Children of God s-2 Page 7

  Like most females of her caste, Jholaa Kitheri had been kept catastrophically ignorant, but she was not stupid. Allowed to see nothing of genuine importance, she was keenly observant of emotional minutiae— astute enough to wonder, even as a girl, if it was malice or simply thoughtless cruelty when, at her father’s whim, she was allowed beyond her chamber and permitted to recline silently on silken cushions in a dim corner of an awninged courtyard during some minor state gathering. But even on those rare occasions, no one came near or even glanced in her direction.

  "I might as well be made of glass or wind or time," Jholaa had cried out at this indifference when she was only ten. "Srokan, I exist! Why does no one see me?"

  "They do not see my most beautiful lady because she has the glory of the moons in her!" her Runa nursemaid said, hoping to distract the child. "Your people cannot look upon the moons, which live in truest night. Only Runa like your poor Srokan can see such things, and love them."

  "Then I shall look upon what the others cannot," Jholaa declared that day, shaking off Srokan’s embrace, and gave herself the task of staying awake past second sundown, and then past the setting of Rakhat’s third and smallest sun, to see for herself these glorious moons.

  There was no one to deny her this, no bar to her ambition except the powerful drowsiness of childhood and of species. It was as frightening as anything a Jana’ata could do, but Srokan was there in the courtyard with her, telling stories and sharing gossip, her fine hands stroking Jholaa: calming the girl as she lost sight first of blues and next of yellows, contrast fading to a gray lightlessness and then to a dense darkness as confining as an aristocratic woman’s life. The only things that staved off blind panic were Srokan’s voice and the comforting familiar scents of nursery bedding and incense, and the aroma of roasted meat lingering in the air.

  Suddenly, Srokan gripped Jholaa’s arms and lifted her to her feet. "There! The clouds have run away and there they are!" she whispered urgently, holding Jholaa’s head so that the girl would look in the right direction—so she could see, like small cold suns, the glowing disks: moons in inky blackness, beautiful and remote as mountain snow.

  "There are other things in the night sky," Srokan told her. "Daughters of the moons! Tiny sparkling babies." Jana’ata eyes were not made to see such things and Jholaa could only accept her nurse’s word that this was so, and not some silly Runa story.

  This was the only memorable event of her childhood.

  For a time, Jholaa shared isolation with the Kitheri Reshtar, her third-born brother, Hlavin. His title meant "spare," and like Jholaa, Hlavin’s purpose was simply to exist, ready to transmit the patrimony should either of their elder brothers come to nothing. Hlavin was the only one aside from Srokan who noticed Jholaa, telling her stories and amusing her with secret songs, even though he was beaten for singing when his tutor caught him at it. Who but Hlavin could have made her laugh as the wives of Dherai and Bhansaar filled nurseries with children who displaced Hlavin and Jholaa in the Kitheri succession? Who but Hlavin would have cried out for her, moved to keening by her story of the moons, and by her confession that as each new niece and nephew was born, Jholaa herself felt more and more like a moon child: invisible to her own people, sparkling, undreamt of, in the darkness.

  Then Dherai’s own Reshtar was born, and then Bhansaar’s; the succession was deemed stable, and Hlavin was taken from her, exiled to the port of Gayjur to safeguard his nephews’ lives from a young uncle’s frustrated ambition. Even in exile, Hlavin found a way to sing to her, and sent Jholaa a radio receiver so that she could hear her own words about the moons’ daughters, riding on waves as invisible as stars, woven into a transcendent cantata sung during his first broadcast from Galatna Palace, which was allowed because he did not sing the traditional chants that belonged to those born first or second, but something new and wholly other.

  The concert left Jholaa angry, somehow, as if her words had been stolen from her, not given as a gift. When the music ended, she swept the radio from its pedestal, as though it were to blame. "Where is Galatna?" she de- manded as Srokan bent to gather the wreckage.

  "It is set like a jewel, on a mountain above the city of Gayjur, and that is by an ocean, my lady," Srokan told her. Srokan looked up, her blue eyes wide. "So much water, you can stand on its edge and look-look as far as you can, but there’s no end to it!"

  "You lie. There’s no such thing as water like that. All Runa lie. You’d kill us if you could," Jholaa said with flat contempt, old enough, by then, to know a master’s fear.

  "Nonsense, little one!" Srokan cried with good-natured surprise. "Why, Jana’ata sleep away the red sun’s time and true night, and no one harms you! This devoted one does not lie to her darling mistress. The moons were real, my lady. The ocean is real! Its water tastes of salt, and its air is of a scent no landsman knows!"

  Resentment was, by then, the only leavening that could lift Jholaa from the torpor that immobilized her for days at a time. She had come to hate the luckless Runa domestics who were her only companions, despising their ability to go into the world, the shameless sluts, unveiled and unguarded, to see oceans and breathe scents Jholaa would never know. Holding an elegant claw to Srokan’s ear, Jholaa began to peel it from the woman’s head, relenting only when the Runao admitted she had not seen or tasted this ocean herself and had only heard stories from the kitchen help, who came from the south. Hlavin would have told her the truth of the ocean, but he was lost to her, so Jholaa allowed her nursemaid’s shaking hands to stroke and soothe her, and breathed in the salt scent of blood, not ocean.

  Later that night, as Jholaa lay blind in the dark, useless light of Rakhat’s small, red sun, she decided to execute Srokan for thinking how she might murder Jana’ata in their sleep, and to have the woman’s children killed as well, to clear the line.

  Srokan was old anyway. Stew meat, Jholaa thought dismissively.

  Which was why there was no one to warn Jholaa or to prepare her for what would happen after her wedding: her domestics were frightened of her and none had the courage to explain why they were dressing her for a state ceremony. But Jholaa was used to being displayed on such occasions, and was not surprised to find herself taken to a stateroom filled with dazzlingly decorated officials and all her male relatives, who continued to chant, as though she were not there.

  She stood quietly through the endless ceremonial declamations; these events tended to go on for days, and she had long since given up listening carefully. But when she heard her own name sung, she began to pay attention, and then she recognized the melody that sealed a marriage, and realized that she’d just been legally bound to a man whose lineal name she’d never heard before. Eyes wide behind her jewel-encrusted veil of gold mesh, she turned to ask someone—anyone—if she were being sent to another country, but before she could speak, her father and brothers surrounded her and moved Jholaa to the center of the room.

  Her Runa maids reappeared and, when they began to remove her robes, Jholaa spoke up, demanding to know what was happening, but the men only laughed. Furious now and frightened, she tried to cover herself, but then the man whose name she could not quite remember came so close she could smell him, and dropped his own robe off his shoulders and he—. He did not merely look at her, but moved behind her and gripped her ankles and—

  She fought, but her screams and struggle were drowned by the wedding guests’ roars of amusement and approval. Afterward, she heard her father comment with chuckling pride to the others, "A virgin! No one could deny it after all that!" To which her eldest brother replied, "Almost as much of a fighter as that outlandish foreigner Hlavin and his friends use…"

  When it was over, she was taken through a courtyard made festive for the occasion to a small shuttered room where she sat, ripped and bewildered, and listened to poetry sung in honor of the fourth-born Jholaa Kitheri u Darjan: against all odds, bred to a third-born merchant who would never have sired a child at all but for the foreign servant Sandoz. And when at
last Jholaa bore that child, its lineage was unquestionable; this was, she came to understand, the only reason for her own existence.

  A similar fate, she believed, was all that awaited her daughter. The lady Jholaa never looked at her infant, after the first moments of its life, when she got a hand loose from the midwife’s grip and tried to slash the child’s throat, from pity and disgust. Later, when her brother Dherai appeared briefly in her room to tell her that the infant was deformed, Jholaa did not care.

  "Kill it then," was all she said, and wished someone had done the same for her.

  6

  Naples

  September 2060

  IT HAD TAKEN HOURS TO CALM DOWN AFTER THE POPE’S VISIT, AND Emilio Sandoz had only just fallen asleep when the knocking startled him half out of his bed. "God! What now?" he cried, falling back against the pillow again. Prone and exhausted, he shut his eyes resolutely and shouted, "Go away!"

  "I hope you’re talking to God," a familiar voice called, "because I’m not going back to Chicago."

  "John?" Sandoz bolted out of bed and pushed open the tall wooden shutters with his elbows. "Candotti!" he said, astonished, head stuck out the dormer window. "I thought they sent you home after the hearings!"

  "They did. Now they’ve sent me back." Grinning up at him, John Candotti stood on the driveway, long bony arms wrapped around a paperplast box, Roman nose making a sundial of his half-bald head in the late afternoon light. "What is this? I gotta be the Pope to get invited in?"

  Sandoz slumped over the windowsill, elbows on the wood, nerveless fingers dangling like stems of sta’aka ivy from his wrists. "Come on up," he sighed with theatrical resignation. "The door’s open."

  "So! El Cahuna Grande tells me you just interviewed the Holy Father for a research assistantship," John called, trudging up the stairs and ducking under a doorway that Emilio—head and shoulders shorter—had never noticed was low. "Nice play, Sandoz. Very slick."

  "Thank you so much for pointing that out," Emilio said, his English suddenly more Long Island than Puerto Rico. He was bent over the little table, putting the braces on. "Now why don’t you give me a nice paper cut and pour some lemon juice in it?"

  "Billy Crystal. Princess Bride," John said promptly, putting the box down in a corner. "You need some new material, man. Did you watch any of those comedies I suggested?"

  "Yeah. I liked that Dutch one, East of Edam, best. No Sign of Life was good, too. I don’t get the jokes in the newer stuff. Anyway," he cried, indignant now, "how was I supposed to know who the Pope was? Some old guy shows up at my doorstep—"

  "If you’d taken my advice," John said with the thin patience of an exasperated seminary admonitor, "you would have gotten the jokes. And you would have recognized the effing Pope when he came to meet you!" Sandoz ignored him, as he had ignored the forty-year hole in his awareness of recent history, too sick to care at first and now simply refusing to acknowledge it. "Do you have any idea how important it was that Gelasius came to us? I told you—it’s time for you to catch up on things! But do you ever listen to me? No!"

  And you aren’t listening now, John realized, watching him. Emilio had gotten better at putting the braces on by himself in the past two months, but the procedure still took a fair amount of concentration.

  "— and Giuliani just stands there, letting me dig the hole!" Sandoz was muttering as he pulled each hand into an open brace and then rocked the atrophied forearms outward to toggle the switches. There was a quiet whirring noise as the flat straps and electronic hardware closed over his fingers, wrists and forearms. He straightened. "One of these days, John, I would really love to sandbag that sonofabitch."

  "Good luck," John said. "Personally, I think the Cubs have a better chance at winning the World Series."

  They sat at the table, Sandoz slouching into the chair nearest the kitchen and John taking the Pope’s seat opposite him. Glancing around the room as they traded lines from East of Edam and Back Streets and a couple of old Mimi Jensen flicks, John took in the bed, the socks on the floor, the dishes in the sink, and then stared suspiciously at Emilio, rumpled and unshaven. Sandoz was ordinarily meticulous, the black-and-silver hair brushed, the conquistador beard closely trimmed, his clothes spotless. John had expected the apartment to be immaculate. "All spiritual enlightenment begins with a neatly made bed," Candotti intoned, waving broadly at the mess. He frowned at Emilio. "You look like shit. When’s the last time you got any sleep?"

  "About fifteen minutes ago. Then some pain-in-the-ass old friend came by and woke me up. You want coffee or something?" Emilio rose and went to the tiny kitchen, where he opened the cupboard and pulled out the beans, making himself busy with his back to Candotti.

  "No. Sit down. Don’t change the subject. When did you sleep before that?"

  "Memory fails." Sandoz put the coffee back, banging the cupboard door, and sank into the chair across the table again. "Don’t mother me, John. I hate it."

  "Giuliani said your hands were giving you hell," John persisted. "I don’t get this. They’re healed!" he cried, gesturing at them accusingly. "Why do they still hurt?"

  "Dead nerves, I am reliably informed, confuse the central nervous system," Sandoz said with a sudden acid vivacity. "My brain becomes alarmed because it hasn’t heard from my hands in a long time. It thinks they might be in some kind of trouble so, like a pain-in-the-ass old friend, it calls attention to the situation by giving me a lot of crap!" Sandoz stared out the window for a moment, getting a grip on himself, and then glanced at John, who sat impassively, a veteran of these outbursts. "I’m sorry. The pain wears me out, okay? It comes and it goes, but sometimes…"

  John waited a moment, and then finished the sentence for him. "Sometimes when it comes, you’re afraid it will never go."

  Emilio didn’t agree, but he didn’t deny it either. "The redemptive power of suffering is, in my experience at least, vastly overrated."

  "Too Franciscan for me," John agreed. Emilio laughed, and John knew if you could get Sandoz to laugh, you were halfway home. "How long this time?" he asked.

  Sandoz shrugged the question off, eyes sliding away. "It’s better if I’m working. Concentrating on something usually helps." He glanced at John. "I’m okay now."

  "But beat down to your feet. Right," John said, "I’ll let you get some rest." He slapped his hands on his thighs and stood, but rather than leave, he went to the sound-analysis gear along the gable wall opposite the stairway. Curious, he looked it over and then spoke casually. "I just wanted to check in with my new boss—unless, of course, you already hired the Pope."

  Sandoz closed his eyes and twisted in the chair so he could stare over his shoulder at John. "Excuse me?"

  John turned, grinning, but his smile disappeared when he saw Emilio’s face. "You said you wanted someone who spoke Magyar. And English or Latin or Spanish. My Latin is pretty feeble," John admitted, faltering under the chilly gaze. "Even so, I’m four for four. And I’m all yours. If you want me."

  "You’re joking," Emilio said flatly. "Don’t fuck with me, John."

  "Sixteen languages to choose from and that’s the kind you use? Listen, I’m not a linguist, but I know my way around systems and I’m educable," John said defensively. "My mom’s parents were from Budapest. Gramma Toth took care of me after school. My Magyar is actually nicer than my English. Gram was a poet in the old country and—"

  Sandoz, by this time, was shaking his head, not sure whether to laugh or to cry. "John, John. You don’t have to convince me. It’s only—" Only that he had missed Candotti. Only that he needed help but hated asking for it, needed colleagues but dreaded breaking in someone new. Father John Candotti, whose great gift as a priest was to forgive, had heard everything—and still, somehow, failed to despise or pity him. Emilio’s voice was mercifully steady when he found it. "It’s only that I thought there had to be a catch. I haven’t had much practice at receiving good news lately."

  "No catch," John declared confidently, for his life had not ta
ught him to brace for the unexpected blow. He headed toward the stairway down to the garage level. "When can I start?"

  "Right away, as far as I’m concerned. But use the library system, okay? I am going to bed," Sandoz announced as firmly as he could around a huge yawn. "If I am still sleeping in October, as I devoutly hope I shall be, you have my permission to wake me up. In the meantime, you can begin with the instructional program for Ruanja — Giuliani’s got the lock codes. But wait until I can help you with the K’San files. It’s a bitch of a language, John." He put his left hand on the tabletop, rocking the arm outward to unhinge the braces, then froze, struck by a thought. "Jesus," he said. "Is Giuliani sending you out with the next bunch?"

  There was a long silence. "Yeah," John said. "Looks like it."

  "And you’re willing to go?"

  John nodded, eyes serious. "Yes. Yes, I am."

  Breaking out of the paralysis, Emilio fell back against his chair and quoted Ignatius with brittle grandiosity. "Ready to move at a moment’s notice, with your breastplate buckled."

  "If I die on Rakhat," John said solemnly, "I ask only that my body be returned for burial in Chicago, where I can continue to participate—"

  "— in Democratic party politics!" Emilio finished with him. He snorted a laugh, and shook his head. "Well, you know not to eat the meat. And you’re big. You may have a fighting chance if some godforsaken Jana’ata takes a fancy to you."

  "I guess that’s what Giuliani thinks, too. If I bulk up a little, we’ve got the makings of a pretty decent NFL offense. The other guys are huge."

  "So you’ve met them already?"

  "Just the Jebs, not the civilians," John said, rejoining him at the table. "The father superior’s a guy named Danny Iron Horse—"

  "Lakota?" Sandoz asked.

  "Partly—French and Swedish, too, he says, and he’s kind of sensitive about it. Apparently, the Lakota side of the family’s been off the rez for about four generations, and he’s pretty tired of people expecting him to wear feathers and speak without contractions, you know?"