“You said ‘arse,’” Nani informed her father. “I heard it from the kitchen.”
She took a seat between Pehr and Jace, reaching for the dish of salad in the center of the table. Using her eating sticks, she brought some to her plate, and then selected a leaf from the pile and brought it to her mouth, still smirking.
“Arse isn’t a curse,” Truff grumbled. “But if it offends your delicate ears, my sweet, you’ve my permission to take your dinner in the pasture with the kampri.”
Nani stuck her tongue out at him, giggled, scooped fish-gruel from its wooden bowl with a palm leaf and deposited it on her plate next to the salad. Pehr glanced over at her and smiled. Nani was a beautiful girl, her brown skin tanned dark by the sun, her hair plaited and partly bleached with lye-stone, dyed oranges and reds to layer in with its natural browns. Since her engagement, she had been in a near-constant good mood, and her grey-green eyes seemed to sparkle. They crinkled at the corners, when she smiled, in a way that had always made the back of Pehr’s neck feel warm and prickly. She was smiling now and he found he had to look away.
“We’re not children, Nani,” Jace said again, elbowing her.
“You’re not men,” Nani said, not looking at him.
“So?”
“So until you’re Tested, you’re children. That’s how it works.”
“You’ve never been Tested.”
“I’m a woman. As you know perfectly well, we don’t take the Test.”
“Don’t see how being betrothed to some hunter who’s made a stupid necklace makes you a woman …”
“Don’t call my necklace stupid. I don’t have to explain to you how it makes me a woman. You wouldn’t understand anyway.”
“What about Luce, then?” Jace asked, grinning.
Pehr snickered, and Nani rolled her eyes. Luce was nearing her sixtieth year, ancient by their standards. She was twenty years older even than Truff, who was one of the few living hunters who had survived past his thirty-fifth year. Luce had come to their village as an orphan refugee, her face deeply scarred during an attack that had decimated her home. Some whispered that it was the work of the Lagos, the weapons of the Gods, but Luce had never confirmed it, afraid to be shunned by her adopted people. She had never wed. She made a living working for the merchantmen, cleaning their homes and sewing their blankets.
“I think they grant an honorary title anyway, once you’ve seen forty winters,” Truff said dryly, and the others around the table laughed.
“Perhaps Pehr can take Luce to bed,” Nani said, giggling. “His Test is nearly here … soon he’ll be a man!”
“If he passes,” Truff said, turning an eye on Pehr, who was still shoveling gruel into his mouth as if it was his last meal on earth.
“I’ll pass,” Pehr said between bites. “You’ve taught me.”
Truff smiled, nodded, leaned back in his chair. “I have. You’ve not the arm-strength I had … I’ll say it will take you a bit longer to open the sow’s brain with your club … but you’re faster and wield a bow better than I did. You will pass.”
“You said Paul would pass, too,” Jace said, and before he had even finished the sentence Nani reached out to swat him on the arm. Jace’s face went pink and assumed an expression of regret with which they were all familiar; his mouth often went off before his brain could catch up to it.
Truff made an expression that was almost a grimace, as if remembering that other boy had filled his mouth with some foul taste. Pehr understood the look; whenever he thought of Paul, and what the Test had done to him, he was filled with a vast sense of anger and futility and helplessness. Paul had been a young phenom, and Pehr had worshipped the ground that his older brother walked on. Still, the Test had taken him.
“I’m sorry, Father,” Jace said. Truff shook his head.
“Don’t apologize for speaking the truth,” he said. “Men make proclamations. We predict the future. In the end, though, the Test sees the truth in us all.”
Truff seemed on the verge of saying something further and then shrugged. What more was there to say? Paul had been the son of a hunter. As such, he had been tested. It was the only judge of hunters’ sons their people had ever known, and though it was a harsh one, it had served them well for many years.
The Test killed, but it did not kill indiscriminately. Paul, dead two years now, had been a force of destruction with the club, but his strength had come at the cost of foot-speed, and the caves had judged him. It was not enough to be strong; only those who were strongest, fastest, smartest, and best with the bow could survive. All others perished, and in some years this left only a very small few. In some years, there were none at all. This was Uru, their world, and this was the only life they knew.
There was silence around the table for a moment, and then Pehr spoke. “What’s passed is passed. I am not Paul. I will live.”
Truff nodded. Nani favored Pehr with a smile that was all hope and belief and excitement, and it sent a warm flush swelling across his skin.
“Then you’ll be a hunter,” she said. “You’ll find some nice girl, and give her your necklace, and then there will be many little Pehrs running about.”
Jace made a gagging noise. Nani reached out and smacked him again, not even bothering to turn in his direction. Pehr shrugged.
“After the Test there is naught but the will of the Gods,” Pehr said. It was a saying taught to all hunters’ children, and it was the truth. Pehr had only vague ideas about life as a man. He would give his necklace to Sili, if she would have it. He would hunt, she would make bread. They would make children. What else was there?
“Worry about what comes after the Test some other time,” Truff said. “Tonight, I need you to help me re-thatch the roof of the chicken pen.”
“Yes, uncle.”
“Good. Jace, you will repair the hole in the kampri fence.”
“But Father—“ Jace began, and Truff held his hand up.
“I’ll not hear it, boy. Your foolish games spooked the beasts and put the hole there. It’s been two weeks, and a pile of rocks is not a fit solution. The kampri will shove them aside eventually, and then we’ll be chasing them from here to the jungle’s edge. You will fix it. Tonight.”
Jace rolled his eyes, sighed, slumped in his chair. “Yes, Father.”
“You would think he had nothing to do with it,” Nani commented, and Jace glared at her. The boy maintained that he was not at fault, that he had been performing an experiment when he impersonated the call of a jungle cat, and could not possibly have expected to trigger a minor stampede. Stupid beasts to begin with, kampri seemed to lose even their limited brainpower when spooked. They had hammered a hole in the fence with their horns, and six had escaped before Jace had built his pile of rocks. He and Pehr had spent an entire afternoon hunting the fugitives down and returning them to their pen. Truff had been unimpressed.
“I don’t care who is at fault,” Truff said. “Even if the Gods themselves hammered that hole in the fence, Jace is the one who is going to mend it.”
“Fine. I’m done anyway,” Jace said. “May I be excused, Father, that I might carry out this important task you’ve given me?”
Jace’s mother, restricted by her vow of silence, shot her son an angry glance. Truff noticed this, and the left corner of his mouth curled upward in a smirk before breaking out into a full grin.
“A little spirit is never a bad thing in a hunter, Anna. Not so long as he knows when to silence his foolish mouth and do as he’s told. You’ve learned that lesson well, have you not, my son?”
“All too well, Father. I sometimes wonder if I’ve yet woken up from a few of your more … zealous teachings,” Jace replied, standing up and collecting his dishes. He left the room, to deposit them in the washtub, where they would shortly be attended to by Nani and her mother.
“Is there any bread left?” Pehr asked, glancing around, and Nani laughed at him.
“Go do your work. If you get it done in time to go out fo
r a swim with me, I will bring you some bread.”
Pehr turned a questioning look to his uncle, who only laughed. “Don’t ask me for permission to go, boy. You heard the girl. Get to it.”
Pehr nodded, stood, and followed Jace into the kitchen.
* * *
“How long have we been friends?” Nani asked him, and Pehr glanced over at her in surprise, eyebrows raised.
“I’ve known you all my life.”
“That’s not what I asked you.”
They had gone to the sea after dinner and their chores were done, swimming slowly out to the very string of rocks that Pehr and Jace so often visited. The younger boy hadn't joined them, preferring instead to stay home and work with his father on techniques with the club.
Nani was lying on her back on the smooth rocks, looking up at the stars above them. She yawned and said, “When I had five years and you had six, you used to pull my hair and call me ugly, and I hated you. I hated you!”
Pehr, who hadn't thought of those days in so long that they seemed now to have happened in some other life, laughed a little. “Yes. Do you want me to apologize, Nani?”
“No. I want you to tell me how long we’ve been friends.”
Pehr thought about it for a moment, looking back through those years, trying to recall when his relationship with Nani had changed from antagonism to something else.
“Tenth year,” he said at last.
“Yours or mine?”
“Yours. It was just five years ago. It seems longer. Do you remember it?”
“I … no. Remember what?”
“When you told Stefan he was no better than kampri shit. You said that because he was insulting Jace, and he shoved you, and you skinned your knees.”
Nani’s eyes lit up and she grinned. “That’s right! I didn’t want to cry, but I couldn’t help it, and you hit him so hard his nose burst.”
“And then he ran home,” Pehr said, nodding.
“You helped me up, and the two of you climbed up in the palms and picked berries for me. You pretended you were monkeys and made me laugh.”
Pehr shrugged. “Jace made you laugh. When I tried to be a monkey, I nearly fell from the tree.”
Nani was smiling, her eyes far away. “I remember.”
“That … that is when we became friends, I think.”
“Yes, that was it. I don’t think we ever fought again … not like we did before.”
Pehr sat in silence. He did not have the words to explain how, in her tenth year, Nani had made some fundamental step in the transition from the awkward, obnoxious child she had been to the woman that she would become. It was not simply her appearance; it went far deeper than that. When Stefan had shoved her, Pehr had understood in that moment that Nani was right. Stefan was a puling, cowardly bully, and she was better than him, and he had no right to put his hands upon her.
Though equal in years, Pehr had always been bigger and stronger than Stefan, and he had settled matters in the way that hunters most often did. Stefan had fled crying to his merchant father, who had in turn made clear a simple fact of life: in their village, as in all Uru, it was best to avoid incurring the wrath of hunters. Stefan had never been more than a minor annoyance to Pehr or his cousins again.
Nani sighed. “I'm afraid for you, Pehr, and for Jace. Will you speak to me as a friend tonight? Not as a woman or a girl, not someone to be protected from the truth, but only as a friend?”
Pehr nodded and, when Nani did not elaborate, said, “I will.”
Nani was silent for a time, so long in fact that Pehr wondered if she had reconsidered her decision to share this thing that was troubling her. He kept his peace, and at last she spoke.
“Will you pass your Test?”
Her voice was tight, strained with concern, and for a time Pehr contemplated her question without answering. At last he said, “I do not fear it.”
“That’s not what I’m asking you!” Nani cried, sitting up and turning to stare at him with an expression that was equal parts anger and love. “Damn it, Pehr … answer the questions I ask you. Don’t give me answers you think I want to hear to questions I never asked.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t ask you for a Gods-damned apology. Answer the question. In three weeks, will I be cousin to a hunter or just another dead man? Will I have to send my husband out on the hunt with only the village idiots by his side, or will I know that when he goes, he goes with friend and family, someone who will think of his safety? When Jace’s time comes, should he pass the Test, will you be there to guide him on the hunt?”
“Nani … what is it that you fear? The other hunters are good men.”
“Oh, yes. Yes, good men. Is that what your father would say of them, then?”
Pehr was taken aback; no one had spoken openly of his father’s death in years. The man had met his end when Pehr was only two years old, the victim of an errant spear thrown not by an enemy but by a fellow hunter. The spear had been intended for a boar but had instead hit Pehr’s father in the chest. Twelve days later, the wound went bad and the fever took him. Pehr’s mother, still in mourning, had died not nine months later, killed by a sea snake in shallows that seemed no danger even to her sons, who were following along behind her.
This was Uru. This was their world. Truff and Anna had taken the boys in as their own, and had done so gladly. The couple had proven nearly infertile, capable of bearing only two children in nearly a decade of attempts, and were in need of sons.
“My father’s death was an accident,” Pehr said.
“Of course it was,” Nani replied. “But would my father have thrown that spear? They were brothers. They were family, like you and I are family. I know that Josep is not, but after we are wed … you will think of him that way. I know you will. You would never throw a spear that might hit him, or my brother.”
Pehr nodded at this. “No, I wouldn’t. I would hold the spear.”
“One of our lives is worth more than some stupid boar. I know you understand that. Oh, Pehr, I’m so afraid for you, and for Jace, and for Josep. I hate the hunt. I … I hate the Test! I hate it!”
There it was at last, or so it seemed to Pehr. This was what Nani had wanted to say; she hated the Test, but feared saying so to a boy who had spent his entire life preparing for it. Now it was out, and Pehr was glad to realize that he was not upset by her hate. The Test was cruel; it had taken family from them both already, and might yet take more.
His heart ached for her, this girl who could only sit and wait and see, who could only hope that her cousin and her brother would survive these dangers forced upon them. He wished, not for the first time, that she might be someone else, so he could take her in his arms and comfort her. This was impossible, and so he merely stared out at the Everstorm, black clouds against a black sky, turned purple-red now and again by flashes of lightning.
“The Test sees the truth in us all,” he said at last, and the words tasted to him no better than they had to Truff earlier in the evening.
“Don’t quote empty sayings at me,” Nani snarled. “Don’t you feed me that shit. I’ll take it from my father – I know it hurts him to say it as much as it does me to hear it – but I won’t take it from you. I won’t take it from Paul’s brother!”
“I was never much with words,” Pehr told her.
It hurt to think too much about Paul, but he understood Nani’s anger. He understood it very well. How many nights had he lain awake after Paul’s death in the caves, hating the Test, hating his village, hating his existence as the son of a hunter? How could he spout such empty platitudes, now that it was his turn to be tested, his turn to face death?
“I want one word, Pehr,” Nani said. “I asked you a simple question, and I want your answer, and I want the truth. Will you pass the Test? Will you be a hunter?”
Pehr paused, breathed, looked deep within himself and evaluated himself against those hunters before him who had passed. There was Josep, Nani’s betrothed
, a strong man and good shot with the bow, but he had been no better than Pehr was now when he had passed the Test. There was Clay, and Torvus, and Sirtram. All were good men, and good hunters, but none had been more prepared, more skilled, or even luckier than Pehr. They had simply passed the Test, as they had trained all their lives to do, as had Pehr.
“I will pass,” he said, and nodded. “Yes, Nani. That is the one word you wanted, is it not? Yes. I will be there to hunt with Josep, and with Jace.”
“Speak for yourself. You will pass, you believe it and because of that, I believe it … but Jace? He is not … you cannot know his fate.”
“He has two years, Nani. That is still much time to learn, and … perhaps I can help. After I pass, I will know the Test. I can help him to prepare.”
“My father knows the Test as well.”
“Yes, but it’s been years. It may have changed. It may have—”
“You know your help will be welcome, Pehr. You are like a brother to Jace and me. But you cannot guarantee his success. We all know that Jace is not … he is not a typical hunter. He is not strong.”
“No, but he is fast and smart and he can shoot. Who is to say?”
Nani sighed. “It’s not fair.”
“Nothing is fair. Nani … when is life fair? My father passed his Test, made his necklace, gave it to my mother and married her. They made children, hunted, made bread … they did everything right, and what did it get them?”
“Death,” Nani said.
“All roads lead to death,” Pehr replied.
“More sayings. Think for yourself, Pehr.”
“I believe that saying. We all must die, Nani.”
“Will you promise me something?”
“Ask.”
“Will you promise to help him? Will you promise to do everything that you can to help him, with the Test and the hunt, and … everything? Will you promise to always be there for him?”
Pehr smiled. “Nani, of course I will.”
“Swear it!”
“I promise. I swear to you that I will keep him safe. If by my power I can stop harm from coming to Jace, or to you, or to any of those that I know and love, I will do so. That is all I can do, and all I can give you.”
The Broken God Machine Page 2
