Earthborn Page 0,10

suppose. Us. The Nafari. Because I think those pedple are Nafari."

"So why don't they send sky people to find us and ask us for help? That's what people do, when the Elemaki are attacking them."

Edhadeya thought about this. "You know something, Mon? There wasn't a single angel among them."

Mon turned to her then. "No sky people at all?"

"Maybe the diggers killed them all."

"Don't you remember?" he asked. "The people who left back in the days of Father's grandfather? The ones who hated Darakemba and wanted to go back and possess the land of Nafai again?"

"Zef... ."

"Zenif," said Mon. "They said it was wrong for humans and sky people to live together. They didn't take a single angel with them. It's them. They're the ones you dreamed of."

"But they were all killed."

"We don't know that. We just know that we never heard from them again." Mon nodded. "They must still be alive."

"So you think it's a real dream?" asked Edhadeya. "Like the ones Luet had?"

Mon shrugged. Something bothered him. "Your dream," he said. "I don't think it's exactly about the Zenifi. I mean ... it just doesn't feel complete. I think it's someone else."

"Well, how can you know that?" she said. "You're the one who thought it was the Zenifi."

"And it felt right when I said it. But now... now there's just something wrong with it. But you've got to tell Father."

"You tell him," she said. "You'll see him at dinner."

"And you when he comes to say goodnight."

Edhadeya grimaced. "Dudagu Dermo is always there. I never see Father alone."

Mon blushed. "That isn't right of Father."

"Yes, well, you're the one who always knows what's right." She punched him in the arm.

"I'll tell him your dream at dinner."

"Tell him it was your dream."

Mon shook his head. "I don't lie."

"He won't listen if he thinks it's a woman's dream. All the other men at dinner will laugh."

"I won't tell him whose dream it is until I'm done. How's that?"

"Tell him this, too. In the last few dreams, the boy and his sister and his mother and father, they lie there in silence looking at me, saying nothing, just lie there in the darkness and without their saying a word I know they're pleading with me to come and save them."

"You?"

"Well, me in the dream. I don't think that the real people - if there are any real people - would be sitting there hoping for a ten-year-old girl to come and deliver them."

"I wonder if Father will let Aronha go."

"Do you think he'll really send somebody?"

Mon shrugged. "It's dark. It's time for dinner soon. Listen."

From the trees near the river, from the high, narrow houses of the sky people, the evening song arose, a few voices at first, then joined by more and more. Their high, lilting melodies intertwined, played with each other, madly inventing, challenging, resolving dissonance and then subverting expected harmonies, a haunting sound that recalled an earlier time when life for the sky people was a short span of years that had to be enjoyed in the moment, for death was always near. The children stopped their playing and began drifting downward from the sky, going home to supper, to their singing mothers and fathers, to homes filled with music as once the thatched shelters of the angels had filled with song in the high reaches of the trees.

Tears came unbidden to Mon's eyes. This was why he spent the moment of evening song alone, for he would be teased about the tears if others saw them. Not Edhadeya, though.

Edhadeya kissed Mon's cheek. "Thank you for believing me, Mon. Sometimes I think I might as well be a stump, for all that anybody listens to me."

Mon blushed again. When he turned around, she was already going down the ladder to the ground. He should go with her, of course, but now the human voices were beginning to join in the song, and so he could not go. From the windows of the great houses, the human servants and, in the streets, the fieldworkers and the great men of the city sang, each voice with as much right to be heard in the evening song as any other. In some cities, human kings decreed that their human subjects must sing a certain song, usually with words that spoke of patriotism or dutiful worship of the king or the official gods. But in Darakemba the old ways of the Nafari were kept, and the humans made up their own melodies as freely as