We had played a game of one word the previous night. Each of us had to make a wish, and the wish could be only one word.
“Meat,” said someone.
“Archer,” said Matsa.
Malan said nothing.
“Mother,” said Elbia.
“Victory,” said Bako.
My wish did not fit into one word. Only my curse. But in the snowy field, I now had a one-word wish: “Boots.”
I did nothing heroic to help Elbia. Before I even thought of that, Bako brought her down with a hard punch, and Danaka sank her teeth deep into my arm. Danaka still thought I was an easy opponent, meat for the dogs. I hit her repeatedly in the head on that white field, until she lost all consciousness. But she would live. She would lose one toe in the snow, but this would be her pride when she grew up and became an Archer.
“I lost a toe in the Sieve fighting with Malan. And Da-Ren,” she would say for winters to come. It was her bravest Story, the one she would greet the Goddess with at the end.
That night, the Guide pulled out Danaka’s blackened little toe in one move in the Sheep’s tent. I heard many stories of how many children fainted at that sight. “Two children fainted,” “three,” “all except me”—they all said something different.
Four of us remained who could still walk, one for each pair of boots, when they dragged the rest away quickly so they wouldn’t die of cold.
Speechless, with warm feet and bloodied faces, we stood still under the stout gray cauldron of the sky that was pouring white vomit from the belly of the Drakon over our heads. The Drakon of the North, the one place where our ancestors never dared go again.
They didn’t let us freeze until the afternoon. It was still early in the morning when the Reghen approached the field again and threw three big pieces of meat, bigger than ever, in front of us. The day’s trial had come to an end. Very fast. Almost. Save for one piece.
We all looked at one another for an instant. My whole body stiffened, ready to attack and defend, watching the other three. The wolf was my mother, the Story said. Urak had beaten Bako badly a few breaths before, and I didn’t want to roll with him. Malan was as strong as I, and maybe he thought he was stronger. Matsa was definitely weaker, but he was quick. One thing was sure: one of us would starve that day. Malan turned and whispered something to Urak. Urak nodded.
There were never any rules in our fights. Kicks, punches, scratches, stones. Urak attacked Matsa, Malan shrugged his shoulders as if he didn’t care to fight, and a breath later he moved fast to punch me. Soon we were wrestling in the white powder. I was stronger than him but didn’t want to crush his head. The fight was not ending. He whispered to me as I was holding him back from biting me.
“Let’s finish this, Da-Ren. It’s Matsa or you.”
It was simple. Unjust, I could say now, knowing what the word means, but simple.
All three of us fell on Matsa, and after a few kicks, which we made sure were far from his head, he fell, helpless, at our feet. I ran to the Wolves’ tent and began to rub my hands furiously near the fire. Then I roasted my meat, which had become as hard as ice. We three devoured the day’s trophy. Matsa’s one eye was swollen shut, but with the other, he looked at the meat. I extended my hand to give him some. He deserved it. He tried to take the whole piece. I kicked him hard. If he deserved it, he should have won it himself.
It was still midmorning when we finished eating. We were trapped in the tent with nothing to do, trying to avoid Matsa who stared at me like a one-eyed toothless wolf cub.
Matsa waited for Malan to turn his back and fell on him punching with both fists. Urak joined the brawl, kicking Matsa again. If they let us, we would keep on it all day, fighting the boredom away, isolated in that tent. The Guides felt sorry for us and let us go back outside, warmed and dressed this time, to carry more horse dung. Felt sorry—stupid words I come up with, as if I knew what others felt. They probably needed more dung for the fire. It was damn cold.
The marks on the snow, red and brown lines, were fading fast but still showed the way to the Sheep’s tents. The four of us played our hearts out. Even Matsa. We rolled around in the snow and had blade fights with wooden poles. As evening fell, I was parrying with Malan when I saw shadows standing out in the pale mist on top of the eastern shed.
I froze. My stick did not rise to block Malan’s.
They were standing there. I saw them just for a breath before Malan’s stick crashed onto my head. My back hit the ground hard. Matsa and Malan knelt next to me.
“What are you doing?” Malan asked.
Urak was circling around us like a trapped boar.
“Let’s get out of here. It’s getting dark,” he mumbled.
“What happened, Da-Ren?” Malan asked again.
“I saw them, there, on top of the shed. Two Wolfmen standing on two legs. Heads and body of a wolf. And tails. Black fur. I saw them.”
“I don’t see anyone.”
“I saw them, Malan, just for one breath, but they had tails. Wolfmen. Not men.”
“Wolf or men, none of us saw them. That stick hit you hard.”
Urak was trembling but not saying a word. He had seen them too.
I counted my fingers from the first night of the Sieve, when Selene was less than half. Eight nights had passed. This ninth one coming would reveal her in full, if the Sky’s cloudbreaths parted. But the Sky refused.
I got off the snow, leaving behind a few blood marks where Malan had hit me. The children’s harmless play ended on that eighth day. The ninth night came dark, its only color the red adorning the white under my torchlight. The Sieve was now ready to dawn on us, razortoothed and merciless.
XI.
Much Worse
Thirteenth Winter. The Sieve. Thirteenth Day.
The mud and the snow fought for the next few days over who would color the field. Our feet prayed. The mud listened. The snow was defeated and round holes of brown earth started to show. The white melted into a net of faint lines that looked like enormous honeycombs. The rain I had cursed the first night returned now as a gift and thawed the earth.
The Guides came and went, taking as few slow steps as possible. They never again touched a cup or a pot, clothing or fire; we did all the work now. Not me, though. Every day three of those who had fallen the day before didn’t come to the field. Instead they were assigned the upkeep of our small camp. We called them Carriers. We also started to wake up a little later, not in the middle of the night.
“We do it for us, so we can sleep, not for you,” I heard Keko say in between various curses about our mothers. Keko always found a chance to bring up our mothers. Up until the night I learned I was a ninestar, I had never thought about mine.
The Reghen who visited our tent each night, a different face each time, was the only reminder that a world existed outside our camp. They brought four new kids around the tenth day. I spoke to one of them, who told me that he had been snatched from his tent at night and carried for six days by oxcart to get here. He wasn’t from Sirol but from one of our outposts on the southern steppe.
We lost two of the children who had never seen the inside of the Wolves’ tent. One morning they just didn’t show up in the field. Instead we saw a cart carrying little bodies from the Sheep’s tents. They told us the children had died. I believed them. They weren’t children who could run away. I believed them because the Ouna-Ma was there when they told us.
Two nights later, the cold came back worse than before. On the morning of the thirteenth day, the scorching horse dung smelled like an old horse had peed inside my nose, but its warmth was the most beautiful gift of the Unending Blue Sky. It wasn’t really that blue those days. I was in the Wolves’ tent again, without Malan, who had fallen for his second time. I was the only one who’d fallen only once. The strongest.
Elbia was with me and eyes would gather on her like flies on meat—all day and all night. The eyes of the other children, the Guides’ eyes, even those of the Ouna-Mas follo
wed her. I may have been the strongest in the Sieve so far, but no one looked at me like that.
I was talking to Elbia less and less. These days she was sought after, and someone always managed to be near her before me. I wasn’t going to wait in line to speak to her. One day I’d ride the war horses with her, and that was enough of a promise to endure any cold. I wanted to shout to everyone around, “Why don’t you all just leave her alone? Can’t you see that she doesn’t want to talk to you?”
But she did. Elbia’s smile burned like a sacred torch of hope, night and day, in the camp of the Sieve. Why did she have a smile for all those boys, even the Guides?
It wasn’t a big camp. It was more like a small cage that could fit the suffering and our misery. I measured it once when a Guide on a galloping horse rode all the way from one end to the other. The horse covered the distance before I could breathe slowly a dozen times. A dozen breaths north to south. About the same west to east; that was all. The field in the middle was half the length of the camp. There was only one gate, at the southeast corner, for horses, carts, Ouna-Mas, and death to enter.
The twenty-first day was approaching, but its ghost had not appeared to warn me. Every day was going a little better than the day before. I looked for the Stories and I slept with the Wolves every night to hear them.
Rouba, the old Guide, encouraged me in his own way. “The Reghen will come again tonight. They’ll bring a new Story,” he would say.
“I will be there,” was my answer.
I didn’t fall again, not until the twenty-first day.
Instead of a Story on the thirteenth night, the Reghen said only a few words to us, but they were enough. “You are not here to die. They give you too much meat for that. Not like in the other camps. There are forty and more camps like this one with children your age in the Sieve this winter. Children you haven’t seen yet. But this one nests the best.”
They were the most beautiful words I had ever heard. Whether it was safety or pride that flooded through me, I can’t remember. Those are things I try to remember now in the winter of my life, but I can’t. Not the events themselves, because they are engraved with iron and fire, deep bloody grooves inside my mind. It is my mind itself that I try to remember, the first thought I had when I was living those moments. What I felt. It would be a lie to say that I remember.
That was how we came out onto the field on the thirteenth day—with the Reghen’s word that we were in no danger and we wouldn’t be killed. We were the best pack of all the Sieve’s camps of the Tribe.
And as the Reghen finished his words, reassuring and beautiful, death arrived hungrier than ever before.
The first girl, Rido, fell too early. She didn’t join us the next morning, or the one after that. For days she had almost split in two from coughing, so I was expecting this to happen. It killed me to hear her every morning. Her curly black hair would straighten and cover half of her back every time the rain poured. The curls would rise back when they dried and bounce like they were alive on their own with each cough. Such a sweet little black-haired lamb fighting with the wolves for so many days. She was the thinnest and the shortest, twelve-wintered but half my size, and I dare say the bravest for having stood for thirteen whole days next to us. We would never again see her in the Sieve.
It wasn’t long after that when Atares fell next to me.
“You fell again? Are you sick?” I had asked him the day before.
“I know what I’m doing,” he answered.
He didn’t know shit.
From the first day, he pretended to know everything, but he had been among the first to fall for the third day in a row. He fell first to his knees, two paces away from my feet, and then facedown. He almost made it look real.
I heard them first. I had forgotten them for days now. I turned and saw them, the gray demon-dogs barking and running toward us. Atares was lying next to me, and the maulers were coming straight for me, straight for him.
My legs froze. I didn’t run. He wasn’t unconscious. I just yelled, “Run, Atares. Now!”
His eyes were open, his ears already knew. He grabbed my calf and tried to get up, but one of the dogs trapped his forearm in its jaw. The second dog went for his neck. I kicked it at the ribs with my free leg, but it made no difference. The boy’s fingers slipped away lifelessly, leaving a trail of mud on my skin, as Rouba lifted me in the air and dragged me back. A scream flew out of Atares’s mouth. It lasted a few breaths, but I kept hearing it for many nights to come. Children screaming.
It is only when the dogs rip the meat from the thighs with their razor teeth that I ask myself. Why would the Goddess ever make us leave this life squealing like pigs and sheep? Wouldn’t it be more glorious and fitting to turn into a cloud of stardust and rise high in the sky, our brave ashes dancing around Selene, swallowing her light? Weren’t we her beloved Tribe? Why did she open us up like a cauldron of meat and red water? Like animals.
The maulers were the end of fat-mouthed Atares. They shut him up quickly, and forever. I was splattered in long thin lines and splashes of deep red and I smelled like a carcass for two nights until the rain washed me off.
Everyone’s face, stomach, and asshole tightened up for the rest of that day. Atares was dragged away into the mist. Up until then, no one had been killed except Ughi on the first night. If I came out a winner, maybe I’d learn that night from the Reghen’s mouth why Atares deserved such a fate. It wasn’t hard to win that day. So many children were coughing and falling.
The Voice of the Unending Sky came again in the middle of the night to festoon with words the two fresh deaths. The Reghen was talking to the Ouna-Ma. She whispered to him, and he recited her answers. It looked as if he were having a conversation with himself, repeating loudly to us both his questions and the Ouna-Ma’s answers.
“Why did Enaka punish Atares?” asked the Reghen.
Like the wind passing through the hides, the Ouna-Ma whispered into his ear and he shouted her words. “Enaka, who sees everything from above, threw a curse on that devious weasel. He fell first every morning for days now, not out of weakness, but to idle alone all day. No one cheats or quails in the Tribe. Enaka sees. Cowards can hide in the vast forest, demons into the deep sea. But may no one ever dare fool her under the Sun, the Selene, and the stars.”
The Reghen wouldn’t stop.
“Tell us, Ouna-Ma. Will another one die in this way if they cheat?” asked the Reghen.
Again he answered himself with Ouna-Ma’s whispers escaping from his gray hood.
“No, not like that. Much worse.”
Grim and frozen were all the faces around me except for the giggling laughter of someone after the phrase much worse.
It was Malan.
“What if he had the sickness?” I asked him.
“Didn’t you hear what they said?”
“And if…”
I was trying in vain. Atares had helped me the first night, but in the end, it was his own scheming mind that did him in.
“Much worse,” the Reghen repeated, louder this time so no one would forget. As if anyone would.
I knew there were many worse ways for someone to die in the Tribe. Crucifixions for the othertribal sorcerers of the Cross, impalements with stake slathered in lard for the deserters and traitors, and flaying for those caught stealing from the Khun. I had seen and smelled these deaths in all their horror in Sirol every summer.
The Ouna-Ma stood near the torch unveiled that night, as we all stared, enchanted, at her snake-egg head and her full black eyes. She had painted tears that shone still on her cheeks. But, that night, a true crystal tear did escape between them.
“Why do you shed tears, Voice of the Sky?” asked the Reghen.
“For Rido,” replied the Ouna-Ma, who for the first time opened her mouth in front of us.
She then drew her red veil across her face and left us alone and motherless again. Rarely, very rarely, did people have the chance to hear the true Voice of the Sky and
to melt as if they had swallowed flaming coal.
That night, after I closed my eyes, I felt a small hand grabbing my calf and then pulled away. Atares’s nails leaving their scratch marks on me. Every night, the same nightmare returned. Until the twenty-first night, when I forgot about him completely.
Children continued to fall and disappear in the days to follow, and all from the same cough. A curse had fallen on the Tribe, and the Guides all covered their faces with hoods. They said the black clouds of smoke we had seen rising from the warriors’ tents in the south were the bonfires of our dead. A plague, a terrible sickness had spread across Sirol.
“Darhul spews his evil blight on us,” Keko the Guide said as he was warming himself again in our tent.
“And that Keko is his murky-eyed servant,” I whispered to Elbia. She smiled and covered her face with her hands for him not to see. We hid beneath our hides, away from the breath of death, of Darhul, of the curse, and of the even viler breath that spewed forth from Keko’s rotten mouth.
The fear of the evil sickness ruled over our souls. For a while, I lost count of the days. Until a clear night came and Selene was nowhere to be seen. And that’s how I found my count again.
Elbia and I overcame the trial every day and slept in the same tent every night. I was full of life, victory, and strength. It was that night, as we were returning to the Wolves’ tent, that I saw Rouba, Keko, and the Reghen talking together outside our tent. And for the first time there were two Ouna-Mas beside them. The image of all of them standing there talking jolted me awake.
“How long have we been here?” I asked Elbia.
“Not even a moon,” she said, “too early to start counting.” Selene showed her face, a thin crescent at the far corner of the Unending Sky. Elbia looked up at the night sky and counted with her fingers.
But I already knew.
The dawn to come would be the twenty-first day.
XII.
The Twenty-First Day
Drakon Book I: The Sieve Page 7
