Heat rose to his face, and Marissin fixed his orange eyes on the taller of the two nichans.
“It’s pointless, I said,” Beïka added, smiling, shaking Domino by the arm. “The kid’s retarded.”
“It’s not true!” Domino shouted. “You’re an asshole!”
At the same moment, Marissin stood. He couldn’t take it anymore, dreading more than ever the pain that would come when Domino’s shoulder would snap.
But even before he stood upright, Beïka, taller than him by at least three heads, sent his foot forward. The braided leather savate reached the little boy’s hip. He toppled over, unable to resist the force of the impact that sent him into the air. Wind whistled in his ears, his heart flipped in his chest, and he hit a wall of cold water. His first reflex was to take a deep breath. Water rushed into his mouth and nose. The child stirred like a madman. His foot knocked the rocky bottom of the river. In the current, he spun around. His wing twisted, its membrane stretched by water pressure, and in an urge to call for help, the child opened his mouth wide again.
A flurry of bubbles burst out of his chest.
The swirling of the river became stronger, and something pulled him out into the open air. Marissin coughed. His nose and eyes burned. His senses overwhelmed, belching large volumes of water mixed with saliva, he slipped, the current doing its best to carry him away. At the price of vigorous paddling, he controlled his balance.
Also, someone held him by the arm and waist.
Between two coughing fits, the human opened his eyes and raised them to a dark, wet, and worried face. Domino. His brother had probably thrown him into the water too.
The river wasn’t deep, but without Domino’s intervention, Marissin’s chance to get back to the surface was thin. Apart from the village baths—whose water level only reached his waist—he had never been completely submerged into water. Here, it reached his clavicle.
As Domino yelled in Beïka’s direction, Marissin pushed back the blond locks falling over his eyes. The washboards and laundry were several feet uphill the river. The current had carried the child away as he struggled. Head spinning, he felt weak at the thought.
He couldn’t swim. Beïka could have killed him. From the top of the bank, still as entertained as ever, the teenager waved to them, displayed his bare ass with hilarity, then left.
“You’re all right?” Domino asked, for the human was still throwing up half the river.
He was also trembling and could hardly breathe, his chest contracted by the cough. Domino pulled him close. “We’re going to get out of here. I’m going to help you out of the water. Come. It’s too high up there. Come on, I’ll—”
“Let go of me!” The words escaped Marissin’s mouth, as sour as bile. He continued, spitting his anger for the first time in months. “It your fault! You talk too much. I not want a name. I want you leave me alone!”
Despite his imperfect Torb, the meaning of his words was unequivocal. Domino, whose face closed abruptly, stepped back. His hand loosened around Marissin’s arms, who caught up with the earth and stone on the bank, heckled by the current. Facing him, the young nichan lowered his eyes.
Around them, the world had darkened. Night had fallen without warning, as if the last minutes had lasted hours.
But Marissin stared at Domino in the dark. He’d never seen such an expression on the other boy’s face. An unpleasant sensation swelled in the human’s belly, tying his guts on themselves.
In the distance, a bell rang, hammered incessantly. The bell in the village square.
The children reacted too slowly. The shock of the fall and the words just exchanged nailed them to the spot.
Domino flinched. Then he jumped again and brought his hand to his shoulder. The bell stopped ringing. Marissin cried out. Something had just fallen on him, burning his skin. Then the same pain on the other shoulder, and again and again, and on the top of his head and his wings.
Was it raining? Marissin looked up at the ink sky.
“No!” Domino cried. “Don’t look up!”
He grabbed the blond boy’s arm underwater and pulled him across the stream. Marissin had no choice but to follow through the cool waves, confused, his shoulders and head burned by the drops that fell harder now. They struggled against the floods that pushed them aside and reached a cavity dug in the earth. As the water brushed against his chin, the Vestige settled against the river wall near Domino.
It was raining, but it wasn’t just any rain. Marissin had to squint. The water gradually took on a dark hue. The drops coming from the sky were black and formed small puddles that didn’t mix with water but stagnated on the surface of the river. And the current dragged the black, acidic puddles toward the two children.
“Don’t touch them.” Domino let go of Marissin’s hand and pushed away the dark pools that kept getting wider and wider, stretching out in their direction like tentacles.
Four hands were better than two. Marissin reached out and pushed. He was too small to divert the puddles out of their trajectory. One of them covered his hand and forearm like a tight glove, and he winced when a burning pain nibbled at his skin.
“Keep your hands in the water!” Domino ordered, pushing the other boy’s hand below the surface, quickly silencing most of the burn. Then he resumed his task, creating ripples powerful enough to keep the threat at bay. “It’s the Corruption Rain. Corruption shit, they say, the grownups. It doesn’t mix with water. If it touches you, you wash it in the water. Okay?”
And even without an answer, he never stopped fighting the stain that thickened as the rain got heavier. Several times he grimaced, his skin blackened with the Corruption. But nothing stopped him. In front of Marissin’s eyes, Domino protected them until the rain passed.
Minutes, hours, an eternity. Hard to measure time in the dark.
The current washed away most of the slimy flanges. The bank was black with them. Above the boys, the substance slowly dripped down from the foliage in heavy, stretchy drops.
Then the sky brightened to its usual gray and light returned.
The two boys stayed under cover. Marissin didn’t want to come out of it for fear that another Corruption shit would catch them off guard, punishing them for escaping it the first time. Near him, Domino stretched his neck take a look at the sky from time to time. He didn’t speak anymore. Now that the danger had passed, the words Marissin had yelled in his face were probably coming back to his mind.
He shouldn’t have said those words. He regretted them now. Since his arrival at Surhok, and even before, Domino had always been good to him. He always smiled at him, talked to him as if with both pairs of their hands, they could remake the world. Sometimes it was too much for Marissin. Mother had not taught him to smile like that. Neither Mother nor anyone else, for that matter. What reason did he have to smile? His priority was to stay here, to survive. He had no energy to waste in words and smiles.
But Domino smiled, day after day.
And he looked at Marissin the way he looked at Mora, the way he stared at the sky sometimes.
“You think the sun is really yellow? If it lights yellow, why is everything gray? The others say it’s the Corruption. Me, I’d like to see the sun. Yellow and round, like an egg, all shiny,” Domino had said while watching the dark clouds that concealed the skies, and he had smiled. As he lowered his eyes to the human, his grin had remained, as had the glow in his black irises.
No one else in the village looked at Marissin that way. It unsettled him. Sometimes he felt a warmth rising in his chest, and the hope invading him ached enough for him to shy away.
He thought of the hand Domino had used to repel the waves of black oil flowing toward them. Under the turmoil, his hand appeared reddened. A few blisters swarmed over his swollen skin. Marissin reached out to make the necessary contact to heal the other boy. He could do this, the gesture would only take a few seconds. Domino had enjoyed every time he’d treated him before.
When their fingers brushed again
st each other, Domino jumped up and stepped aside. They exchanged but a brief glance before the nichan turned away, wedging his burned hand against his heart, taking a series of shivering breaths.
A nichan approached the river some time later. The woman appeared above them, pushing a solid, lumpy pile of filth with a rake. As it fell into the water, it splashed on the children, who shouted in unison. The woman noticed their presence, and her face turned pale.
Domino and Marissin were helped out of the water. Their laundry, left unprotected in the rain, was ruined. They were taken through the village, which the nichans scraped meticulously to clear the remains of the black rain. Then the idea of burning the houses and the sanctuary’s facade didn’t seem stupid anymore. In spite of the rain, all the buildings remained unaltered.
“The first Corruption shit in two years,” someone said.
“I hope the hunters found shelter in time,” said another.
Then the children were taken to the baths. The path to the bathhouse had already been cleared.
Neither boy spoke as they cleaned themselves.
When they went to bed that night, exhausted, shoulders flecked with superficial burns, they’d still not broken the silence.
V I I
The saving rain, the one that had been foretold, succeeded the black rain in the middle of the night and didn’t cease until the next day’s first light. Everywhere in the village, although still having the tint of the Corruption, mud replaced the stains. But the roofs were rinsed off, and the river washed and carried away most of the disaster.
What better way to celebrate the Gods’ merciful rain than a glass of potato alcohol shared on everyone’s porch? The enthusiasm seized every soul, from the eldest to the youngest nichan.
The children gathered in the central square to play a game they had named, “The Flight of the Chickens.” The slippery cobblestones and the usually dry earth of the village were now a pool of sticky, slate-colored mud. Not a single child would come out of this in their original colors. But with one-fifth of the clan hunting and gathering supplies at the nearest human village, and half of the adults cradled in the sugary heat of alcohol, the younger ones felt audacious.
The children took place all around the square. Half the players offered the curve of their back to another child. Facing one another, the porters were no longer children. They were brave hens taking their eggs back to the coop, the egg being the child each was carrying. Two children, chosen more or less at random, played the role of birds of prey. Their goal, to make an omelet of those eggs and ruffle some feathers, if possible. Simple enough, in theory. The raptors suffered no limits—death was not even an option in these kids’ minds. Reaching the henhouse was sometimes quite a feat. But none of these young nichans were shy. To win the Flight of the Chickens made you a better hunter, they said.
Birds inspired freedom and courage. Just like the Gods, the animals had never seen enemies in nichans. They never flinched, never fled. If this wasn’t a sign of exceptional power, then what was?
Two lines formed. The children climbed on their friends’ backs. Beïka, one of the biggest, wore the hungry grin of a raptor today.
Domino held his breath, waiting for the start. A bird cried out in the distance, and the children took off.
Mud splashed everywhere, staining their legs, soaking their pants. The birds of prey threw themselves on the hens with dazzling speed and ruthless strength. Shouts of encouragement rained from the eggs. Less than three seconds after the start, several children collapsed in the mud.
Sitting on the steps of a nearby house, Domino didn’t know where to look. The children screamed, fell, slid, charged to reach their goal by brute force. In the middle of the fiery muck, a merciless war raged. And neither Domino nor the human boy was welcome on the battlefield.
Especially not the Vestige, the other children had said. He was going to turn the mud into quicksand, replied a boy named Jaro, a pest who spent too much time in Beïka’s shadows.
“That’s bullshit,” Domino had said, unable to restrain himself.
If Mora hadn’t left with the hunting party, Domino would never have used such language. Moreover, the human had told him the previous day that he spoke too much, so perhaps the best would have been to keep quiet.
Beïka hadn’t defended them. He often did that, pretended Domino wasn’t his brother, that he had nothing to do with the little boy. When Memek, their cousin, had complained that the game should have started by now, all the children had turned their backs on them to have fun.
Now, Domino imagined himself in the middle of the tumult, the human perched on his back, his wings flapping in the wind as Domino made his way through the crowd of other chickens and birds of prey. He dreamed that at least once they would let him and Gus play.
Gus, Gus . . .
Domino couldn’t get the name out of his head, but he had to. The child had said he didn’t want a name.
Next to him, the human’s face bore the same mask of boredom and indifference. Nothing in this display of force seemed to move him. Unlike Domino, he hadn’t asked to play. As usual, the little blond boy was content to wait in the distance, his eyes wary.
Maybe it wasn’t a bad thing not to be on the field with the others. With his small build, the human would get trampled if he found himself on the ground.
Beïka shouted a rather convincing imitation of a hawk and then hurled himself at the other children. At thirteen, he was far too old and big for this game. He didn’t give the kids around him a chance. But the friends he’d made were all younger than him, enough to offer him a place among the players.
He gave a violent shoulder blow to a girl that sent her and her little brother face-first in wet dirt. His entire body freckled in black mud dots, Beïka yelled another victorious cry.
Domino looked away. That his brother was allowed a single second of fun after what he’d done to the human revolted him. If Domino had not freed his arms from Beïka’s fist, Gus might have drowned . . .
The village gates opened below.
Several nichans entered, faces grim. They’d only been gone for three days. What was the meaning for this premature return?
Very few of them brought back meat or provisions. A hare or two hung from their belts. Not enough to feed everyone.
Then Ero walked through the gates, and the air in the village filled with fear. Excitement gave way to trouble, and the children stopped playing. The fallen got up, black with mud, bruises on their knees. And they watched the nichans coming in one by one in a silent procession.
Then they appeared. Two nichans each held the end of a rope, one in front, the other behind. In the middle was a small man.
Human.
He was bare from his muddy feet to his sticky hair, dirty, bruised, and bleeding from his nose and mouth. What seemed to be dried vomit coated his chest. He was restrained. The hands behind his back had been tied tightly hard, painting the palms and fingers a nauseating purple. The man looked young and exhausted under all that blood. Terrified too.
The nichans dragged him through the village, then Mora came in, strands of hair escaping his long braid. He spotted Domino and the human immediately and ran to them.
For once, Beïka joined them without being asked. “What’s going on?”
Before he could answer, Belma, Mora’s friend, joined them in a hurry and examined the teenager from head to toe.
She had a round face devoid of angle and was a little taller than Mora. Her forearms were tattooed with long intertwined lines. She had arrived in Surhok a few years before the three brothers, accompanied by her great-grandmother, both survivors of an incident in which part of their family had lost their lives. When his brothers asked him about it, Mora remained vague; out of respect for his friend, he said.
“Are you all right?” she asked, and Mora nodded. “I heard . . . Is it true?”
“Yes.”
Belma cursed in a whisper.
Domino glanced between them as the
last nichans entered the village, shielding everyone in as the doors closed. “True what?”
“Everyone in the square!”
The powerful call, as deep as a chasm, came from the other side of the village, from Ero. Standing on the highest step at the entrance of the sanctuary, his eyes searched the crowd before going down to the prisoner who had just been forced to kneel on the muddy cobblestones. Even twenty yards away, the dried blood staining their uncle’s clenched fists was unmistakable.
“What’s going on?” Beïka repeated as he moved towards the square, reacting to Ero’s call as if it were an order.
Mora held him by the arm, looking dark. “No, you stay here with Domino. You go back to the hut.”
“Why?”
Mora pulled him toward him and brought his face closer to his cadet’s. Despite the age gap between them, the two brothers were the same height. “They’re going to execute someone. It is no sight for children.”
Beïka’s eyes widened, and Domino recognized the same excitement his brother had displayed during the game. “I definitely want to see that!”
The little square was filling up. Parents sent their children back to the houses before gathering around Ero. The Unaan came down the steps, his bald skull protruding in the sea of brown heads.
Beïka tried to free himself from his brother’s grip. Mora lost patience and pushed them all, Beïka, Domino, and the human, between the houses, away from the commotion. “I said no! You stay here and look after the little ones.”
“Mora . . .” Belma backed away slowly, worry in her eyes, following the tide of the crowd.
Mora took one last look at his brother, then let go of him to follow his friend. Seconds later, ignoring Mora’s orders, Beïka slipped between the huts, out of sight.
Domino stayed put before turning to Gus. No, to the human, he remembered. Normally, Domino would have asked him if he wanted to follow them. But he talked too much, didn’t he? So he held his tongue and turned his back on the human. Then he mirrored his brothers’ footsteps.
He reached the crowded square and stopped at a wall of fully grown nichans. They all held their breath, waiting.
The Nichan Smile Page 8