Fire Country Read online

  “Like what?” I say, remembering what she said.

  “Crying because you don’t think you’re pretty, shoveling other people’s blaze, being forced to breed when you turn sixteen. The Call. All of it can be avoided.”

  “I wasn’t crying,” I say. “And it’s not breeding.” She makes it sound like we’re animals, hunks of meat. Look at me—do I look like meat?

  She offers a wry smile, her lips barely parted. “Mm-huh. They pick a guy, they pick a girl, stick you together, and nine full moons later out pops a kid. Sounds like breeding to me.”

  When she says it that way, it almost does sound like breeding. My throat is dry. I haven’t had a drink in ages and I really don’t have time for no conversating. “Whatever, Lara. Look, thanks for coming by to try to…”—Cheer me up? Be my friend? Scare me?—“…do whatever it is you’re doing, but I really need to get cleaned up and get home.” I try to stand, but my legs really are as wobbly as a baby tug’s, and I put a hand down to steady myself, settling for a crouch.

  Lara raises an eyebrow, as if I’ve said something unexpected. “Just let me know if you want to hear more,” she says, and then whirls around and stalks off toward the village.

  I watch her go. Weird. I’m not sure what that was all about, but at least it stopped my steep dive into a pit filled with stuff far worse’n blaze. Self-pity.

  When I turn back to the watering hole, its face is glassy again, and there I am.

  I swipe a hand through the water so I don’t hafta look at myself.

  ~~~

  My skin is clean again, free of blood and durt and worse things. The water even seemed to wash away the self-pity, at least temporarily. I almost feel refreshed.

  My dress, however, is a different story. No matter how hard I scrubbed, I couldn’t get all the stains out, and now it looks even worse ’cause it’s sopping wet, dragging along below me like a wet blanket.

  The moon goddess is out tonight, her eye bright orange in the dark, cloudless sky. Her godlings are scattered all around her, filling the firmament with twinkling red, orange, and yellow lights. I find myself wishing I were one of them.

  The watering hole is a short walk to the village, but tonight I wish it was longer. I dread facing my father.

  My father ain’t Head Greynote, but he’s searin’ close. At thirty two years old, he’s already beaten his average life expectancy, and if it wasn’t for Greynote Shiva, who’s thirty five, he’d be at the top. Most men die within a year of turning thirty. Shiva hasn’t come out of his tent in a few quarter full moons, and rumor has it he’s got a bad case of the Fire, and he’ll be dead within the full moon. My father’ll take his place.

  I pass the first of the border tents, which are inhabited by the village watchmen and their families. The guard ignores me, continues to scan the area beyond the village, his bow tightly strung and in his hand. The attack from three full moons ago has left everyone tense.

  As I zigzag my way through the tightly packed tents, I see all the usual nighttime village activities: a woman hanging wet clothes from a line; Totters playing tag, squealing with delight, their mother scolding them for making too much noise, one hand on her hip and the other holding a wooden spoon; a big family praying to the sun goddess before eating dinner—probably ’zard stew or fried pricklers—this one a man with his three Calls and nine children. A Full Family. A rare thing to see these days.

  Most of the tents are boxy and upright, a standard collection of ten wooden poles of varying lengths based on size of family, knotted tightly together with cords at each corner. Four of the poles are dug into three-foot-deep holes and form the tent corners, rising up to meet the side and cross beams which run along the upper sides of the tent, as well as through the middle of the ceiling, forming an X, and helping to support the heavy tugskins, which are knitted together and provide the tent covering.

  However, some of the tents are half-collapsed, their support poles cracked, bent, or rotted. Anything from strong winds to wild animals to age and decay coulda caused the damage, but the families that live in these tents are forced to make due, as they won’t be allotted any further wood unless the sun goddess grants a miracle and trees start growing in the desert, or the contract with the Icers can be renegotiated with more favorable terms.

  We used to live in one of those broken down tents.

  But now, ’cause my father’s a top-ten Greynote, we get to live in a sturdy wooden hut.

  I reach the end of the eastern tent fields and cut across the eye of the village, which is the quickest path to the western side, where the families of the oldest Greynotes live. I’m not sure why I’m in such a hurry all of a sudden—I think ’cause being alone in the night scares me.

  As it has for every night I can remember, a large fire roars in the village center, casting a reddish-orange halo of flickering light in every direction. Men sit on stone benches drinking fire juice and telling boisterous stories and jokes that end with raucous laughter from their mates. There’re no women in sight.

  A group of Youngling boys sit with the men and try to act grown up by being every bit as loud as their fathers. They even sip out of leather flasks, which are likely filled with cactus milk or perhaps milk from their own mother’s teats. I laugh softly at my own joke.

  I hurry by, giving the fire a wide berth, keeping my head down so as to not draw any attention to myself. Considering I look like a drowned rat, that’s easier said’n done. When I do glance over at the fire to confirm I’m in the clear, one of the Younglings stands up, stares at me. No, I think. It’s Hawk. Here we go again.

  Forcing one foot in front of the other, I keep moving swiftly, not running, not walking, but preparing myself to run like scorch if necessary. But Hawk doesn’t move, just watches me, his eyes tracing my path across the village, his lips curled into a smile. He points, says something to his buddies, and they all laugh. I let out a long exhalation when I pass out of their sight and between two of the Greynote huts.

  Away from the glow of the fire, it’s dark, and I stop in the shadows, panting, trying to force the thud, thud, thudding in my chest to slow down. I lean against the side of one of the sturdy huts, suddenly feeling the need for something to support me. For a few seconds, I just breathe, in and out, in and out, a simple act that my body normally performs automatically, without me even thinking ’bout it, but which now seems so difficult, as if it requires every bit of my energy to make the oxygen fill and then exit my lungs.

  Eventually, however, my heartbeat does slow, my breathing does return to normal, and I’m able to move on. My only concern now is what my father’ll say when he sees me. Or more accurately, what he’ll do to me.

  Chapter Four

  The huts flit away on either side. Two, four, six—turn right. Thud!

  I run smack into someone who’s moving in the opposite direction. My feet get tangled and I stumble, start to fall backwards, but strong arms grab my thin ones and haul me up, the soles of my moccasins lifting off the ground for a moment ’fore clamping back down. A familiar face stares down at me.

  “Where have you been?” Wrapped up in the voice’s tone is a question, a threat, and a punishment, all bundled together in one angry snarl. Without waiting for an answer, my father growls, “Get inside!” His fingers are like pincers, cutting into my upper arm and beneath my armpit, as he drags me into the hut on the left. His hut. Although I always called the old, beat up tent we used to live in our tent, since moving to the hut, I’ve never referred to it as our hut. It’s always been his.

  His domain, his palace, his power.

  His hut. A king in his castle.

  My mom and I are just squatters.

  I allow him to pull me inside, ’cause fighting him would just deepen the bruises that I can already feel settling beneath my skin. You cannot resist! The phrase pops unrequested into my head. It’s what the leader of the Glassies said to us using some sorta device that magnified his voice like a god’s. At the time, he was only a speck in t
he distance, his army of fire chariots and strange, pale-skinned warriors stretched out in front of him, but his voice boomed across the sand-blasted desert plains, over the heads of the men defending us, and into the ears of every woman, child and Fire-afflicted man left behind.

  You cannot resist!

  The phrase fits so well with my current situation that I accidentally snort. It just slips out, a laugh that I try to stop, to cover with my free hand, which just makes it worse, turning it into a…well, a snort. My father stops just in front of the door, whirls on me, his eyes a black void of anger. “Is something funny?” he says between clenched teeth.

  I stare at him, my eyes and mouth wide. When I don’t answer, he says, “You show up well past your curfew, smelling like filth, wetter’n a Soaker, and you think something is funny?” His mouth is all screwed up like he wants to spit on me, and I know I’d better break my silence soon or things are only gonna get worse.

  “What’s a Soaker?” I ask ’fore I can stop myself. When I see his face redden, I backtrack. “No—I mean, no, sir. I didn’t mean to…I didn’t think…”

  He releases my arm and pulls his hand back across his body, preparing to strike. I close my eyes, cringe, wait for the blow to come—

  Creeaakkk!

  A second passes, then two. I open my eyes to find a woman staring at us from the doorway of the hut across the way. Tari—last remaining wife of the Head Greynote. Older’n durt—thirty three years old!—but tougher’n iron. She’d hafta be to handle her husband.

  My father glances at Tari, then back at me. His eyes narrow and for a second I think he’ll hit me anyway, but then the tension drops from his arm at the same time as it drops to his side. “Inside. Now,” he says.

  Just before pushing through the door, my eyes flick to Tari and I try to convey my thanks in the look I give her, but her expression is neutral and I can’t tell if she gets the message.

  As I move inside, heat radiates off my father. He’s royally grizzed this time—more’n I’ve ever seen before. I wonder if now—in the privacy of our own home—he’ll hit me.

  While he closes the door, I scan the room. Even without looking, I coulda pictured it. Sari, my newest Call-Mother, sits cross-legged on the floor, making something, probably clothing for one of her kids. Her children, Rafi and Fauna, who are my Call-Brother and Call-Sister, sit next to their mother, playing some game—Rocktop or Tugbug or something. There’s an empty chair beyond, where my last Call-Mother used to sit, before a Killer attack two years ago took her and her two children, Jace and Naya. I cried when they died. Father gave me four snappings on my wrist and I shut up; but what he didn’t know is that I continued to cry inside, where it counts the most, in my heart. My mother taught me that.

  My mother, who’s at the table cutting something, fresh prickler probably, looks up when I enter.

  “Siena, where in the name of the sun goddess have you been?” she says, standing and navigating past my father.

  Seeing my mother’s worried face, her eyes every bit as chestnut as mine, free of lines and wrinkles, as if she’s still a Youngling, brings hot tears to my eyes. All the fear of my father’s wrath slips away in an instant, replaced by the desire to act like a Totter, to make myself smaller’n a burrow mouse, to let my mother hold me and sing me soft lullabies. But I know that’s just a child’s dream. My father’s only getting started.

  “I was washing up at the watering hole,” I say, blinking away the tears as quickly as they spring up. She puts her arms around me and pulls my head into her chest, which only makes things worse. I’m choking now, sobbing, and I feel the warmth of a tear from each eye roll down my cheeks. It’s like the memories of all the awful things that happened today have melted away, dripping from my tear ducts.

  “You could have washed up here,” she purrs. “We were worried about you.” She pauses, seems to think for a second. “I was worried about you.” I understand her change in word choice. My father worried? Not a chance. If I were dragged away by yellow-eyed Killers in the middle of the night, he’d be thinking about what message to give to the rest of the village to prevent panic, not worrying about my wellbeing. I lick my lips, which taste of salt and well-water. It’s like the terrible events of the day are suddenly no more’n pesky springbugs, and I’m able to swat them away using only my mind. All that matters is the fact that my father doesn’t give a blaze about me.

  “I’m sorry, Mother,” I say quietly, pushing her away with both hands.

  Her dark brows are creased like a V, her lips a tight line. Don’t, she mouths.

  I ignore her, face my father, whose back is to me. “Want to hear about my day, Father?” I say, scorpion poison in my tone.

  His hands, which are clenched at his side, open, and then close again, making fists so tight that his knuckles are blotched with red and white. His shoulders rise and fall with heavy breaths. I don’t know what’s gotten into me, but I just can’t take it anymore. My bones hurt from a day shoveling blaze. My ribs ache in a dozen places, where Hawk kicked me. And my pride? Well, I guess that’s the only thing that ain’t hurt, ’cause I never had any in the first place.

  “Let’s see,” I say, tapping my teeth with a finger, “where should I start? With getting punished or getting the blaze kicked out of me by another Youngling?”

  “I know all about your day,” Father says, turning sharply. Although I can feel the hot rush of anger coursing through my veins, the look on his face—twisted and gnarled, like he’s not thirty two, but forty two—makes me shrink back. It’s as hot as scorch in our hut, but a shiver runs down my spine. This man is but a shadow of the father I once knew: the father who sat me on his knees and bumped them up and down while I squealed with laughter; the father who smiled bigger’n the desert when I came home from Learning holding the Smooth Stone, awarded to the best Midder student; the father who held my hand and confronted Midder Vena when she struck me in the arm. No, the man standing ’fore me ain’t the man who did any of those things.

  He steps forward and I step back, but my spine bangs against the door, sending needles through my ribs. “Do you know how embarrassing today was for me?” he asks. “First I get called out of a Greynote meeting so Teacher Mas can inform me that you’ve been given Shovel Duty for the fourth time this full moon. Then Hawk and his father show up at my door to tell me how you and Circ jumped him and broke his nose. These are not small things, Siena!” His voice is the bellow of a tug, and I have the sudden urge to squeeze my eyes shut and curl up into a ball in the corner.

  “I didn’t…we didn’t…” My voice is the squeak of a burrow mouse, barely audible above the echoes of my father’s accusations.

  “You didn’t what?” he spits.

  “We were just defending ourselves,” I cry.

  “I will not have you lie to me, Youngling!” he roars. “I’m on the verge of becoming the Head Greynote. How do you think it looks when I can’t even control my own daughter? Do you think the people will trust me to lead them?”

  His words must sting my cheeks, ’cause I feel them warming up. “But it wasn’t my faul—”

  “Excuses! That’s all I ever get from you, Siena. You think I give you a hard time to be mean?” Uh…yeah? “No! I do it because I want you to be safe, to grow up and have a family. You’re less than a year from the Call and you can’t even take responsibility for your own actions. How do you expect to raise a child?”

  “Maybe I don’t want a child!” I scream. I slap a hand over my mouth, right away regretting my words. But the hand is a moment too late ’cause I’ve already said it, have already admitted what most every Youngling girl thinks. And yet, for some reason, saying it is unforgivable.

  At first there’s silence, everyone just staring at me, my father’s eyes as big as my mother’s favorite firepan. His lips open and I dread what he’ll say. As if realizing my apprehension, he pauses, runs his tongue along his upper teeth, drawing out the moment, then finally speaks. “No daughter of mine is above the
Law. You will learn your duties, one way or the other. If I have to throw you in Confinement, I will. It’s for your own good.”

  Confinement? But that’s for bad people—people who break the Law. “I haven’t done anything wrong,” I say. “You wouldn’t.” I try to say the last bit with as much conviction as I can muster, but even as I speak it I know it’s not true. He would. He’d do anything if he thought it’d help maintain our way of life. Even throw his own daughter in prison.

  “Try me,” he says, his eyes penetrating mine like darts. “Woman, get my snapper.”

  His last command is to my mother, who’s frozen as still as a prickler. She’s watching me, her face full of something I can’t identify. A hint of sadness, maybe. But there’s something else, too, something harder, like stone, noticeable only in her eyes, which don’t match up with the rest of her face. Save me, I think as hard as I can in her direction.

  “My snapper!” my father yells. “Now!”

  The steel in her eyes disappears and I know she didn’t hear my silent plea. Hidden beneath her dress, her feet carry her across the room and behind the barrier, where my father spends the night with each of his wives on a rotational basis, although lately I’ve noticed Sari’s there at least two out of every three nights. I know it’s just the way of my people, but seeing my mother get ignored for Sari, who I barely know, grizzes me off more’n anything.

  A moment later she reappears, a black swatch of leather dangling from her hand. At one end is a handle, which wraps around my father’s palm for greater grip, and at the other side it splits into ten strips, each of which comes to a knot intended to add a bit of sting to each snap. The teeth of the snapper my father calls them.

  Her eyes on the floor, my mother hands it to him.

  Chapter Five

  In Learning they told us about a time when men and women were gods and goddesses, and lived until they were sixty, seventy, even eighty. Some of the kids even said their parents told them people used to live until they were ninety or, in rare cases, a hundred, which I think is a bunch of tugblaze. I draw the line at a hundred.