The Memory of Earth Read online

  "Enough to make a bull into a steer," Nafai had quipped in reply, and Eiadh had laughed and then repeated his joke several times later in the day. If a woman like that existed in the world, why should a man bother with silly fashions?

  When Nafai got to the kitchen, Elemak was just sliding a frozen rice pudding into the oven. The pudding looked large enough to feed them all, but Nafai knew from experience that Elemak intended die whole thing for himself. He'd been traveling for months, eating mostly cold food, moving almost entirely at night-Elemak would eat the entire pudding in about six swallows and then go collapse on his bed and sleep till dawn tomorrow.

  "Where's Father?" asked Elemak.

  "A short trip," said Issib, who was breaking raw eggs over his toast, preparing them for the oven. He did it quite deftly, considering that simply grasping an egg in one hand took all his strength. He would hold die egg a few inches over the table, then clench just the right muscle to release the float that was holding up his arm, causing it to drop, egg and all, onto the table surface. The egg would split exactly right-every rime-and then he'd clench another muscle, the float would swing his arm up over the plate, and then he'd open the egg with his other hand and it would pour out onto the toast. There wasn't much Issib couldn't do for himself, with the floats taking care of gravity for him. But it meant Issib could never go traveling the way Father and Elemak and, sometimes, Mebbekew did. Once he was away from the magnetics of the city, Issib had to ride in his chair, a clumsy machine that he could only ride from place to place. It wouldn't help him do anything. Away from the city, confined to his chair, Issib was really crippled.

  "Where's Mebbekew?" asked Elemak. The pudding was done-overdone, actually, but that's the way Elemak always ate breakfast, cooked until it was so soft you didn't need teeth to eat it. Nafai figured it was because he could swallow it faster that way.

  "Spent the night in the city," said Issib.

  Elemak laughed. "That's what he'll say when he gets back. But I think Meb is all plow and no planting."

  There was only one way for a man of Mebbekew's age to spend a night inside the walls of Basilica, and that was if some woman had him in her home. Elemak might tease that Mebbekew claimed to have more women than he got, but Nafai had seen the way Meb acted with some women, at least. Mebbekew didn't have to pretend to spend a night in the city; he probably accepted fewer invitations than he got.

  Elemak took a huge bite of pudding. Then he cried out, opened his mouth, and poured in wine straight from the table jug. "Hot," he said, when he could talk again.

  "Isn't it always?" asked Nafai.

  He had meant it as a joke, a little jest between brothers. But for some reason Elemak took it completely wrong, as if Nafai had been calling him stupid for taking the bite. "listen, little boy," said Elemak, "when you've been out on the road eating cold food and sleeping in dust and mud for two-and-a-half months, maybe you forget just how hot a pudding can be."

  "Sorry," said Nafai. "I didn't meant anything bad."

  "Just be careful who you make fun of," said Elemak. "You're only my half- brother, after all,"

  "That's all right," said Issib cheerfully. "He has the same effect on full brothers, too." Issib was obviously trying to smooth things over and keep a quarrel from developing.

  Elemak seemed willing enough to go along. "I imagine it's harder on you ," he said. "Good thing you're a cripple or Nafai here probably wouldn't have lived to be eighteen."

  If the remark about being a cripple stung Issib, he didn't show it. It infuriated Nafai, however. Here Issib was trying to keep the peace, and Elemak casually insulted him for it. So, while Nafai hadn't had the slightest intention of picking a fight before, he was ready for one now . Elemak's having counted his age in planting years instead of temple years was a good enough pretext. "I'm fourteen," said Nafai. "Not eighteen."

  "Temple years, planting years," said Elemak. "If you were a horse you'd be eighteen."

  Nafai walked over and stood about a pace from Elemak's chair. "But I'm not a horse," said Nafai.

  "You're not a man yet, either," said Elemak. "And I'm too tired to want to beat you senseless right now. So fix your breakfast and let me eat mine." He turned to Issib. "Did Father take Rashgallivak with him?"

  Nafai was surprised at the question. How could Father take the estate manager with him, when Elemak was also gone? Truzhnisha would keep the household running, of course; but without Rashgallivak, who would manage the greenhouses, the stables, the gossips, the booths?

  Certainly not Mebbekew-he had no interest in the day-to-day duties of Father's business. And the men would hardly take orders from Issib-they regarded him with tenderness or pity, not respect.

  "No, Father left Rash in charge," Issib said. "Rash was probably sleeping out at the coldhouse tonight. But you know Father never leaves without seeing that every-thing's in order."

  Elemak cast a quick, sidelong glance at Nafai. "Just wondered why certain people were getting so cocky."

  Then it dawned on Nafai: Elemak's question was really a back-handed compliment-he had wondered whether Father had put Nafai in charge of things in his absence. And plainly Elemak didn't like the idea of Nafai running any part of the Wetchik family's rare-plant business.

  "I'm not interested in taking over the weed trade," said Nafai, "if that's what you're worried about."

  "I'm not worried about anything at all," said Elemak. "Isn't it time for you to go to Mama's school? She'll be afraid her little boy got robbed and beaten on the road."

  Nafai knew he should let Elemak's taunt go unanswered, shouldn't provoke him anymore. The last thing he wanted was to have Elemak as an enemy. But the very fact that he looked up to Elemak so much, wanted so much to be like him, made it impossible for Nafai to leave the gibe unanswered. As he headed for the courtyard door, he turned back to say, "I have much higher aims in life than skulking around shooting at robbers and sleeping with camels and carrying tundra plants to the tropics and tropical plants to the glaciers. I'll leave that game to you."

  Suddenly Elemak's chair flew across the room as he jumped to his feet and in two strides had Nafai's face pressed against the doorframe. It hurt, but Nafai hardly noticed the pain, or even the fear that Elemak might hurt him even worse. Instead there was a strange feeling of triumph. I made Elemak lose his temper. He doesn't get to keep pretending that he thinks I'm not worth noticing.

  That game , as you call it, pays for everything you have and everything you are," said Elemak. "If it wasn't for the money that Father and Rash and I bring in, do you think anybody'd pay attention to you in Basilica? Do you think your mother has so much honor that it would actually transfer to her sons? If you think that, then you don't know how the world works. Your mother might be able, to make her daughters into hot stuff, but the only thing a woman can do for a son is make a scholar out of him." He practically spat the word scholar. "And believe me, boy, that's all you're ever going to be. I don't know why the Oversoul even bothered putting a boy's parts on you, little girl, because all you're going to have in this world when you grow up is what a woman gets."

  Again, Nafai knew that he should keep his silence and let Elemak have the last word. But the retort no sooner came to his mind than it came out of his mouth. "Is calling me a woman your subtle way of telling me you've got some heat for me? I think you've been out on the road too long if I'm starting to look irresistible."

  At once Elemak let go of him. Nafai turned around, half-expecting to see Elemak laughing, shaking his head about how their playing sometimes got out of hand. Instead his brother was standing there red-faced, breathing heavily, like an animal poised to lunge. "Get out of this house," said Elemak, "and don't come back while I'm here."

  "It's not your house," Nafai pointed out.

  "The next time I see you here I'll kill you."

  "Come on, Elya, you know I was only joking."

  Issib floated blithely between them and cast an arm clumsily across Nafai's shoulders. "We're late getting in
to the city, Nyef. Mother will be worried about us."

  This time Nafai had sense enough to shut his mouth and let things go. He did know how to hold his tongue-he just never remembered to do it soon enough. Now Elemak was furious at him. Might be angry for days. Where will I sleep if I can't go home? Nafai wondered. Immediately there flashed in his mind an image of Eiadh whispering to him, "Why not stay tonight in my room? After all, we're surely going to be mates one day. A woman trains her favorite nieces to be mates for her sons, doesn't she? I've known that since I first knew you, Nafai. Why should we wait any longer? After all, you're only about the stupidest human being in all of Basilica."

  Nafai came out of his reverie to realize that it was Issib speaking to him, not Eiadh. "Why do you keep goading him like that," Issib was saying, "when you know it's all Elemak can do to keep from killing you sometimes?"

  "I think of things and sometimes I say them when I shouldn't," said Nafai.

  "You think of stupid things and you're so stupid that you soy them every time."

  "Not every time."

  "Oh, you mean there are even stupider things that you don't say? What a mind you've got! A treasure!" Issib was floating ahead of him. He always did that going up the ridge road, forgetting that for people who had to deal with gravity, a slower pace might be more comfortable.

  "I like Elemak," said Nafai miserably. "I don't understand why he doesn't like me."

  "I'll get him to make you a list sometime," said Issib. "I'll paste it onto the end of my own."

  TWO - MOTHER'S HOUSE

  It was a long but familiar road from the Wetchik house to Basilica. Until the age of eight, Nafai had always made the round trip in the other direction, when Mother took him and Issib to Father's house for holidays. In those days it was magical to be in a household of men. Father, with his mane of white hair, was almost a god-indeed, until he was five Nafai had thought that Father was the Oversoul. Mebbekew, only six years older than Nafai, had always been a vicious, merciless tease, but in those early years Elemak was kind and playful. Ten years older than Nafai, Elya was already mansize in Nafai's first memories of Wetchik's house; but instead of Father's ethereal look, he had the dark rugged appearance of a fighter, a man who was kind only because he wanted to be, not because he was incapable of harshness when it was needed. In those days Nafai had pleaded to be released from Mother's household and allowed to live with Wetchik-and Elemak. Having Mebbekew around all the time would simply be the unavoidable price for living in the place of the gods.

  Mother and Father met with him together to explain why they wouldn't release him from his schooling. "Boys who are sent to their fathers at this age are the ones without promise," said Father. "The ones who are too violent to get along well in a household of study, too disrespectful to abide in a household of women."

  "And the stupid ones go to their fathers at age eight," said Mother. "Beyond rudimentary reading and arithmetic, what use does a stupid man have for learning?"

  Even now, remembering, Nafai felt a little stab of pleasure at that-for Mebbekew had often bragged that, unlike Nyef and Issya, and Elya in his day, Meb had gone home to Father at the age of eight. Nafai was sure that Meb had met every criterion for early entry into the household of men.

  So they managed to persuade Nafai that it was a good thing for him to stay with his mother. There were other reasons, too-to keep Issib company, the prestige of his mother's household, the association with his sisters-but it was Nafai's ambition that made him content to stay. I'm one of the boys with real promise. I will have value to the land of Basilica, perhaps to the whole world. Perhaps one day my writings will be sent into the sky for the Oversoul to share them with the people of other cities and other languages. Perhaps I will even be one of the great ones whose ideas are encoded into glass and saved in an archive, to be read during all the rest of human history as one of the giants of Harmony.

  Still, because he had pleaded so earnestly to be allowed to live with Father, from the age of eight until he was thirteen, he and Issib had spent almost every weekend at the Wetchik house, becoming as familiar with it as with Rasa's house in the city. Father had insisted that they work hard, experiencing what a man does to earn his living, so their weekends were not holidays. "You study for six days, working with your mind while your body takes a holiday. Here you'll work in the stables and the greenhouses, working with your body while your mind learns the peace that comes from honest labor."

  That was the way Father talked, a sort of continuous oratory; Mother said he took that tone because he wasn't sure how to talk naturally with children. But Nafai had overheard enough adult conversations to know that Father talked that way with everybody except Rasa herself. It showed that Father was never at ease, never truly himself with anyone; but over the years Nafai had also learned that no matter how elevated and hortatory Father's conversation might be, he was never a fool; his words were never empty or stupid or ignorant. This is how a man speaks, Nafai had thought when he was young, and so he practiced an elegant style and made a point of learning classical Emeznetyi as well as the colloquial Basyat that was the language of most art and commerce in Basilica these days. More recently Nafai had realized that to communicate effectively with real people he had to speak the common language-but the rhythms, the melodies of Emeznetyi could still be felt in his writing and heard in his speech. Even in his stupid jokes that earned Elemak's wrath.

  "I've just realized something," said Nafai.

  Issib didn't answer-he was far enough ahead that Nafai wasn't sure he could even hear. But Nafai went ahead and said it anyway, speaking even more softly, because he was probably saying it only to himself. T think that I say those things that make people so angry, not because I really mean them, but because I simply thought of a clever way to say them. It's a kind of art, to think of the perfect way to say an idea, and when you think of it then you have to say it, because words don't exist until you say them."

  "A pretty feeble kind of art, Nyef, and I say you should give it up before it gets you killed."

  So Issib was listening, after all.

  "For a big strong guy you sure take a long time getting up Ridge Road to Market Street," said Issib.

  "I was thinking," said Nafai.

  "You really ought to learn how to think and walk at the same time."

  Nafai reached the top of the road, where Issib was waiting. I really was dawdling, he thought. I'm not even out of breath.

  But because Issib had paused there, Nafai also waited, turning as Issib had turned, to look back down the road they had just traveled. Ridge Road was named exactly right, since it ran along a ridge that sloped down toward the great well-watered coastal plain. It was a clear morning, and from the crest they could see all the way to the ocean, with a patchwork quilt of farms and orchards, stitched with roads and knotted with towns and villages, spread out like a bedcover between the mountains and the sea. Looking down Ridge Road they could see the long line of farmers coming up for market, leading strings of pack animals. If Nafai and Issib had delayed even ten minutes more they would have had to make this trip in the noise and stink of horses, donkeys, mules, and kurelomi, the swearing of the men and the gossip of the women. Once that had been a pleasure, but Nafai had traveled with them often enough to know that the gossip and the swearing were always the same. Not everything that comes from a garden is a rose.

  Issib turned to the west, and so did Nafai, to see a landscape as opposite as any could possibly be: the jumbled rocky plateau of the Besporyadok, the near- waterless waste that went on and on toward the west. A thousand poets at least had made the same observation, that die sun rose from the sea, surrounded by jewels of light dancing on the water, and then settled down in red fire in the west, lost in the dust that was always blowing across the desert. But Nafai always thought that, at least where weather was concerned, the sun ought to. go the other way. It didn't bring water from the ocean to the land-it brought dry fire from the desert toward the sea.

 
; The vanguard of the market crowd was close enough now that they could hear the drivers and the donkeys. So they turned and started walking toward Basilica, sections of the redrock wall shining in the first rays of sunlight. Basilica, where the forested mountains of the north met the desert of the west and the garden seacoast of the east. How the poets had sung of this place: Basilica, the City of Women, the Harbor of Mists, Red-walled Garden of the Oversold, the haven where all the waters of the world come together to conceive new clouds, to pour out fresh water again over the earth.

  Or, as Mebbekew put it, the best town in the world for getting laid.

  The path between the Market Gate of Basilica and the Wetchik house on Ridge Road had never changed in all these years-Nafai knew when as much as a stone of it had been changed. But when Nafai turned thirteen, he had readied a turning point that changed the meaning of that road. At thirteen, even the most promising boys went to live with their fathers, leaving their schooling behind forever. The only ones who remained behind were the ones who meant to reject a man's trade and become scholars. When Nafai was eight he had pleaded to live with his father, at thirteen he argued die other way. No, I haven't decided to be a scholar, he said, but I also haven't decided not to be. Why should I decide now?

  Let me live with you, Father, if I must-but let me also stay at Mother's school until things become clearer. You don't need me in your work, the way you need Elemak. And I don't want to be another Mebbekew.

  So, though the path between Father's house and the city was unchanged, Nafai now walked it in the other direction. The round trip now wasn't from Rasa's city house out into the country and back again; now it was a trek from Wetchik's country house into the city. Even though he actually owned more possessions in the city- all his books, papers, tools, and toys-and often slept three or four of the eight nights of the week there, home was Father's house now.