hand that signed for the humans also took the covenant in our way, too."
"Then I will," said Ender, "as I promised you I would."
Human reached out and stroked Ender from the throat to the belly. "The brother's word is not just in his mouth," he said. "The brother's word is in his life." He turned to the other piggies. "Let me speak to my father one last time before I stand beside him."
Two of the strange brothers came forward with their small clubs in their hands. They walked with Human to Rooter's tree and began to beat on it and sing in the Fathers' Language. Almost at once the trunk split open. The tree was still fairly young, and not so very much thicker in the trunk than Human's own body; it was a struggle for him to get inside. But he fit, and the trunk closed up after him. The drumming changed rhythm, but did not let up for a moment.
Jane whispered in Ender's ear. "I can hear the resonance of the drumming change inside the tree," she said. "The tree is slowly shaping the sound, to turn the drumming into language."
The other piggies set to work clearing ground for Human's tree. Ender noticed that he would be planted so that, from the gate, Rooter would seem to stand on the left hand, and Human on the right. Pulling up the capim by the root was hard work for the piggies; soon Quim was helping them, and then Olhado, and then Ouanda and Ela.
Ouanda gave the covenant to Novinha to hold while she helped dig capim. Novinha, in turn, carried it to Ender, stood before him, looked at him steadily. "You signed it Ender Wiggin," she said. "Ender."
The name sounded ugly even to his own ears. He had heard it too often as an epithet. "I'm older than I look," said Ender. "That was the name I was known by when I blasted the buggers' home world out of existence. Maybe the presence of that name on the first treaty ever signed between humans and ramen will do something to change the meaning of the name."
"Ender," she whispered. She reached toward him, the bundled treaty in her hands, and held it against his chest; it was heavy, since it contained all the pages of the Hive Queen and the Hegemon, on the other sides of pages where the covenant was written. "I never went to the priests to confess," she said, "because I knew they would despise me for my sin. Yet when you named all my sins today, I could bear it because I knew you didn't despise me. I couldn't understand why, though, till now."
"I'm not one to despise other people for their sins," said Ender. "I haven't found one yet, that I didn't say inside myself, I've done worse than this."
"All these years you've borne the burden of humanity's guilt."
"Yes, well, it's nothing mystical," said Ender. "I think of it as being like the mark of Cain. You don't make many friends, but nobody hurts you much, either."
The ground was clear. Mandachuva spoke in Tree Language to the piggies beating on the trunk; their rhythm changed, and again the aperture in the tree came open. Human slid out as if he were an infant being born. Then he walked to the center of the cleared ground. Leaf-eater and Mandachuva each handed him a knife. As he took the knives, Human spoke to them - in Portuguese, so the humans could understand, and so it would carry great force. "I told Shouter that you lost your passage to the third life because of a great misunderstanding by Pipo and Libo. She said that before another hand of hands of days, you both would grow upward into the light."
Leaf-eater and Mandachuva both let go of their knives, touched Human gently on the belly, and stepped back to the edge of the cleared ground.
Human held out the knives to Ender. They were both made of thin wood. Ender could not imagine a tool that could polish wood to be at once so fine and sharp, and yet so strong. But of course no tool had polished these. They had come thus perfectly shaped from the heart of a living tree, given as a gift to help a brother into the third life.
It was one thing to know with his mind that Human would not really die. It was another thing to believe it. Ender did not take the