Children of Exile (19 page)

Everywhere I looked, I saw swinging arms, pounding fists.

And—over there—was that the glint of a knife?

Just then a blow landed against the side of my head. I felt my neck jarring from side to side, the pain reverberating.

I collapsed to the ground and everything went black.

I woke
to darkness.

Is this how it happened for the father?
I wondered.
When all the light in the world turned off for him?

I found myself feeling for my arms, each hand grasping for the opposite elbow, the opposite forearm and hand. I flexed my leg muscles and feet. All my limbs were still there, but moving them shot pain through my entire body. I felt rips in my sleeves, gashes in my skin, dried blood everywhere.

I had never before had such serious wounds. I had never before had so much as a scratch that wasn't instantly tended to, that wasn't immediately dabbed with antiseptic and lovingly bandaged.

My heart ached with longing for the love and care of my Fred-parents, for the simplicity of life in Fredtown. Tears stung my eyes, but I couldn't blink them away. When I tried harder, I finally saw a hint of light.

It wasn't that my eyes had stopped working. It was that my eyelids were so painfully swollen that I could open them to only the barest of slits. And the light around me was so dim that at first it had seemed like darkness.

I forced myself to sit up. I forced my eyes open wider.

I was alone, on a cot. And I was in . . . a cage.

There were bars on three sides of me. The fourth side was a solid stone wall. The only section of the bars that looked like it might be a door was held firmly in place by a thick padlock.

I remembered Bobo looking at the caged-in, locked-down stores and thinking their bars were masks.

I remembered Bobo. I remembered that I'd lost him.

“Bobo!” I screamed. “Bobo!”

Nobody answered. Nobody came.

I remembered that we'd been trying to find Edwy. I remembered the maid saying that he'd been kidnapped.

“Edwy?” I called hopefully. Maybe he was being held nearby. Maybe he was just waiting for me to yell for him. That was the kind of thing he'd do. Maybe he'd figured out how to pick the lock on his cage. Maybe he was just hiding in the shadows to see if I would figure it out, too.

There was still no answer.

Even Edwy wouldn't be so cruel as to not answer when I sounded so desperate.

I stood up on trembling legs and struggled over to the nearest wall of bars. I wrapped my hands around two of the bars and tried to shake them loose.

The bars held firm, their ends embedded in the stone ceiling above me and the stone floor beneath my feet. I yanked at the padlock on the door, but it held fast. Clutching the bars or trying to open the door was as useless as clenching my hands into fists and hitting the people who hit me.

I fought just as hard as they did,
I remembered, everything about the fight coming back to me.

Shame and guilt flooded over me. I had violated one of the most sacred principles the Freds had taught me:
You must never, ever, ever fight. Even if someone hits you, you don't hit back. You use your words and your wits and you settle disputes peaceably.

I had had neither the words nor the wits to settle anything. I had fought, and I had lost Bobo. And now I was in a cage.

I collapsed to the floor and wept.

I was still weeping when I heard a voice: “Rosi? Rosi—is that you?”

I raised my head, forced my swollen eyes to open as wide as possible. I knew the voice didn't belong to Bobo or Edwy. It didn't belong to any child. It didn't belong to the mother or the father either.

But it was still a little familiar.

I heard footsteps and saw a figure approaching in the near-darkness. It wasn't until I caught a glimpse of slightly tilted eyes that I understood who had called my name:

It was the missionary from the mother's church.

“I'm here,”
I whispered. I raised my voice for what I really wanted to say. “Do you know—is Bobo all right? What happened to him?”

The missionary rushed toward my cage. He reached out and touched the padlock holding the door in place. Maybe he couldn't quite believe it was real either.

“Bobo is fine,” he said in a cautious, soothing voice. “You don't have to worry about him or your parents. They all escaped safely. Without injury. I just saw them—in fact, your parents were the ones who sent me here. I got special permission. . . . Oh, I am so sorry.”

I squinted up at him in confusion. The motion made my eyes and eyelids ache even more, the swollen skin bunching painfully together.

“
They
put me here?” I asked, heartbreak in my voice, no matter how hard I tried to hide it. “The parents? They think I belong in a . . . a cage?”

I thought of the mother slapping me, of the way she'd been mean to me from the very first. I thought of how she'd lied to the father about what color my eyes were. Had he found out the truth, and
this
was the result?

I thought again of how I'd hit and punched and kicked the people attacking me in the marketplace. How I'd fought. How I'd lost Bobo anyway.

Maybe I did belong in a cage.

“No, no, it was—” The missionary broke off. He ran his hand through his hair, which made it ripple like black silk. I let myself be distracted by that for an instant. His hair was completely different from mine.

It was easier to think about hair than about anything else right now.

And when I'd broken so many other important rules, what did it matter if I focused on someone's appearance?

The missionary sank down to the floor to sit beside me, just on the other side of the bars.

“A prisoner has the right to know why she is being imprisoned,” he said. “So you can hear things now that you weren't allowed to know before.”

Imprisoned?
I thought.

I wanted to say that I already knew what I'd done wrong. But the words stuck in my throat. Nothing came out.

“First of all, I owe you an apology,” the missionary said.

I raised my head and looked at him.

“This could get lost after you hear the rest, but I'm sorry for the way things went on Sunday,” he said.

“Sunday?” I repeated, because after everything else that had happened, Sunday seemed a million years ago. But, depending on how long I'd been unconscious, it might have only been the day before.

“Yes. Yesterday,” the missionary said, so at least I knew that much. “Yesterday morning at the church service . . . You have to understand. I minister to broken people who have known great sorrow and pain. For twelve years I'd hoped and prayed alongside them. Year after year, I had to comfort weeping couples who had tiny newborn babies ripped from their arms. After all that sorrow, can't you understand why, when God finally granted our prayers and you children returned, all we wanted to do was savor our joy? Rejoice in our miracle?”

I could almost see this, almost understand. But something perverse made me object.

“The mother, the father—the parents Bobo and I were sent back to—they never seemed happy to get
me
back,” I said. It hurt to say that. To acknowledge that my own parents didn't seem to want me.

The missionary nodded in a way that accepted my words without agreeing.

“Your parents lost a baby when you were taken away,” he said. “It's not that they expected you to still be a baby after twelve years, but . . . you and the other older children . . . you've already been shaped by the lives you lived apart from your parents. You've grown up very differently, into different people. More like . . . the people who raised you.”

He meant the Freds. On Sunday I'd wanted to scream,
Freds aren't evil! Freds are good!

Now I didn't even feel worthy to speak the name, Freds.

The missionary grimaced, but in a sympathetic way. It was almost a Fred expression.

“Jesus Himself would have been able to walk into that church and rejoice with the parents, but also comfort you children who felt bewildered and lost,” he said. “I failed to do that. Until you stood up, I didn't even understand that I needed to. It had been so long since I'd been around children. . . . I'm sorry. I thought there would be time to explain that to you . . . before it came to this.”

He glanced around, his gaze taking in the bars of my cage. Or prison. Maybe that's what it really was.

Somehow his apology—or confession—jarred loose one of my own.

“I know why I'm here,” I admitted. “For fighting. It's understandable when little kids bite or hit or scratch, because they don't know any better. But I know it's wrong. I deserve . . .”

My throat closed again, and I couldn't finish. I might have managed to say,
to be in a cage. A prison.
But what if this man thought I'd deserved to lose Bobo? To never see him again?

I also wanted to say,
The mother slapped me—is she in a cage somewhere too?
But her slapping me hadn't caused my fighting. I was responsible for my own actions.

“Your Jesus is the one who said,
Turn the other cheek,
right?” I asked. “He'd hate me for what I did!”

“He would
forgive
you for what you did,” the missionary said gently. “And that's if he thought what you did was wrong. Under the circumstances . . . Did you ever hear that Jesus also said,
I bring not peace, but a sword
?”

“He did?” I said. That had never once been mentioned in Fredtown.

“It's caused a lot of problems over the years,” the missionary admitted. “I personally don't view it as a call to war. Just that sometimes God wants us to stir things up. And we're supposed to be wise enough to figure out when we need to be peaceable and abiding, and when we need to stand up and shout for change.”

I latched onto the strange word he'd said.

“War?”
I asked. “Why would you worry about that? There hasn't been a war in ages!”

The missionary froze.

“Is that what the Freds told you?” he asked in a strangely quiet voice. It made me think of ice that was about to crack.

“Yes, of course,” I said confidently, using my school recitation tone. Coming home had been one challenge after another, but I could handle this. “Just as little children have to learn that hitting and lashing out is wrong and doesn't work, humanity as a whole did, too. A long time ago, before people were civilized, they had wars. Of course now we know that there are always other, better ways to work out conflicts. We know that war is much too terrible.”

I couldn't remember any Fred telling me exactly when people had stopped fighting wars, but that was probably because it had been so long ago. Practically prehistory.

The missionary let his eyes close—a sign of weakness? prayer? Then he opened them again.

“Rosi, the last war ended only twelve years ago,” he said. “The day you were born. You and Edwy. Two newborn babies miraculously saved from the heart of a war zone. . . .”

I couldn't deal quite yet with that strange and horrible concept—
war
—as something that had occurred during my lifetime. But I could inch toward it. The Freds had always said that Edwy and I were taken to Fredtown on the very day we were born. But they also said that newborns were generally considered too fragile to travel great distances. If Edwy and I had been born during a war, of course the risks
of leaving us in place were greater than the risks of travel.

And if the war had ended, then the danger wasn't as great for the children younger than us. As babies, they could be left in their hometown, cared for by Freds, until they were a little stronger. They just had to be taken away eventually because . . . because . . .

Because their parents had once been in a war? Because they were still
capable
of war?

Something odd happened in my brain—something like double vision in my mind's eye. I could see the fighting I'd witnessed in the marketplace: the fists raining down on me, my screaming for Bobo, the glint of a knife slashing through the air. Was that what war was like?

And I could see the father's sightless eyes, his empty shirtsleeve; the mother's scarred, paralyzed face. I could see all the other disfigured and disabled adults in my hometown, the wasteland of burned houses.

Were all those signs of war, evidence of battles fought only a dozen years ago?

I remembered scrambling onto the table and screaming about Edwy's disappearance. I remembered swinging my own fists against the people hitting me.

“Did I just start another war?” I whispered.

“No,”
the missionary said, shaking his head emphatically. “
No.
You can't put that blame on yourself. The people who started the fighting . . . they were just looking for an opening. They had too much hate in their hearts to tolerate their former enemies getting their children back. And anyhow, Enforcers came and stopped everything. . . .”

He wouldn't quite meet my eye.

I remembered that back when there were wars, people died in battle.

“Bobo!” I wailed. “Are you
sure
he wasn't hurt? Did you see him for yourself? You're not just telling me what you think I want to hear, are you? Please tell me. . . .”

The missionary reached in through the bars and laid a hand on my shoulder.

“I promise you, Bobo is fine,” he said. “Physically.”

“But psychologically . . . ,” I whimpered.

“I won't lie to you,” the missionary said. “Of course he
was shaken up. And worried about you. But your parents are taking good care of him. I
did
see him. I helped your mother bandage the scrapes Bobo got from falling. He'll heal. Body and spirit.”