Pehr’s village was made up of a loose collection of families, most of which were largely self-sufficient except in times of crisis. Truff’s tiny clan was perhaps the smallest, and the mammoth, fifty-person family to which Nani’s betrothed, Josep, belonged was without question the largest. In times of grief, danger, or celebration, the village came together to form a cohesive whole some four hundred strong between the youngest baby and the eldest member – a title which had now passed to a man named Kal’Aldus, who had lived for fifty-three years.
They gathered together now, the women and children nearest to the center, tending a great fire in the central pit upon which mounds of kampri and ears of sweet yellow corn were roasting. The hunters and those other men brave enough and skilled enough to fight stayed on the outskirts, wary of attack, always watchful. Between them and the fire were the rest, a loose collection of untrained merchants, farmers, and boys like Pehr and Jace who were old enough to fight, but not yet truly men.
The farmers and merchants were armed mostly with wooden clubs and a few flimsy bows. The hunters’ sons were better equipped, carrying greatly superior bows and clubs with heads of bone. The hunters themselves, of course, held the best bows, the arrows with the sharpest heads, and large axes or clubs made from heavy stone, shaped by hours of painstaking labor.
Into the deep of the night they waited and watched, but nothing came from the blackness save the sound of the drums, which grew ever closer, pounding their never-ending rhythm and drowning out any hope for peace or serenity. It was during this time that fatigue began to gnaw at the villagers, and one by one they succumbed to sleep. Pehr watched it happen, sitting out at the edges of the firelight, sharpening his bone arrowheads on a piece of stone in between bites from a chunk of gritty, dried cheese.
“You’ll grind that down to nothing before long,” Jace said. He was perched atop a boulder, just as before, facing the jungle. If he was feeling any fatigue at all, he had shown no signs of it.
Pehr shrugged and set the arrowhead aside, picking up a new one. “If we had more branches, I could be making more arrows.”
“If there were any more branches to be had, I would have brought them to you,” Jace replied.
Pehr nodded. The yukkiuli trees that dotted the landscape and grew such fine, straight branches for arrow-making had all been stripped. There were always more, but only at a distance too great for the scavenging party to have reached and returned before nightfall. As it was, the last few stragglers had nearly received arrows in their guts as thanks for their efforts, so nervous were some of those defending the perimeter.
“Is Nani asleep?” Jace asked him.
Pehr glanced up and over toward the central fire, needing only a moment to locate Nani’s prone figure, her arms wrapped around Josep’s four-year-old brother. He could tell even at this distance by the steady, slow rise and fall of her chest that she was asleep, and he said so to Jace.
“Good,” the boy said. “They won’t come tonight.”
Pehr laughed a little, shaking his head. “Indeed? And you know this … how?”
“They always attack at dusk. That’s what Luce said. I suppose the drums are meant to keep us up and make us tired.”
“You’ve become quite the expert.”
“Told you … I listened. I keep all those stories up here.” Jace tapped his head.
“You always had the mind for those things,” Pehr said. “I could never keep the stories straight. Grandfathers and Gods and Lagos, the Everstorm, the Great Destruction … none of it will help me kill a boar that’s decided to charge.”
Jace nodded. “You would have passed the Test, you know. You were built for it. Like Josep.”
“There is still time.”
Jace shook his head, still gazing out into the night. “No, there isn’t.”
“We will fight them. Jace, I have no intention of dying when whatever is banging those drums arrives.”
“Neither does my father, or Josep, or even old Aldus. Pehr, I must ask you for something.”
Pehr was silent for a time, but finally spoke, reciting another saying: “I cannot know how I will answer until the question has been asked.”
“When they … when they come for Nani, I …” Jace paused, his throat working. He had turned at last to look at Pehr, and the older boy could see that his cousin’s eyes had gone watery, reflecting the firelight in the distance.
“Jace …”
“They mustn’t have her. You must promise me that if it comes to it, you will take her life. She is my sister, and I can’t bear the idea of … of … I know that you love her as a sister. I think you would love her as more, if you could.”
Pehr was taken aback as much by his cousin’s latter statement as by the request. It was true, he had for many years harbored feelings in his heart that, though he would never have admitted them to another, had become impossible to deny to himself. Still, to have been read so easily by this boy of only fourteen years …
“Jace, I cannot make this promise to you,” he managed at last.
“You can,” Jace said. “Is it not an easy promise to make? If you truly believe we will survive this, then there is nothing to fear. If in a few days’ time we are all sitting ‘round the table at home, laughing at Jace and his foolish stories, then I swear to you I will never ask you for anything more in our lives.”
“It’s not—”
“But if I’m right, and they come for her … Pehr, whatever you do to her will be like a gift from the Gods compared to what they intend. You’ve seen Luce’s face. She was the lucky one from her village. Promise me that you will love Nani until the end, and stay with her, and kill her before they can make her suffer?”
Pehr thought about this. He was neither a fast thinker, nor so cunning as Jace, but he was also not a fool. He understood what Jace was asking, and why, and he felt the truth of Jace’s words. Nani was the daughter of a hunter, and Pehr thought she might even wish for it herself, rather than surrendering to the beasts.
And so he nodded. “Very well, Jace. I don't believe the end will come, but if it does, and I'm at her side, I’ll do what’s necessary to keep her from them.”
* * *
In the dark a girl’s voice called for him, and at first he thought it was Nani, and that whatever was coming for them had arrived at last. Pehr struggled to a sitting position, looking around and blinking, and heard his name called again. This time, though, he realized the voice was not one he recognized, and it was not coming from within the village’s central circle. Instead it came from out in the darkness, from an area that he knew to contain an empty field of grass and a few stripped trees. The moon was obscured by clouds and there was little light beyond what the fire cast; if someone was out there, Pehr couldn't see them.
“Pehr, where are you?” the voice asked, and in it Pehr heard such a sad, plaintive desperation that he could not help but come to his feet. He walked out into the grass, straining to see into the darkness, secure in the knowledge that whatever was pounding the drums was to his back and not before him.
Now he could see the figure, tall and rail-thin, female, standing in the knee-high grass and staring as he approached. He did not know this person. He did not even know anyone who looked like this person, so unlike the women of his village.
“I cannot find you,” the girl cried, and Pehr raised his hand.
“I’m here,” he said.
“Oh, Pehr, where are you?”
“I am before you. Just before you.” He was now no more than a dozen paces from the girl. Surely she could see him.
“I must find him,” the girl muttered to herself, pacing back and forth, tromping down the grass. “I must.”
“I’m right here,” Pehr said, and he reached out, putting his hand to her shoulder. The girl spun at his touch, gasping, her eyes going wide, and for a moment they only stared at each other in the dark.
“Find me,” she said.
Then she was gone. She did not run, or fal
l back, or even fade from existence. She was simply gone, and Pehr found himself standing in the middle of the field alone, staring out into the darkness. He glanced back over his shoulder at the fire in the central square, checking to see if anyone else had observed this girl or heard her calls, but it seemed no one else had stirred.
“A dream,” Pehr said to himself, and surely that must have been right, but it hadn’t felt like a dream. He felt no more awake now than he had moments before, when the girl had turned to him and stared. There had been something strange about those eyes, but he couldn't remember. In fact, all memory of her appearance was leaving him. He could only remember that she had been someone unknown, and she had been calling. For him.
Shaking his head, Pehr made his way back to the circle, returned to his bedroll, and slept.
* * *
By morning, Jace’s eyes were so dark and sunken in their sockets that he looked almost dead. He ate his breakfast of oat gruel and honey with slow, listless motions but was otherwise showing no signs of fatigue. He did not yawn or stretch, did not rub his eyes or nod his head. Pehr, who had slept for a few hours near the dawn, was growing concerned, but had no idea what to do for the boy.
Nani had woken with the sun and come to join them. Pehr could see that she, too, had noticed Jace’s state and was shaken by it. He could read the deep concern in her glances at the boy and supposed that she was struggling just as he was to find a way to comfort Jace, to reassure him that they would fight through this threat. In the distance, the drums crashed and thundered, and the noise of them seemed to make a mockery of any potential brave pronouncements.
Jace wouldn’t have believed them, even if he’d had the words, and so Pehr had said nothing. Jace, for his part, had been silent as well … a rarity for him, and an event that at other times Pehr might have welcomed. At the moment, the lack of conversation was growing steadily more uncomfortable, and it was Nani who finally broke the mounting tension.
“We’ll have to leave the circle soon, I suppose,” she said.
Pehr looked up at her and nodded, then returned to his bowl of gruel. It was Jace who answered, not bothering to look down at his sister, still staring out at the jungle as if hypnotized by the sound of the drums.
“Why would we do that?”
“Well, surely we can’t stay here all day. There are crops to tend, fish to catch, bread to bake …”
“We have enough of those things to last until dusk. After that, we won’t need any more.”
“The Gods help those who help themselves, Jace. You know that. It’s better to prepare for tomorrow than to assume it won’t come.”
“The Gods have set the Lagos upon us. We are beyond help.”
Nani glowered at him. “I do wish you’d stop talking like that. The children are frightened enough as it is without nonsense stories. What if they hear you?”
“What if they do?”
Nani made a growling noise and hauled herself to her feet, eyes narrowed to slits, two spots of red standing out on her cheeks. Moving quickly, Pehr stood as well, and he put a hand on her shoulder.
“Let him be,” he offered, his voice calm and quiet. “Take a walk with me instead.”
“Where?”
“We’ll go home. It’s not so far that we won’t hear the alarms if something is spotted.” Anyway, the hunters wouldn’t organize any supply parties for another hour or more. Nani could make the dough and set it out to rise while he fed the kampri.
Nani considered this, and then took Pehr’s hand, letting him lead her away. “Fine. Fine, then! We’ll let Jace stay here and brood by himself.”
“We’ll be back before dusk,” Pehr said to Jace, and the boy nodded.
“Very well.”
“Come, Nani,” Pehr said, and he tugged on her hand again. When she turned to follow him, he let it go, and together they started toward their home. They had walked only a short distance in silence before Nani reached down, picked up a stone, and hurled it with all of her might toward the lagoon to the west.
“What is wrong with him!?” she cried, turning her head and glaring back at the boy still sitting on the rock, staring out toward the jungle. “It’s as if he’s become some other person. I don’t know this Jace, I don’t like him, and I want my brother back!”
“He believes we are all about to die,” Pehr said. “I have heard Truff and the other hunters talk about this. Some men lose their emotions before the hunt. Have you not seen this same behavior in some of the others around the village? Those who believe in the Lagos are terrified, and some of them are wrestling with it like Jace.”
“He doesn’t seem afraid! How can he talk so plainly about … about dying?”
“Of course he’s afraid, but he’s locked that away. It’ll help him with it, Nani.”
“Help with what?”
“The fighting. The killing and the dying. You know his mind; he sees things in a way the rest of us don’t. If he thinks too much about what he might lose, it’ll overwhelm him. How can he draw his bow and hope to shoot true if his hands are shaking with fear?”
Nani chewed on her lower lip, looking less than convinced by this explanation. Finally she said, “If that’s what he needs to do, then so be it, but it doesn’t explain why he looks like one already dead.”
“You don’t understand. The fear is still in him. He hasn’t disposed of it … he’s merely locked it away, and it eats at him from within.” Pehr shrugged. He thought Jace was on the very edge of something approaching raw, incoherent terror, the sort of fear that they were supposed to put behind them as they left their childhood. It seemed better that he be like this, and remain able to fight, than that he break down entirely.
“He’s just a boy,” Nani said.
“He’s being a man. Would you rather he wept? Begged your father to save him and make the bad drums go away? Wasn’t that what Josep’s brother was doing only last night?”
“Alain has only seen four years …” Nani’s tone was truculent, and she wouldn’t meet Pehr’s eyes.
“Yes. He’s a boy being a boy. Is that what you want of Jace?”
Jaw clenching, Nani struggled but at last admitted it: “No.”
Pehr held his hands out in front of him, palms up, a gesture of futility.
“I hate it,” Nani said. “I hate seeing him grow so old, so quickly.”
Pehr smiled a little. “Everything here grows old quickly.”
“And I hate it!”
“It’s our world.”
Nani had no answer to that, and so they walked again for a time in silence. They were moving casually, not in any rush. Both understood that this walk was more about the conversation than the tasks that awaited them.
“I dreamt of a girl,” Pehr said at last.
Nani gave him a quick, smirking glance. “Sili? I’m not surprised. She’s been on your mind a lot, of late.”
“How would you know that?” Pehr asked her, and almost immediately wished that he hadn’t.
“Our walls are thin,” Nani said, and she laughed as his cheeks reddened. “Don’t feel bad, Pehr. Sili’s offerings are … very ample.”
“It wasn’t her,” Pehr muttered, trying to ignore his embarrassment. In truth, he hadn't so much as thought about the girl since Jace had interrupted him the day before. She was ample, Nani was right about that, and she had let him see all of her that time when they had gotten drunk together, but it wasn’t Sili who he felt the burning need to protect from danger.
“Not her?! She’d be disappointed to hear you’re having such dreams about other girls!” Nani teased.
“It wasn’t that type of dream. It was …” Pehr paused a moment, trying to put it into words, but he could only remember the calls. He couldn’t remember what the girl looked like, only that she was not Sili, not Nani, not any girl that he had ever known. In his mind’s eyes, Pehr couldn't see her face.
“It was what?” Nani prompted.
“Nothing,” Pehr said. “I don’t remember
.”
“Oh, Pehr, don’t be like that. I’m sorry I teased you!”
“It’s not that, I just … I can’t see her anymore. Not what she looks like. There was a girl in the dark, and she was calling. I went to her, but … I can’t … these damned drums!”
Nani nodded in sympathy. “They make it impossible to think.”
“I’m no great thinker anyway,” Pehr grumbled.
“Don’t say that.”
Pehr shrugged and continued walking. They went the rest of the way without speaking, until they were standing in front of their mud-brick and thatched-branch home. Nani seemed reluctant to go inside, and so Pehr stood for a moment, waiting. He glanced up, noting that the house fire must be very low indeed; there was only the faintest wisp of smoke curling up from the hut’s central hole.
“You’ll need to rekindle that fire,” he said. “It’s almost—”
Nani interrupted him. “Are we going to die?”
“Of course not,” he said, and realized only after he said it that the lack of a pause, of any sort of contemplation, betrayed the emptiness of his words. Nani understood this immediately.
“Pehr … please.”
Pehr put the heel of his hand against his brow, head lowered and eyes closed. He was tired and achy from a night sleeping on the ground and ill-prepared to spout bravado.
“Nani, I don’t know.”
When he looked up, she was trembling, and there were tears on her cheeks. “Something terrible is about to happen. Jace is right. Something … even if some of us survive, there’s going to be death. So much death. Do you not feel it?”
Pehr did. He had stopped trying to fool himself on this account at some point in the middle of the night, when he had realized that he was sharpening each of his arrows for the tenth time not out of boredom or even fear, but simply out of the growing knowledge that there would be fighting. The drums that hammered still in the distance might be anything, might be marauding creatures of the Gods or merely other men, but there was little doubt left that they heralded some great evil. They were the drums of war, and to deny this fact seemed mad.
The Broken God Machine Page 4
