The Lawgivers: Gabriel (23 page)

Gah-re-al hesitated, but he was
convinced Lexa was descended from the builders. He still doubted
the majority of the humans—if any—were, but Lexa was different and
it went beyond the unusual coloring. She’d risked her life to help
him when he’d been attacked by the cougar. That wasn’t something
someone completely focused on their own survival would have done.
They would’ve run in the hope that he would keep the cat occupied
long enough for them to escape, he thought wryly. She had the
nobility of spirit one expected of a higher race. “Your
people.”

Lexa sent him a disbelieving
look.

Gah-re-al shrugged. “At least that’s
what my people believe—the khabler. The word in your language was
archeologist. They study ancient cultures by digging up and
examining what they’ve left behind. It’s been … difficult to put
together the civilization that built these cities we’ve found—very
few remains of the inhabitants. The skeletal remains they have
found were definitely human, but there’s no way to say with
absolute certainty whether they were the people that lived here or
….” He broke off. Her people had become scavengers if they really
were descendants of the original inhabitants. The ‘villages’ where
he’d found all of those he’d found thus far were like the one below
them—built long before the people that now occupied them and
crumbling to dust around them.

Lexa frowned. “But you don’t believe
it?”

He shrugged. “You tell me. Did your
people build these cities? And if so, how is it that no one seems
to remember? Or to remember how to do any of the things that your
people once knew how to do?”

A mixture of shame and resentment
flickered through Lexa. She wasn’t completely certain of why beyond
the fact that it seemed that Gabriel thought they were too
primitive and backwards to ever have done anything like—or even
close to—what his people had.

It seemed to her that he—probably all
of his people—just wanted to see her people as beneath them. Why?
So they felt justified in taking over what didn’t belong to
them?

Despite her resentment, images
flickered through her mind of the village the people at the
encampment had come from. It hadn’t looked much different from any
other village she’d seen in her wanderings and, with great
reluctance, it struck her that they were a sad, sorry
lot.

Why had no one gone back to the great
cities they’d built, she wondered abruptly? How had they sunk so
low?

The olders like Sir had to have
remembered many things from before.

But then it was a rare thing to see
olders, she realized, and even Sir hadn’t been able to do many of
the things he remembered from before. He’d said his garden didn’t
grow well because the earth wasn’t the same, and maybe that was
true and why no one had been able to make things like before? Maybe
it was because the ones who should have remembered had forgotten?
And maybe it was just because everyone was too busy trying to stay
alive to do anything else?

“Would you like to see more? It’s safe
enough.”

She wanted to. At the same time, it
made her feel strangely sad, and afraid, and ashamed. Finally, she
nodded, though, her curiosity overcoming her reluctance.

That time when Gabriel held her tightly
and flew down to the hard street below them she scarcely noticed
the discomfort. She was too busy trying to see what was below her
for a change.

The street, she saw when Gabriel alit,
was the hard, black ribbon Sir had described—sort of. The black
rock was fractured all over, like the surface of a frozen pond and
there were great pits and small pits everywhere. As she stared into
the distance, though, she could see that it did look the way he’d
described it—wide and very long, seeming to go on
forever.

It was even filled with the things Sir
had described as cars. At least, that was what she thought they
must be even though they were mostly crushed and flattened. On
either side, there were tall buildings like he’d described,
too.

It had to be ‘the city’! Sir had said
it was a very long way from their farm.

She’d thought of it as a story when she
was a child and he’d told them about it—something magical and
fanciful and not really real. When she’d grown up, she’d decided
that must have been what the stories were, something he’d made up
to entertain them because she had walked a very long way and she’d
never seen anything like the place he described—not
before.

This was real, though, and if it was
real and Sir had seen it when he was a child then it was their
people who’d built it!

Maybe.

What if it was just that his parents
had found a place like this and taken him there?

“Sir saw ‘the city’ when he was a
child,” she said after a while. “He described it to us.”

“What was the city called?”

Lexa blinked at him blankly. “The
city.”

He frowned. “You said your father saw
it? Not your mother?”

Uneasiness flickered through Lexa. She
always felt uneasy when he questioned her. She wasn’t certain why
it made her feel threatened somehow, but she didn’t know why he
wanted to know the things he asked and it was the possibility that
it was ‘wrong’ to tell him that made her uncomfortable. “I don’t
think so,” she finally admitted reluctantly. “She was born before,
I think, but she didn’t talk about it like Sir.”

“So your father was older than your
mother?”

“I guess. He was a long
beard.”

“A what?”

“The boys—the human boys—they have hair
on their faces. It grows and mostly they let it so it gets very
long. Sir’s had no color, like the hair on his head. I never seen
many with hair with no color like his.” She frowned. “Some of
Ralph’s hair was like Sir’s—no color—and some … yellow. He was a
long beard, too, but his wasn’t as long.”

They walked in silence for a time,
peering into the gaping holes of dark, cave-like buildings they
passed—those that seemed relatively whole. There was a good deal of
rubble piled in places that were nearly as high as a mountain. When
they paused at the intersection of two streets, Gah-re-al reached
out and lightly ran a hand along a lock of Lexa’s hair. “This hair
… did you get it from your mother? Or your father?”

Lexa blinked at him. “It’s my
hair.”

He chuckled. “Was your mother’s hair
this color?”

She shook her head. “It was dark like
yours but not as dark.”

“Then your father.”

“His hair was no color.”

“The man who fathered you,” Gah-re-al
clarified.

Lexa frowned. “Mother never talked
about him.”

He shook his head. “Children usually
look like one parent or the other … or sometimes like both. The
color of the hair and eyes and skin. The shape of the facial
features ….”

Lexa shrugged. “I don’t know. I can’t
see my face.”

A jolt of surprise went through
Gah-re-al. It hadn’t occurred to him that she might not know what
her own face looked like, but he realized, then, that there were
few reflective surfaces where she might have seen her face and
those that did reflect also distorted.

“You look like your parents?” she asked
curiously.

That question sent another unpleasant
jolt through him because it was nearly as unexpected as the comment
before and he hadn’t had time to brace for it. He shrugged. “My
mother died at my birth and … I never knew my father.”

The sympathy in Lexa’s gaze discomfited
him. “That’s … that makes me feel sad. My babies died and I cried
for them because I never got to know them or got the chance to love
them and know their love. How sad for you and your mother. She
missed so much.”

Gah-re-al had never considered it from
his mother’s viewpoint, naturally enough, only his own. He wondered
if his mother would have felt as Lexa did—sad that she couldn’t be
there to love him or know his love.

It wasn’t a thought he wanted to dwell
on, however. It made him feel … hollow inside and he had spent many
years trying to bury that sense of emptiness that had plagued his
childhood each time he’d seen other children with their parents—and
the anger.

Shaking the unwelcome memories, he
redirected his mind and Lexa’s to his purpose for taking her to
show her the city. “My people believe that it was your people who
built these cities. They want to teach them the things that were
lost so that your people can live as you once did—build new
cities.”

Lexa’s heart was thudding, but although
most of it, she was sure, was because of the way Gabriel had looked
at her and touched her hair, some of it was excitement at the
thought of living as these people must have—the way Sir had told
her things were ‘before’.

She still felt some uneasiness, as
well. “Why would they do that?”

He shrugged and grimaced. “I was
appointed as a Lawgiver—to help to bring order to the wild
territories because the gangs, particularly the roving gangs,
create problems for the colonists. The ones that take over the
villages usually only create problems for those weaker than
themselves.

“Part of it is nothing more than
that—to establish peace between our two peoples so that we can
focus on our own comfort. There are also those who believe that
your people will eventually perish if something isn’t done to help
your people recover from the destruction of your civilization. If
you are the people who built the great civilization of this world,
your numbers have dwindled and this will only continue with such
limited resources. They believe it’s the only way to save your
people. They want to do it because the udai are a civilized people
who consider the death of an entire civilization a great loss to
all.”

He was saying they were all going to
die if they didn’t learn from the angel-demons, Lexa thought,
feeling uneasiness prick her?

Was that so hard to believe, though?
She knew how hard it was to survive from personal experience, how
hard she had to struggle every day to find food and water. She also
knew that it had been hard even before she’d struck off on her
own—for everyone. In all the time she’d wandered she hadn’t come
upon anyone or any place where the story was different.

She thought about what Gabriel had said
as they began to walk again and found herself trying to picture
what it might have been like to have lived in such a place with all
the things Sir had told her about that had seemed so wondrous.
Water that could be had by simply turning on a faucet—whatever that
was—but in every place. Food that one could get just by going to a
place called a grocery store—all kinds of food and plenty of
it.

She thought the angels must live like
that. They never looked hungry and thirsty and she was almost
always both. Everyone she knew or had ever known was almost always
hungry or thirsty or both.

They had things that Sir had never told
her about and she knew they’d come here from another world and she
didn’t think even the ‘before’ was like that—that her people had
traveled from one world to another. “That’s what the relocation and
rehabilitation is?” she asked finally.

“Yes.”

Lexa frowned. “We wouldn’t have been so
scared if you’d explained that.”

Discomfort wafted through Gah-re-al.
“You have a point. I’m not sure they would’ve cooperated anyway—or
believed, however. They don’t trust us.” He shrugged. “And
honestly, I didn’t know they didn’t understand.”

Lexa shrugged. “You wiped out the king
and his gang.”

“That should’ve built trust,” he said
with disgust. “The kings and their gangs prey upon the weak.
They’re the worst savages.”

Meaning they were all savages as far as
he was concerned?

She knew he thought they were—primitive
savages hardly better than animals.

He must think they were better than
that, though, if he thought they’d built the great city? And he
thought they could learn the things they’d forgotten?

It seemed to her that it would take a
whole lot of learning, but then maybe not?

“It was scary the way you did
it.”

He lifted his brows at her. “I didn’t
think you stayed around long enough to watch,” he said
dryly.

“I didn’t see much, actually. It was
scary, but it was the judgment thing. It was like they do things.
They just decide.”

Anger flickered through him. “You’re
saying they weren’t guilty of the most heinous crimes?”

Lexa frowned. “Not sure what heinous
is.”

“Rape, murder, torture.”

“Oh. Well, I don’t know. I’d just got
there.”

He shook his head in disgust. “I do.
I’ve cleaned out my share of the vermin in my time.”

Lexa was certain he was right. She’d
seen her share of them and she hadn’t seen any ‘nice’ ones. Ralph
wasn’t even the worst she’d run across and he’d done some pretty
horrible things. “What were you before you were a Lawgiver?” she
asked curiously.

“A soldier.”