by Wendy Orr
One night they camp on an island with no town nearby, just a spring to refill their water jugs, and another they have to anchor at sea. Those are the only mornings that no tribute is added. All the other nights, the captain and half the crew march up to a town or Hall to demand their payment, and two or four or even twelve youths are hoisted on board to join Aissa and Luki.
By the last day thirty-two thirteen year olds are crammed onto the front deck. There’s no room to move; the deck stinks of the goat kids or piglets crammed beneath it each morning to feed the crew.
The children all speak different languages. A few can understand each other and a few can understand the crew.
Luki and Aissa don’t know many words, but they’ve learned the commands. They teach the new dancers how to promise not to run away, to scramble under the deck when the captain approaches, and the signs for water and food.
One girl can’t stop crying and one boy can’t stop vomiting. Most of the rest throw up occasionally and cry at night. There’s no privy and no privacy on the ship, but Aissa shows the other girls how to squat on the edge and hope that a shark won’t bite their bare bottoms.
They learn that the world is bigger than they’d imagined, and that people are all the same under their different words and clothes. For this little while, it doesn’t even matter that Aissa can’t speak.
Then late one afternoon, the land that rises up out of the sea goes on so far they can’t see where it ends. The sailors’ songs have a different rhythm, triumphant and final. There are fishing fleets and ships as big as theirs, more than they can count, sailing in or hauled up on the beach. There are buildings right down to the water’s edge.
They’ve arrived at the Bull King’s land.
The road is paved smooth
but everything else
is rough with noise,
crowds and colour:
crews unloading cargo,
bleating goats and squealing piglets,
barrels, jars and boxes,
people shouting
in different tongues,
wearing different clothes
with skin of different colours –
some are darker
than Aissa and Luki
and many paler
with hair that isn’t black and curling
but brown or gold or red.
The huddled thirteen year olds
don’t feel like bull dancers.
What they feel is
afraid,
but there is nowhere to run
because the road
is packed tight with people,
goats and donkeys,
snorting horses pulling carts,
curtained chairs on stout poles
on the shoulders of slaves –
and where
would they run if they could?
Aissa’s always known
that the Bull King’s land
was big;
that the men on the ship
weren’t all
the men in the land;
that more women and children
waited at home.
But she didn’t know
there could be numbers like this,
people swarming
like bees from a hive;
houses and halls
right down to the shore
like mussels on a rock.
She touches fingers with Luki
but a girl from the ship
grabs her hand tight
as if she’s drowning
and Aissa can save her.
The whisper goes round,
‘Where do we go?
What do we do?’
The words are all different
so some make the shrug –
palms out,
eyebrows arched –
the question mark
that Aissa and Luki made,
so they all understand
but no one has the answer.
A new shout:
a woman and a man
are coming towards them.
The man’s left leg
is withered and drags
so he walks with a stick –
but no one would laugh
or call him Flopleg
because he looks as strong
as a mountain goat
with a temper to match.
The woman wears
a short kilt like the man
and looks as strong
but her right arm
is gone.
They shout and gesture
for the dancers to follow.
The man leads;
the woman circles behind
like a dog herding goats
and everything about her says
if they try to run
she’ll catch them.
The crowd steps back
to let them through,
though hands shoot out
to touch and pinch,
voices call
and laugh,
and eyes stare,
as if the dancers were lambs
brought to market.
The road is long
and people line it all the way
from the town at the sea
past groves of olives
and fields of new-reaped barley
into another town
that makes the first
look small and plain;
the houses not of stone
or blending into a cliff
as houses should,
but coloured bright
in reds and blues
with windows for light
and flat roofs
where people sit
to watch the dancers pass.
Aissa catches
Luki’s eye
and they both laugh
to see something so strange.
But they don’t laugh
when they see
on the rise of a hill,
lit by the setting sun
the bull god’s Hall –
roofs stacked high,
halls on top of halls,
too huge,
too grand,
too rich and bright
to be anything human.
And over the gate ahead,
lit by flares in the dusk
a monster leaps through
a blood red wall
as if he’s not made of stone
but alive and charging –
and if that’s a bull,
Aissa never wants to meet one.
The limping man leads them
past the guardhouse and painted bull
on the road around the halls
past courtyards
stone steps and pillared rooms
past more gates
that are not for them.
Aissa’s head spins to see
so many people,
so many buildings,
so much strangeness
and she breathes a little stronger
when they turn to a side road,
leaving the palace behind,
past grand houses
to a hall out on its own.
In the central room, lit with lamps,
tables are set
with fruit and cheese,
barley cakes and flatbread,
dried fish
and jugs of milk with wine.
But first,
the man and the woman
stand at a long bench
with jugs of water
and basins
to wash their hands,
carefully pouring
water over their fingers,
showing the new dancers,
as if they might never have seen
hands washed before.
The man barks an order
and everyone jostles
around the jugs,
because they all want
to do it right.
And they all want to eat.
When the food is gone
down to the last crumb
the man shouts again,
shoving the boys
to a room at one side,
while the one-armed woman
herds the girls to another:
lined with sleeping mats
and shadowed girls within
watching the new ones arrive.
In the morning they roll
their mats and bundles
against the wall,
open the doors to the central room
and in the daylight
they see
paintings of bulls
with boys and girls leaping
over their backs,
of bulls throwing a girl,
dashing a boy to the ground –
and it doesn’t look
like dancing at all.
20
SPRING TRAINING
The man with the dragging leg and the woman with the missing arm are ex-bull dancers. Now they train the new ones, the story of their injuries a constant warning.
Niko had been sold to the Bull King when his parents couldn’t pay their taxes. He’d been a strong boy and had worked in the storage rooms, helping much bigger men haul jugs of oil and bags of wheat to store in giant clay pots. But from the first time he saw the bull dances, he practised handsprings and backflips – and did them whenever there was a chance that someone important could see him. Finally someone did, and Niko was moved from the slave quarters to the training hall. He’d survived the year, till the great spring dances and very nearly through them; freedom had been so close he can still remember the taste of it. Freedom, glory and wealth: the rewards of a successful dancer. He’d have been mobbed in the streets, a star for life.
But on the last dance, the last bull, his left hand slipped as he grabbed the horns. Instead of leaping into a handstand, he swung one-handed, and the sharp horn ripped through his left leg, shredding the muscles forever.
Mia had come as tribute from one of the furthest lands that the Bull King’s navy reached. Niko had been her trainer; he’d pushed her mercilessly because he could see her skill and drive, and knew she had a chance of success.
Like Niko, she lasted until the spring dances, when another dancer, flying broken from the horns of a bull, knocked her to the ground. The bull trampled them both: the other girl died, and Mia’s right arm was smashed to a pulp. The healers knew there was only one way to save her life: they cut off the shattered arm. Not many people survive surgery like that, but Mia was lucky.
In fact, they both know how lucky they are. Training the new dancers is the next best thing to freedom; they’re respected and honoured – especially by the gamblers who come to ask their advice for the coming year. Betting is part of the thrill of the games: from high-society ladies to the poorest workman, nearly everyone has a wager on which dancers will make it through to the end. The real gamblers take it further. They’ll bet on every possibility for each stage of the year: who will be left after each dance, who will die, who will turn and run.
But the bullring needs luck as well as skill. No matter how much gold a gambler offers, Mia and Niko never tempt fate by suggesting which of their young athletes will fail. Pointing out a trainee’s extraordinary skill or amazing strength is different – and they’re quite happy to accept a gold ring or a silver necklace afterwards.
Today is a long way from that. Today is the start of organising ninety-eight scared children into teams of highly skilled, fearless acrobats.
The first step is to weed out anyone not worth training. There’s no time to waste: it’s less than two cycles of the moon before these dancers face their first bulls. So, by the end of the day, some of them will be in the slave quarters. They might even be the luckier ones. But as they’re woken, sent to the washhouses and breakfast tables, no one suspects they’re already being tested.
Neither Mia nor Niko know exactly what they’re looking for – they just know it when they see it. The girl who’s last out of bed: someone has to be last, but is she always slow? The boy who’s still crying; the one everyone seems to shun.
Aissa sees Luki across the dining hall. His face lights up with relief and she feels hers glowing too. They hug like brother and sister, and go together to find the others from their ship, because those shipmates are already like cousins.
In the babble of reunions in a dozen different languages, the trainers don’t notice that Aissa doesn’t speak.
Breakfast is light, and over quickly. Training is about to begin.
Everyone’s still dressed in their native clothing: mostly tunics, in many different styles, though some boys are in kilts. A few girls are wearing long robes and Mia gives them ropes to belt their skirts up out of the way. One starts to cry.
‘Send her out now?’ calls Niko.
‘Let her run,’ says Mia. ‘We’ve been wrong before.’
‘Not often!’
Mia laughs. It’s true. They’ll be watching this girl closely, as well as the others they’d noticed earlier.
Dragging his leg behind him, Niko leads the way out the door at the end of the dining hall. Mia does her herd-dog act, rounding up anyone who hasn’t guessed that they’re supposed to follow, and carefully noting them. Intuition – guessing what someone else is thinking without being told – is as important as running in the bullring.
However, speed is easier to test, and Niko and Mia want to see not just how they run, but how they race: how determined they are to win.
The trainees stop dead as they enter the ring. Across the silver shimmer of olive groves, a distant mountain rises to a peak – but no one’s looking at the view. The arena is seventy paces long and thirty wide, enclosed by wooden walls, with tiered seats behind them. The walls are painted with more pictures of bulls and acrobats.
‘Just wait till they see the real thing,’ Niko mutters.
Mia smiles. It’s always like this – she doesn’t hold it against them. She remembers her own first sight of it: the shock of the vivid paintings in this vast court, and the realisation of what she was expected to do. That awe is part of the reason the training ring is so elaborately painted. The other reason is that bulls are sacred. Anything to do with them should be as beautiful as it can be.
Aissa and Luki are standing with the others from their ship, a small known island in a sea of strange faces. The girl who’d cried in her sleep is holding Aissa’s hand again.
Mia breaks them apart. A bull dancer is part of a team, but they need to think on their own as well. It’s time to break up the friendships and organise new groups.
After some shoving, shouting and pointing, the ninety-eight youths are divided into eleven groups. Mia sends Aissa to one group with another girl and two boys from the ship and five strangers. The girl who’d held her hand goes to a different group, and Luki to a third.
Aissa studies a painting of a girl grabbing a bull by the horns, and another of a boy doing a handspring down a bull’s back.
The bull is enormous, five times the size of the boar Luki had tried to leap. What the acrobats are doing is impossible.
She can see the gate where the bulls will enter . . .
We’re going to die, right now, on the very first day!
Mia lays a straight line of rope across the hard-packed dirt in front of them, and another at the far end of the arena.
Niko shoves Luki’s group into a line behind the first rope. Mia comes back and steps into the centre spot; the trainees sidle well away from her.
‘Go!’ Niko bellows. No one in that group understands the word, but when he claps his hands and Mia leaps over the rope into a fast, fluid run, Luki follows. Tigo’s training is paying off: Luki mightn’t be the fastest runner, but he knows about racing. He runs harder than he’s ever run before. He’s gasping as he strides over the finish line, his foot touching the ground on the same heartbeat as Mia’s. None of the others
are close.
If Aissa had a voice, she’d have lu-lu-lu-ed for joy. Luki has won the very first race. It’s got to be a good omen.
She checks the gate quickly: no sign of bulls yet.
The next group is lined up. Mia doesn’t need to run with them this time. Everyone starts when Niko claps his hands – and they all want to win. The race is surprisingly even.
In the third group the hand-holding girl from the ship twists her ankle and tumbles to the ground. Mia beckons; the girl hobbles off to the side and sits out the rest of the morning.
My first friend! Did I give her my bad luck?
A boy who trips his neighbour is sent to join her. The girl who was late for breakfast is just as slow on the racetrack; another boy nearly as far behind flaps his arms like wings. Mia and Niko whisper, and send them to the sidelines.
Those three weren’t anything to do with me, Aissa thinks.
But the most important thing now is to get through her own race. She’s never run with anyone else – fleeing the twins is not the same as racing. The more she thinks about it the more she worries.
She can tell that the rest of her group are thinking the same thing: Let us go next! Let’s get it over with!
They’re the very last to run. They’re all so tense they’re ready to explode over the line before Niko has time to clap his hands. One boy actually does.
Niko roars. They don’t need to understand the words to know what he’s saying: ‘Get back behind the line! Wait till I clap!’
When the clap finally comes, the boy is so determined not to be wrong again that he starts a moment behind the others.
Aissa never sees him. She runs as if stones are hurtling, as if a wolf is on her heels. She feels the air in her lungs and the spring in her legs. She seems to have barely started when she sees the great gate ahead of her and realises she’s leapt right over the end line. The others are just reaching it now.
Mia’s striding up to her.
I didn’t stop at the line! I’ll be sent off!
But Mia is grinning. She pats Aissa’s shoulder and sends her back to her group.
They sleep in the dorms, eat in the dining hall, and train in the arena. The days are hot, hotter than at home; they train before and after breakfast and again in the evening; the afternoon siesta is long. They learn to strap each other’s wrists and ankles for strength, and to feel comfortable wearing shorts and a close-fitting top. Life is a haze of shouted commands and pushing their bodies until they ache. When they rest their minds buzz with new words and their new life.
They learn handstands and handsprings, cartwheels, somersaults and backflips, and how to jump from a standing start. They pull themselves up on a high bar and swing around it.