In class the next day and every day thereafter I felt obsessed with my studies and oblivious to pain. Every evening when I got home from warrior classes, my body was covered in cuts, gashes, and bruises. Everyone thought I was insane to study thus when I was pregnant. But I was addicted to the joy of falling, just as a bird might be addicted to flying. In classes, I would think of my father, my brothers, my family—past, present and future—and my dogs, and I’d fight with a fury I hadn’t known I possessed. But one day in class the fury didn’t rise in me as it used to, and I realized that my worst memories had become scars rather than wounds. I remembered what my mother had told me long ago, and I knew that my soft heart had mended, rather than breaking like a hard one. My father was a part of the same dream that my past had become. He had formed me as much as anyone or anything in my childhood had, but now my childhood, like Maruk’s, was gone. I came to think of my father and Maruk as magical, like the wisest elders, or like the magical childhood I now saw I’d had.
As the days passed, Panyor helped many Bakshami build their houses. He told us about battles in which he’d fought, and about ships he’d flown. He gave classes and lectured to the Bakshami who’d moved into our new village. The Bakshami were surprisingly good at learning of war—after all, according to legend, the Bakshami had descended from a Soom Kali man and a beast. We grew confident in our ability to defend ourselves. We were such impressive students of war that a couple of the finest warriors in Soom Kali honored us by moving to our colony. Even Zem returned from Artroro and became one of the most flamboyant and lazy members of my new village.
On the day that Artroro officially declared war on Soom Kali, Moor and I decided to hold our mating ritual. The night before, I sat up by myself, thinking about the time long ago when I’d seen a wave of sand pounce upon a man. That stranger had appeared in our village like the first flea of summer, a harbinger of the scavengers and bloodsuckers who soon descended upon our quiet lives, scavenging for the remains of war.
I sat on the ground by a couple of lonely trees. Most of the landscape in our colony had a lonely quality. I felt eyes on my back. I turned smiling, certain it was my future husband. But it was my mother, staring at me with haunted eyes. She rarely talked to me since my father had died. I thought she blamed me for my father’s fate. His remains were trapped in Artekka’s hot center, never to become a part of the hallowed Glass Mountains. The hate flashed for a moment, then burned itself out, to be supplanted by an expression I had not seen in so long I could not quite place it.
“What are you thinking?” I said.
“I was thinking how proud I am of you,” she said simply.
We held each other and cried. When the sun rose, our relationship had changed in that way all parent-child relationships change eventually. Now I was the grown-up, taking care of someone more helpless than myself.
And in this state of mind I faced the great wars of my future.
Cynthia Kadohata, The Glass Mountains
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