Earthborn (Homecoming) Read Free Page A

of pleasure flutter inside his chest. Pabulog had sent his son to seek him out, because he had been brave as a baby. He remembered attackingthe soldier who was threatening his mother. Until this moment, he had never thought of himself as brave, but now he saw that it was true.
    “Anyway, Nuak was at the point of being murdered by Teonig. They say that Teonig kept demanding that Nuak fight him. But Nuak kept answering, ‘I’m the king! I don’t have to fight you!’ And Teonig kept shouting, ‘Don’t make me shame you by killing you like a dog.’ Nuak fled up to the top of the tower and Teonig was on the point of killing him when the king looked out to the border of the Elemaki country and saw the hugest army of diggers you ever saw, flooding like a storm onto the land. So Teonig let him live, so the king could lead the defense. But instead of a defense, Nuak ordered his army to run so they wouldn’t be destroyed. It was cowardly and shameful, and men like Teonig didn’t obey him.”
    “But your father did,” said Akma.
    “My father had to follow the king. It’s what the priests do,” said Didul. “The king commanded the soldiers to leave their wives and children behind, but Father wouldn’t do it, or at least anyway he took me. Carried me on his back and kept up with the others, even though I wasn’t all that little and he isn’t all that young. So that’s why I was there when the soldiers realized that their wives and children were probably being slaughtered back in the city. So they stripped old Nuak and staked him down and held burning sticks against his skin so he screamed and screamed.” Didul smiled. “You wouldn’t believe how he screamed, the old sausage.”
    It sounded awful even to imagine it. It was frightening that Didul, who could remember having actually seen it, could be so complacent about it.
    “Of course, along about then Father realized that the talk was turning to who else they ought to burn, and the priests would be an obvious target, so Father said a few quiet words in the priest-language and he led us to safety.”
    “Why didn’t you go back to the city? Was it destroyed?”
    “No, but Father says the people there weren’t worthy to have true priests who knew the secret language and the calendar and everything. You know. Reading and writing.”
    Akma was puzzled. “Doesn’t everybody learn how to read and write?”
    Didul suddenly looked angry. “That’s the most terrible thing your father did. Teaching everybody to read and write. All the people who believed his lies and sneaked out of the city to join him, even if they were just
peasants
which they mostly were, even if they were
turkey-herds.
Everybody. He took solemn vows, you know. When he was made a priest. Your father took those vows, never to reveal the secrets of the priesthood to anybody. And then he taught
everybody
.”
    “Father says all the people should be priests.”
    “People? Is that what he says?” Didul laughed. “Not just people, Akma. It isn’t just
people
that he was going to teach to read.”
    Akma imagined his father trying to teach the taskmaster to read. He tried to picture one of the diggers bowed over a book, trying to hold a stylus and make the marks in the wax of the tablets. It made him shudder.
    “Hungry?” asked Didul.
    Akma nodded.
    “Come eat with me and my brothers.” Didul led him into the shade of a copse behind the hill of the commons.
    Akma knew the place—until the diggers came and enslaved them, it was the place where Mother used to gather the children to teach them and play quiet games with them while Father taught the adults at the hill. It gave him a strange feeling to see a large basket of fruit and cakes and a cask of wine there, with diggers serving the food to three humans. Diggers didn’t belong in that place where his mother had led the children in play.
    But the humans did. Or rather, they would belong wherever they were. One was little, barely as old as Akma.