The Necessary Beggar Read Free Page B

told her she could cry if she wanted to, that no one would laugh at her. But she hadn’t felt like crying, not then. She had felt like being very quiet.
    That had been after the first Family Council, where the adults had had long, worried discussions of how best to go into exile. Most of the time, Family Councils were about boring things like how much rice to buy or what color the new curtains should be, and children weren’t included. But everyone was included this time, because what had happened was so important, and would affect them all forever.
    And so the family gathered in their inner courtyard, and sat on the ground in a circle, and drank tea, and tried to plan. They were having the finest weather of the year, with clear skies and warm breezes. Small lizards basked on the walls, among the honeysuckle vines, and hummingbirds hovered above the sweet blossoms, drinking the nectar. Zamatryna tried very hard to pay attention, although she would rather have been playing with her pet beetles or memorizing a poem. She had been working on learning the Epic of Emeliafa , the woman who had first learned to plant gardens. She loved the poem, with its vivid descriptions of loam and weeds and the first tender green shoots of the pea plants.
    She forced herself to mind the grown-ups, but as hard as she listened, exile was far more difficult to imagine than Emeliafa’s first harvest of lettuce. The family would be living somewhere else, but no one knew where, and Zamatryna, who had been born and lived her entire life in this house, tried to think what it would mean. Would it be like being at her friend Lalli’s house? Would it be like playing hide-and-seek under Grandfather’s carpet stall in the Great Market, except that you would live there forever?
    But every time she asked a question, the adults said only, “We don’t know,” and she grew more and more confused. No one who had been in exile could report back to advise how it should be done. The Judges said that no two Other Worlds were the same, although they promised that all were habitable, an infinity of welcomes. There was no way to plan a life in a place you couldn’t picture, but the family had to try. And because they did not know where they were going, knew only what they were leaving, the Councils turned into endless discussions of what they should bring with them.
    Zamatryna’s father, Erolorit, wanted to shield his brother Darroti from any further shame. He favored wearing their best things, so that wherever
they arrived, the people there would think they were just visitors on vacation, rather than the family of a criminal sent into disgrace. “But we will not be on vacation,” Grandfather Timbor had pointed out quietly. “We will be in exile. And we do not know if there will be other people there at all. So we had best bring what we will need to live.”
    â€œBut then we will look like Mendicants,” Uncle Macsofo had said, frowning. “We will be claiming a position of honor we do not have, and—”
    Grandfather Timbor stopped him with a raised hand. “We will be Mendicants in fact. It will be no pretense. We will need to ask for many things to live in this other place, if there are people there to ask at all. And if there are not, we must bring as much as we can of what we would ask other people to give us.”
    Macsofo still looked worried. “It does not seem right. It seems a mockery to act as if we are Mendicants ourselves. We are going there because a Mendicant is dead now.”
    At which Auntie Aliniana let out a little wail, and Uncle Darroti—who had not stopped weeping since the fragrant dawn when the City Guard had found him, clutching a bloody knife and swaying over the fallen body of the Mendicant woman—gave a low moan, the whimper of an animal in pain. Zamatryna’s mother, Harani, put a hand on his arm and said gently, “We have to be able to talk about this,