The other Archons are considered the same as generals and scientists. They can’t visit the boy at home. Home remains a sanctuary clad in nets and guards and sensible rules. Prima is the sole exception. She is welcome to walk through the corona-adorned curtain, and portions of her staff can come along. But nobody will argue if the parents say, “No.” Nobody dares. Master Nissim is also welcome, and certain trusted neighbors have attended occasional feasts held on the big new landing, and every happy boy deserves to have good friends.
For four hundred days, public opinion has held steady as an old blackwood: the boy is a prize leftover from the Creation, and he could well be a treasure too. If the big Archon wants to steal Diamond away from them, then Diamond certainly must be a creature worth knowing.
Hundreds of children attend the Marduk school, but barely a dozen are allowed inside Diamond’s home gate. After classes, once every three or four days, a group gathers on the landing. Ancient contests like tag and spider-scramble lead to new games invented for the occasion, using whatever props and moods are on hand. Diamond isn’t a natural climber. His arms are short, his instincts slow. Everybody else finishes before their friend climbs to the top of the net and back down again. But the boy runs faster than anyone on the flat wood, and he rides a bicycle built to fit his long legs, and when the current game ignores him, he quietly settles down to do nothing while his friends play, sitting next to the stoic guards while gazing at the net overhead, screams and laughter filling the space, right up until Haddi steps outside, arms waving as she chases away the chaos.
Exactly two children are special enough to be invited into the boy’s room.
Seldom is a slight but growing boy, and Elata is still a sharp-tongued girl with a strong build and very little fear.
A team of workmen bearing hammers and chisels enlarged the old room, with the compliments of the local Archon. An oval hole has been cut through the thick brown bark, and two sheets of transparent coral glass have been set inside the new window, tiny bars of the best steel lending strength to that very expensive indulgence.
The three children play near the window. Seldom likes board games with complicated rules that he knows better than anyone else. Elata is fond of puzzles and reading stories. “No better friends could exist,” Haddi often tells him. Diamond understands comfort and happiness when just the three of them are sharing his fine new room. He likes his classmates and always tries to be pleasant, getting along with them and everyone else too. But sometimes Diamond’s hand makes a foolish move before letting go of the wooden disc or the coral warship. His turn is over and those are the rules, except he hears himself asking Seldom for a second chance. He’ll claim that he didn’t mean to do what he did or he doesn’t understand the rules yet. His complaining doesn’t sound like complaining, and he has a big smile, and if Seldom ever says, “No,” then the matter will end. But Seldom never tells Diamond, “No. Now it’s my turn.” He always lets his friend pull the piece back, and sometimes he even coaches by throwing his eyes in an important direction.
Seldom never gives Elata second chances, and noticing as much, she sits on her hands, saying nothing.
Sometimes Diamond complains while playing with the girl’s puzzles, using a tone that isn’t angry but isn’t nice either, convincing Elata maybe half of the time to give him what he wants.
Games are wrapped inside games, and Diamond wages these little battles just to win thin, unnamed prizes.
His attitudes are less subtle when a big group shares the landing. Bodies run and climb, balls flying and the guards standing safely to one side. Diamond invents a new flourish to the current game—something he can do better than anyone else. Explaining himself in a few words, he usually wins allies and believers. But sometimes the other children don’t want to play that way. One or two of them might even insult their host, claiming he isn’t being fair. There have been days when this good boy with his strange life and his various mysteries will walk up to the guards and ask politely that so-and-so be sent home now, and if they can’t learn how to play nicely, maybe that name should be sliced off the friends-list.
Small moments like these are always noticed.
Children and the guards see them. It’s possible to find an alarming trend at work. Or maybe underneath the oddness, he is an ordinary, immature boy.
But people are watching.
Marduk is one tree hanging inside a vast forest. Every tree is covered with apartments and windows, and there are people wielding telescopes, staring at this one house with the corona on the curtain and the boy that nobody can explain. Even indoors, playing with his two great friends, several sets of eyes are fixed Diamond, reading lips and guessing his thoughts. Then night rises and the household falls asleep, and peering into the darkness, magnifying the last glows of lights and candles, these same watchers study the prize as it settles into sleep and dreams.
Every soldier wears a name and a rich life full of exploits that the boy can summon at will. Every soldier has died multiple times, always as a hero, and Diamond sits on the varnished blackwood floor with those gangly legs trying to make a knot, stunted toes curling as he talks, replaying the killing blows from swords and bullets and arrows and gigantic bombs. He doesn’t remember every game played—his mind isn’t that relentless. But death should be memorable and tens of thousands of good deaths beg to be shared, and it is easy to forget that even best friends don’t have feelings for chips of wood and these elaborate stories.
Elata bores first, and she’s first to complain.
“Let’s do something more, anything else,” she says. “Or we can do nothing, maybe. Nothing can be fun too, if you do it right.”
Seldom wants to be patient, and where he can, he wants to uncover whatever proves fun. Nobody in the world has such a friend, and sitting in this one room, feeling bored, is an honor that can’t just be thrown away. So he listens to the soldiers’ names and the battle names. Seldom is smart but doesn’t wield this kind of memory. When he concentrates, the play-fight becomes crisp loud images living inside his head, and with a boy’s instinct for violence and heroism, he listens as Diamond moves hundreds of men across a complicated landscape that doesn’t resemble any part of the world.
Nobody else has the honor to be bored and mesmerized in exactly this way.
One day, listening to the history of a pretend war fought five hundred days ago, a good new thought finds Seldom:
Diamond is a puzzle.
Their friend is huge and intricate and maybe without answers, and those various puzzle parts are set inside a human-shaped box.
They are talking to a box, and the box talks to them.
Except now Elata and Seldom and the box are snacking on finger-dabs, and thirty-seven soldiers have been charged with defending a fortress built from armor and white light.
The enemy is a monstrous giant marching its way up the long hill.
“What does that mean?” asks Elata. “What is a hill?”
She is interested, but only a little bit.
Diamond stops talking. He doesn’t want to stop, but he can’t let the question go unanswered. “ ‘Hill’ is a papio word. The ground of the world rises to one high point.”
But that’s not quite how the papio use it.
Elata squints. “What, like on the reef? At the edge of the world?”
Diamond pauses, considering.
“That’s where this is, on the reef,” says Seldom, and he bends forward, wanting the story to continue.
But Diamond says, “No, it isn’t on the reef. I’m talking about a different hill.”
Seldom is wrong, which makes him uncomfortable.
Diamond uses hands and words to describe what he imagines—a cone resting on a flat surface. There are few trees in this place and they grow in the wrong direction, rising up instead of dangling down. And the cone is a tall important place on this impossible terrain, and so it must be defended to the last man.
“I don’t understand,” Elata complains.