I did ask. During one of our long chats, Michael started riding his hobbyhorse about herdfolk yet again, how he wanted to save the poor loners. This piece of hypocrisy always infuriated me. He wanted to use herdmen, but he secretly despised them. In his eyes they were merely muscular brutes. I suffered in silence for a while and then forced out the words: “It’s time for me to leave.”
He straightened in his chair, bristling. “To go where?”
“Home,” I said simply.
He looked surprised, then pleased. “Well, you’d never get into a kayak, but that shouldn’t matter. Did you know I had four brothers? The wetlands must be teeming with your cousins, if you could ever find—”
“Home to the grasslands.”
“What?” He threw back his head and cackled.
I glared in silence. I no longer needed to sit on the floor when visiting Michael. He had ordered a special chair made—solid, high enough to be easy for me, with a footrest. It was infuriatingly comfortable.
“Rot!” he said. “Decay and putrefaction! Why would a civilized being like you want to go back to live among those animals?”
“They’re my people. I don’t belong here nor in the wetlands. I want to go home. Everyone does in the end.”
That was not quite true. Some angels, like Michael, elected to live out their life span in Heaven, but most headed off eventually in search of wife and hearth and children. Michael, having considered the matter, was now openly suspicious. “No, you’re no child-killer. Why? You’ve got something else in mind!”
His insight stunned me, but of course, that was the key to his success at manipulating people. “No, I don’t! Will you let me go?”
“Not until I know why!” We were both shouting.
“I’ve told you!”
“No you haven’t!”
“Animals, are they?” I swung my feet down. “But the women perform satisfactorily?” I heaved myself upright.
Michael switched moods, a common trick of his. He stayed in his pillowed chair and beamed up at me jocularly. “Now what vast confusion is churning inside that blond head of yours, son?”
“Just that word: son! You took my mother like the loan of a blanket!”
“You ought to be glad I did, surely?”
“You made me a yellow-haired freak!”
He sniggered. “Your complaint is paradoxical. You display an unthinking lack of gratitude. Your mother was very grateful.” I screamed at him.
“Seriously!” he said blandly. “She told me she’d never realized it was supposed to be a pleasure.”
“Liar! Filthy liar!”
“No. And when I returned and found you…” He paused, eyeing me oddly. I was shaking with wild fury. “Lithion? That was her name, wasn’t it, Lithion?”
“Yes.” I took a lurching step toward the door.
“What happened to her? Did she have many more children after you? How many others?”
“Damn you to dark hell! I don’t want to talk about her!” I stepped for the door again, just as the snortoise lurched. Caught off balance, I staggered, missed a grab at a chair, and pitched to the floor. That was not the first nor the last spill I took in Heaven, but it was one of the worst. Throne must have felt my skull hit his shell.
The strange lights faded from my eyes. The building settled. I was lying on my back, listening to the rumbles of the world’s mightiest digestion. I struggled to sit up and discovered Michael was kneeling at my side, assisting me.
“Easy!” he said. “You took a bad knock. Easy, son!”
“Don’t call me that!” I flailed vainly.
“But you are my son. Mine and Lithion’s.”
“No!” I tried to shout but only groaned. Though my head was spinning, I knew I must go, and go at once. “I won’t talk about her. I killed her. Help me up—now!”
“Easy!” He tightened his grip, with more strength than I would have believed he possessed in his withered little frame. To stand up I must first lie down, and he was supporting me. I floundered like a child. My frustration made me start to weep.
“Tell me,” he whispered, hugging me tight. “Tell me what happened.”
I blurted out the story of Anubyl, or some of it, anyway. I don’t know how much I told, because I wasn’t listening to what I said. At the end of it, I buried my face in the collar of Michael’s coarse white gown and sobbed like a baby. He clutched me firmly until at last I snuffled away into shamed silence.
“Better now?”
“Mmmph.” I felt like an imbecile. “Banged my head…better go lie down for a while.”
“Listen first,” he said. “You were only a boy—and a very small boy by their standards, right?”
I tried to protest and was stopped by a surge of nausea.
“He was twice your size. He had a club, and a sword, too. Would the others have helped you if you’d called on them?”
I grunted. Michael knew the answer as well as I did.
“There was nothing you could do! If you’d so much as breathed a word, a single word, he would have cut you down. And then probably her also, for not teaching her son manners. You know that, Knobil!”
“Let me up.”
“Knobil—he’s dead! Long dead! Fewer than a third of the herdfolk got past the Ocean, and he’d be an old man by now. No herdmaster ever lives to be an old man. He’s long dead, Knobil.”
“Gotta go to bed.” I began struggling again, and still he held me.
“There’s nothing you can do about him now, Knobil. Even if he were alive, there’s no way to track down one man on the grasslands.”
“Let me up!”
“It wasn’t your fault, Knobil—what happened to Lithion wasn’t your fault.”
“Shut up!” I screamed, knocking his hands away. “Don’t talk about her! She was my mother! My mother—do you understand? And to you she was just a couple of sweaty romps, that’s all! You used her like a spittoon, to catch some unwanted secretions!” I broke loose and rolled over on my belly, preparing to rise.
“I offered to buy her. And you, too.”
I stopped and then raised myself on my elbows. “You did what?”
“I told her I could love her. I told her I would try to buy the two of you, and we could go to the wetlands together.”
“Mad!” I whispered, appalled. “If my father had heard—”
“I’m your father, not that hairy bull who owned her! We both knew that. So do you.” His voice softened. “Oh, Knobil! There we were, lying in each other’s arms. You were sitting in the corner sucking your thumb and scowling at me in very much the same way you’re scowling at me now—”
“Idiocy! She wouldn’t have left the others.”
He nodded sadly. “That was a problem—she wouldn’t leave her other children. And I suspect she didn’t trust me not to kill them if I took them, as well. She even said that… What was his name—the herdmaster?”
“I don’t know.” I wrestled myself up on my feet at last, although I still felt limp and sick. “I never knew his name.”
“Well, she said he’d likely kill you if I even hinted that you were mine and not his. He hadn’t thought of it, she said, and the women had never dared suggest it to him.”
“He hadn’t thought of it?” I echoed, dusting myself off and trying to look dignified. “Hadn’t thought of it? Of course he’d thought of it! He knew perfectly well. He used to call me…” I choked over a sudden flash of long-lost memory, of being cuddled and tickled by that huge, shaggy man with the dread dark eyes, both of us slickly wet in the hot, dim tent—him cooing and chuckling, me I suppose giggling… I must have been very small. It could not have been long after the second visit by Green-two-blue. “He called me his dasher. His little pink dasher who ran into his tent! I wasn’t as brown as the others, you see.”