Akma clapped Khimin on the back. "There you go, Khimin. When Aronha decides that something is dishonorable, we can't do it even if it would have been a pretty effective ploy."
"Don't make fun of my sense of honor, Akma," said Aronha.
"I wasn't," said Akma. "I admire you for it."
Mon suddenly had an irresistible impulse to make trouble. "That's the way that Aronha most resembles Father. The only reason we've had any success at all is that Father is so honorable."
"Then that makes honor a weakness, doesn't it?" asked Ominer.
Aronha answered him with withering contempt. "In the short run, dishonor gives an advantage; in the long run, a dishonorable king loses the love of his people and ends up the way Nuab did. Dead."
"They tortured him to death with fire, didn't they?" asked Khimin.
"Try not to sound so delighted at the thought of it," said Akma. "It makes other people uneasy."
But what Mon noticed, what disturbed him in all this, was the fact that Akma seemed to draw closer to Ominer the more he said things that should have made a decent person recoil from him. Ominer said that honor was a weakness; now, though he said not a word about it, Akma had his arm around Ominer's shoulders and Ominer was all smiles. This is wrong. There's something seriously wrong. Akma wasn't like this, not even as recently as last year, before all this began. I remember when he would have been adamant about honor and decency as Aronha was. What is it, are the vile people we associate with now beginning to influence him? Or is it simply a natural consequence of having the adulation of so many thousands of people?
Whatever it was that was happening to Akma, Mon hated it. This couldn't be the real Akma emerging; it was more as if Akma were beginning to take on this cynical, amoral posture because he thought it was what he had to become in order to have his victory. Or perhaps it was a true part of Akma that never came out until he began to think that he was so important and powerful that he didn't have to be decent to other people anymore. How much of his bantering with Aronha is really joking these days, Mon wondered, and how much of it is real contempt for Aronha's kingly bearing?
I mustn't think these things, Mon reminded himself. It's the Keeper trying to win me away from my brothers.
No, it's not the Keeper because there is no Keeper... .
Mon excused himself from them because he needed to sleep. The others all took it as a signal. The conversation turned to empty playful chatter as they walked back to the house where they were staying. The place was far too small for five grown men to stay-half the family that lived there had been farmed out to neighbors' houses-but Akma insisted that they couldn't always stay in rich men's houses or the Kept would be able to accuse them of pride. Seeing what the Kept already accused them of, Mon thought the addition of one nib re minor charge would be worth it for a good night's sleep, but as usual Aronha saw things Akma's way and so he was crammed into a space where he couldn't stretch out or roll over without waking somebody up. The poor just don't build big enough houses, he told himself as a nasty little joke. He could never say it out loud, of course, because Akma would tell him that "people won't understand it's just humor."
The next morning, Aronha decided they'd take Father's advice and leave at once instead of staying another day, and instead of going to Fetek, they'd head for Papadur. Oh, excellent, thought Mon, twice the walk, and uphill the whole way instead of down. I'll have to write Father a note thanking him for his suggestion.
On the way, Akma critiqued Khimin's speech of the night before. Mon had to admire the deft way that he did it, always praising right along with his criticisms so that Khimin never felt diminished. It helped, of course, that Khimin held Akma in absolute awe.
"What you said about how our teachers are well-educated and the Kept teachers are all just as ignorant as their students-that was a deft point, and I'm glad you made it."
Khimin smiled. "Thanks."
"There's just a word-choice thing you'll want to think of for next time. I know, it's so frustrating, you have to think of so many things at once, the same thing happens to me, you get one thing right and something else slips. But that's why not everybody can do this."
It was so easy for Mon to see Akma's flattery, how he set Khimin up and won him over. Yet Khimin was oblivious, the poor fool.
Then Mon had the uneasy thought that perhaps Akma adapted his technique to whatever fool he happened to be talking to, and maybe to someone else Mon looked just as oblivious, just as gullible.
"I was thinking, as you talked last night, How can I steal this idea from Khimin and use it in my speech?"
Khimin laughed. So did Ominer, who was listening in-and who definitely could use some help with his speeches, too, since, while he never stammered or fumbled as Khimin did, he was also never for a moment entertaining.
"Here's how I would have said it," Akma offered. " ‘My father, in his compassion, has established a religion in which the ignorant teach the ignorant, and the poor minister to the poor. This is a noble enterprise; let no man interfere with it. But for humans and angels, for people of education and manners, there is no reason to pretend we need the primitive doctrines and coarse company of Akmaro's so-called Kept.' "
"What do you mean, ‘Let no man interfere with it'?" asked Khimin. "I thought that's what we were doing!"
"Of course that's what we're doing, and the audience knows it. But you see what the effect of that is? It makes it seem like we're not anybody's enemy. We're not opposing them, we're meeting the needs of the better sort of people while the Kept meet the needs of the poor and ignorant. Now, how many people in our audiences think of themselves as poor and ignorant?"
"Most of them!" Ominer said snidely.
"Most of them are poor, compared to someone who grew up in the king's house," said Akma, with only a hint of sarcasm. "But how do they think of themselves? Everybody thinks he's one of the more educated, refined people-or if he isn't, he's certainly going to do everything he can to make sure other people think he is. So now- which assembly is he going to go to? The one that will make him seem to be one of the educated and refined. You see? Nobody can accuse us of name-calling or abusing the Kept-and yet, the more we praise them, the more we make people want to stay as far away from them as possible."
Khimin laughed with delight. "It's like-you take what you want to say, and then you find a way to say the opposite, but so that it will have the effect you want."
"Not quite the opposite," said Akma. "But you're getting it, you're getting it!"
Mon's truthsense suddenly erupted inside him, rejecting what he had just heard with such violence that he felt like he might throw up. He stopped walking and, without meaning to, sank to his knees.
"Mon?" asked Aronha.
At that moment there was a loud noise, and all of them looked up to see a huge object, grey as granite, whirling as it plummeted toward them. Smoke poured out of it as if it were on fire, and the roaring sound was deafening. Mon covered his ears with his hands and saw that his brothers were doing the same. At the last moment the huge grey stone veered off and fell toward the ground not a dozen paces from them, the smoke and dust blinding them. ‘At that moment the earth shook, throwing them from their feet like punted dolls. Yet there was no crashing sound, or if there was, it was swallowed up in the roar of the fallen stone and the rumbling of the earth.
As the smoke and dust cleared, they saw someone standing in front of the stone, but what he looked like they couldn't guess, for he shone so brightly from every part of his body that their eyes could not see anything but the human shape of him. The reason there had been no crashing sound now became clear, for the great grey object hovered in the air perhaps half a meter from the ground. It was impossible. It was irrational.