Earthborn (Homecoming) Read online

  Finally the ordeal was over. Pabul delegated Didul, and Didul in turn assigned his older brother Udad to take the ungrateful, traitorous, and ill-mannered Akma back to his work. Udad seized Akma’s wrists and yanked so harshly that Akma couldn’t walk, but ended up being dragged stumbling over the grassy ground to the top of the hill. Udad then threw him down the hill, and Akma tumbled head over heels as Udad’s laughter echoed behind him.

  The taskmaster refused to let any of the humans stop their work to help him. Shamed and hurt and humiliated and furious, Akma rose to his feet and tried to clean off the worst of the food mess, at least from his nostrils and around his eyes.

  “Get to work,” demanded the taskmaster.

  Udad shouted from the top of the hill. “Next time maybe we’ll bring your sister along for a meal!”

  The threat made Akma’s skin crawl, but he showed no sign of having heard. That was the only resistance left to him, stubborn silence, just like the adults.

  Akma took his place and worked the rest of the daylight hours. It wasn’t until the sky was darkening and the taskmaster finally let them go that he was finally able to go to his mother and father, tell them what happened.

  They spoke in the darkness, their voices mere whispers, for the diggers patrolled the village at night, listening to hear any kind of meeting or plot—or even prayer to the Keeper of Earth, for Pabulog had declared that it was treason, punishable by death, since any prayer by a follower of the renegade priest Akmaro was an affront to all the gods. So as Mother scrubbed the dried-on fruit from his body, weeping softly, Akma told Father all that was said and all that was done.

  “So that’s how Nuak died,” said Father. “He was once a good king. But he was never a good man. And when I served him, I wasn’t a good man either.”

  “You were never really one of them,” said Mother.

  Akma wanted to ask his father if everything else Pabulog’s sons said was true, too, but he dared not, for he wouldn’t know what to do with the answer. If they were right, then his father was an oathbreaker and so how could Akma trust anything he said?

  “You can’t leave Akma like this,” said Mother softly. “Don’t you know how far they’ve torn him from you?”

  “I think Akma is old enough to know you can’t believe a liar.”

  “But they told him you were a liar, Kmaro,” she said. “So how can he believe you?”

  It amazed Akma how his mother could see things in his mind that even he himself had barely grasped. Yet he also knew it was shameful to doubt your own father, and he shuddered at the look on his father’s face.

  “So they did steal your heart from me, is that it, Kmadis?” He called him dis, which meant beloved child; not ha, which meant honored heir, the name he used when he was especially proud of Akma. Kmaha—that was the name he wanted to hear from his father’s lips, and it remained unspoken. Ha-Akma. Honor, not pity.

  “He stood against them,” Mother reminded him. “And suffered for it, and he was brave.”

  “But they sowed the seed of doubt in your heart, didn’t they, Kmadis?”

  Akma couldn’t help it. It was too much for him. He cried at last.

  “Set his mind at rest, Kmaro,” said Mother.

  “And how will I do that, Chebeya?” asked Father. “I never broke my oath to the king, but when they drove me out and tried to have me killed, then yes, I realized that Binaro was right, the only reason to keep the common people from learning to read and write and speak the ancient language was to preserve the priests’ monopoly on power. If everyone could read the calendar, if everyone could read the ancient records and the laws for themselves, then why would they need to submit to the power of the priests? So I broke the covenant and taught reading and writing to everyone who came to me. I revealed the calendar to them. But it isn’t evil to break an evil covenant.” Father turned to Mother. “He isn’t understanding this, Chebeya.”

  “Sh,” she said.

  They fell silent, only the sound of their breathing filling their hut. They could hear the pattering feet of a digger running through the village.

  “What do you suppose his errand is?” Mother whispered.

  Father pressed a finger to her lips. “Sleep,” he said softly. “All of us, sleep now.”

  Mother lay down on the mat beside Luet, who had long since dropped off to sleep. Father lay down beside Mother and Akma settled in on the other side of him. But he didn’t want Father’s arm cast over him. He wanted to sleep alone, to absorb his shame. The worst of his humiliations wasn’t the gagging and choking, it wasn’t the smearing with fruit, it wasn’t tumbling down the hill, it wasn’t facing all the people in tattered clothing, covered with filth. The worst humiliation was that his father was an oathbreaker, and that he had had to learn it from Pabulog’s sons.

  Everyone knew that an oathbreaker was the worst kind of person. He would say one thing, but no one could count on him to do it. So you could do nothing with him. You could never trust him when you weren’t there to watch. Hadn’t Mother and Father taught him from earliest infancy that when he said he would do a thing, he had to do it, or he had no honor and could not be trusted?

  Akma tried to think about what Father said, that to break an evil covenant was good. But if it was an evil oath, why would you swear to it in the first place? Akma didn’t understand. Was Father evil once, when he took the evil oath, and then he stopped being evil? How did someone stop being evil once he started? And who decided what evil was, anyway?

  That soldier Didul told him about—Teonig?—he had the right idea. You kill your enemy. You don’t sneak around behind his back, breaking promises. None of the children would ever tolerate a sneak. If you had a quarrel, you stood up and yelled at each other, or wrestled in order to bend the other to your will. You could argue with a friend that way, and still be a friend. But to go behind his back, then you weren’t a friend at all. You were a traitor.

  No wonder Pabulog was angry at Father. That’s what brought all this suffering down on us. Father was a sneak, hiding in the wilderness and breaking promises.

  Akma started to cry. These were terrible thoughts, and he hated them. Father was good and kind, and all the people loved him. How could he be an evil sneak? Everything the sons of Pabulog said had to be lies, had to be. They were the evil ones, they were the ones who had tormented him and humiliated him. They were the liars.

  Except that Father admitted that what they said was true. How could bad people tell the truth, and good people break oaths? The thought still spun crazily in Akma’s head when he finally drifted off to sleep.

  TWO

  TRUE DREAMS

  Mon climbed to the roof of the king’s house to watch the setting of the dry sun, as it funneled down between the mountains at the northern end of the valley. Bego, the royal librarian, told him once that when the humans first arrived on Earth, they believed that the sun set in the west and rose in the east. “This is because they came from a place with few mountains,” said Bego. “So they couldn’t tell north from west.”

  “Or up from down?” Aronha had asked snidely. “Were humans completely stupid before they had angels to teach them?”

  Well, that was Aronha, always resentful of Bego’s great learning. Why shouldn’t Bego be proud of being a skyman, of the wisdom the sky people had accumulated? All through their hours at school, Aronha was always pointing out that the humans had brought this or that bit of wisdom to the sky people. Why, to hear Aronha go on about it, you’d think the sky people would still be sleeping upside down in the trees if it weren’t for the humans!

  As for Mon, he never ceased envying the wings of the sky people. Even old Bego, who was so stout he could hardly glide down from an upper story to the ground—Mon yearned for even those old leathery wings. His greatest disappointment of childhood was when he learned that humans never grew up to be angels, that if wings weren’t there, furry and useless, pressed against your body when you were born, they would never grow later. You would be
cursed forever with naked useless arms.

  At nine years old, all Mon could do was climb to the roof at sunset and watch the young sky people—the ones his own age or even younger, but so much more free—as they frolicked over the trees by the river, over the fields, over the roofs of the houses, soaring, dipping, rising, madly tussling in the air and dropping like stones until perilously near the earth, then spreading their wings and swooping out of the fall, hurtling down the streets between the houses like arrows as earthbound humans raised their fists and hollered about young hooligans being a menace to hardworking people just minding their own business. Oh, that I were an angel! cried Mon within his heart. Oh, that I could fly and look down on trees and mountains, rivers and fields! Oh, that I could spy out my father’s enemies from far away and fly to him to give warning!

  But he would never fly. He would only sit on the roof and brood while others danced in the air.

  “You know, it could be worse.”

  He turned and grimaced at his sister. Edhadeya was the only one he had ever told about his yearning for wings. To her credit, she had never told anyone else; but when they were alone together, she teased him mercilessly.

  “There are those who envy you, Mon. The king’s son, tall and strong, a mighty warrior is what they say you’ll be.”

  “Nobody knows from the height of the boy how tall the man will be,” said Mon. “And I’m the king’s second son. Anybody who envies me is a fool.”

  “It could be worse,” said Edhadeya.

  “So you said.”

  “You could be the king’s daughter.” There was a note of wistfulness in Edhadeya’s voice.

  “Oh, well, if you have to be a girl at all, you might as well be the daughter of the queen,” said Mon.

  “Our mother is dead, you might remember. The queen today is Dudagu poopwad, and don’t you dare forget it for a moment.” The childish term poopwad was translated as the much harsher dermo in the ancient language of the kings, so that the children got a great deal of pleasure from calling their stepmother Dudagu Dermo.

  “Oh, that doesn’t mean anything,” said Mon, “except that poor little Khimin is hopelessly ugly compared to all the rest of Father’s children.” The five-year-old was Dudagu’s eldest and, so far, only child, and though she was constantly wangling to have him named Ha-Khimin in place of Ha-Aron, there was no chance that either Father or the people would stand for replacing Aronha. Mon’s and Edhadeya’s older brother was twelve years old and already had enough of his manheight for people to see he would be a mighty soldier in battle. And he was a natural leader, everyone saw it. Even now, if there was a call to war there was no doubt that Father would put a company of soldiers under Aronha’s command, and those soldiers would proudly serve under the boy who would be king. Mon saw the way others looked at his brother, heard how they spoke of him, and he burned inside. Why did Father continue having sons after Mother gave him the perfect one first?

  The problem was that it was impossible to hate Aronha. The very qualities that made him such a good leader at age twelve also made his brothers and sister love him, too. He never bullied. He rarely teased. He always helped and encouraged them. He was patient with Mon’s moodiness and Edhadeya’s temper and Ominer’s snottiness. He was even kind to Khimin, even though he had to be aware of Dudagu’s schemes to put her son in Aronha’s place. The result, of course, was that Khimin worshipped Aronha. Edhadeya speculated once that perhaps that was Aronha’s plan—to make all his siblings love him desperately so they wouldn’t be plotting against him. “Then the moment he succeeds to the throne—snip, snap, our throats are cut or our necks are broken.”

  Edhadeya only said that because she had been reading family history. It wasn’t always nice. In fact, the first nice king in many generations had been Father’s grandfather, the first Motiak, the one who left the land of Nafai to join with the people of Darakemba. The earlier ones were all bloody-handed tyrants. But maybe that was how it had to be back then, when the Nafai lived in constant warfare. For their survival they couldn’t afford to let there be any disputed successions, any civil wars. So new kings more than once put their siblings to death, along with nieces and nephews and, once, one of them killed his own mother because . . . well, it was impossible to guess why those ancient people did all those terrible things. But old Bego loved telling those stories, and he always ended them with some reference to the fact that the sky people never did such things when they ruled themselves. “The coming of humans was the beginning of evil among the sky people,” he said once.

  To which Aronha had replied, “Ah, so you called the earth people devils as a little jest? Teasing them, I suppose?”

  Bego, as always, took Aronha’s impertinence calmly. “We didn’t let the earth people dwell among us, and set them up as our kings. So their evil could never infect us. It remained outside us, because sky people and devils never dwelt together.”

  If we had never dwelt together, thought Mon, perhaps I wouldn’t spend my days wishing I could fly. Perhaps I would be content to walk along the surface of the earth like a lizard or a snake.

  “Don’t get so serious about it,” said Edhadeya. “Aronha won’t cut anybody’s throat.”

  “I know,” said Mon. “I know you were just teasing.”

  Edhadeya sat beside him. “Mon, do you believe those old stories about our ancestors? About Nafai and Luet? How they could talk to the Oversoul? How Hushidh could look at people and see how they connected together?”

  Mon shrugged. “Maybe it’s true.”

  “Issib and his flying chair, and how he could sometimes fly, too, as long as he was in the land of Pristan.”

  “I wish it were true.”

  “And the magic ball, that you could hold in your hands and ask it questions and it would answer you.”

  Edhadeya was clearly caught up in her own reverie. Mon didn’t look at her, just watched the last of the sun disappear above the distant river. The sparkling of the river also ended when the sun was gone.

  “Mon, do you think Father has that ball? The Index?”

  “I don’t know,” said Mon.

  “Do you think when Aronha turns thirteen and he gets brought into the secrets, Father will show him the Index? And maybe Issib’s chair?”

  “Where would he hide something like that?”

  Edhadeya shook her head. “I don’t know. I’m just wondering why, if they had those wonderful things, we don’t have them anymore.”

  “Maybe we do.”

  “Do you think?” Edhadeya suddenly grew animated. “Mon, do you think that sometimes dreams are true? Because I keep dreaming the same dream. Every night, sometimes twice a night, three times. It feels so real, not like my other dreams. But I’m not a priest or anything. They don’t talk to women anyway. If Mother were alive I could ask her, but I’m not going to Dudagu Dermo.”

  “I know less than anybody,” said Mon.

  “I know,” said Edhadeya.

  “Thanks.”

  “You know less, so you listen more.”

  Mon blushed.

  “Can I tell you my dream?”

  He nodded.

  “I saw a little boy. Ominer’s age. And he had a sister the same age as Khimin.”

  “You find out people’s ages in your dreams?” asked Mon.

  “Hush, woodenhead. They were working in the fields. And they were being beaten. Their parents and all the other people. Starved and beaten. They were so hungry. And the people who were whipping them were diggers. Earth people, I mean.”

  Mon thought about this. “Father would never let diggers rule over us.”

  “But it wasn’t us, don’t you see? They were so real. I saw the boy getting beaten once. But not by diggers, it was by human boys who ruled over the diggers.”

  “Elemaki,” murmured Mon. The evil humans who had joined with the diggers and lived in their dank caves and ate the sky people they kidnapped and murdered.

  “The boys were bigger than him. He was h
ungry and so they tormented him by shoving more food than he could swallow into his mouth until he choked and gagged, and then they rubbed fruit and crumbs all over him and rolled him in the mud and grass so nobody could eat it. It was horrible, and he was so brave and never cried out against them, he just took it with such dignity and I cried for him.”

  “In the dream?”

  “No, when I woke up. I wake up crying. I wake up saying, ‘We’ve got to help them. We’ve got to find them and bring them home.’”

  “We?”

  “Father, I suppose. Us. The Nafari. Because I think those people are Nafari.”

  “So why don’t they send sky people to find us and ask us for help? That’s what people do, when the Elemaki are attacking them.”

  Edhadeya thought about this. “You know something, Mon? There wasn’t a single angel among them.”

  Mon turned to her then. “No sky people at all?”

  “Maybe the diggers killed them all.”

  “Don’t you remember?” he asked. “The people who left back in the days of Father’s grandfather? The ones who hated Darakemba and wanted to go back and possess the land of Nafai again?”

  “Zef . . . ”

  “Zenif,” said Mon. “They said it was wrong for humans and sky people to live together. They didn’t take a single angel with them. It’s them. They’re the ones you dreamed of.”

  “But they were all killed.”

  “We don’t know that. We just know that we never heard from them again.” Mon nodded. “They must still be alive.”

  “So you think it’s a real dream?” asked Edhadeya. “Like the ones Luet had?”

  Mon shrugged. Something bothered him. “Your dream,” he said. “I don’t think it’s exactly about the Zenifi. I mean . . . it just doesn’t feel complete. I think it’s someone else.”

  “Well, how can you know that?” she said. “You’re the one who thought it was the Zenifi.”

  “And it felt right when I said it. But now . . . now there’s just something wrong with it. But you’ve got to tell Father.”