‘At fault?’ Nahir almost screamed. ‘This foulness—’
Kuutma silenced him with a curt gesture. ‘Go on,’ he said to Diema.
‘And so,’ she said, ‘I was faced with a choice. I could have terminated the pregnancy. It would have been no shame. But the wombs of the daughters of the People are the portals through which the Blessed enter the world. I decided to be delivered of the child, if I can carry it to term. And once that decision was made, I was thenceforth Kelim and Ben Rush was my partner, the man with whose seed I must be sown. Three times, the laws say.’
‘The laws do not cover this!’ Nahir shouted. ‘The laws are silent on this!’
‘It is without precedent,’ Kuutma said.
‘It’s filth and abomination!’
Diema had said her piece. She stood with her head slightly bowed, awaiting Kuutma’s verdict.
And for the first time since he took the mantle of command — his own personal holy of holies — Kuutma was at a loss.
‘Bring me the boy,’ he said at last.
Nahir turned to the nearest of his Elohim, but Alus and Taria, the women who served Kuutma as his bodyguards, had already detached themselves and were gone.
‘Say nothing to him,’ Kuutma warned Diema. ‘I’ll question him myself.’
The women returned, a few seconds later, leading Ben Rush between them. Rush looked anxiously at Diema, who looked pointedly away, then at Nahir, who glared at him like an ogre in a pantomime.
‘Keep your eyes on me,’ Kuutma snapped. Startled, Rush obeyed.
‘If anything has passed between you and our sister,’ Kuutma said, ‘tell us now. Only honesty will save you. A lie dooms you, and ruins her. So speak.’
The boy took a long while to get a word out. And since he was an Adamite, when he did it was a lie. ‘I didn’t touch her,’ he said. His gaze flicked sideways at Diema again.
‘At me,’ Kuutma growled. ‘Only at me. So there was no physical congress? She’s clean? Clean of your pollution?’
The boy was clearly terrified now. Perhaps he had some inkling of what was at stake here; of how close he was to death.
‘I … obviously I came on to her,’ he stammered. ‘I thought, you know, I might be in with a chance. So if … yeah. Anything that happened was down to me. But it wasn’t much. She … Diema wasn’t interested. She smacked me in the head, and that was that.’
Kuutma reached out and gripped the boy’s face in his broad hand.
‘You’re saying you didn’t lie with her?’
‘No,’ Rush mumbled. ‘I mean, yes. That’s what I’m saying.’
‘So if she were pregnant, the child could not be yours?’
The boy’s face gave him all the answer he needed. The wonder and terror and stark astonishment that warred there could not be counterfeited.
‘Tannanu, I beg you,’ Nahir said, his voice thick. ‘Kill the Adamites here and now, and be done. The three of them. Nothing is gained by this … this humiliating alliance.’
Kuutma released his hold on the boy and made a brusque gesture. Alus and Taria took Rush away, handling him a good deal more roughly than before.
Nahir’s face, now, was almost as transparent as the boy’s had been. The whole course of his affections for Diema, his hopes, and the crisis into which he was now thrown, could be read there.
‘I will not pronounce on it,’ Kuutma said, speaking mostly to Diema herself. ‘Not yet. The time is too pressing. Diema, I will allow you to bring your Adamite menagerie to New York, and I will guarantee their safety until this threat is dealt with. After that, we will speak further on these matters. For now, we set them aside.’
But Nahir wasn’t quite done. His whole body shaking, he spat out the hrach bishat, the formal execration that made him Diema’s accuser.
‘Are you sure you want this?’ Kuutma asked Nahir.
Nahir made no answer. There was nothing to be said: too much had been said already.
‘You will return with us,’ Kuutma told Nahir. ‘Make the arrangements.’
He pondered that decision now, alone in his room in het retoyet, while in the city around him, his Messengers moved in and out among the Adamites, weaving their invisible skein. Surely so great a concentration of Elohim in one place had never been seen before, in all the ages since Christ’s death. Perhaps Ber Lusim was right: perhaps these were, after all, the end times.
Or perhaps he was just growing old.
Old men, past their prime, were wont to second-guess their own decisions.
There was no doubt in his mind as to what Diema’s performance was meant to achieve. She had chosen a course of action — perhaps the only course of action — that would bring Tillman, Kennedy and the boy out of Budapest alive. Because she’d reasoned, correctly, that leaving them behind in Nahir’s hands would mean consigning them to their deaths. So she’d demonstrated that Tillman and the rhaka were still valuable alive, and then she’d extended to the boy the temporary but binding status of an out-father.
It was clever and deeply troubling — that his protégée, his agent, his almost-daughter should waste so much effort to such an end. As though she had lost the Elohim’s necessary indifference to Adamite lives. As though she had forgotten, all at once, the rules that licensed and governed her.
But it wasn’t so sudden, he corrected himself. There had been the boy she killed, and her inability to put his death behind her. The warning signs had been there from the start.
Kuutma knew he had been right, in any case, to bring Nahir back to Ginat’Dania. If they all survived this, the Sima would hear Nahir’s accusation against Diema, and pronounce on it. It would mean exile for one of them. This needed to be done at once. It couldn’t be allowed to fester.
But to place Nahir in Diema’s team — to force them to work together — that was unnecessary cruelty. It showed Kuutma the mirror of his own failings. He had put too much faith in the girl, allowed her inside his guard, and now he felt a sense of grief and anger that was largely personal, when he should be entirely Kuutma, the Brand, his individual emotions sublimed away by the heat of righteousness.
He had never had a family. The women he had known had never been as real to him as his vocation, his life of service, and he had let them drift away with no sense of loss.
For the first time, now, he found himself thinking about what Tillman had lost. Then about what Tillman had destroyed, with his own hands. It would not be possible to imagine two men who had lived more different, more opposed lives than himself and that man. The Adamite’s purely private, purely selfish quest, as against his own public life, his relentless self-abnegation.
But he knew what it was he was feeling, and the facile comparison didn’t blunt the force of it. Nahir’s jealousy, so blatant and indecent, allowed him to see his own for what it was — but it gave him no clue as to what he should do about it. Perhaps he would be fortunate. Perhaps the decision would be taken out of his hands.
Perhaps the world would end.
65
Three miles out from Manhattan, breaking the speed limit in the back of a truck that had air conditioning but no suspension, Kennedy held on tight to a balance rail and to her kidneys, and tried not to think about the situation they were all in.
Rush was sunk in introspective misery. The two female Elohim, Alus and Taria, sat in perfect stillness, seeming indifferent to their surroundings but, Kennedy was sure, supremely aware of them. Tillman was awake but very weak — and strapped onto a bench at the front end of the truck so that the incessant jolts and bounces didn’t send him sprawling. There was still a danger that they would open his wounds, and Kennedy could see from the expression of concentration on his sweat-sheened face the effort it was costing him to keep himself from fainting every time they hit a bad stretch of road. Diema stood a few feet away from him, her feet bracing her into a corner, staring at her father with an expression of deep thoughtfulness. Nahir watched them all, the way a cat watches a mousehole.