Fire Country (3 page)

Rest: I like the sound of that. There’s nowhere to sit in the pit, unless you want to sit in a big ol’ pile of blaze, so we climb back out, slipping and sliding on the slope. Once I almost fall, but Circ grabs me by the arm and keeps me upright. My head’s down when we near the top and I hear a voice say, “Having fun yet, Scrawny?”

I look up to see three Younglings staring down at me. Hawk’s in the middle.

Stopping, I let Circ pull up alongside me. Caught by surprise, I’m tongue-tied, unable to find the right words to send these
blaze-eaters packin’. Circ, on the other hand, always seems ready for anything. “Get the scorch out of here, Hawk. We’re working.”

“Mmm, shovelin’
blaze. And from the looks of it doin’ a pretty grizz-poor job of it.” One of his mates, a guy they call Drag, coughs out a laugh.

“Like you’d know anything about it,” Circ says, taking a step forward.

“You’re right. I dunno a searin’ thing about blaze, other than it comes out from between my cheeks about a day after I eat a load of tug meat. And then you get to shovel it.” He laughs. “But the only thing I don’t understand, is why you’re here, Circ. Wasn’t the punishment for Scrawny?” There’s a gleam in Hawk’s eyes that makes me shiver, despite the oppressive midafternoon heat.

“I don’t abandon my friends,” Circ says calmly, although I see his fingers curl into fist
s. “And don’t call her that.” Another step forward, just one away from the lip. Hawk’s friends take a step back, but Hawk doesn’t move.

“But that’s what she is, right? I mean, look at her. She’s skinny, not an ounce of muscle on her—”

“Watch it.” Circ’s voice is a growl.

“—she’
s got legs that are wobblier than a newborn tug’s—”

“Shut it!”

“—and her chest is flatter than the Cotee Plains.”

Circ moves so fast I almost slip again just watching
him. I don’t even see the step or two he takes before he’s on top of Hawk, pounding away with both fists. Hawk’s doing his best to block the blows, but he’s making a strange high-pitched noise that tells me plenty of Circ’s punches are getting through. Drag and the other guy, Looper, seem so stunned at first that they just stand there, but then they finally get their act together and jump on top of Circ, each grabbing one of his arms from behind, pulling him away from Hawk.

Circ struggles, but they’ve got
him so tight he can’t get his arms free. I’m frozen, as if the coldness of ice country has suddenly descended from the mountains, gluing my feet to the sludge beneath me.

Hawk stands up.

They’re going to hurt him—

Hawk steps forward, wipes a string of blood
from his nose, his mouth all screwed up.

—all ’
cause of me—

The first punch is below the belt and Circ groans, doubles over, unable to protect
himself.

—I hafta
do something.

My feet
finally move, come unstuck, as if someone else is controlling them. I’m not Scrawny anymore, not a Runt, not Weak, not any of t’other names I been called my entire life. I’m Siena the Brave, and Circ is my friend, and he needs me.

Hawk sees me coming and moves to cut me off, but he’s too slow. My muscles ache from the shoveling, but I block
it out, block everything out, ’cept for getting to the guys holding Circ’s arms; if I can just unloose one of them…

I trip. Maybe on the lip of the blaze pit, maybe on a random rock I don’t notice, maybe
on my own feet for all I know—it certainly wouldn’t be the first time—but regardless, I start tumbling headfirst, out of control, my arms and legs flailing and flopping like an injured bird as I try to regain my balance.

I don’t.

I crash into the back of Looper, who feels more like a boulder’n a Youngling boy, my nose crunching off his iron-like elbow, which fires backwards, knocking me off my feet. I’m in a pile in the dust, covered in blaze and durt and a bit of warm blood that trickles from my nose and onto my lips and from the scrape that I feel on my knee.

“Stupid, Runt,” Hawk says, looming over me, his shadow providing a much needed reprieve from the relentless
sun. “You two ain’t even worth the blaze you’ve been shoveling.” He kicks me once in the stomach and I groan, clutching my ribs, which feel like they’ve cracked in half.

With my cheek against the dust, I see Circ struggling against the boys, bucking and twisting, but they’re strong, too, and they have the advantage in numbers and energy. Hawk laughs and saunters back over to Circ. “Don’t worry, I won’t hurt your girlfriend anymore. She practically knocked herself out anyway.” Violence spreads
across his face and he slams his fist into Circ’s stomach twice, and then, winding up, whips a wild haymaker that glances off Circ’s jaw with a vicious thud. Drag and Looper throw him to the ground, where he slumps, unmoving.

All I can think is:

My fault.

W
inter is approaching, and with it, the dust storms. Already I can feel a change in the wind, as if it’s grown arms and legs and a face with a mouth that howls and cries as it approaches. Every few seconds it reaches its boiling point and sweeps a cloud of dust into the air and into my face. I close my eyes, cover my face with my hands, wait for the tiny pricks of sand to cease. Then I soldier on toward the village watering hole.

It’s getting late, the sun having sunk deep on the horizon
, where the thickest yellow clouds swirl like a toxic soup, turning the sky darker’n darker brown with each passing moment. Soon the sun goddess’s eye’ll wink shut completely as she passes into sleep.

I’m glad it’s getting late for two reasons: i
f I run into anyone, it’ll be harder for them to see my blaze-, durt-, and blood-covered skin; and it’s less likely anyone’ll still be at the watering hole. Circ went to his family tent to get cleaned up, but I’m too scared to face my father looking like this. I didn’t tell Circ I wasn’t going home right away, and he didn’t ask, which I’m glad about, ’cause he probably woulda wanted to come with me, which I really can’t handle right now.

I’m still muddling through everything that happened. Circ apologized about a thousand times on the way back toward the village, until I finally told
him to “Shut it!” He has nothing to apologize about—it’s me who messed everything up.

When I reach the watering hole
, no one’s there.

I sit on the edge and look at the murky brown face
in the water. I’m just plain ol’ Scrawny again. I been called it a thousand times, probably more times’n Siena, so why shouldn’t it be my name? Add it to the number of times I been called Runt, Stickgirl, and Skeleton, and you’ll have a number greater’n the total people in the entire village.

Rippling Scrawny looks back at me, Real Scrawny. Her long, black hair is
stringy with sweat and durt. Her thin face is dark brown from the sun but featureless, muddled, with chestnut eyes that almost disappear beside her skin. The dress she wears is frayed and torn, soiled from a day spent shoveling crap and scrabbling in the dust. Her bone-thin arms are like the weakest, topmost branches of the trees she’s seen sketched by village artists, good for nothing but swaying in the wind. And…

—
she’s got legs that are wobblier than a newborn tug’s—

—
and her chest is flatter than the Cotee Plains.

I close
my eyes, hating Hawk’s words ’cause they’re true.

When my bleeding time first arrived I was scared, but also excited. Bleeding meant becoming a woman, finally finding my place in the world. But it never really materialized.
I didn’t become a woman, just stayed a scrawny girl, the bumps on my chest no more’n mosquito bites, my hips remaining as flat and straight as a pointer shot from a Hunter’s bow. The only thing that identifies me as a girl is my long hair. My reflection shatters when the tears drip off my chin.

“It doesn’t have to be like this,” a voice says from behind, startling me. I go to turn but then remember my tear-streaked face. Cupping a hand in the water, I splash a bit onto my cheeks and then turn around, rivulets of tear-hiding water streaming down my cheeks, neck, and beneath my dress.

Lara. With her scalp-short haircut, she looks more like a boy’n ever under the darkening evening sky. Even more like a boy’n me—but at least she looks like a
strong
boy, her arms tanned and toned, her jaw sticking out a little. Solid—that’s the word for her.

“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-seven years old, he’s already beaten his average life expectancy, and if it wasn’t for Greynote Shiva, who’s thirty-eight, 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 zi
gzag 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.