We stood beside the crater in silence, trembling in the heat. Then we went back to the Precepture. Elián was nowhere to be found.
In the dispatches, later, I read that Talis had demanded blood from the trommellers for interfering, and that the family had elected to surrender not Hannah but the old woman.
It is only royalty who turn over their children.
10
GRETA CHOOSES
The punishment we’d been expecting came the next day, before Elián was even returned to us. It was, as such things usually were, very simple. The windows wouldn’t open. Atta tried them once, twice, then turned to us with an eloquent shrug. The classroom door slid closed of its own accord.
Heat it was to be, then. Not the blistering heat and strange fumes of the crater—not what we’d feared—but heat nonetheless. Well. We’d survived that before. The temperature was already creeping up when Brother Delta shambled in. Without comment he launched into a discussion of the use of ritual in limiting wars.
There is a sense in which war is nothing but ritual: the magical change of blood into gold or oil or water. There have been whole cultures whose notion of war was not much different from their notion of religion, or of sport. The Aztec Flower Wars, for example, were century-long rituals whose intent was to produce prisoners for religious sacrifice. When the Spanish came, they thought the Aztecs were savages because the Flower Wars had not resulted in wholesale death.
An odd notion of savagery.
Talis had pushed us back toward the Aztecs, insisting, for instance, on limiting the effective range of weapons to a hundred yards. I’m talking handguns, crossbows, said the Utterances. Hell, bring back broadswords—those were cool. If you want blood, then I want it all over your hands.
While the room heated slowly, we discussed the emotional differences between hand-to-hand combat and what was once called “the morality of altitude”—the ability of pilots and drone operators to kill tens of thousands of people without looking any one of them in the eye. Which was more savage?
Talis’s first rule of war: make it personal.
My hands were damp with the heat. I wiped them down my thighs.
The ritualization of war is an inexhaustible topic. The lecture went on for hours—all morning. The heat lapped around us like an incoming tide. Da-Xia pulled her feet up and tucked herself into a half lotus. That didn’t look as if it was going to help.
The bells rang, but Brother Delta did not even pause. We watched the younger children file out into the gardens as he pushed the discussion toward hostages specifically. Tokugawa Ieyasu, first Tokugawa shogun of Japan, had spent his childhood as a hostage. As young princes, Vlad the Impaler and his brother had been held hostage by the Ottoman sultan to guarantee the cooperation of their father.
“Oh, yes,” said Grego. “And this worked out so well. History remembers him as ‘the Impaler’ only because he invented the shish kebab.”
“Really?” said Han.
Atta—from Vlad’s part of the world—very nearly made a noise.
“Stop it,” barked Thandi. “Stop it, it’s not funny.” She was sheened with sweat, and she kept looking at Elián’s empty desk as if to set it on fire with her eyes. A proctor climbed up and perched there, and Thandi turned away. There was another proctor on the ceiling, and a pair by the door.
The jokes flagged.
The heat rose.
Brother Delta called on me for a précis of the Roman tradition of hostages, which was extensive. The Romans took hostages by the herd—the thousand noble children of the Achaeans, for instance, during the war against Perseus of Macedonia. These had included the historian Polybius, whose father—
But I found myself breathing through my mouth, trying to keep cool. Polybius, who—
I could not remember.
Atta swiped his sleeve across the fogged-up window and sucked at the moisture in his cuff. The sun had swung westward and was now pouring onto his desk, and Gregori’s. Grego was pink, the capillaries in his skin standing out cruelly. His eyes were snapping light-dark-light as he fluttered on the edge of consciousness.
Out the cleared swath of the window, I watched the twelve-and thirteen-year-olds pile the more overgrown of the zucchini into heaps to feed to the goats. On the day goats refuse to eat zucchini, we humans will have to give up all pretense of domination over the agricultural world. The squashes will have won.
For just a moment I could vividly imagine World War Squash.
Heat. I was slipping.
“Hostages,” said Brother Delta, and then Gregori fainted. Atta—he was silent, but he wasn’t stupid, and he could size things up as quickly as any of us, and react faster than anyone else except quick, graceful Xie. Atta slid out of his own chair and caught Grego on his way to the ground. He laid the body on the floor in front of the desks. Gregori’s samue top was so wet with sweat that it left a dark mark on the grey stone floor. He looked so . . .