The girl kept to herself more than ever after that. She hadn’t ever encouraged her classmates’ cult of hero worship, but now she repelled all advances with deliberate rudeness. She wanted no more deaths queuing up at the gates of her conscience, no matter how strongly those gates were defended.
She endured. She won out. She took all that her teachers could give her, internalised it, and like a spider gave it back as a single thread of woven silk. Only the oldest teacher, Rithuel, who taught some of the psychology classes, gave her a less than exemplary mark. In fact, he gave her a fail. When the girl sought him out to ask him why, he was blunt but – to the girl’s mind – enigmatic.
‘To make you pause,’ was all he said.
‘To make me pause in what?’ she demanded.
Rithuel opened his palms and held them out to her, empty. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted.
‘Then—’
‘Inaction can be as important as action. The pause before you act is filled with many things, and one of them is truth.’
‘But I didn’t fail your tests,’ the girl protested. ‘I answered every question. I don’t believe I made any significant errors.’
‘You made no errors at all. That was precisely what troubled me. I think it may help you, some day, to know that you’re not perfect. To be so close to perfect can sometimes be a dangerous thing. Dangerous for the soul, I mean.’
And there was yet one more test, one about which all the students exchanged wild rumours, empty speculation and tasteless jokes. It would come when they least expected it, the students mostly agreed. And you could fail it by a single word or movement out of place.
One evening, after eating her evening meal in the refectory, the girl was sought out by a runner who said that Ushana was waiting for her in the gymnasium. When she got there, she found the teacher waiting in the dark. At her feet there knelt a man – a boy, rather. His hands and feet had been fastened with short lengths of chain to the tallest of the vaulting horses, where iron rings had been set – presumably, the girl now realised, for this purpose. The boy was her own age, but with the white-blond hair almost never seen among the People. He was slightly overweight, and dressed outlandishly in short trousers and a sleeveless tunic that bore the meaningless legend HOME-BREWED FOR FULLER FLAVOUR! He was terrified, the marks of recent tears on his cheeks.
The girl knew at once what was expected of her, but she said nothing. She presented herself to her teacher with a respectful bow, ignoring the boy utterly, until Ushana nodded in his direction. ‘That is Ronald Stephen Pinkus,’ she said. ‘Say hello to him, in his own language.’
‘What is his language,
Tannanu
?’ the girl asked. She knew better than to assume that the boy spoke English, just because that was the language of the words on his shirt.
‘English,’ Ushana said. There was approval in her tone.
The girl turned. ‘Good evening to you, Ronald Stephen Pinkus,’ she said.
The boy’s face underwent a convulsion of surprise and hope. ‘Shit,’ he yelped. ‘You speak English! Oh, thank God! Listen, there’s been some kind of a mistake. They think I’m someone else, but I’m not anybody. They took me right off the street, and it’s like – I don’t know. I don’t know what they want.’
The girl turned from him again, looked to Ushana.
‘Kill him,’ Ushana said.
The girl bowed her head in acquiescence, but she didn’t move. She wanted to be sure. ‘For what crime?’ she asked.
The boy had no idea what was being said. He looked from her to Ushana and back again. Perhaps he thought that she was passing on what he’d said to her.
‘For no crime. Kill him because I tell you to.’
And she did. With her bare hands, because no weapon had been specified. Afterwards, though she wept, she wept in silence, and nobody in the dormitory had any inkling of it.
Ronald Stephen Pinkus was not of the People. It was wrong to cry for him, and it was shaming. Next time, she promised herself, she would do better.
And so, in due course, she was sent back to Kuutma, with a note from her teachers that was notable for its brevity: ‘She’s ready.’
He welcomed her with a fatherly embrace, expressing great satisfaction in her accomplishments. The girl thanked him graciously. Neither of them mentioned the mark that Rithuel had given her for psychology, and so she was saved from the necessity of criticising one of her teachers.
Kuutma gave her fresh fruit and water spiced with cloves and cinnamon. He offered her wine, too, but the girl wasn’t fond of wine. Alcohol interfered with her body’s uptake of kelalit, slowing it down unpredictably.
They sat in companionable silence for a while, in the same room in which they had met, three years before.
That meeting was on Kuutma’s mind, too. ‘I told you once that I had a plan for you,’ he said to her. ‘It’s time, now, for that plan to be put into effect.’
The girl experienced a moment of very pleasurable disorientation, a shifting of her mental perspectives sudden enough to induce mild vertigo. If Kuutma had summoned her here to command her into action, then she was now a Messenger. Those simple words were her graduation ceremony, her induction into the ranks of his
Elohim
.
‘I’m ready,’ she said.
‘Good.’ He filled her glass with water, then his own. The wine, it seemed, had been brought only in case she wanted it. ‘But you need to know that this is an unusual assignment – an unusual situation, in every respect – and you’ll be within your rights to refuse it.’
The girl nodded. She wondered what Kuutma could possibly ask of her, in the name of the city and the People, that she would refuse – or would even hesitate before accepting.
‘You know that one of the elders has left us. An elder, I should say, in name only. He is younger than me, in fact.’
‘Yes,’ the girl said. And then, ‘Of course.’
‘He was the
Yedimah
,’ Kuutma said. ‘The Seed. The one who, in the sittings of the Sima, is deputed to look to the future and argue in favour of change. But he has forfeited that position, of course, and the name. He is who he was. Avra Shekolni.
‘Shekolni took his writ too far with the rest of the Council of Elders, bringing into question the most profound and sacred of the principles by which we live. His premise, essentially, was that the People have misinterpreted the nature of the bargain God made with us – that our entire way of life is founded on a misunderstanding. God promised us the Earth, Shekolni said, but He didn’t promise to deliver it to us: He expected us to take action ourselves to accomplish His will. You see the problem with this position, sister?’
The girl did, and said so.
‘Then expound it for me.’
‘The Adamites outnumber us by many thousands to one. And their history is one of uninterrupted war, so their weapons are advanced far beyond anything we can match. That’s why we hide. If we tried to fight, we couldn’t possibly win. So we wait. We wait for God’s judgement.’
‘An excellent summary,’ said Kuutma. ‘And the council spoke to Shekolni in that wise, seeking to correct his thinking. But, as you know, he wouldn’t take correction. He was expelled from the Sima. And then he left Ginat’Dania itself. It’s not known how he was able to get out of the city without sanction or permission, but it’s certain that he did. We’ve searched far and wide for him since, but found no trace.’
The girl nodded, but didn’t speak. She would ask questions only if she was invited to.
‘Bad as this was,’ Kuutma went on, ‘we now know that there is worse. Shekolni made contact, out among the Nations, with a Messenger – or rather a Summoner, a commander of Messengers – who seems to share his unsanctioned views. The commander in question, Ber Lusim, was a great man in his time – so formidable, and I might venture to say, so cruel a warrior that he was sometimes called, by those who knew him, the Demon. The previous Kuutma relied on him absolutely. But then, perhaps ten years ago, Lusim fell into disgrace. He failed in his sacred duties. There were deaths – from among our number, not Adamite deaths – that could have been avoided.
‘The old Kuutma called Ber Lusim back so that he could be punished, but he refused to come. When Messengers were sent to recall him, he disappeared. It was only then that we realised how strong a cult of personality had grown up around him – for a great many Messengers who knew him and had sojourned with him among the Nations now followed him into exile. They dropped from our radar – went native, we thought, although if anything the truth seems to be the opposite of that. They hold themselves aloof, still, from the Adamites, even though they’ve foresworn all contact with the People and with Ginat’Dania. Theirs must be an intolerably lonely existence.
‘But somehow, as I said, Avra Shekolni found Ber Lusim. At first this was only a guess: Shekolni disappeared so completely, we theorised that he must have had help. Then Ber Lusim contacted us himself and said that Shekolni had been sent to him and his followers by God – and he thanked us for being instrumental in the forwarding of that gift. He warned us not to look for Shekolni and he told us – I quote exactly – to hold ourselves ready for judgement.’
Kuutma paused for a moment and took a sip of his water. He swirled it in his mouth, as though trying to rid himself of a sour taste. Then he swallowed.
‘I sent a reply to Ber Lusim,’ he said, in a low voice. ‘Or at least, I sent forth one of my
Elohim
at a time and in a place where I guessed – correctly – that Ber Lusim would be sure to intercept him. I warned Lusim that Shekolni was a heretic. And I urged him to come back into Ginat’Dania, among the People, where he belongs.’
‘He ignored the summons,’ the girl guessed.
‘Yes, he did. But more. This will distress you, sister. Remember that God ordains all things and brings forth good from evil. Ber Lusim scarred the face of my emissary with blades and hot irons, making him so hideous that all who saw him flinched and looked away. Branding my servant in this way was an insult aimed at me. This innocent man’s face was only the paper on which Lusim chose to write his message.’
The girl was inured to violence, but this still shocked her to the core. Her stomach convulsed and her gorge rose sour in her throat. She missed some of Kuutma’s words as she struggled to regain her equanimity.
‘—of course impossible, now, for that man to go back out into the world. He was forced to forsake his calling. And beyond that, the shame is very great. He’s asked leave to kill himself, but I’ve told him to reflect a little and to spend time with family and friends. I hope that will be enough to draw him back into the normal business of life, which has an enormous healing power in itself.’
‘This Ber Lusim is a monster,’ the girl said, her throat still tight and sore from the acid she’d forced back down.
‘Perhaps.’ Kuutma sighed heavily. ‘After this atrocity, we spoke the
hrach bishat
, the execration, over him. As you know, that curse was once reserved for those thought to be possessed. It meant that Ber Lusim was henceforward to be considered a demon, rather than a man. He had finally earned the title that had already been accorded him.’ Kuutma seemed to hesitate. ‘Tell me, little sister, when you were growing up, in the orphan house, did you ever experience cruelty, or discrimination, on account of your origins?’
The girl stared at him, false-footed by the sudden change of topic. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, at last. And then, ‘That was a long time ago.’
‘The other children called you names?’
The girl thought back. Yes, of course they had, but it had meant very little. It was the teacher-nurses who’d hurt her, by their coldness and contempt. Until she learned to find the place inside herself that they couldn’t touch – and to love colour and tone and texture and pattern more than she loved people.
‘What did they call you?’ Kuutma asked.
‘It was a long time ago,’ the girl said again.
‘But you remember, I’m sure,’ he prompted her.
‘They called me bastard.’ And mixer, by-blow, whore-sore, bleed, drop-in, mongrel,
Kelim
-fart, crossbreed, Adam’s apple. A hundred things, all variations on the same thing.
Your mother went out into the world and spread her legs, waited for some passer-by to impregnate her, and now here you are
.
‘Ber Lusim was also the child of a
Kelim
woman. It may be that the abuse he suffered as a result was what hardened his heart against the
Kelim
.’
Kuutma raised his glass, as though to take another sip of his water, but then merely stared into it, and for the longest time said nothing.
‘Perhaps Shekolni was right, in one respect,’ he murmured at last. ‘Change … change may come to us, whether we want it or not. I’m not even sure that this would be a bad thing. Stagnation is possibly our worst enemy at this point. Stagnation and decadence.’
He shook off the sombre mood with a visible effort, looked at the girl and raised the glass a little higher in a salute. ‘I shouldn’t speak this way,’ he said, ‘on this day of your triumph. I’ve watched you through your training. I don’t know if you were aware of that?’
She was very well aware, of course, but she made some modest disclaimer.
‘Yes,’ Kuutma said. ‘I’ve watched you and I’ve been pleased. Proud. Delighted. You’ve suffered all that’s worst in us, and you embody all that’s best. I hope to live to see you rise to the heights you deserve.’
The girl was uncomfortable with so much praise. ‘What am I to do?’ she asked, both as a way of changing the subject and because she was desperate to know.
‘I’m sending you against Avra Shekolni and Ber Lusim,’ Kuutma said simply. ‘I want you to find out how many men now follow them, and where they are, and what they’re doing.’
‘And bring them home to be judged?’
‘No.’ Kuutma shook his head. There was a sheen of sweat on his bald forehead, which made it gleam even in the room’s dim light. ‘Or at least, not immediately. Ber Lusim is a formidable opponent in his own right, and we don’t know for certain how many others stand with him. You could scarcely hope to prevail against them alone. Consider how you would be handicapped, in any such meeting. Consider how little you could hope to achieve.’