"I’m sorry," he said finally. "I’m sorry! I don’t know what happened here, and I won’t pretend to understand what you have lived through —»
"Thank you. I am glad to hear it—"
"But, Sofia, I do know what it is to be a commodity," he said, cutting her off. "I know what it is to be erased. I also know what it is to be falsely accused, and God help me! I know what it is to be guilty—" He stopped and looked away, but then met her eye and said, "Sofia, I have eaten Runa, and for the same reason the djanada did: because I was hungry and I wanted to live. And I have killed—I killed Askama, Sofia. I didn’t mean it to be her, but I wanted to kill, I wanted someone to die so that I could be free, one way or the other. So you see," he told her with bleak cheer, "I am the last person to judge anyone else! And I grant you that the Jana’ata you fought got what was coming to them! But, Sofia—you can’t let the Runa kill them all! They’ve paid for their sins—"
"Paid for their sins!" Incredulous, she stood, and left her chair and walked a step or two, bent and hobbled by a coiled spine. "Did they confess to you, Father? Have you forgiven them, just because they asked you to?" she asked, face twisted with contempt. "Well, some things cannot be absolved! Some things are unforgivable—"
"You think I don’t know that?" he shouted, his own anger rising to meet hers. "No one confesses to me anymore! I left the priesthood, Sofia. I didn’t come here to judge you. I didn’t even come back to rescue you! I came because I was beaten senseless and kidnapped by Carlo Giuliani. I spent a good portion of the voyage from Earth drugged, and all I want to do right now is go home and find out if the woman I nearly married seventeen years ago is still alive—"
She stared at him but now his eyes did not drop. "You said that you knew what happened to me at Galatna, Sofia, but you don’t know the worst of it: I left the priesthood because I can’t forgive what happened to me there. I can’t forgive Supaari, who did this to me," he said, holding up his hands. "And I can’t forgive Hlavin Kitheri, and I doubt that I ever will. They taught me to hate, Sofia. Ironic, isn’t it? We heard Kitheri’s songs and risked everything to come here, prepared to love whomever we met and to learn from them! But when Hlavin Kitheri met one of us—. He looked at me, and all he thought—"
He stopped, spun from her, hardly able to breathe, but turned, trembling, and held her uneasy gaze as he said in a voice soft with outrage, "He looked at me and thought, How nice. Something new to fuck."
"It’s over," she snapped, face white. But he knew it wasn’t, not even for her, not even after all these years. "You work," she told him. "You concentrate on the task at hand—"
"Yes," he agreed willingly, quickly. "And you make loneliness a virtue. You call it self-reliance, right? You tell yourself you need nothing, that you don’t want anyone in your life ever again—"
"Wall it off!"
"You think I haven’t tried?" he cried. "Sofia, I keep stacking up the stones, but nothing holds the walls together anymore! Not even anger. Not even hate. I am worn out with hating, Sofia. I’m tired of it. I’m bored by it!" The storm was now only minutes away and the lightning was frighteningly close, but he didn’t care. "I have hated Supaari VaGayjur, and Hlavin Kitheri, and sixteen of his friends but… I can’t seem to hate in the aggregate," he whispered, hands falling emptily. "That one small island of integrity is still left to me, Sofia. As much as I have hated the fathers, I cannot hate their children. And neither should you, Sofia. You can’t in justice kill the innocent."
"No," she said, curled over her own heart. "There are no innocents."
"If I can find you ten, will you spare the others for their sake?"
"Don’t play games with me," she said, and motioned for her bearers.
With one step, he came between her and the chair. "I helped to deliver a Jana’ata baby a few days ago," he told her conversationally, blocking her way. "Cesarean section. I did what I could. It wasn’t enough. The mother died. I want her baby to live, Sofia. There is very damned little that I am certain of these days, but I’m sure of this one thing: I want that kid to live."
"Get out of my way," she whispered, "or I’ll call my guards."
He didn’t move. "Shall I tell you what the baby’s older sister is called?" he asked lightly. "Sofi’ala. Pretty name, isn’t it?" He watched her react, her head jerking as though recoiling from a blow, and he pressed on mercilessly. "The child’s mother was named Ha’anala. Her last words were of you. She said, ’Take the children to my mother.’ She wanted us to march them to Gayjur! A sort of children’s crusade, I suppose. I didn’t do it. I refused her dying wish because I am afraid to be responsible for the lives of any more children, Sofia. But she was right—those kids have never murdered or enslaved anyone. They are every bit as innocent as the VaKashani children we saw slaughtered."
The rain was beginning—heavy drops as warm as tears—wind whipping the fabric of the shelter noisily, almost drowning out his words. "I will stand surety for those kids and their parents, Sofia. Please. Let them live and all the good they do—all the music, the poetry, everything decent they are capable of—all that is to your credit," he told her, desperate now, taking her stillness for refusal. "If they kill again, I’ll be the goat. Their sins on my head, okay? I’ll stay here and if they kill again, then execute me and let them have one more chance."
"Ha’anala’s dead?"
He nodded, ashamed to weep when Sofia should have mourned. "You taught her well, Sofia," he said, voice fraying. "She was, by all accounts, a remarkable woman. She founded a sort of utopian society up in the mountains. It’s probably doomed—like all utopias. But she tried! All three of our species live together up there, Sofia—Runa, Jana’ata, even Isaac. She taught them that every soul is a small reflection of God, and that it is wicked to murder because when a life is taken, we lose that unique revelation of God’s nature."
He stopped again, hardly able to utter the words. "Sofia, one of the priests I came with—he thinks your foster daughter was a sort of Moses for her people! It took forty years to burn the slavery out of the Israelites. Well, maybe the Jana’ata need forty years to burn the mastery out of them!"
He shrugged helplessly at her stricken glare. "I don’t know, Sofia. Sean’s probably full of shit. Maybe Abraham was psychotic and schizophrenia ran in his family. Maybe Jesus was just another crazy Jew who heard voices. Or maybe God is real, but He’s evil or stupid, and that’s why so much seems so insane and unfair! It doesn’t matter," he shouted, trying to make himself heard through the roar of the rain. "It really doesn’t matter. I don’t give a damn about God anymore, Sofia. All I know for certain is I want Ha’anala’s baby to live—"
She walked out into the rain, its relentless noise drowning all other sound. For a long time, she simply stood in the downpour, listening to its hissing crash, feeling it beat down on her twisted shoulders, work its way through her hair, wash over the ruins of her face.
When she came back from where she had been in memory, Emilio was waiting for her. Soaked and chilled, she walked slowly to her chair, accepting his offer of an arm to steady her climb. When she reached the platform, she sat as heavily as a tiny woman could.
The first violence of the storm was passing, the rain now a steady drumming, and for a time they simply gazed out at the drowning landscape. She touched his shoulder and he turned to her. Reaching up, she placed her hand gently over the mark she’d laid there, minutes before, and then lifted a lock of his hair. "You’ve gotten gray, old man," she said. "You look even worse than I do, and I look awful."