I, Klado: Rescued

On the planet of Gat Er, Klado is rescued from death and enslavement.

The Compound Gate

Quarter-cycle accounting was underway, and I, Klado, sat cross-legged, my knees chaffing against the unfinished wood under the table. I emptied the tally pebbles onto the rich blue and green tapestry of my ancestors and rolled them individually into color-coded piles. The black pebbles represented our birds that provided eggs and meat. I counted 113. The speckled pebbles were goats. 48 of them provided milk and meat for occasional celebrations. A slight smile touched my lips as I rolled each grey pebble into their pile. The grey pebbles were people, and I knew them each by name. There were 34 of us, including me. Four cycles ago, when my father first bequeathed this territory to me, we were only 25.

Surely my father would be pleased; these counts proved once again more than satisfactory. The precarious numbers rose and fell depending on how well we fended off the predators surrounding our forest compound. Constantly harassing us, they dug up our roots, stole our birds, killed the goats, or made off with our children. My job as Dependable was to keep us fed, safe, and to provide comfort after finding the ravaged, bloody entrails of a child beneath the endless canopy of trees.

All was well until Jun burst in, his face wet with sweat, his breathing deep and labored. I instinctively grabbed a grey pebble and clutched it in my fist.

Jun clung to the doorjamb, trying to catch his breath. “The Taro are on their way! They are coming to make war!”

I dropped the stone. It made a small, sharp clink as it struck another, then rolled onto the floor with a thud.

The Taro were powerful neighbors with villages on the far side of the Alluvial valley, yet rarely went to war with my father. It had been ten cycles since they last clashed, and that was over a wellspring in the middle of the wide valley that separated them.

Why then were they making war against me?

I, Klado, a lesser progeny of the Tang dynasty, was not a warrior, neither was Jun nor any of the young people in my compound. We were an Emergent outpost, trained only to ward off the forest beasts. Good with our bows and arrows, we sat in trees to pick them off before they got too close. But killing humans was not in our skill set, nor in our hearts.

There was only one explanation. They were defying tradition, their minds set on murder and theft, because of me! And they would massacre my people without mercy because clan members are loyal only to their Dependable and could never serve another.

I had to protect them. Even at the cost of my freedom. In war, the losing Dependable, after being forced to watch the carnage, was enslaved and added to the winning clan’s collection of deposed monarchs.

Arising from the table, I took one last look at the ancestral colors adorning the walls and upholstering the furniture—the rich blues and greens of the Tang clan. “Take everybody and run into the forest. Make your way back to my father’s compound!”

Jun shook his head, rigorously. “We… we won’t leave you!”

“If you leave immediately, you can escape.”

“What about you?”

“I will hold them off.”

“But your father—”

“He will open his gates for you. You are his kin.”

“But—”

“Do it! Now!”

Jun ran out and called the others to follow him into the forest. The young women snatched their toddlers. The young men grabbed their tools, leaving the animals behind. There was no time to herd them. They had to run for their lives.

I followed as far as the back veranda and watched them disappear into the dense, tangled foliage, knowing my father’s disappointment was inevitable.

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From the moment of my birth, I was a disappointment, an abomination, and a blight on my father’s good name. My mother told the story only once when I was old enough to understand. She refuses to speak of it anymore. “The past has no bearing on the present,” she would say each time I asked. But it was an easy birth, she said, simpler than her previous deliveries. As the birth pains seized her, relatives rushed to her aid, and after the midwife arrived, it was only a short while before she yelled for her to push. I slithered out, head first, she said, into the midwife’s skillful hands. Then she heard her gasp.

My mother, anxious but exhausted, struggled to open her eyes. “What’s wrong?”

With a shake of her head, the midwife averted her gaze, her lips pressed into a thin line.

“Is the child dead?”

“The child lives.”

My mother, relieved, collapsed onto her back. “Is it a boy or a girl?”

“Neither,” the midwife said, her hands trembling as she placed me on my mother’s breast.

My mother, frantic, searched my lower limbs, looking for any sign of sex, but all she found were two tiny, pallid puckers. She let out a tragic howl and shoved me wailing to the floor.

The midwife scooped me up. “Shall I take it into the forest?”

“I don’t care what you do with it!”

The midwife turned to leave, but the village shaman, overhearing the commotion, forced her way in. She held out her hands for me, and with a small, practiced movement, pinched herbs from her satchel—something bitter smelling—and sprinkled them on my chest. She squinted at the pattern they created, tilting her head this way and that. Then she swaddled me in our clan’s colors and took me back to my mother.

My mother drew her knees up to her chest and covered her face with her hands. “Get it away from me!”

A forbidding figure loomed large in the doorway. It was my father, a Dependable of Dependables. Clothed in full clan regalia, his booming voice reverberated, commanding everyone’s attention. “You heard what she said! Get rid of it!”

The shaman threw her head back, scoffing, and shoved me into my mother’s cold and unwelcoming arms. “Feed it,” she said. Then she turned toward my father, her face hard and her eyes blazing with authority. “It is not for you to end this child’s life!” She shook her finger, gnarled with age, at the tea-green sky above. “It is up to the stars.”

My parents obeyed and over time, my precociousness endeared me to my mother, but my father never trusted me. He trained his sons to be warriors, but to me, along with my sisters, he gave no instruction, except how to nurture and protect the resources our lives depended on. I learned to be content with that. It is more important to support human life than to take it.

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That is why I held my ground as the gate hinges shook with the warring clan’s rage. Let the Taro take our birds and goats. Let them dig up our roots. They can rip the colors from our walls and take me captive, for nothing was as important as my people fleeing for their lives.

I dug in, shoving the full weight of my six-foot frame against the gate until I sensed a stirring behind me. I spun around. It was an elderly man dressed head to toe in gleaming white robes—a foreigner, like no one I had seen. Deep lines etched his blue-bronze face buried beneath a mass of unkempt off-white hair.

“Who are you?!”

He gave me no answer. Instead, he seized my shoulder with one hand and slid the other under his cloak.

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If you haven’t had a chance to read If I Ruled the World, start here.

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