"She's forgotten that."
"No she hasn't, I haven't, either. There's not a day goes by that I don't remember what I was and what I did."
"All right, I'm sure she does remember. What I meant was that she forgave you long ago."
"Forgave me," said Didul. "But it's a long stride from there to the love a wife should have for a husband." He shook his head. "Do you want bean paste? It's quite spicy, but the earth lady who made it for me is the finest cook I've ever known."
Akmaro held out his flatcake, and Didul smeared the paste on with a wooden spoon. Then Akmaro rolled it up, folded the bottom end, and began eating from the top. "As good as you promised," he said. "Luet would like it too. Can't make it spicy enough for her."
Didul laughed. "Father Akmaro, don't you know your own family? Suppose I did speak to Luet. About this, I mean. About marriage. We talk all the time when I'm there, about other things-history and science, politics and religion, all of it, except personal things. She's- brilliant. Too fine for me, but even if I dared to speak to her, and even if she somehow loved me, and even if you gave consent, it would still be impossible."
Akmaro raised an eyebrow. "What, is there some consanguinity I'm not aware of? I had no brother, and neither did my wife, so you can't be some secret nephew in the first degree."
"Akma," said Didul. "Akma has never forgiven me. And if Luet loved me he would take it as a slap in the face. And if you then gave consent to such a marriage, there would be no forgiveness. He'd go mad. He'd-I don't know what he'd do."
"Maybe he'd wake up and get over this childish vindictiveness of his," said Akmaro. "I know he's never been the same since those days, but-"
"But nothing," said Didul. "I did it to him. Don't you understand? Akma's hatred, all of it arises from the humiliation I heaped upon him that first day and so many days afterward-"
"You were a child then."
"My father wasn't cracking a whip over my head, Akmaro. I enjoyed it! Don't you understand? When I see these people who tease digger children because of their poverty, because they live in holes and get dirty, because-I understand them. The tormentors. I was one. I know how it feels to have driven all compassion out of my heart and laugh at the pain of someone else."
"You're not the same person now."
"I have rejected that part of myself," said Didul. "But I'm the same person, all right."
"When you pass through the water-"
"Yes, a new man, I become a new man. I'm a man who does not do those things, yes. But I'm still and always the man who once did them."
"Not in my eyes, Didul. And I daresay not in Luet's."
"In Akma's eyes, Father Akmaro, I am the same one who destroyed him before his sister, his mother, his father, his friends, his people. And if it ever happened that Luet and I became married-no, if he even heard that I wanted to, or that Luet was willing, or that you approved-it would set him off. I don't know what he'd do, but he'd do it."
"He's not a violent man," said Akmaro. "He's gentle even if he does harbor ancient grudges."
"I'm not fearing for my life," said Didul. "I just know that someone as smart as Akma, as talented, as clever, as attractive-he'll find a way to make us all regret that we ever dared affront him in such a way."
"So what you're telling me is that you refuse even to offer my daughter the possibility of marrying one of the finest young men I know in this whole empire, solely because her brother can't grow out of his childish rage?"
"We have no way of knowing what it was that happened inside Akma, Father Akmaro. He may have been a child, but that doesn't make the things he felt then childish."
Akmaro took the last bite of his flatcake. The bean paste having been used up, it tasted dry and salty. "I need a drink of water," he said.
"The Milirek has no pure source," said Didul, "and it flows from low mountains, some of which lose their snow for much of the year."
"I drink the water that the Keeper gives me in every land," said Akmaro.
Didul laughed. "Then I hope you won't go down out of the gor-naya! The slow-flowing waters of the flatlands aren't safe. They're muddy and foul and things live in them. I know a man who drank it once without boiling it, and he said his bowels didn't stop running until he had lost a third of his body weight and his wife was ready to bury him, if only to save the trouble of digging yet another latrine."
Akmaro grimaced. "I hear those stories, too. But somehow we have to learn to live in the flatlands. We've had peace for so long that people from all over are coming here. Former Elemaki, people from hidden mountain valleys, coming to Darakemba because under the rule of Motiak there's peace and plenty. Well, the peace will last, I hope. But the plenty ... we have to find a way to use the flatlands."
"The diggers can't tunnel there, it all floods," said Didul. "The angels can't perch there because the trees are so thick-limbed and close together that the jaguars can reach them everywhere."
"Then we should think of some way to build houses on rafts or something," said Akmaro. "We need more land. And maybe if we opened up new lands, my young friend, where diggers and angels and humans had to live in the same kind of house, we might be able to create the kind of harmony that is so hard to bring to pass here in the gornaya."
"I'll think about it," said Didul. "But I hope you also give this problem to cleverer men and women than me."
"Believe me, I have and I will again," said Akmaro. "And to cleverer ones than me, too. I learned that from Motiak. Don't waste your time asking advice from people stupider than you."
"That's comforting advice," said Didul.
"How so?"
"I can ask anybody," he said, laughing.
"False modesty is still false, no matter how charming it might seem."
"All right, I'm smarter than some people," Didul admitted. "Like that one teacher who says that angels are afraid to go down into digger holes."
"Aren't they?"
"I know three angel physicians who do it all the time, and they've never been harmed."
"Maybe," said Akmaro, "our teachers would be less afraid if they believed their teaching was as valuable a service as the herbs of the physician."
"Well, there we are," said Didul. "If the believers weren't so torn by doubt, they might do a better job of persuading the unbelievers."
"Oh, I don't even mind their doubt," said Akmaro. "If they could just act as if they believed, they'd be more persuasive."
"If I didn't know you better," said Didul, "I'd think you were praising hypocrisy."
"I would rather live among people who behave correctly than among people with correct opinions," said Akmaro. "I've noticed no higher incidence of hypocrisy among the former than among the latter, and at least the ones who behave well don't take up so much of your time with arguing."
Bego puffed along behind Akma and Mon, complaining the whole time. "I don't see why we couldn't have this discussion, whatever it's about, in my study. I'm too old for this, and you may have noticed that my legs are less than half the length of yours!" To which Akma heartlessly replied, "So fly then." From behind, Mon gave Akma a shove in the shoulder, sending him stumbling into some brush beside the path. Akma turned, ready to be angry, ready to laugh, depending on the intention he read in Mon's eyes.
"Have respect for a friend of mine," said Mon softly, "if not for his age and office."
Akma smiled at once, his most winning and charming smile, and it worked as it always worked, suggesting as it did a sort of self-effacing humility, a believable protest of innocence, and a promise of friendship-whatever good thing the other person wished to read into it. Mon always wondered at that smile even as it triumphed over his own anger or envy. Where could such power over others come from?