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imperious Wawasen. ‘It not only denotes infertility, as the mother still fertile also bares it conspicuously, but it also acts as a summons to those not iniquitous to remember the future and how every being depends on every other being, both now and forever.’

  At this point the Ammit placed his second hand on the mat’s shoulder and brought her to her knees. He took the largest branding billet in his first hand, from the prancing fire behind the line of perpetrators. Zus’s eyes were directed at her saudari, though she didn’t look directly at her. Zus looked at the space between and the space that came after her. That is, she looked inside herself and felt the blood flee from her heart. It ran and looped around and around until each capillary of her face lit with the life substance and her neck throbbed with the beat of it. Her knees pocked the wet earth like the knees of some of those who faced her. Her knees didn’t tremble like she had expected, but were lifeless and felt separate. She completely forgot about her hands, which hung like wilted plants in need of water. The Ammit’s hand, however, burned hot against her shoulder.

  Ravno quickly followed her gaze to where it rested on Kar. Kar knelt opposite and as close to the line of victims as the ceremony allowed, her face flat and controlled and emotionless save her chin, which shivered in the mist.

  The Ammit pressed the glowing symbol against Zus’s neck and the skin cells screamed and spat and the small hairs burnt and joined the increasingly stuffy air that lazed around the meadow. The Kawani, stern but slim in stature, leaned close to the fresh wound and pronounced, ‘No ini kayama!’

  A fair mark! Zus dropped her eyes to the ground. She stayed thus even as her maite, her crime-partner, her lover was branded in turn.

  ‘No ini kayama.’

  Keba instinctively took Ravno’s hand as the Ammit placed his own, old hand on the shoulder of the oldest boy. The boy squirmed but his whimper dissolved in his stomach as he came to his knees. The wet air made the smaller creambush rod cry with sizzles and pops as it came from the fire. It cried until it marred the young skin of the three-year-old, who knelt as tall as he could and held his older saudara’s hand tightly. The Ishi from Bu, his torso almost invisible behind his grey capa in the thick air, held the newborn son, unswaddled and drunk on coca corba. The only part of batsu omhaals that troubled the Ishi was the incrimination of such a young creature unable to hold himself erect on his own knees. Even so, the Ishi held the infant tightly and positioned him for the Ammit to firmly brand in the appropriate place. Though others were already crying, branded and unbranded alike, the baby was the first to be heard above swimming streams of air. This prompted the Kawani, after a final inspection, to trumpet, even more loudly, ‘No ini kayama!’

  At this, the fifth pronouncement, those witnesses on their knees crumpled their bodies forward, foreheads falling against folded arms, in support and compassion for the branded. Those who were ambivalent about the branding simply stood and squinted through the fog. Onlookers were curious about the new wounds and how much pain they caused, though some turned on toes to head back to the city, the main attraction over. Those who approved the Eleven’s approach stood proudly and solemnly, grateful of the designates and of the Eleven’s unerring wisdom. They stared disapprovingly at the ottsa.

  Feet stacked with colorful plastic bangles crossed through Ravno’s upside-down field of vision. His forehead lay against his arms; his arms pressed into the grass. After a moment he slowly ventured up out of his position. He saw Jasmin Sanjukta dab kukui nut oil from an archaic glass phial on the wounds of the branded family who sat in a circle around the fire, gazes lost in pulsing embers. The Eleven’s trio had disappeared into the steam and were nowhere to be seen. Kar sat beside her saudari in the circle, their intertwined hands clutched together vehemently.

  Ravno rose to his feet as Jasmin Sanjukta finished tending to the youngest son. The newborn lay in his ottsa’s arms, his dewy face finally quiet after a feed from the breast of Zus. Keba fell into Ravno’s embrace and they stood encircled in fresh bouts of steam. The coca corba salad smell washed away and left only a wet-burnt aroma, like day-old dark incense. Though he held her with caring arms, Ravno’s mind wondered what all the dramatic excitement was about. Didn’t this family knowingly have too many children? They could have been voluntarily sterilized after the first or second—or even before—like so many others, and avoided their children’s branding. It was their own undoing, a nonsensical act followed by a sensible one. The batsu omhaal re-taught communal responsibility. Didn’t the Kawani make it clear? ‘Nu motsu gia panta, kaku vie bezona kaku vie.’ Every being depends on every other being, both now and forever. Only the family couldn’t see it—as if their eyes were sewn shut.

  Jasmin Sanjukta removed the line of kukuis from her neck and carefully separated one nut from the strand. She lit the oil of it on fire and placed it in the mat’s hand. The smoke poured about the mat’s face before she handed it to her saudari, Kar, who tenderly helped the second boy hold it and pass it to the eldest. Zus now held the infant while her maite held the burning nut. The nut came down to a soft glow and, before extinguishing it, the ottsa handed it back to Jasmin Sanjukta who tossed it into the fire. Her necklace now held twelve kukui’s but would be reduced to eleven by the last quarter of the same moon.

  ‘Isn’t it absurd?’ Keba said. ‘That this is actually happening today, in our time?’ Keba and Ravno were walking west to Mara and the setting sun with a southward detour past the lavvy. Keba looked imploringly at her friend’s large, sympathetic eyes. Her lips had lost their color, intensifying the green and yellow and black that outlined her shrunken pupils. It wasn’t hatred Ravno saw in her eyes but a resilience or hardening, or the absence of something.

  ‘I guess it seems odd using a hot brand on such young kids.’

  ‘Odd? Rav, those children, all three of them, were sterilized before we got there, along with their ottsa, and then branded in public with their mat, poor woman. I can’t think of a worse thing we could do in this situation besides executing them. Even that would be more desirable for the victims, at least.’

  ‘I wouldn’t like to be executed,’ Ravno said. He watched the dark soil of the path pass under his feet; a tree root here, or bedewed fern there, reached in from a darkening forest. The slow-filling moon rose high in the sky. He sniffed in, brows partially gathered.

  ‘Maybe it’s best if nobody comes?’ he said. ‘Then it wouldn’t be public and they could—’

  ‘Ravno we’re not there to poke and pry but sing if we need to, or cry. Those are people. You and I could easily be the ones kneeling with the Ammit’s calluses grinding our shoulders.’ She talked faster with every word. ‘I’ve heard he clenches his hand just before bringing the noh against their neck, like he gets some sick enjoyment out of crushing them.’ She lashed the words out as if she directly reprimanded the Ammit himself.

  Ravno sensed the need to be ever-present in the discussion and find what he truly felt about her comments, and what he felt about the guilt that creeped through some layer within. But he obsessed over the phrase, ‘If it were you and I,’ and procreating with her. Before now he had never planned on having any children. He had previously considered committing to somebody, content as a pair, but suddenly the thought of her nursing their child at her breast overtook his senses. Though in retrospect, when he mulled the scene over, as he lay on his back in the cool of the night, he wasn’t sure if it was just the making of the children that he found overwhelming. The thought of tearing open her green capa and bringing their nakedness together in a frenzy of hazy reds and orangey pinks….

  ‘And did you see the second boy on his knees, taking the brand bravely like his mat?’

  ‘I thought Zus looked very sad,’ Ravno said without much conviction, though he said what he felt.

  ‘Why are you so apathetic about it, like you couldn’t care less?’ She stopped and held him there with her eyes.

  ‘I guess, I don’t know…. It’s the first batsu omhaal I’ve been to and I don’t
know what to think. There’s just so much to think about.’

  They climbed to the top of the hill where the lavvy sat between rows of magnolia trees that overlooked an aphotic ocean. Ravno gathered his skirt around his waist and faced west. He squatted just past the point where the trench was last filled and untied the cloth that looped between his legs. Keba found another trench and similarly squatted. She could dimly see Vorra Mound’s needle stitching the sky’s eye shut.

  Ravno called from his trench, ‘K, I forgot to grab a petal and can’t reach any, can you pass me one when you’re finished?’

  ‘Why don’t you just rinse instead?’

  ‘I prefer the magnolia. I’m old fashioned that way.’

  After she replaced the magnolia petal and lili moss that sat in her cloth, to catch her blood, Keba brought a petal over to Ravno who still squatted with his skirt-gathered.

  ‘Still at it?’ she asked with a surface level grin on her cheeks.

  ‘I’ve always taken longer and it gives me time to recalibrate, anyway. Thank you.’ He took the magnolia petal from her. Keba went back to cover her waste with dirt to expose the newest part of the trench for the next patron. As she walked past the largest magnolia