Orson Card - Ruins

“Don’t be sarcastic with me,” said Param.

“I think he was being delicate and respectful,” said Loaf. “If I had said that, it would have been sarcastic.”

“I shouldn’t have pushed him,” said Param.

“We’re making progress,” said Loaf.

“Someone else should have done it,” said Param. “I shouldn’t be reduced to protecting the name of the royal family myself.”

“The royal family that tried to kill us all back in Ramfold?” asked Loaf. “The royal family in which the queen tried to murder her own children while she bedded General Citizen?”

“Leadership comes naturally to some people. Look at Rigg and Umbo. Raised in the same village. But Rigg is a natural leader, and Umbo is . . .”

“A peasant boy,” said Loaf. “I think that’s what you called him, when you accused him of being a liar.”

“I never accused him of—”

“I have perfect recall now,” said Loaf. And when he quoted her own words back to her—“And we’re supposed to take the word of a peasant boy?”—his voice sounded astonishingly similar to her own. All the intonations were exactly right.

“I didn’t suggest that he was lying,” said Param. “I merely said that it was unreasonable to expect someone like me or Rigg to take the word of a peasant boy as if it were indistinguishable from fact.”

“So you studied the history of the wallfolds for nearly a year and you’re still as ignorant as ever,” said Loaf.

Instead of time-slicing to get away from Loaf, Param slowed down and let him move on ahead. But Olivenko stayed with her, walking at her slower pace.

Param could feel the hideous music of the Wall playing with the back of her mind, making her angry, sad, despairing, lonely, anguished; but not the way it was the first time she had experienced the Wall, not overwhelming, not terrifying. “Are you going to criticize me, too?”

“You were raised to rule,” said Olivenko.

“Or so my mother said,” Param replied. “I have no idea when her plan for me changed, but my education, such as it was, never changed. You don’t announce to the cattle that you’re going to slaughter them.”

“You were raised with courtly manners,” said Olivenko. “You heard people talking in elevated language, observing the courtesies.”

“As Rigg does,” said Param.

“But the expendable Ramex trained him to be able to do that.”

“Exactly.”

“So you and Rigg were taught to behave in a certain way. You were given skills. But how was Umbo raised?”

“As a peasant boy,” said Param. “I didn’t say it was his fault .”

“He was the son of a cobbler in a small village. He attended the village school. In that school, he was taught the history of Stashiland. He was taught that the royal family were rapacious monsters, who came to Aressa as uncivilized barbarians from the northeast. They killed most of the ruling class of Stashiland, and raped the few women of that class that they allowed to live, after killing their children, so they could ‘start fresh.’ ”

“I’ve read the history. I’m not proud of our origins. But that was many hundreds of years ago.”

“Not so very many,” said Olivenko. “And Umbo wasn’t taught that history as a distant memory, to be ignored or glossed over. He was taught it as if it was a fair description of the way the Sessamids have always ruled in Stashiland.”

“And that’s a lie,” said Param.

“So there was no murderousness when Aptica Sessamin decreed that no male could inherit the Tent of Light and had all her male relatives executed like criminals, for the crime of being male? Including the male babies?”

“That was ugly,” Param admitted. “But it was a long time ago.”

“Your mother’s grandmother,” said Olivenko. “I’m not arguing with you, I’m reminding you of what Umbo was taught. The People’s Schools taught children that everybody had the right to rule, when their turn came, and nobody was better by birth than anyone else.”

“Obviously false.”

“By birth,” Olivenko repeated. “By lineage. Umbo was taught that just because your mother was powerful didn’t mean you had any more right to that power than anyone else. He was taught that power had to be earned, and that if you showed merit, you could become anything.”

“But that’s not how the People’s Republic worked at all,” said Param with contempt. “I saw how those hypocrites pretended everything was so egalitarian as they promoted their relatives and friends and established a whole new class of nobles.”

“I’m reminding you of what Umbo was taught in Fall Ford at the base of the Stashi Falls,” said Olivenko. “So all of a sudden, his boyhood friend—a boy who was even lower in social standing than Umbo, remember, because he lived a wandering life as a trapper’s son—his boyhood friend has a bag of jewels and starts talking like a lord. That came as a shock, you can imagine.”

“Rigg was coming out of his disguise, coming into his heritage,” said Param.

“Coming to prison as fast as the People’s Republic could arrest him, is that what you mean?”

“It was our fate during that time,” said Param.

“So Umbo does everything he can to get his friend out of imprisonment, and he does it just in time—”

“Rigg got us out of prison! Using his talent and mine together. He found the passages in the walls, and I got us through those walls into the passages, and—”

“You weren’t free of danger until Umbo pushed you and Rigg back in time a few days—which is where you acquired me ,” said Olivenko.

“I was not saying that Umbo wasn’t helpful and good,” said Param.

“Only that his word was worthless, because he was born in a village to ordinary people.”

“Not worthless, just uncorroborated.”

“Remember, I’m trying to help you understand why Rigg got so angry with you. Umbo was his friend in that village, in a time of Rigg’s life when other boys wouldn’t have befriended him. Rigg was the stranger, the outsider, and everybody assumed he was a bastard. At least Umbo’s parents were married.”

“I know they’re friends,” said Param. “But Rigg’s supposed to be my brother , and to take the side of—”

“When people were trying to kill you, he took your side, didn’t he?”

“Nobody was trying to kill Umbo.”

“And then I remember a time when you announced you weren’t going to journey another step. You rebelled against Rigg.”

“That didn’t mean I wanted to follow Umbo!”

“And you didn’t. You followed me .”

“You’re an educated man,” said Param.

“Educated by the side of your father,” said Olivenko. “But still born to a much lower class. Not a natural leader, right?”

“More of a leader than the others.”

“Param, are you really this blind? I speak the language of court, in the accents of court, because I worked very hard to learn to talk that way. And so you followed me when you wouldn’t listen to anybody else. But I was never the leader of that group. I was simply the one person who could get you to do anything.”

“You led us!”

“They let me pretend to lead,” said Olivenko, “because Loaf wasn’t talking yet, and Umbo was taking care of Loaf. But the fact is, it was Umbo who did everything that kept us alive.”

“You did it with him!”

“I did what he told me to do,” said Olivenko. “Umbo understood that you were out of your element, that everything was strange for you. He also understood that you would only listen to me. So he made sure that I knew the right things to do, so that I’d be the one to say them, so that you’d listen.”