighbors’ houses—but Akma insisted that they couldn’t always stay in rich men’s houses or the Kept would be able to accuse them of pride. Seeing what the Kept already
accused them of, Mon thought the addition of one more minor charge would be worth it for a good night’s sleep, but as usual Aronha saw things Akma’s way and so he was crammed into a space where he couldn’t stretch out or roll over without waking somebody up. The poor just don’t build big enough houses, he told himself as a nasty little joke. He could never say it out loud, of course, because Akma would tell him that “people won’t understand it’s just humor.”

The next morning, Aronha decided they’d take Father’s advice and leave at once instead of staying another day, and instead of going to Fetek, they’d head for Papadur. Oh, excellent, thought Mon, twice the walk, and uphill the whole way instead of down. I’ll have to write Father a note thanking him for his suggestion.

On the way, Akma critiqued Khimin’s speech of the night before. Mon had to admire the deft way that he did it, always praising right along with his criticisms so that Khimin never felt diminished. It helped, of course, that Khimin held Akma in absolute awe.

“What you said about how
our
teachers are well-educated and the Kept teachers are all just as ignorant as their students—that was a deft point, and I’m glad you made it.”

Khimin smiled. “Thanks.”

“There’s just a word-choice thing you’ll want to think of for next time. I know, it’s so frustrating, you have to think of so many things at once, the same thing happens to me, you get one thing right and something else slips. But that’s why not everybody can do this.”

It was so easy for Mon to see Akma’s flattery, how he set Khimin up and won him over. Yet Khimin was oblivious, the poor fool.

Then Mon had the uneasy thought that perhaps Akma adapted his technique to whatever fool he happened
to be talking to, and maybe to someone else Mon looked just as oblivious, just as gullible.

“I was thinking, as you talked last night, How can I steal this idea from Khimin and use it in
my
speech?”

Khimin laughed. So did Ominer, who was listening in—and who definitely could use some help with his speeches, too, since, while he never stammered or fumbled as Khimin did, he was also never for a moment entertaining.

“Here’s how I would have said it,” Akma offered. “ ‘My father, in his compassion, has established a religion in which the ignorant teach the ignorant, and the poor minister to the poor. This is a noble enterprise; let no man interfere with it. But for human and angels, for people of education and manners, there is no reason to pretend we need the primitive doctrines and coarse company of Akmaro’s so-called Kept.’ ”

“What do you mean, ‘Let no man interfere with it’?” asked Khimin. “I thought that’s what we were doing!”

“Of course that’s what we’re doing, and the audience knows it. But you see what the effect of that is? It makes it seem like we’re not anybody’s enemy. We’re not opposing them, we’re meeting the needs of the better sort of people while the Kept meet the needs of the poor and ignorant. Now, how many people in our audiences think of themselves as poor and ignorant?”

“Most of them!” Ominer said snidely.

“Most of them
are
poor, compared to someone who grew up in the king’s house,” said Akma, with only a hint of sarcasm. “But how do they think of
themselves
? Everybody thinks he’s one of the more educated, refined people—or if he isn’t, he’s certainly going to do everything he can to make sure other people
think
he is. So now—which assembly is he going to go to? The one that will make him seem to be one of the educated and refined. You see? Nobody can accuse us of name-calling or abusing the Kept—and yet, the more we praise them, the more
we make people want to stay as far away from them as possible.”

Khimin laughed with delight. “It’s like—you take what you want to say, and then you find a way to say the opposite, but so that it will have the
effect
you want.”

“Not quite the opposite,” said Akma. “But you’re getting it, you’re getting it!”

Mon’s truthsense suddenly erupted inside him, rejecting what he had just heard with such violence that he felt like he might throw up. He stopped walking and, without meaning to, sank to his knees.

“Mon?” asked Aronha.

At that moment there was a loud noise, and all of them looked up to see a huge object, grey as granite, whirling as it plummeted toward them. Smoke poured out of it as if it were on fire, and the roaring sound was deafening. Mon covered his ears with his hands and saw that his brothers were doing the same. At the last moment the huge grey stone veered off and fell toward the ground not a dozen paces from them, the smoke and dust blinding them. At that moment the earth shook, throwing them from their feet like punted dolls. Yet there was no crashing sound, or if there was, it was swallowed up in the roar of the fallen stone and the rumbling of the earth.

As the smoke and dust cleared, they saw someone standing in front of the stone, but what he looked like they couldn’t guess, for he shone so brightly from every part of his body that their eyes could not see anything but the human shape of him. The reason there had been no crashing sound now became clear, for the great grey object hovered in the air perhaps half a meter from the ground. It was impossible. It was irrational.

The man of light spoke, but they couldn’t hear him; his voice was lost in the other noise.

The stone suddenly fell silent. The rumbling of the earthquake faded. Mon raised himself onto his arms and looked at the man of light.

“Akma,” said the man. “Stand up.”

The voice was hardly human; it was like five voices at once, five different pitches that set up painful vibrations in Mon’s head. He was glad that it was Akma’s name that was called, not his; and though he was immediately ashamed of his cowardice, he was
still
glad.

Akma struggled to his feet.

“Akma, why are you persecuting the people of the Keeper? For the Keeper of Earth has said, These are
my
people, these are the Kept. I will establish them in this land, and nothing but their own evil choices will be allowed to overthrow them!”

Mon was overwhelmed with shame. All these months of denying his truthsense, and it had been right all along. Akma’s arguments proving that there was no Keeper now seemed so thin and meaningless—how could Mon have believed him for an instant, when he had the truthsense within him telling him otherwise all along? What have I done? What have I done?

“The Keeper has heard the pleas of the Kept, and also the plea of your father, the true servant of the Keeper. He has begged the Keeper for years to bring you to understand the truth, but the Keeper knew that you already understood the truth. Now your father begs the Keeper to stop you from harming the innocent children of Earth.”

The earth rumbled under them again; Akma was knocked to his knees, and Mon fell, his face striking the damp soil of the road.

“Can you claim any more that the Keeper has no power? Are you deaf to my voice? Blind to the light that shines from my body? Can’t you feel the earth shake beneath you? Is there no Keeper?”

Mon cried out in fear, “Yes! There is! I knew it all along! Forgive me for my lies!” He could hear his brothers also crying out, pleading for mercy; only Akma remained silent.

“Akma, remember your captivity in the land of
Chelem. Remember how the Keeper delivered you from bondage. Now
you
are the oppressor of the Kept, and the Keeper will deliver them from
you.
Go your way, Akma, and seek no more to destroy the Assembly of the Kept. Their pleas will be answered, whether you choose to destroy yourself or not.”