27 Short Stories - By Orson Scott Card Page 0,54

to him. "After floodwater this year the Great Derku came into the pen with a human baby in its jaws. It was a two-year-old boy of the Ko clan, and it happened he was the firstborn of his parents.

"This means only that Ko clan wasn't watchful enough," said Naog

"Perhaps," said his mother. "But the holy men saw it as a sign from the god. Just as we stopped giving human flesh to the Great Derku when he refused it, so now when he claimed a human victim, what else were we to think?

"Captives, then. Why not captives?

"It was your own father who said that if the Great Derku had taken a child from the families of the captives, then we would sacrifice captives. But he took a child from one of our clans. What kind of sacrifice is it, to offer strangers when the Great Derku demanded the meat of the Derku people?

"Don't you see, Mother? Father was trying to keep them from sacrificing anybody at all, by making them choose something so painful that no one would do it.

She shook her head. "How do you know what my Twerk was trying to do

He was trying to save YOU.

"Me?

"Your father was clan leader by then. The holy men said, 'Let each clan give the firstborn son of the clan leader.'

"But I was gone.

"Your father insisted on the ancient privilege, that a father may go in place of his son.

"So he died in my place, because I was gone.

"If you had been here, Glogmeriss, he would have done the same.

He thought about this for a few moments, and then answered only, "My name is Naog now.""We thought you were dead, Naked One, Stirrer of Troubles," said Mother

"I found a wife.

"I saw her. Ugly.

"Brave and strong and smart," said Naog

"Born to be a captive. I chose a different wife for you.

"Zawada is my wife.

Even though Naog had returned from his journey as a man and not a boy, he soon learned that even a man can be bent by the pressure of others. This far he did NOT bend: Zawada remained his wife. But he also took the wife his mother had chosen for him, a beautiful girl named Kormo. Naog was not sure what was worse about the new arrangement--that everyone else treated Kormo as Naog's real wife and Zawada as barely a wife at all, or that when Naog was hungry with passion, it was always Kormo he thought of. But he remembered Zawada at such times, how she bore him his first child, the boy Moiro; how she followed him with such fierce courage; how good she was to him when he was a stranger. And when he remembered, he followed his duty to her rather than his natural desire. This happened so often that Kormo complained about it. This made Naog feel somehow righteous, for the truth was that his first inclination had been right. Zawada should have stayed with her own tribe. She was unhappy most of the time, and kept to herself and her baby, and as years passed, her babies. She was never accepted by the other women of the Derku. Only the captive women became friends with her, which caused even more talk and criticism

Years passed, yes, and where was Naog's great message, the one the god had gone to such great trouble to give him? He tried to tell it

First to the leaders of the Engu clan, the whole story of his journey, and how the Heaving Sea was far higher than the Salty Sea and would soon break through and cover all the land with water. They listened to him gravely, and then one by one they counseled with him that when the gods wish to speak to the Derku people, they will do as they did when the Great Derku ate a human baby. "Why would a god who wished to send a message to the Derku people choose a mere BOY as messenger?

"Because I was the one who was taking the journey," he said

"What will you have us do? Abandon our lands? Leave our canals behind, and our boats?

"The Nile has fresh water and a flood season, my father saw it.

"But the Nile also has strong tribes living up and down its shores

Here we are masters of the world. No, we're not leaving on the word of a boy.

They insisted that he tell no one else, but he didn't obey them. In fact he told anyone who would listen, but