"Why didn't you go back to the city? Was it destroyed?"

"No, but Father says the people there weren't worthy to have true priests who knew the secret language and the calendar and everything. You know. Reading and writing."

Akma was puzzled. "Doesn't everybody learn how to read and write?"

Didul suddenly looked angry. "That's the most terrible thing your father did. Teaching everybody to read and write. All the people who believed his lies and sneaked out of the city to join him, even if they were just peasants which they mostly were, even if they were turkey-herds. Everybody. He took solemn vows, you know. When he was made a priest. Your father took those vows, never to reveal the secrets of the priesthood to anybody. And then he taught everybody"

"Father says all the people should be priests."

"People? Is that what he says?" Didul laughed. "Not just people, Akma. It isn't just people that he was going to teach to read."

Akma imagined his father trying to teach the taskmaster to read. He tried to picture one of the diggers bowed over a book, trying to hold a stylus and make the marks in the wax of the tablets. It made him shudder.

"Hungry?" asked Didul. Akma nodded.

"Come eat with me and my brothers." Didul led him into the shade of a copse behind the hill of the commons.

Akma knew the place-until the diggers came and enslaved them, it was the place where Mother used to gather the children to teach them and play quiet games with them while Father taught the adults at the hill. It gave him a strange feeling to see a large basket of fruit and cakes and a cask of wine there, with diggers serving the food to three humans. Diggers didn't belong in that place where his mother had led the children in play.