by Sean Wallace
The siblings stood over the bodies, their power fading, and stared up as a white ball flew straight into the sky, far above the trees, and began to blaze like a small sun.
In the men’s bags, they found a map that marked a village high in the hills.
“It’s too close.” Tou moved his finger marginally along the hilltop to where their village truly lay.
“Look.” Za unfolded the map further and, with each piece of paper she exposed, she felt more and more sick. Villages dotted the high hills. “They’re all too close.”
From the mountains in the far north, where vast spirits kept the snow from ever melting, the green hills stretched out like numerous fingers towards the lowlands where the Nu lived. Only two hill-fingers away from theirs, a perfectly placed dot marked the village where Koua, Za’s closest childhood friend, had gone to be married. Imperial men had been there, almost two years earlier – forcing the people of the village to reveal the location of their silver mine, forcing them to work it until their bones filled the empty tunnels.
“Take the bodies to the river,” Za said. “Just in case that thing up there burns out before more of them can arrive. Then scout more, in case they weren’t the only group. I’m going to see if I can find out any good information.”
“How?” Tou asked, just curious –
– but Pao knew. “If you trust a word that comes out of that man’s mouth, you deserve to join these men in the river!”
“He hates them almost as much as we do!” Za snapped back, wanting their mother’s strength to smack him into silence.
“So he said! To win you over, to—”
“Enough,” Tou said. “They will come anyway. If Za can convince that man to tell us anything useful, she should try.”
“You’re an idiot,” Pao spat, but he didn’t stop Za as she ran back to her basket, where her infant son was bundled with the bamboo shoots she had been harvesting.
She began the long walk downhill to the trade town, hating Pao, hating the Nu, trying to ignore her son’s complaints at her long, jostling pace.
Fox-skull. Many purposes, including the
acquisition of the fox’s ability to see at night
and its strong senses of smell and hearing.
Za had hunted the fox when she was still weak and sore from childbirth, but no one else would do it for a half-Nu baby.
“Perhaps it’s for the best,” her mother had advised as the boy, small from his premature delivery, cried feebly beside Za. “He will only last a few days. And because of his size, he has not hurt you.”
As soon as night fell on the boy’s second day and everyone slept, Za wrapped herself in clothes and gathered what she needed: her bow and arrows, her fox-ear pouch, her mortar and pestle. She touched her baby once on the forehead, gently, so as not to wake him, and set out into the snow that coated the ground in a fine layer like cotton.
Her pouch still contained fox-skull.
It cast the forest in a pale-grey glow. Za sniffed the wind. Foxes sometimes hid in winter, but they didn’t hibernate. They needed to hunt too.
Za tried to put aside her mother’s words. “It only works half the time, and who knows what his Nu blood will do? It probably won’t work at all. He’s small and sickly – let nature run its course.”
“I want to try,” she had said.
“Listen to wisdom for once in your life, child!” Temper had flared in her mother’s voice – the same anger that had made her strike Za to the floor when she revealed the pregnancy, although later she had apologized with grief in her eyes. “Your life will be normal again. Don’t you want that?”
In the snow, an hour’s hard hike from her village, Za crouched. Something rustled. She nocked an arrow and waited, still as a rock, until she saw what her nose had found: a male fox, searching for food. Za drew the bowstring back and released, and her arrow struck it in the rump, only wounding. It ran off – slowly, dripping blood, and even sore, tired Za managed to follow it until she had a clear second shot.
She finished it with her knife and flayed it on the spot, rolled up the hide to carry home, and began stripping away the flesh. The hide would help to make her son’s first jacket, she decided, and the flesh would go into a stew for herself, to restore her energy and enrich her milk. But before all that, she needed the bones.
Out of respect for the fox, she ground its bones there, setting her mortar and pestle in the snow and forcing her cold fingers to cooperate. First she ground the tail bones, murmuring the words her grandmother had taught her early in the pregnancy: For a strong heart. For strong lungs. For strong arms and legs. For strength. For strength. She poured the pale powder into a small pouch. Then she ground the other bones, separating them as use dictated, and picked up the hide and meat and set off home with steps full of fear: that the tail bones would not strengthen her son; or that they would, and her mother would hate her for it.
A fox’s hindleg bones: femur, tibia, and fibula.
The speed that a sprinting fox longs for.
Further south, the hills were entirely cultivated, and the trade town sat among them like a curious outcrop of bare fat trees. Za followed a narrow path from an outlying village. On either side, terraces of rice and corn stretched up and down the hill: over a hundred large steps from the top of the hill to the valley, and again on the other side.
If she glanced north, the imperial men’s orb still shone in the sky.
With several weeks until the next trade day, the town’s streets were almost bare. Men and women worked in the surrounding fields while children helped or watched animals or played near their houses. A few people recognized her, with her half-Nu son; she hurried between the houses with their anger at her back.
She remembered liking this town.
At its far side, a house sat slightly apart from the others, identical in construction – walls of wood and a roof of dried banana leaves – but far smaller. Almost at its door she stopped, biting her fingers. She needed information. She didn’t want to talk about anything else – she wouldn’t let him. Fixing her village firmly in her mind – her grandparents, her parents, her littlest sister who liked to chase the chickens – she took one step forward, and another, and soon she stood outside the doorway, looking at the man bent over his paper with ink staining his fingers dark like indigo, as if she had never left.
Hello. I hate you. No I don’t. Why was I stupid in the fertile part of my cycle?
“Why are there imperial men in the northern hills?”
The brush in Truc’s hand clattered to the paper, ruining his words. “Za,” he said, then thought better of whatever he’d wanted to ask first. Silence grew awkwardly between them. Her son stood up in the basket, trying to pull himself up to see over her shoulder, and Truc’s agonized expression worsened. “He’s mine?” he asked softly.
Za glared at him. What other Nu man was I fucking? The father couldn’t be a Hma man – the differences between Hma and half-Nu babies were small, but they’d been pointed out enough that Za doubted anyone could miss them.
“Tell me about the imperial men,” she demanded.
“What imperial men? Um, do you want to come inside? I have some soup and tea and . . .” His words withered. “Come inside, at least, Za, and sit down.” Several stools sat by the wall, unused. If Za’s shoulders had hurt less, if her feet hadn’t needed to carry her to the town so quickly, she might have refused him. Instead, she stepped inside and gently put the basket on the floor beside her and sat on one of the stools, longing for the silent emptiness of the forest.
Truc stayed at his table, stiff-shouldered, not quite watching her or her son.
“You must know about them,” Za said. “You’re still one of them – someone would have come to you. What did you tell them?”
Sighing, he said, “They came to me with a map and asked me to confirm its details.”
“A map.” From among bundles of uncooked rice and freshly cut bamboo shoots and some corn she had traded in the
last village for extra shoots, she removed the map: wet on the edges, from rainfall and her son’s brief mouthy fascination, but unmistakable.
“Yes.” Truc looked directly at her. “That orb in the sky is theirs. I assume that, when you took this map, one of them managed to set it off.”
“You told them where to go.” Deny it, she thought. Then, Tell the truth.
“No. I promise you, no. I told them nothing, even though they threatened me. I threatened back. They left. And now that orb is in the sky, confirming their suspicions.” He sounded genuinely unhappy.
“What are they doing?”
“Looking for silver, of course, but that is not all. What I managed to get their leader to say indicated tensions in the imperial court – they need an enemy to fight for a while, and your secretive, silver-rich people suit their needs perfectly.”
“Why? There’s so many people in their empire.”
“And they are busy fighting most of the others, too.” Truc smiled wryly. “This is why I left, remember.”
“I remember you saying that my people would be safe.”
His meagre humour faded. “I thought you would be. That map . . . I don’t know where they got that information.”
“How do we stop them?”
“I don’t know.”
Two years ago, after the destruction of Koua’s new village, he hadn’t been able to answer. He had promised to think of ideas, to use his exiled life in ways that benefited the people of the hills – but Za’s mother had been right. None of his fine ideals made a difference.
“Are there more of them?” she asked, because nothing mattered except getting information.
“Yes. A small detachment – about one hundred, I believe. They are probably in the hills north of here already.”
One hundred imperial soldiers walking faster than she could, guided by the orb.
She stood up and took her son from the basket. “Goodbye.”
“Za,” he said as she turned, and he filled her name with an intensity of emotion that surprised her.
“I need to tell my people,” she said without looking back. “I need to travel fast.”
Many more questions hung in the air between them. She answered just one.
“His name’s Cheu.” She didn’t tell Truc that sometimes, on days when she looked at her son’s face and saw every small way he differed from little Hma boys, she called him Fenh – a Nu name, one of Truc’s many.
Outside the town, she tied her son to her chest and swallowed ground hindlegs.
A fox’s tail vertebrae. Used to sustain life.
Za breathed a story on to the ground tail bones:
“Long ago, all our people were created in the mountains, by a great spirit who had already created many animals. When the time came for the spirit to make people, a different animal oversaw each of our births: foxes watched the first Hma man and woman be stitched from the air, ants watched the first Daren, snakes watched the first Pinoh, and so on.
“Many years later, the spirit grew weary of our company and sent us away, and we moved south into the hills where we settled comfortably and developed our own ways of life. Even we Hma are different. Some of us, whose clothes are bright as every flower combined, live in the same hills as many other people, and are probably the most numerous. Some of us, whose clothes are almost fully black and whose cheeks are tattooed with lines as thin as hairs, live in small numbers in hills far to the west. We, the only hill-people to live where snow sometimes falls, are scattered across many hills, always in the north, always hidden.”
She pressed more powder to the baby’s tongue.
I will make you fully Hma, she thought. I will fill you with our stories – then you’ll have to be Hma, and this will work, and you’ll live, and everyone will stop hating you.
Blinking away tears, she began another story.
A fox’s scapula. Pleasant when smoked with
tobacco. Said to promote health in the elderly.
Za stopped at the last Hma village before hers, a place where two rivers crashed together and bamboo grew thick-stemmed on the shore. The white peaks of distant mountains hung in the northern sky like clouds. She put away her fox-speed at the village’s edge and appeared in front of an old woman who sat on a fence surrounding a small corn field.
“That’s a good trick!” the woman said, grinning toothlessly. “Although I don’t think your son likes it.”
He still wailed against her chest.
“He’s fine,” Za said. The sudden stop had jarred her. She blinked, expecting the village to blur like the road behind her. She kept herself still.
“Will you be staying long?”
“No.”
“What do you want to discuss then, little mountain one?”
The noises of the village and the eternal river wrapped around each other in a distant knot. Here, with only her son’s quietening cries and the faint sucking of the old woman on her pipe, she didn’t feel like she did in the village. She preferred being here. In the village they often derided her for sleeping with a Nu man, the girls with their Hma husbands and their first Hma children with perfect little Hma faces.
“Would you at least like a drink?”
“No.” Za felt stable enough to talk. “My village is in danger. I have to hurry to them.”
“The imperial men,” the old woman said unhappily.
“What do you know about them?”
“They have been in this area, hunting silver.” Anger simmered in her eyes, but sadness kept it from boiling. “We told them we don’t know the location of any mines. We trade the silver for our corn, for our little chickens that hatch as easily as the sun rises. So they stole as much of our silver as they could, and moved on.”
Za looked at the woman’s jacket, so brightly stitched that she hadn’t noticed how little silver adorned it – only two small discs, which would sit side-by-side if she fastened the jacket at her throat. And she wore just two narrow hoops of silver in her ears. Compared to her, Za felt like a silver mine. One thick band of stitched colour – red and white and yellow and black, and the russet of magic-rich fox fur – circled her indigo-dark jacket at her chest, and a row of silver discs ran above and below it. A similar design circled the end of both sleeves. Nothing decorated her dark trousers or boots, but thick bracelets clustered at her wrists and a large hoop hung from each ear. Even her son, whose jacket bore thick bands of fox fur for protection, owned more silver than the old woman.
Za’s village knew a good silver mine, as bounteous as the summer sun. A sick suspicion clenched in her.
“You told them,” she hissed.
“No.” The old woman spoke firmly. “We don’t know where you live, so how could we give them any details? They’re far away, we said. They come to us but we don’t go to them. And then, a month later, one of our men went hunting and never returned.”
Of all the people of the village, a hunter would best be able to guess the village’s location.
“We still don’t know where he is,” the old woman said. “Perhaps he lives, in one of the stolen mines. Perhaps his ghost wanders the mountains, lost.”
Za shivered. “They’re coming for us.”
“That light in the sky is theirs, isn’t it?”
“Too near.”
Za realized she was holding on to her son, like a child with a new fur. You will be safe, she thought. At least, from the Nu. What would they do to a half-Nu child? Throw him into the forest with the other infants, too small to work in a mine, left to cry at pines and rocks for food? Keep him? Sneer at him, just like everyone else?
“He’s a handsome child,” the old woman said, smiling. “A year?”
“Almost.” Za swallowed. “Thank you.” She couldn’t remember when someone had last complimented her child. She stroked his hair absently. “I have to go.”
“Safe journeys, little mountain ones. I hope you impale many imperial soldiers on your claws.”
Za grinned. “Oh, we
will.”
Some people stared as she jogged through the village, but the wind stole their words – she slid back into her fox-speed and ran with the forest blurring at her sides. She heard her son scream.
“Hush,” she said, gasping, jarring again from fast to slow. “Please. We need to hurry.”
The wails tore at her ears.
Za opened the pouch at her waist and frowned as, for the first time since the days after his birth, she fed him fox-bone. At two years, her grandmother had said. Wait two years. It is powerful and dangerous; wait, unless the baby’s life is in danger. Well, it most likely was. The Nu would laugh as they tore the silver from his jacket and threw him aside. Stupid to think otherwise.
His eyes went wide and he inhaled as if trying to breathe all of the journey ahead.
“All you have to do is stay still,” she told him, “and try to enjoy it.” She felt very strange, talking to him like this. “Can you do that?”
He wriggled and stared into the forest, so Za re-bound him to her chest, facing out, and hoped he didn’t get too many bugs in his eyes and mouth. Slitting her own eyes, she ran, and her son pealed with joy.
Fox hide. Use varies depending on how it is stitched.
Za sat nearly alone in her family’s house, winding a long braided strip of fox hide around her son’s head: one loop for every week he had lived so far and for every decade she hoped he would live. Ten weeks accumulated around his head, with its tufty dark hair. Soft as a fox cub’s, Za thought. Ten decades – though none lived that long. He watched her, with dark eyes in a face that seemed to get plumper every day, slowly gaining the fat he should have got in her womb.
“For sixty healthy years,” Za said, on the sixth loop.
No one joined them for this ritual, except for her littlest sister who sat just inside the doorway, crouched and wary. Misbehaving Bao, who ignored their mother’s order.
Za didn’t shoo her away.
“For seventy healthy years,” Za said, on the seventh loop.
Her son watched her with such contentment, such a simple kind of happiness: fed and warm and full of fox-strength, wrapped in it tight as the linens, woollen blankets and the fur stitched with every protective strengthening thread Za knew. As she began the eighth loop, he made little noises of pleasure.