Every so often, Maruk, along with Ansmeea’s tall daughter—named Sian—would take short journeys ahead for reconnaissance. They made a striking couple, brave and exotic. When he got back, he replaced our storytellers. Sometimes he told us what the maps couldn’t show, where changes in the sand had made it easier to take a path other than the one the maps indicated. Everyone listened. I so wanted to believe in our safety that I developed the sense that Maruk was a savior and that as long as he helped us, we would survive. Many nights he stayed not in our tent but in the tent that housed Sian and her family. There was gossip, but they didn’t care. They ignored the gossips.
Always, Maruk’s reconnaissance was completely accurate. He memorized every dip and rise in the sand and predicted the future direction of even the slightest breeze. Some of the older among us grumbled that they didn’t see the advantage of knowing the inevitable. “Has it come to this?” they would say. “Must we know the future in the same way as the fools who visit the elders?”
But most of us waited eagerly for his information; and every night he was gone, if the weather permitted us to sleep without a tent, I would stare up at the stars and moons and the Veil of White—our galaxy—and pray to the beauty of the sky that my brother would return safely.
Because my mother was Ansmeea’s closest friend and Maruk’s mother, she was chosen to officiate at the wedding of Maruk and Sian one torrid evening. The ceremony was simple, since we’d brought no frills, but we kept candles burning all night in the sand, filling the air with the smell of wax and with the soft, soft sound of a thousand candle flames fluttering. I felt great pain that night, knowing for the first time in my life that I would not always be first in my brother’s heart. And in a fit of unfamiliar bile I wished the worst for Sian and Maruk, and then hated myself for wishing that.
I fell asleep wedged between Artie and Leisha on a blanket in the sand, but I woke up somewhere around half night after dreaming that two ghosts as magnificent as the Veil of White passed through me, and the ghosts were my parents. My eyes shot open. All around me candles burned. A few people had lapsed in keeping theirs alight, and wisps of smoke dissipated in the night. I thought that as lovely as the stars above me were, if someone were to look down at our camp the sight would be just as lovely as the stars. And as this occurred to me I heard a whine in the sky, a noise like the humming of scavenger ships yet somehow more threatening. I was still half asleep and watched unbelievingly. Across camp, Maruk must have heard all that I’d heard, and more, because he jumped to his feet and shouted, “Run! Everybody run!” Trusting Maruk completely, I grabbed Katinka and didn’t wait to see who followed, just ran as fast as I could. I saw my dog gliding behind me, and to my side I saw Jobei, and I knew that Maruk’s voice had caused my whole family to run. I didn’t have to turn around to know that they were all there. We ran into the black until we could run no more, despite our tremendous stamina. When we stopped we stood on a slight incline and could still see the faraway camp, but not clearly.
Many other families had heeded Maruk, and as we stared at the camp I could tell he felt embarrassed to see that we could make out the candles burning, since nothing at all had happened. The sound of the whine had gone. All was peaceful. The camp appeared quiet and normal, like the sands covering a dead man appear normal.
“There’s the lake in the other direction,” exclaimed Jobei. He was excited, but I knew he’d really spoken to take attention away from Maruk’s embarrassment.
Maruk spoke breathlessly. “I don’t care what my eyes tell me. Something is wrong down there.”
“Perhaps it was a dream,” someone said. I felt sorry for Maruk, but I admired the way he refused to give in to what his eyes told him. The whole way back Maruk walked several measures to the side of my family. He walked quietly and inefficiently, kicking sand, hardly ever looking up, digging in his bare toes—no one had had time to put on shoes. Sian walked by his side. We’d run with abandon, and after our day of walking and night of celebration for the wedding, the run had exhausted us. We spent nearly twice as long just to get halfway back.
Except for the dogs, Maruk smelled it first, the smell of death, filling the air as the smell of wax had filled it just a short time earlier. “There’s danger,” he said simply.
Altogether there were about a hundred of us. Tarkahna and I held hands so tightly my knucklebones cracked.
We continued barefoot into the sand, which was still warm even at this hour, and I watched the sand ahead of me alertly. My parents walked holding hands. They were as attached to each other as a planet to the sun. When they fought sometimes, it was like arguing over which of them was the planet and which the sun. I prayed to the sand that ruled the lives of the Bakshami: Make my parents safe always.
We walked back to camp without talking. It was just starting to get light, the black sky filled with whispers of blue and red. With every step the sweet smell grew stronger, until finally it grew so overwhelming it seemed it couldn’t possibly have grown more. But it did.
When we got closer we saw that what we’d thought from the incline were candles burning had been the burning of many of our possessions. When we got closer still we saw that bodies had burned as well. Smoke now hung in the air like a raincloud over our camp.
“Hurry!” someone called to us. “There’s a lot of work to be done, and they may return.”
I felt I needed to pause a second to take it all in, the burnt shapes of my neighbors and some of their dogs and the camp. The camp, which had seemed so large when last I sat inside it, now seemed small and inconsequential in the vast desert.
We all gathered up the remains of our possessions: a few items of clothing, and, fortunately, a few slabs of meat. In certain ways the Formans had done a merciful job. There was probably not much suffering or forewarning. Under charred covers lay charred bodies, facing toward the sky. There was no screaming or groaning because no one was alive. Maruk said the Formans may have used some sort of heat-seeking bomb. He said this not as if he knew what he was talking about but as if he liked the sound of the phrase, “heat-seeking bomb.” Since the day we’d first seen the flea-bitten man with the weapon, Maruk had changed. But what the change would come to I didn’t know. I’d never heard of such a device as Maruk spoke of, but then I’d never even heard of any kind of bomb at all until the current troubles.
I worked quietly, breathing through my mouth and trying not to look around. I also tried not to think about who might have lived and who died. There were those I’d befriended who’d probably died, but I didn’t want to think about them now. We needed to work quickly. One family had gathered all the sleds the Formans hadn’t destroyed and lined them up so that we could all pile goods on them. I knew that nobody owned anything anymore, that there were no personal possessions. If one of us starved it would be because we all starved.
We went quickly through the whole camp. Sunlight bled over the horizon, through the clouds that seemed to ring only Bakshami but that for all I knew ringed the whole of Artekka, ringed Forma and Artroro and Soom Kali. Before I left camp I permitted myself a deep breath through my nose, so I would always remember what the Formans had done to my people, and I let my eyes search for anyone that I might recognize. I saw only one—Tarkahna’s brother—and then I couldn’t bear to see more.
“Mariska, hurry,” said my mother, and I ran to follow the others.
I usually loved sleep and dreaming, and this was the first night ever I could remember that I didn’t dream at all. The Bakshami see sleep as another one of their necessary rituals. I’d never slept so little. Leisha and Jobei looked pasty, but Maruk, if anything, appeared flushed. He no longer pulled out his knife repeatedly with a flourish, yet he struck me now as stronger and infinitely more lethal than he had when he used to show off his knife by whipping it out of his robe. Now he looked as if he could use that knife.
I carried a knife, too, the one my grandfather had given me from Soom Kali. It was the only one of my possessions that had sur
vived the attack.
For the last few days, Katinka had refused to walk, and she rode now on Artie’s sled with some of our charred possessions. Katinka’s eyes scared me, the way they stared at nothing and the way the whites had taken on a yellow cast. My parents had already lost several children, including three after I was born. Deaths of children were solemn but expected events. But now, having lost many of our neighbors, I didn’t think I could stand it if anything happened to Katinka. When it came time for a short break, I gave her my water ration, which she drank voraciously without even noticing where it came from.
I’d never been so tired and thirsty. If this trip was like other long trips I’d taken, we were not yet living our hardest moments. But I couldn’t believe that. I knew that if things got harder my eyes, too, would turn yellow, and I would have to hope weakly that others would take pity on me. There were certain types of brutality that one got used to in Bakshami: the brutality of the sun, the brutality of the sand and dust, the brutality of living two hundred years in the sun and sand and dust. But I think my people always tried to make up for the brutality with their kindness, their fortitude, and their peaceful ways. We kept no jails; we bore no murderous thoughts. So this hate I felt rising in my heart was new to me. Just as the sight of the flea-bitten man’s weapon had made Maruk’s eyes flame in a new way, so the smell of hundreds of dead Bakshami had created a malignity in my heart that I would not have believed possible just a short time earlier.
3
I think we’d all believed that the day we arrived at the first lake on our journey would be a day of triumph. Instead we plowed despairingly through a weedy, dried-out forest and sat around a lake so small I almost felt I could swallow it in a single gulp. We dropped our packs and fell upon the water, taking huge gulps with a fervor and passion that at times made me forget what had happened and feel a type of gluttonous joy. The dogs yelped with pleasure, and we had to prevent them from jumping into the lake at least until we could fill our bottles. When we finally let the dogs go in, they splashed furiously to rid themselves of the fleas that tormented them.
We ourselves bathed in the warm water and then sat quietly near the lake. I swore the water level looked lower than it had when we arrived. Ansmeea’s daughter, alone now but for Sian, sobbed uncontrollably, and it was as if she sobbed for all of us as we sat stoically in our new camp.
Finally someone spoke, the woman who’d been the oldest in my village after Grandfather. She hadn’t uttered a word since we left our village. “I go no further,” she said.
We all looked at her without speaking, since speaking wouldn’t have been our place. But her daughter placed a hand on her mother’s arm and said gently, “But you must.”
“I go no further.”
“We can’t leave you here.”
“How many times does an old woman have to repeat herself?”
Actually, the idea of staying appealed to me. Where there was a lake there was bound to be plenty of roots, and where there were a lake and roots a person could live. My mother and father scarcely listened, instead bending over Katinka as she coughed on a sheet still smelling of smoke and death.
The elder’s daughter said, “We can’t all stay. The lake will run dry.”
“I don’t propose that we all stay. I stated only that I go no further.”
“You can see—how many people could this area support?”
“It supports what it supports. I ask no one to remain with me. I only say that this is as far as I go.”
“Mother, don’t make us carry you.”
“The sled doesn’t exist that can carry me where I refuse to go.”
My parents had begun to pile up things around Katinka. So far they’d piled around her a toy that hadn’t been destroyed, some bedding, a sheet, several bottles, and a piece of meat. I’d seen my parents do the same before, and other parents as well. It was a traditional ritual, an attempt to keep the child alive by surrounding it with chosen items. We all started to help, gathering up strong rocks, or leaves that still had life in them, and placing the items in a circle around my little sister. Every time she appeared to gain more light in her eyes, we redoubled our efforts, but after a while it was clear that she’d begun to slip away.
My mother turned to the elder. “What can I do?”
And the elder said, “Nothing. She’s dead.”
Indeed, Katinka’s lovely black eyes now stared into a world none of us could see. My father looked first at my dead darling sister and then at each of us children in turn. “Has anyone considered negotiating with the Formans?” he said sadly.
“The Formans don’t negotiate, they give you choices,” someone replied.
“Isn’t having choices better than having no choices? And if one of those choices means that no one else need die? I have a daughter dead.”
“I don’t mean to be unsympathetic, but many have lost children, and more than you have. How can you negotiate with murderers?”
My father said, “Like everyone here, I knew nothing about murderers before the current troubles, but now I think I do know something. I know that murder must be stopped. Someone must see what choices Forma offers us.”
Maruk stood up boldly to my father. “I take no choices from the Formans.”
“Same here,” said Sian.
“And here,” I surprised myself by saying. I’d never before defied my parents on an issue of such importance.
My father shook his head. “Even if the war ended tomorrow, I can see that you children are changed forever, just as Katinka is.”
We took Katinka into the forest and dug a grave, lining it with pebbles. We then laid down a blanket before placing my sister in to sleep. My mother shut one of her eyes, my father the other, and everyone in camp sprinkled a handful of sand over her, again and again until together we filled in the hole. My parents sprinkled the first two handfuls and the last. In that way, they buried a child for the ninth time in their lives.
Back at camp, Maruk laid out his map and studied it while most of the rest of us ate. My parents conferred to the side, nibbling occasionally on pieces of meat as they talked. I saw how after more than a hundred years together they were two heads, two hearts, two bodies, and one soul. When one died, the other would.
My father walked over to where Maruk studied his map. “Maruk, you’ve recently come of age, and these are extraordinary circumstances, so I must allow you to make your own decisions. But your mother and I have decided to return to see whether we can negotiate, and we would hope that you would take care of your brothers and sisters at least until you reach the hotlands.”
“No, you can’t go!” I said. “I saw your ghosts in a dream.” That gave my parents pause, but I could see they’d made their decision.
“There are twenty Ba Mirada clan members still alive here, including you children. They’ll take care of you, and you must take care of them. I don’t think I can do more for you than to try to end this absurdity.”
“Mother!” I said.
“Where one spouse steps into danger, the other must follow,” said my mother.
When my mother spoke in that tone, her mind would not be changed.
The events of the day had caused the shattering of our family. I went off to the forest to pout with Artie. I believed from my dream that my parents would die. Beyond that I held no beliefs.
Artie licked my face and hands with his huge dry tongue. He placed his paw in my lap and fell asleep. I, too, fell asleep, leaning over with my arms around him. I awoke to the sound of Maruk’s voice calling my name. It seemed far away, part of my sleep, until I shook myself and saw how dark the forest had become.
“I’m here!” I said.
In a minute he rushed from the trees and hugged me. “You scared us all. Why are you hiding?”
“I fell asleep.”
“Listen, we’re all searching for you. I have to take you back to camp.”
“I’m ready,” I said.
“There’s something
else first.”
“Go on.”
“Sian and I are leaving soon for the Soom Kali border.”
“What? They’re nothing but barbarians there. You’ll get killed.”
“As you’ve seen, I could get killed as easily in my own sector.”
“But your family is here.”
“My new family will be where my wife and I make it.”
“And your old family?”
“Always first in my heart. But a Bakshami cannot always act as his heart tells him to. In that respect, we’re well suited for war.”
“You’re not the Maruk I grew up with.”
“I cannot live a life of peace in the midst of a war. I might as well lie down and let the sun beat me to death. I have a responsibility to my fate. Grandfather wrote me that I would live someday in the Land of Knives.”
He gestured behind him, and I noticed Sian’s tall form standing in the near-darkness. “We’ll arrive in Soom Kali before you reach the hotlands.”
“But Maruk,” I said. “If you leave, I’ll...”
He took my head in his hands and kissed me gently on my forehead, and still more gently on my lips. “You’ll be okay. I make my own prediction. You must stick with Jobei and Leisha, and the three of you will flourish together.”
“This is all my fault.”
“How can any of it be your fault?”
“I don’t know ... I should have given you my knife. Then you would love me enough to stay.”