Free Sample
Preview from chapter one
Nate woke before the horn, his stomach already awake and empty, and lay a while looking at the cane roof of the common house. Above him, in the bunk, someone coughed. Below, a boy of the trade — not a child, fifteen or sixteen, still with a right to the bowl — scratched a jungle bite and did not turn over. The air smelled of bodies that slept too close, of old smoke, and of the root pap that never quite washed out of the bowls.
Today he turned twenty-one. In Hoya de Karr that was not a feast. It was a door closing behind him.
He sat up. His ribs marked the fiber shirt. He had never had meat to spare; the common house ration was not enough to invent a body. Long arms, thin wrists, a work-mark on the palm from passing needle and cord so long in the net workshop. The warriors, when they came through for water, did not look at him. Or they looked and went on, which was worse.
He went down barefoot to the bowl yard. The stone floor was cold and damp. Beyond the inner palisade the jungle could be heard, a continuous noise of insect and leaf, and farther off the dull blow of something large moving between trunks and not letting itself be seen. No one from the common house hunted that. Hunting was for those who no longer ate from the common pot. Or for the warriors, who were not many anymore and did not spend arrows on a skinny man from the workshop.
The cook — an old woman, one of those who stayed after the Quiebre — held out the bowl without asking him the day.
“The last,” she said, and it was not cruelty. It was the account. “Until the horn. After that, the pot doesn’t know you.”
Nate looked at the bottom. Gray pap, a thread of fat, a piece of smoked root the size of his thumb. He ate it slowly, standing, so it would last. The heat went down to his stomach and went out at once.
“Materials?” he asked.
“After the circle. Not before. If I give them to you now, some clever one will trade them for a bite and you’ll go out with empty hands.”
He nodded. He washed his mouth with a sip from the common jar. The water tasted of stone and moss. In the inner rings there was still a cistern. In the outer ones, the old people said, the Quiebre had split the channels and what remained was mud or bone.