ROC

Published by Ne» American Library, a division of

Penguin Group (USA) Inc.., 375 Hudson Street,

New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen's Green, Dublin 2,

Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124,

Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,

New Delhi - 110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany,

Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue,

Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin

Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Roc trade paperback edition.

First Roc Mass Market Printing, August 2006

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Copyright © Janine Cross, 2005

Excerpt from Shadowed by Wings Copyright © Janine Cross, 2006 All rights reserved

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

Printed in the United States of America

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or oth­erwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.

To Zach and Faren (even if I won't let you read this till you're older)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Huge thanks to Linda Demeulemeester, a brilliant writer and amazing friend whose insights and humor not only shaped this book but have supported me through some intensely interesting times.

Many heartfelt thanks also to Michel Nadeau, whose decades of friendship gave me the time and resources to realize a great deal, this book not the least.

Thanks also to my agent, Caitlin Blasdell, and editor, Liz Scheier, for their patience and hard work, and Therese, so new and wondrous in my life, whose support has been monumental.

PROLOGUE

They came into the yard on a cloud of red dust, four young aristocrats burning with indignation and wine, and they went into the potters' work shed and hauled the woman out by her hair. They dragged her along the floor, through shards of shattered statues, out into the yard, where the smoke from the kilns was only just beginning to turn the air chalky. One man broke her jaw beneath his boot heel, then stood her against the wall of a mud-brick hut. Her knees sagged, so he dropped her. They began searching for her man.

They mistook Twisted Foot Ryn for the one they wanted, and it wasn't until Ryn's flock of children, all shrieks and small, balled fists, threw themselves upon the four that the aristocrats realized they'd erred. Weeping, Ryn's woman told them where to find the man they wanted.

He was in the men's ceramic studio. Blue powder covered the hairs on his brawny arms and filled the mortar on the table before him. He said nothing. Slowly, he placed his pestle down in the mortar. Just so.

They dragged him into the courtyard even though they needn't have, for he put up no resistance. With the leather laces from his own sandals, they bound his hands and ankles, then gagged him with a clot of clay and chaff, but one of the four said, No, take it out. She needs to hear him scream.

When they were ready, they led a yearling over, man height and twice as long, wings a-tremble and scales contracted, its claws fully intact: one of the warrior-lord's own dragons. They lashed the man upright against a water-filled barrel, then stacked an empty one atop it and ordered it filled with stones to prevent it from tipping. They cracked bullwhips against the yearling's hide and hurled platters at its head to drive it into a frenzy. It attacked the bound man.

Between drawing one breath and another, the man was disemboweled. But the aristocrats had difficulty bringing the yearling under control, and by the time they managed to subdue the beast with muzzle poles and blow darts, the ribbons of white sinew and meat strewn across the courtyard came not just from the once-bound man, but from a potter's child and one of the aristocrats.

Let this be a lesson to you, roared the blue-eyed, blond- haired aristocrat, as blood from a woman's mouth dried upon his boot heels. Let this be a lesson none of you forget!

I can assure you, blue-eyed, blond-haired one, no one forgot. Not the pottery clan men, who ever after were the most brutally devout upon Clutch Re. Not the women, who suffered blows for misdemeanors imagined and real. And certainly not the potters' children, who witnessed the horror of that day. They, most of all, lived lives haunted by the only two screams the bound man had time to utter, a man who'd been a master potter, a claimer, and a father.

My father.

The woman with the broken jaw, my mother.

No, I can assure you, blue-eyed, blond-haired one, that was a lesson no one ever forgot. Least of all I, Zarq Kavarria Darquel. That lesson made me all that I am today.

I write this so the people of my new land—these gruff, impulsive foreigners—will understand and learn without ever witnessing such as I and the rest of the potters' children did, so many mountains, so many scars, and so many years ago.

ONE

My first memory: white dust.

Cool and airy, drifting down upon my head like a blessing. The taste of it a fine, gritty tang I later knew to be kaolin. The soft thud of hammers crushing lumps of dry clay into small pieces, the crunch of rolling pins reducing the granules to powder. The unbroken rhythm of hands kneading air pockets out of damp clay, the thuds as steady and resonant as a heartbeat.

I was born a danku rishi via, a pottery clan serfs girl, on the dragon estate known as Clutch Re. I could claim none as my navel aunties, however, for my mother was born not in Clutch Re, but in Clutch Xxamer Zu, the very same dragon estate infamous for reckless wagering during Arena events When of a day the Xxamer Zu estate owed Re a sum it could ill afford, my mother was among the serfs given in lieu of lucre.

She arrived in Clutch Re late one Fire Season evening, ill and filthy from the month long march from her birth Clutch. Due to her skill with clay, she was placed in the pottery clan, and no sooner did my father lay eyes on her than he claimed her as his roidan yin, his garden of children.

Within days, it became obvious she would have difficulties in her new home: She would not, could not, be piously servile. Even to her claimer. She wanted to create with clay whatever she wanted, whenever the whim took her.

So she did.

Mother's defiance against the men's daily Proclamations about what could be sculpted, when, was tolerated for three reasons only: my father's mastery of clay, mother's own impressive skills, and her sweet, light nature.

For yes, contrary to how many have painted her, my mother was the softest creature I have ever known. Soft-spoken, soft-stepping, her face alight with a kindness that drew children to her knees. Almost a sacrilege, that, to have such a benevolent countenance upon a lowly Clutch serf. Yet there it was; the calm eyes, the gentle smile, the infinite patience of the dragon-blessed shining from my mother.

The immensity and population of Clutch Re helped conceal her oddness. A fertile, hill-pebbled valley sprawling between jungle-choked mountains, Clutch Re was home to almost a hundred serf guild clans, or rishi kus. It boasted an enormous infirmary, several smaller hospices, three mills, a plethora of apothecaries, an infamous dragonmaster who was the best in the nation, though admittedly the most eccentric, and enough egg workers to form a veritable regiment, all necessary for the welfare of Re's seven thousand brooder dragons. Our pottery clan, danku Re, was just a blot on the huge map of Warrior-Lord Re's Clutch.. Mother was invisible—and safe—as long as she remained quiet.

My second memory: my father's arms.

Ruddy, brawny, thick, with coarse black hair, his hands from the wrists down pale, soft, and hairless from the endless hours immersed in clay solution.

Throughout our childhood, my sister, Waisi, insisted this could not be a real memory, not so young in my life as I claimed, and perhaps she was right—really, she must be— for my childhood was spent with the other potters' children in the women's barracks. I had little close contact with my father. Indeed, I only understood him to be such when I was about four.

Like all women regardless of clan and status, my mother lived separate from the men and saw her claimer privately only when summoned to the mating closets. Otherwise, all conversation with him was in the manner of orders received or words exchanged in the course of a day's work. My intimate memory of his hands so early in my childhood must therefore be fabricated or transposed, lifted from later in my life and transplanted back to the time when I still crawled on all fours.

Was my father, Darquel, as weak as history portrays him? Or bewitched by the evil spirit that supposedly inhabited my impious rebel mother? Neither. Merely obsessed. Obsessed with my mother, who was called Darquel's Kavarria, Darquel's Obsession, after father claimed her, though others called her his Djimbi whore when out of his earshot; obsessed with his eldest girl-child, Waisi, who was determined to rise in status somehow, anyhow; and obsessed with me, his youngest, Zarq.

Yes, that was my father: obsessed with three vastly different women.

I remember the first time I heard the word Djimbi applied to my mother. I was nine years old, and my mother, sister, and I were watching Mombe Taro, the annual ceremony when chosen boys are publicly inducted into apprenticeship to the dragonmaster. Dono stood beside me, shoving and elbowing and leaning forward for a better view. He and I had been playmates when younger, and I was enjoying his company, despite his insistence that I address him only by his full name, Yeli's Dono.

He should not have been standing beside me, young Dono. Although only nine years old, he was regarded as a man, and men are supposed to line one side of the Lashing Lane, the road used during Mombe Taro, and women and children the other. But as the men have to stand behind the monks, they are deafened by the gonging of the monks' ceremonial water bowls, and blinded by the reflecting tin and water of the same. Thus, while approximately half the men observe the segregation, the rest crowd onto the women's side of the 'lane of pain.' This is all conveniently overlooked by attending Temple wardens.

Never do the women stray over to the men's side, need I point out.

We had walked all morning to reach the Lashing Lane by high noon. The stable stench of dragon dung, decomposing nests, and maht, regurgitated dragon food, coated my tongue like thick jelly. Waisi stood on my left, pinching my neck and complaining she couldn't see. Dono stood on my right.

"Look, look!" he screamed. "They're coming!"

The cries of the crowd lining the lane momentarily drowned out the noise of the water bowls.

TWO

When next I became aware of my surroundings, it was dark, that stifling blackness that devours Re valley when the mountains swallow twilight. The humid air was thick with the musky smells of jungle: rotting humus, moist foliage, sweet night blooms. The scent of damp greenery was so different from the dry smells of the exposed, sunbaked Lashing Lane. We were near the eastern edge of Clutch Re, not far from our pottery clan compound. Each guild within a Clutch forms its own clan; each clan lives within the walls of its own compound. We potters of danku Re— the pottery guild clan of Clutch Re—were no different.

I came to slowly, resuscitated by the familiar jungle smells. Then I remembered my mother's admission and the abrupt revelation it had brought. I whimpered.

"Hey-o, Zarq. No fear, no fear, almost home."

"I had a bad dream."

"Just a dream."

"You said you were Djimbi."

She grunted and shifted my legs a little, which were latched round her waist.

"Mama?" I whispered. "You're not Djimbi."

"I am." She dropped the words from her mouth as if they were hot stones. "Your navel Greatmother, my mother, is jungle-born Djimbi. She was raped during capture and brought with her mother to Clutch Xxamer Zu as a slave. Shortly after, I came into the world. I, too, am Djimbi."

"My Greatmother came from the jungle," I said in disbelief. "My Greatmother in Clutch Xxamer Zu."

"Yes."

“But you're only half-blood Djimbi, yes?"

"By the color of my skin, it matters little whether I'm half or full blood. And I speak the language, have certain Djimbi skills. I am Djimbi."

"But—"

"We'll talk more of this in the morning," she said shortly. "Hush now, hey-o. Hush."

But we never did. Talk of it, I mean, her Djimbi blood, my Djimbi ancestry. Not until the day she died did she discuss her mother again, and then not by words. And I, too ashamed of what I'd learned—me, part Djimbi!—I never found the courage to break her silence before then.

That night I visited the mating closets. Mother carried me. Not because I couldn't walk without fainting, but because she didn't want me waking anyone else in the women's barracks. I knew it was very late by the damp coolness of the air, but was too sleepy to be concerned with questions.

The cubicles within the stilt-raised mating shack were always hot, airless, and close smelling. Mother set me down on the mats in one cubicle and softly slid the door closed. She left it unlatched and returned to my side. I drifted back to sleep.

I awoke to find my father looming over me, stinking tallow candle in one hand. He was crouched on his haunches, and his hairy shins pressed against my tummy as he reached over and gently lifted my injured hand. He growled in his throat, a noise I instinctively knew was directed at the dragonmaster.

"What've you done for her?" he grunted.

Mother's voice came out of the darkness near my feet. "Bathed it with cooled boiled water, applied a poultice—"

"It'll scar."

"I hope not. I was quick."

"What did he do it for?"

"Because he could."

"Crazy bastard."

"Yes."

My father sighed and reached awkwardly to stroke my brow. "Don't race again next year. Or go slowly if you do. Hear?"

"Yes, sir," I murmured.

"Sleep," he ordered, and patted my head again. I turned on my side and closed my eyes, with the intention of feigning sleep so I could listen to what they might next say. But the day's events and the late hour defeated me. My parents remained silent the short time it took for me to drift back into slumber.

I awoke sometime later to the hiccup-gasps of my mother and the heavy, wet breaths of my father coming from the cubicle across from mine, and, comforted by the familiar, I fell immediately back to sleep, dragonmasters and Djimbi lineage completely forgotten.

The Djimbi. The Mottled Bellies. If Malacar, my birth nation, has any true-blood natives, they are to be found in the Djimbi. If you can find the Djimbi, that is. They are an elusive people.

As children, we were terrified those green-haired half- demons would slink out of the jungle, slide snakelike over our walls, and steal us from our sleeping mats. They would cut out our tongues and eat them raw, then bind us and blind us and drag us deep into the jungle, where they'd hoist us into the jungle crown using pulleys and ropes. There, among the decomposing nests of a dragon colony, they'd feed us limb by limb to sharp-toothed hatchlings.

The Djimbi did that. Oh, we knew. Didn't matter what the adults would or wouldn't admit. We knew. The Djimbi loved feeding children to hatchlings. They did it to tame the hatchlings, see, and accustom them to the Djimbi scent.

Then, when the hatchlings were sated, they would touch them. Sure, sure they would. Stroke the hatchlings' scaled heads and gristle-packed crops and cool, dirty bellies. They'd reach beneath their whip-thin tails and slowly insert fingers where fingers shouldn't go, then tongues and cocks and whatever else our imaginations could come up with

There's some truth to all that.

That's what titillated us and repulsed us and fueled our terrible, terrifying fantasies.

It was not only we children who feared the Djimbi, though. The Archipelagic people—the Emperor's Own— also feared them, their fear based not just on stories of kidnap, cannibalism, and bestiality, but on cultural prejudices.

Understand, five hundred years ago, when the blond- haired Xxeltekers first crossed the glacial range that separates their nation from Malacar, they flourished as nomads upon Malacar's fertile plains and never once caught sight of the Djimbi, for the Djimbi live solely in the rain forest. Indeed, the Mottled Bellies weren't discovered until 130 years later, when Emperor Wai Soomi-kun from the Archipelago launched a concerted coastal invasion upon Malacar's shores, and in doing so entered the jungle.

Without discrimination, the Emperor's warriors raped women they came across from both the Xxelteker and Djimbi tribes. Those bastards born from the loins of raped Djimbi women stubbornly bore the mottled green-and- brown pigmentation of their mothers, while those born from the loins of Xxelteker nomads bore pale ivory skin. These latter children were deemed acceptable of recognition by some of those who had sired them; the Xxelteker nomads were soon absorbed by the Archipelagic invaders.

It did not take long—seventy years or so—for the notion to flourish that the ivory-skinned children of those invaders were Malacar's true natives. The Djimbi, with their bizarre pigmentation that was so difficult to breed out, with their incomprehensible jungle culture, their singsong language, and their intimacy with dragons, were viewed as subhuman intruders.

Thereafter, pockets of Malacar were invaded many times by various island tribes. Indeed, the land was not yet called Malacar, but was known by numerous names, depending upon which people you spoke with, where, during which decade. From coast to mountain range, from jungle valley to fertile plain, the nation was peppered with slowly diverging cultures. But throughout, revulsion toward the Djimbi remained constant.

Two hundred and seventy years after the first Xxelteker nomads, the great Zarq Car Mano united the various cultures and peoples of the land into the nation it is today: Malacar, the Land of Iron. However, little changed for the Djimbi under Car Mano's rule, and they remained as elusive and reviled as ever.

Even the great Car Mano could not prevent the warlike, millennia-established peoples of the Archipelago from coveting our land. A mere sixty years after the forging of our nation, the Archipelago once again invaded Malacar, this time under the direction of Emperor Wai Fa-sren. Using a formidable militia fortified by his own brand of religious doctrine, Emperor Wai Fa-sren soon conquered Malacar. He ruled by means of a rigid theocratic dictatorship: Ranon ki Cinai. The Temple of the Dragon.

The landed gentry favored by Emperor Wai Fa-sren— those with the strongest allegiance to the Emperor, wealth in their coffers, and easily traced Archipelagic ancestry— soon rose to various levels of power. Known as bayen, aristocrats of First-Class Citizenship, their prosperity, status, and political sway soon separated them from the bulk of the populace. Only they were allowed to own dragons.

One hundred seventy years later, when I was but nine, Emperor Wai Fa-sren's successor continued to rule Malacar by means of the Temple. As a rishi, a Clutch-born unindentured serf, I was almost at the lowest level of Temple hierarchy. But there was one group of people considered much lower than mine.

The Djimbi.

I was lucky indeed that my skin was like my father's and showed none of the pigmentation of my Mottled Belly mother.

I awoke just before dawn on the day following that memorable Mombe Taro. I was back in the danku women's barracks, the domicile where women and children of the pottery clan slept. I didn't remember being carried back. I did recall Mother whispering something odd in my ear, though, something like "Run ever, my Zarq. Run fast."

Dream nonsense.

Predawn is a dusky time, a watery otherworld moment suspended between light and dark. Edges are blurred. Everything looks liquid. Back then, on that morning, I kept still, savoring the calm.

My reed sleeping mat, which at night was furred with old sweat and stuck like honey to my body, now felt clean and crisp and smooth. Waisi's arm felt cool where it touched mine, not thick with fleshy heat. The night had transformed the snores and farts and whines of a barrackful of women and children into light, even breaths. No crickets stirred within the walls, no cockroaches skittered over the raised wooden floor. Outside, stars melted into murk while dew silently beaded huts, temples, and stables alike. Gray silence reigned, cool air its consort.

The stillness was so rare I couldn't feast enough on it. I didn't just listen to it; I drank it in through every pore.

Then a flametail gave its signature tee-tee-wheet! from the jungle. A pause, then it repeated its cry. Its soliloquy continued for a short time before another flametail joined in.

The dense gray around me lightened to a pale ash. Someone stirred and coughed to my left. A basabird screeched. Abruptly, the entire jungle erupted into raucous birdsong.

I groaned and sat up.

I saw my hand, caked with cloth bandages stained yellow. In a rush I remembered the previous day: the dragonmaster, the race, the whip thrust into my palm. Today—the day following Mombe Taro—was Sa Gikiro.

My heart skipped like a bead of water dropped upon a red-hot skillet. I grabbed Waisi's arm in terror. "Wake up, wake up! Day of Doom!"

She groaned in her sleep.

"Waisi, the dragonmaster will pick me for sure. He'll see my hand and remember me and pick me—"

"Shut up, Zarq," she growled, and rolled away from me. "Don't be such a shitball. You're a girl."

I was a girl. Ergo, I was safe. I stared at her long braids and wondered what had come over me.

"Paak time, Waivia," Mother mumbled from her mat beside me. When she called Waisi by her proper name, Waivia, she meant business. At all other times she called my sister by the fond diminutive Waisi, as did I. "Hey-o, girls, up you get."

Others stirred, too. The mothers of young men rose quickly. As one, they knelt, folded arms behind backs, foreheads pressed to the ground, in Supplication to a Dragon position, and started chanting.

Their drones drew the air out of the barracks and replaced it with tension. Some of the babies started to whimper.

I rolled up my mat, eager to be out of there.

"What's all the fuss for?" Waisi said grumpily, rubbing sleep pebbles from her eyes. "The dragonmaster never comes into this zone, anyway."

"He might," I said, but low, so the chanting mothers couldn't hear me; the last thing they needed was their fears spoken aloud. "There's always a chance he might."

Waisi dismissed the possibility with a disdainful wave of her hand, hauled herself to her feet, and trudged before me, down the worn wooden stairs of the women's barracks, into our compound's courtyard. The red dust of the courtyard smelled rich with dew, and at our approach a flock of tiny mitewings burst from the ground into the sky. Although the sun had not yet crested the eastern jungle ridge, the threat of its coming turned the air heavy with humidity. Waisi began unraveling her plaits as she walked.

"I hope the dragonmaster does come," she said. "I hope he comes and takes Dono out of here."

"Shhh!" I hissed, and pointed at the humped mud huts directly across from us. They belonged to old Yeli; he and his sons, including Dono, all lived within. "They're probably awake."

"So?" Waisi sniffed. She lowered her voice, though, not so brave as to express her opinion within earshot of men. "It's so stupid. While the women are praying our zone won't be visited, the men are praying it will. Do you think my hair is beautiful?" She shook out her thick hair and wrapped it about her bosom. "My breasts are going to be bigger than Mama's. Not like you. That's what you get for being named after a man."

I didn't like to be reminded of my angular figure and masculine name, and tried to draw the conversation back to the significance of the day. She would have none of it.

"Soggy Carrot Day," she said, deliberately mispronouncing the Emperor's tongue.

As we hitched the wooden paak ramp to its barrel, she mocked the solemnity of Choosing Day by listing in a singsong all the other names the day goes by: Dragonmaster's Snatch, Day of Re, Dawn of Reckoning, Doomsday, and, of course, our favorite: Soggy Carrot Day, which, if pronounced correctly, is Sa Gikiro. Her litany annoyed me, not because of its irreverence, but because I envied her her clever sarcasm.

"You shouldn't laugh, Waisi. Sa Gikiro is important."

She made a rude noise with her lips and gestured at me to help lift the egg cradle. We bent, grunted, and hoisted the rusted egg cradle onto the mixing barrel and locked it into place.

"I know how important it is," she said, thumping a latch shut. "That's why I hope the dragonmaster does come and choose Dono as one of his new apprentices. I want some silk for a proper gown, and jewels—"

"I thought you liked Dono."

She shrugged.

"He could die, you know. Some of them do. Look what the venom did to my hand, and I hardly even touched the whip." I brandished my bandage under her nose and a flake of yellow landed on her foot.

"Does it still hurt?"

"It's kind of numb, like I slept on it all night."

She shrugged again. If I'd confessed to excruciating pain, that might have held her interest. Truth, the whole arm throbbed queerly, as if I'd whacked my elbow against a table corner. But there was no point in complaining; I wouldn't be relieved of work unless dying. A harsh reality of rishi life, that.

But Waisi's indifference piqued me, and as we walked toward the egg cellar, I voiced my indignation.

"You're not nice, Waisi, not at all. If Dono was one of the boys chosen, he'd be whipped at next year's Mombe Taro. He'd suffer, maybe die—"

"Shut up. You don't know anything. Little brat."

"Am not."

"Are too."

"Am—"

"Just think a bit, hey-o? All the men right now are praying the dragonmaster will choose a boy from our clan as apprentice, and why? 'Cause they know it'd improve our clan. We'd be rich overnight."

We entered the cellar; she banged the heavy wooden door closed behind us. I squinted in the darkness.

"So don't act like all the other pottery clan women," Waisi said contemptuously, "sniveling and carrying on like it would be a tragedy. Use your brain."

The cellar smelled of sour green featon chaff and earth that had never seen the light of day, a damp reek of slow decay and fat worms. In the gloom, the pumpkin-sized dragon eggs at the bottom of the cellar's steep earthen ramp huddled beneath their protective blanket of chaff. To me, those cloaked shadows looked sinister, half alive. The cellar scared me—

"She doesn't have a brain to uthe," a voice spat out of the dark. "Zarq'ths yolk headed."

I shrieked at the voice; Waisi merely crossed her arms over her chest.

"What are you doing here, Dono?"

A short, lithe shape rose from the eggs huddled at the bottom of the cellar.

"Waiting for you." A wheedling note crept into Dono's voice. "I thought I'd help you carry eggth—"

"I don't need your help," Waisi said curtly.

Dono started up the ramp toward us, hands outspread, lisp exacerbated by his wheedling. "Awww, don't thay that—"

"You didn't get me a whip, Dono."

"I'll make it up to you."

"I'm not keeping my part of the deal. You can forget all about that."

Dono stopped before us, an ingratiating smile upon his narrow face. "You can't back out now. I've told everyone—"

"Once a year, Dono, once a year. That's how often Mombe Taro takes place. When else am I going to have the chance to impress a bayen lordling, hey-o? You ruined it, so you're not going to get anything from me."

"You know what'll happen to me if you don't do thith? You know what they'll say?"

"I don't care."

"It's your sister's fault, not mine. That was my whip—"

"Hey! I won that whip fairly," I cried indignantly, forgetting completely that Dono was considered a man and his word was therefore not to be refuted. "I was fastest. I reached the dragonmaster before you."

"I could beat you any day," Dono said, his face undergoing a rapid change.

"But you didn't beat me yesterday, did you?" I said hotly. "So the whip was mine. Not yours, mine."

"You cheated. No girl beatth a man. Ever."

I should have kept my mouth shut; I could not.

"Even the dragonmaster said I was faster than you," I said, hands on hips. "I've always been faster than you—I've just always let you think you're faster. So there."

Dono glared at me, quivering with fury. Then his arm shot out, slender and smooth as a bark-stripped twig, and his fist landed deep in my belly.

I doubled over; couldn't breathe, couldn't scream, couldn't move. Then I drew in a breath and pain roared across my abdomen. Dono dug his fingers into my bristle- brush hair, yanked my head back, and landed a stinging blow across my face.

I shouldn't have fought back; I did.

I clawed at his eyes, shrieking, felt skin shred under my nails. He kicked my legs out from under me. I landed hard on my rump, reached for his ankle to yank him down. But his foot landed in my ribs, then against a kidney, then in my belly.

I scrambled away, went sprawling down the ramp into the shadows, my teeth jagging through my lower lip. I thudded against the eggs huddled at the cellar's bottom; featon chaff lifted into the air and settled about me.

"Leave her alone!" Waisi shouted, and from where I lay, stunned and hurting all over, I watched two silhouettes grapple at the top of the cellar ramp, backlit by the nimbus of light shining from the cellar door.

The two figures parted, chests heaving. The smaller, thinner of the two flicked his thumbnails against his throat in a gesture of insult.

"You think you're so fine, danku Re Waivia, with your big ass and big tits? You think an aristocrat is going to claim you and get you out of here? Not a chance. You're kiyu material, born to be a sex slave. A lowly rishi Djimbi whore."

"Get out of here, Dono," my sister growled. "Get out of here before I tear your puny balls off with my teeth."

He held a finger before her face. "You'll beg me to claim you one day. You'll thee."

He whirled, yanked open the cellar door, and disappeared into the blinding morning light. After a moment, Waisi descended the ramp. I started sobbing.

"Stop your sniveling! You don't see me crying, do you? Zarq. Boy without a penis."

I bit my lip and held my breath as she knelt before me. Why was she angry at me? But angry she was; she radiated heat and fury as she stared down at me.

"I'll make this easy for you, hey-o?" she spat out. "You take what I want, I hurt you. You hurt me back, and I hurt you worse. Understand?"

I didn't.

"Do you?" she said brittlely.

I nodded, kept nodding as she flared her nostrils, sucked in a breath, and rose to her feet. "Fine. Let's see if you broke any eggs."

I obeyed, moving jerkily upon my knees, a wooden puppet completely unable to think for itself, let alone identify a cracked egg. But I went through the motions nonetheless, shuffling through the featon chaff, seeking sticky goo. Waisi likewise went from one egg to the next. Finally, she straightened and nodded: no leaking albumen present.

"Get up, then," she said. Not unkindly. Her voice, if anything, was husky with unshed tears. "We've got paak to make."

Waisi pushed a wheelbarrowful of dragon eggs uphill in silence. I trudged after her, in a daze.

Once outside the cellar, we both stopped, blinking in the rosy yellow of early morning. I felt as if I'd climbed out of a night terror that had turned, mid-dream, into reality.

I glanced at Waisi. Her cheeks looked like roasted coranut shells, shiny teak brown, and her eyes stared straight ahead. Sweat beaded her neck and bosom as if she had coughing fever. I looked away.

Over by the cluster of mud-brick huts where the Leishu men slept stood Mother and Leishu's Caan. The two women worked in rhythm, thumping their long wooden pestles into narrow barrels as they ground featon grit into flour for Sa Gikiro holy cakes. My playmates, Rutvia and Makvia, were barely visible among the muay fronds of our First Garden; the plants swayed as the twins crawled about, popping yellow maggots between their thumbs. Their mother, Kobo's Dash, was crouched in her usual spot at the garden's southern end, grinding sesal nuts into paste. Nearby, Korshan's Rutkar shoved eggshell and muay fodder through the bars of the hutches that contained our meat source, the lizardlike renimgars.

Normality reigned.

It confounded me that everything looked ordinary despite what had just occurred in the cellar. Surely, everyone should have been affected by the aura of violence and upheaval coming from the cellar's dank depths

"Come on," Waisi said, and I hastily obeyed.

We pushed the egg barrow over to the paak-making nook at the northern end of the women's barracks, then placed the five eggs we'd collected into the snug depressions in the cradle we'd earlier latched atop the paak barrel.

Waisi lifted the corak off its wall hook, while I fished a hard curl of pallum bark from the dusty urn that perpetually sat in the paak-making nook. I crouched on the ground and began grating the bark into a fine red powder, my belly knotted with emotion, nausea threatening with each wave of pain that radiated from where Dono had landed his blows.

"I'll show him." Waisi growled. "I'll get out of this place one day." And she stabbed the corak into the base of an

egg.

She withdrew the instrument smoothly and swiftly, the triangular prongs of the corak leaving behind three neat holes. Not a single shard of shell broke off into the barrel; she was good at stabbing, Waisi. Albumen began thudding into the barrel in heavy ropes as she stabbed all five eggs.

"I'm going to be a pleasurer, the most famous in all of Malacar—"

"A pleasurer?" I squeaked. "You?"

Her dark eyes turned as moody as the jungle in twilight. The corak in her hand twitched.

"You don't think I'm pretty, little brat?"

I did not. Pretty is light, sweet, pleasing. Waisi was none of that. She was a full moon and dark shadows, a she-cat in heat, all claws and swollen vulva.

THREE

We finished making paak in silence, rolling the barrel until the albumen within whispered, indicating it had turned into froth. By then the soft pink of dawn had turned into the bright, hard yellow of full morning; we sweated freely, and my bandaged hand throbbed. Mother helped grease the long, rectangular paak molds with gharial oil, fill them with our frothy paak mixture, and carry them to the kilns where embers still glowed from firing ceramics two days previous. Usually Waisi and I did such alone. That morning we were running behind.

Small wonder.

All the pottery clan men already milled about the courtyard, exchanging greetings. Their limbs shone from the palm oil they'd rubbed into their skin. Two women set out tureens of sesal nut paste before them, followed by platters of another day's paak, cold and neatly sliced.

It's what we ate every morning, every day, every season: dragon eggs, in one form or another. Unfertilized dragon eggs, understand; the eating of dragon flesh is forbidden to all but a dragon, and a fertilized egg is considered dragon flesh.

Evening meal was the same as what we ate in the morning, paak and sesal nut paste, with the addition of yanichee soup, rishi style: the yolk boiled into threads instead of fried, and floating in a broth made from renimgar meat and the ubiquitous green muay leaves found in every Malacarite serfs diet.

Oh. And featon grit.

Yes, we ate those kernels fed to brooder dragons. Hard as pebbles, they were, yet we ate them. Morning and noon soaked in water, at night, in yanichee. A lean diet, or so I thought in my youth. But experience would teach me that although the pottery clan had little variety, our cellars were never empty and our bones were strong and straight, and that such could not be said of others living a life of labor elsewhere. Really, we were well fed. By rishi standards.

Dono glared at me as Mother and I joined the women and children settling around the outskirts of the men, who by now had seated themselves upon the swept courtyard floor. To Waisi, Dono gave a look of mingled anger and appeal. She ignored him.

Moments later, Greatfather Maxmisha cleared his throat.

I craned my neck to see his wiry figure in the center of the men, for I loved how the growth above his left ear wobbled when he talked. It was a horrible thing, the size of a fist. On cool Wet Season mornings, he wrapped a turban around it.

"I'm waiting for wings to bless the herd of Re," he rasped.

"May your waiting end. May the wings hatch," everyone replied.

Ritual greeting out of the way, he nodded to Father and blood-Uncle Rudik, who served him a large slice of paak spread thickly with sesal paste. He took a bite, grimaced as was his wont, and the rest of the men began eating. Mother fidgeted, as impatient as the youngest children. When all the men had served themselves, we began to eat. Mother shamelessly took two slices of paak. I was not so brave and stuck to my one, augmented by a bowl of grit and water.

Greatfather Maxmisha tottered to his feet and began the Proclamation before my grit was properly soaked, so I had to swallow the mess down while it was still hard. Again, Mother didn't bother with protocol, nor did the women who needed the grit thoroughly softened for their babies. Greatfather always overlooked those transgressions, whether from empathy or myopia, I don't know. I suspect myopia. He wasn't the empathetic sort, Greatfather.

"Today is Sa Gikiro," he husked. "Our clan will perform this to please the dragon: We'll go to temple, we'll return, we'll burn offerings. A work party will slash vines while chosen potters make coil bottles: symmetrical, bayen quality, to be smoke fired."

A groan went through all present. Smoke-fired bottles took several painstaking days to complete, especially ones of bayen quality, and slashing vines from our compound's outer walls for fuel was hot, hard work. The only person pleased was Mother. She flushed and beamed. She loved working in the jungle and focusing afterward on the intricate work of creating a coiled bottle fit for aristocrats.

Even at age nine, I knew Greatfather must have chosen that Proclamation to please her, for she only obeyed his Proclamations if they suited her. By choosing a Proclamation she'd like, he'd guaranteed that no defiance of his dragon-directed will would occur on holy Sa Gikiro. It made me uneasy, understanding that, yet I didn't know why.

The Proclamation over, the men rose, stretched, and returned to their respective huts. Usually, a trail of pipe smoke followed them, but temple demanded abstinence on Sa Gikiro, so that day the air smelled sweet.

Twisted Foot Ryn's brood gathered the empty food bowls and platters and scurried over to the washing corner to scrub them down. Leishu's Caan set to sweeping the courtyard smooth again. The rest of us returned to the women's barracks and readied ourselves for the trek to temple. The mothers of young children carried bowls of soaking grit discreetly tucked under a fold of their bitoos.

"Hey-o, Zarq," Mother sang, bending to link an arm through one of mine. "Vine-slashing day! We'll have fun, no?"

The last thing I felt like doing was swinging a scythe through insect-laden vines. But loath to dampen Mother's pleasure, I nodded.

Mother and I always accompanied the slashing parties, her to comb the outskirts of the jungle for medicinal barks and pigment sources, and I to do the miserable work of a young boy. Boyhood was always the gender ascribed me when my nimble arms and legs were needed to ease the workload of those with a genuine claim to the male sex.

Mother loved picking through the jungle's edge and often consumed the most embarrassing things with great relish. Olingo termites and the translucent goo inside brallosh leaves, for instance. Today her pleasure was increased knowing that when she returned from vine slashing, a dozen coiled bottles would await her in the pottery shed, made by hands unwilling to tackle the intricate designs the aristocrats desired on their ceramics.

As we climbed the barrack steps, Waisi tossed her hair. "You wouldn't catch me joining a work party. Ever."

Mother laughed. " 'Course not, Waisi! No girls allowed. Only our Zarq."

"And you," Waisi said accusingly.

"Close your fast lips," Big Grum Grum's Li said over her shoulder. "Talk so much and you'll get someone in trouble."

She was wise, Big Grum Grum's Li.

But Mother just winked at Waisi and said serenely, "We need fresh dyes and pigments. Someone who knows the proper things to gather must go search jungle's edge. Sacrilege, to make temple tiles with lackluster colors; only fresh will do."

Mother's serenity faltered while cleaning my face with a spittle-dampened corner of her bitoo. "Where-how these bruises, little one?"

"I hit her," Waisi immediately responded, not pausing as she brushed her hair to an enviable sheen. "She was capering about the egg cellar. Wouldn't stop. Almost broke an egg. I slapped some sense into her."

Mother clucked reproachfully at me. "You know better than that, Zarq. Ah, child. Now let me see your hand."

I held it out, and she unwrapped the crusty bandage. The center of my palm was a little bubbly and oily, like the deep-fried renimgar skin I so loved.

"Kiiiyew!" Waisi made the Malacarite sound of disgust that's also the term for the sex slaves whose wombs end up stinking from pus. "No man will claim you for sure now."

"By chance, our Zarq won't need a man, hey-o?" Mother said as she washed and dressed my palm with an unguent. "Maybe she'll claim herself."

"Nonsense," Waisi sneered, but Mother tweaked my nose as if we shared a secret.

The woven-reed walls of the barracks suddenly shook and rattled from a gust of wind. Odd, that, for the weather was hot and still, and at once my pulse accelerated with dread, an instinctual reaction shared by any creature experiencing an unnatural and sudden change in the climate, and Mother's hands fell still upon my new bandages, and we all in the barracks held our breath.

Hurricane?

From the courtyard came a peculiar flapping sound, growing rapidly louder, somewhat like wind through palm fronds, but not clearly demarcated as such. Then a hail of men's voices, the excited cries of young boys. Commotion. A baffling, explosive snorting sound. More voices.

All of us within the women's barracks stared at the woven-reed walls, breath held, limbs tensed. Footsteps thudded up the barrack stairs....

My playmates, Rutvia and Makvia, burst inside, babbling and gesturing wildly.

"... Outside, in the courtyard, they flew here—"

"... Speaking to Greatfather right now—"

"... On a winged dragon!"

A pause as this disjointed information sank in, then we all rushed to the barrack doors and pushed and jostled for a view. The sight that greeted us caused many to stuff fists into mouths and rear back, eyes wide with alarm.

A magnificent yearling dragon fretted in our courtyard's center, green- and rust-colored scales as glossy as enamel despite the clouds of dust stirred up by the leathery, claw- tipped wings folding and refolding nervously along its flanks. The beast dwarfed our courtyard, its long, twiggy tail with diamond-shaped membrane at the end brushing the ground in front of the mating shack, its oval body, higher at shoulder than some of our men, reaching halfway across the courtyard's length.

Two strangers stood either side the yearling's arrowshaped snout, wicked muzzle poles hooked through the dragon's nostrils to hold it steady. Even had the winged dragon not been present, it was obvious the two men were bayen; the shiny black of their knee-high boots, the rich turquoise and generous cut of their pantaloons, and the artfully unlaced fronts of their white silk shirts were unmistakably the garments of First Citizens, of Clutch aristocrats. Of bayen.

One of the two appeared to be concerned only with the dragon, from what little I could see of him behind the yearling's neck and bluish dewlaps, for he looked at none but the dragon and spoke steadily to it. But the other aristocrat ignored the dragon completely and instead gestured to one of our clan men to take his muzzle pole. The chosen man— Big Grum Grum—came forward with spine stiff from fear of the dragon. Neck locked and eyes glassy, he took hold of the proffered muzzle hook and stood straight as a temple spire.

With the repose of the truly privileged, the lordling sauntered toward Greatfather Maxmisha, strolling as casually through the dusty courtyard as if through an immaculate garden. Greatfather bowed low even as he tottered forward to meet the young lord.

I recognized him at once, that nonchalant, flaxen-haired young man. As did every woman crammed in the barrack's doorway.

The First Son of the warrior-lord of our Clutch. Waikar Re Kratt.

Striking a lazy pose that best showed the sun-browned muscles visible beneath his unlaced shirt, Waikar Re Kratt spoke with our Greatfather. He spoke briefly, gestured once with his chin at the women's barracks, whereupon we all shrank back into shadow. Greatfather bobbed his head. Bowed. Gestured brusquely for a boy to approach, whereupon he barked an order at him. The boy immediately whirled and ran toward our barracks.

With an alarmed murmur, we all fell back from the doorway. The boy clattered up the stairs and darted inside, eyes huge and shiny with excitement. He was a resident of the barracks, and not yet having reached manhood, could therefore so readily enter our domicile.

"Danku Re Darquel's Waivia," he barked. "Come forward!"

A collective intake of breath; ice water in my veins.

With a slow, hip-heavy walk, my sister pushed by the young boy and went outside. She stood there a moment in the sunlight, lush and flame haired, every limb replete somehow with indecency. Then she slowly descended the stairs and approached Waikar Re Kratt.

We all surged toward the doorway again, whispering and exchanging flushed looks. Not so flustered was our Waisi, not flustered in the least. She cat-walked toward Kratt as though she owned time and sunlight itself.

He remained in his casual stance, not a muscle flicking. But something in the air changed, all right. Oh yes. Something in the air changed. The tension was nigh on unbearable.

Waisi stopped several feet away from Kratt. I held my breath; would she not get on her knees and kowtow?

She would.

Slowly, with a sensuality that made me squirm, she knelt. She moved in a way that was as titillating as if she were unclothing herself for a mating. She was not submitting to this lordling, no. As she knelt with face pressed to earth, her fine, full rump and her lush hips high, her too-short bitoo exposing her long, smooth legs, she was taunting the lordling. Mocking him with all that she possessed.

Then she rose to her feet. Tossed her flaming hair. Lifted her chin at him—yes! she did!—and turned away. Walked back to the barracks with that rolling gait of hers that no man could ignore.

Kratt watched her as she mounted the stairs, watched her as she entered our barracks. The women gathered at the doorway pulled back as she came in, stepped away from her, aghast and dumbfounded by her outrageous behavior. Waisi sailed through them as if they did not exist. She returned to where she'd been kneeling, readying herself for temple, and continued to comb her magnificent hair as if nothing untoward had occurred.

My attention snapped back to Kratt. Unlike the other women, I'd not moved an inch from my post at the door. So I saw his reaction to Waisi's departure, and it chilled me to the marrow and aroused me, both.

He smiled, a lazy, feral smile that grew slowly and lingered. His eyes, so blue, so piercing, remained intently upon the barracks for several heartbeats. Oh, to be looked at that way!

Then he returned to the dragon.

Whatever words he exchanged with his peer were curt;

within moments, the two were upon the yearling's back, muzzle hooks telescoped small and notched in the thick leather belts at their waists. Kratt sat in the fore, upon the dragon's stout neck, reins in hand; his friend sat directly behind him. I say sat, but in fact they half lay upon the dragon, so that Kratt's companion looked to be embracing Kratt while half lying atop him.

How would they get the yearling airborne with no space for the beast to run and launch itself upward?

By beating it, of course.

With a bamboo crop that cracked like a thunderclap against the yearling's neck, Kratt caned the yearling. The yearling flapped its vast wings, lashed its tail, reared up, and clawed the air with talons as thick as my arm and as bright as new steel. Dust billowed up, red and gritty. The yearling trumpeted. Kratt caned the beast once more, holding tight onto the reins, keeping its head back. Those great claw-tipped wings beat the air into a dusty gale; I squinted, held my breath, clung hold the doorframe as my bitoo snapped about my body.

Then whoosh! Kratt gave the dragon its head and the beast sprang upward. It was airborne.

It seemed impossible, a miracle, a feat of skill that only a demon could possess, that Kratt had launched the dragon skyward in such a small space. Now I know that the warrior-lord's yearlings are rigorously trained to do just such a thing, for use in combat, but back then, at age nine, I was unencumbered by knowledge. The miracle of seeing such a beast burst into flight was all that I knew.

And, of course, the marvel of the warrior-lord's First Son coming to view my sister in our humble clan compound.

Like all temples throughout Clutch Re, Wabe Din Temple was more than a temple. It was a marketplace and well- water place. It was a place for schooling those lucky enough, and a place for flogging those unlucky. It was where the daronpuis, the Holy Wardens, lived in tiled and gilded grace, administrating, admonishing, and ruling our lives. And meditating. They did that, too, though in my nine years I'd never seen it.

As I walked, I kicked up as much dust as I could and spat with gusto, loudly echoing Waisi's repertoire of invective. The only time a female may curse while in the presence of men is while circumnavigating the temple, so we all cursed heartily. Even Mother defamed Re, our Clutch bull, so vigorously her face turned red as a fire-baked brick.

Those curses fool the evil kwano spirits into thinking a male dragon is worthless, and thus the evil ones left alone our bull, Re. But also much jockeying takes place during circumnavigation, as each person tries to follow his current antagonist, be it sister, uncle, or someone from a neighboring clan. It is very cathartic to scream expletives and kick dust at one's opponent under the guise of piety. Though some of the pious occasionally came to blows. From time to time.

"Stinking Djimbi afterbirth!"

The yell came from directly behind me. I turned, and a heartbeat before dust bit my eyes, I saw Dono glaring at me.

Blinded, I stopped and balled my knuckles into my eyes.

"Dragon-sucking Djimbi whore!" he yelled, and his foot connected with my knee. I almost went down; Mother's grip around my arm kept me upright.

"Keep walking," she ordered, and I knew by her tone that she realized the kick hadn't been accidental, that this wasn't the usual competition between me and my old playmate in our quest to create the most shocking expletives.

Blinking gritty tears, I obeyed. Dono followed right behind.

"Hatchling fondler! Jungle deviant—"

"Limp-dick fuckless cuckold!" I countered, but Mother shot a look at me that bade me be silent and not inflame Dono further. There was more than anger in Dono's voice. There was malice. I was badly bruised and still sore from his attack that morning; I wanted no repeat of his frightening fury. So I obeyed Mother's look and bit my tongue.

I didn't glance back after that. I tried to ignore Dono and failed. Waisi and Mother stationed themselves either side of me, while still walking backward, and hooked their arms through mine to prevent Dono from kicking my knee backs again.

It was a long circumnavigation, that one.

When at last it was complete, we entered the temple with visible relief. With one last bitter curse hurled after me, Dono separated from us to enter the men's section of the temple. He descended to the ground tier, as befitted his age, and sat among the eldest boys there.

Wabe Din Temple was an open structure roofed with domes. Pendentives allowed the square plan at ground level to carry a dome above. Wabe Din had just the three requisite domes: one to shelter the men, one for the holy fire, and one for the women. From the apex of the central dome, the altar chimney exited as a magnificent four- headed dragon that glared over our entire zone from its perch. Smoke billowed out its four mouths in the four compass directions.

Mother, Waisi, and I entered the temple under the central dome and descended its eight amphitheater tiers to the sunken floor. Mother lifted the lid off the urn she carried as we approached the altar fire. We stepped close, but not too close, crammed our hands into Mother's urn, and cast a fistful of marinated chilies onto the smoldering flames.

Fizzle, hiss, belch! Smoke that burned the lungs and made the eyes and nose stream spewed up to thank us. Already a pile of shriveled, charring chilies sprawled like a dismembered corpse upon the fire, creating a peppery vinegar reek. An acolyte about Waisi's age and riddled with oozing acne repeatedly hoisted a long fork into the fire and raked off the chili offerings into a row of seed- splotched buckets.

Coughing and sputtering against the sting of the burning chilies, and our wombs now cinai-blessed from our offering—for the chilies represented human ovaries, and the fire the blessing of the bull dragon—Mother, Waisi, and I ascended to a tier in the women's pendentive. We sat.

And waited.

Ack, how I hated the waiting! It went on and on while people came and went, while women threw chilies onto the fire and the acolyte raked them off again. Throughout, the temple daronpuis strolled from tier to tier, pendentive to pendentive, cracking dragon whips over our heads to remind us of our fealty and subservience to Re, and bellowing statutes aloud, some from rote and some reading scrolls. Each daronpu wore a clackron, the holy dragon mask with the large, flared mouth that amplifies and sends the wearer's voice booming through the temple. Those words rolled over the whip snaps and the white noise of the crowd circumnavigating the temple.

Headache coming, as usual. Mouth dry, eyes and nose membranes outraged by the burning chilies.

Gong! Gong! Every here and there, a daronpu struck a gong and we women obediently picked up the urn of remaining chilies sitting at our feet and passed it to whomever sat next to us.

Gong! Gong! The men likewise passed around their bamboo boxes of holy cakes. Thus we spread harmony, goodwill, and wishes of fertility from clan to clan. All the time, my bandaged hand throbbed and occasionally twitched like a beheaded pigeon.

Still, we waited. Waited for a daronpu to notice Greatfather Maxmisha sitting stern and straight among the men crowded on the tiers in the men's pendentive. Only when Greatfather was acknowledged with a somber daronpu nod would he rise and leave temple, the rest of the pottery clan following.

It was that way always on holy days. One entered the temple at will and left so also, as the statutes were recited throughout the day until sundown. However, the daronpuis took note of who stayed until acknowledged, informed their temple superior, and chits were handed out accordingly on chit days.

I know what you think. Chits should be distributed according to how many goods and services each clan has provided to temple and Clutch. And so and so and so, I say! In an ideal world, perhaps. But no, we sat upon those hard tiers and waited, prisoners to the whims of masked daronpuis.

I played games while I waited. With my eyes I connected the thousands of three-dimensional porcelain palm fruits decorating the pendentive columns. I examined the finely chiseled stonework on the arcing dragon-neck chimney and the legs supporting the huge, raised fire altar. I concentrated on the cracks in the cobalt blue tiles covering the massive stone hood that gaped over the fire and directed the smoke up the chimney. I critically regarded the colored glass tesserae of the ground-floor mosaic.

I forgot it was Sa Gikiro.

I first became aware of the noise as a lack, and I came out of my reveries with a violent jerk, instantly cognizant of the tension throughout temple. Mother, Waisi, every man, woman, daronpu, and child sat or stood rigidly, and I felt as if I were the only one not holding my breath, so I did that, too.

The source of this collective tension was apparent: the cinai komikon. The dragonmaster was the only one now moving within the temple as he descended one tier, then another, humming. Or perhaps the humming was only blood rushing through my ears.

Subtle movement outside as word spread. The crowd inched forward, each individual eager to watch yet unwilling to draw attention from the dragonmaster, despite his unprecedented visit to our zone on Sa Gikiro, despite the fact that this visit offered a chance for a clan to leap into prosperity if one or more boys should be chosen to apprentice to the dragonmaster. The reluctance stemmed from the knowledge that the chosen boys would be publicly flogged with dragon venom during next year's Mombe Taro, and suffer much worse should they survive. Much worse.

While everyone longed for the prosperity, no man wished such a fate upon himself or his sons.

So the crowd outside inched cautiously forward, an entity filled with trepidation, curiosity, and desperate hope. I felt hemmed in.

The dragonmaster stopped descending at the fifth tier in the men's pendentive and strolled along it, his every movement watched by the adolescents seated there. They watched as a mongoose watches a shadow that may be either rat or kwano snake, meal or death.

Suddenly, he stopped. Swatted the air once, twice, thrice.

Crouched, then leapt upward with a blood-congealing roar. Midleap he spun, landing in the same spot yet facing the other direction, in the same half-crouch as he'd leapt from.

Several women shrieked. I shrieked. The boys seated nearest him jerked, poised to flee, to scramble away, to will themselves invisible. Or perhaps not. Perhaps I projected my fear onto them and read their wide, glistening eyes and open mouths and rapidly moving chests not as hope but as terror.

The dragonmaster remained crouched for several pulse beats, then tilted his head. This way. That way.

He's forgotten where he is, I thought, recognizing the manner of a dazed tree rat that has fallen to the ground.

Snap! The spell that held him broke, and once more he ambled along the tier, whistling. Yes, he was whistling.

He didn't seem to be examining the adolescents seated alongside him, yet all of a sudden he yanked one up by an earlobe. He prized the young man's mouth open, looked up his nose, pulled down his lower eyelids to examine the pink flesh underneath. His prey looked stunned stupid.

Judging by the glass bangles encircling the young man's biceps, I guessed he was a glass spinner's boy. I was right; the glass spinners in the women's pendentive shifted in barely suppressed excitement.

The young man was about Waisi's age and oddly shaped, with wide shoulders, a bulbous torso, and hairy arms that hung to bowlegs. Heavy flesh padded his rather pale frame, and that slack jaw of his threatened to catch flies.

"Dragon bait," Waisi breathed beside me, and from the corner of my eye, I saw her lip curl contemptuously. I knew what she meant: Here stood a boy being chosen merely as a toy for Re, our bull dragon. I refused to think of that seven-year-old boy at Mombe Taro. Refused.

The glass spinner's blocky frame was the exact opposite of the lithe, athletic kind needed to survive against a bull dragon, and he looked to not have the wits to know it. His apprenticeship would be short and his death spectacular and inevitable, witnessed by two hundred thousand Malacarites jeering at him from the stands of Arena.

If the dragonmaster chose him.

"You," the dragonmaster said, choosing him.

Just like that, a yolk-brained glass spinner picked as apprentice! Now his guild clan would be wealthy. Incredulity rippled round the temple. Would anyone else be picked from our zone? Would another clan be as lucky?

No.

The dragonmaster climbed the tiers to leave, to continue his search for apprentices in another part of our vast Clutch. He crooked one finger in the air for the yolk brain to follow him. The dazed glass spinner had to be nudged by a fellow to follow."

A cough sounded. Loud. Deliberate. Clear. The dragonmaster froze. I froze.

Again the cough, a throat-clearing summons from somewhere near the ground tier in the men's pendentive.

Slowly, the dragonmaster turned around.

His eyes darted to and fro, his nostrils flared; he tasted the air with the tip of his tongue. All right. Maybe he stood too far away for me to see all that, but this is what I imagined him doing as he stood brittlely tensed. The glass spinner also froze, having not moved more than two steps from where he'd been seated. His was a look of such utter bafflement that I wondered if he truly might be simple.

Cough.

My eyes shot to where the third cough had originated, and as fast as they moved, so too did the dragonmaster. He looked as tensile as a potter's cutting wire, as fluid as water, as he swiftly descended the tiers to stand before ... whom? What boy had dared break the silence in temple, had deliberately drawn upon himself the cinai komikon's wrath? For I had no doubt that the youngster the dragonmaster now confronted was indeed the cougher. I doubt anyone else questioned it, either.

Beside me, Waisi sat straighter.

I think she was the first of all potters to realize who the boy was. In retrospect, I'm not surprised.

My name, Zarq, is an aberration for a girl.

To grasp the enormity of how strange the name is for a female, one must first understand how we name our babes in Malacar, and in every nation long under the Emperor's rule.

All sons upon birth are called First Son, Second Son, Third Son, and so on, or, in the Emperor's language: Wai Kar, Kazon Kar, and so forth. Naturally, the boy also takes the name of his father. He keeps that birth name until he loses all his milk teeth, whereupon he leaves the women's barracks and undergoes Tazik Masiumutian, Call-the- Name-Out Ceremony, during which all the men of his clan choose a name for him that reflects some trait, hoped for or existing, in the boy's nature.

For female babies, it is much the same.

A girl child, however, is not called a father's daughter. No such word exists in the Emperor's tongue. She is instead called so-and-so's girl, or via. That name is kept until the girl is claimed by a man, whence she is called so-and- so's whatever—desire, cook, temptress, and so forth.

So there you have it; the conventions that dictate how a Malacarite is named.

My name flouts these rules. Blatantly.

I was never called Kazon, though I was the second child to leave my mother's womb, and I was never via, or girl. I was Zarq. Zarq. That harsh, brusque Xxelteker name so common among Malacarite men.

In all the history of our pottery clan, and I daresay the nation of Malacar itself, never before had a girl been so named. When my mother gave birth to me and bestowed that travesty of a name upon me, another pottery clan woman was also laboring to push a babe into the world. A squalling boy was born the eve after.

Again, a strange naming took place, though not nearly as strange as mine.

The babe's mother died after a terrible labor, and because she was ebani-basa, a woman claimed as pleasurer by more than one man in our clan, no one could say for certain that the babe was Yeli's, as she'd stated. The boy was therefore referred to as Ebani-basa Caldekolkar. Caldekolkar: womb-ripping son. A terrible name to curse an innocent babe with.

You might think that, over time, the moniker would have been shortened. But not so, for boys will be boys, and when sensing a weakness in another, they will pounce; they reveled in calling Caldekolkar by his full, inglorious name: Womb-ripping son of a many-men pleasurer.

So in lieu of a father's name, the boy grew up with ebani- basa preceding his birth name. Not rare. Ebani-basas do conceive, after all. But such a name is not loved by any boy bearing so ignoble a title.

By the time both I and Ebani-basa Caldekolkar reached our fifth years, it became clear that the boy's mother had been correct: Yeli was the father. The wide, almost astonished eyes, the narrow face, the short legs, and restlessness of the boy all marked him as Yeli's get. And he resented his name with a hatred that surpassed the average child's loathing of a shameful parental burden.

So the days passed, and with each one Ebani-basa Caldekolkar yearned for the time when he could leave the women's barracks and be given his true name. He vowed to have his father's name precede it. I was sorry for how much he wished to leave the barracks, for he was an energetic playmate able to invent exhilarating games and increase the risk of old ones.

Then, when he was nearly seven, Ebani-basa Caldekolkar disappeared from our compound.

He returned at nightfall, his face ashen, his cheeks swollen, his chest soaked in blood. Not content to wait for his remaining milk teeth to fall out, and his name jeered at one too many times the day previous, he'd sequestered himself in the jungle's edge and pulled every remaining milk tooth from his mouth. Weak and triumphant, he returned to the pottery clan a man.

Infection set in, the kind so prevalent and feared by those who live in tropical climes. He was not expected to survive.

He wasted away, trapped in pus and delirium. The half-dozen adult teeth he'd had prior to extracting his milk teeth blackened and fell out. His fevered mutters haunted the women's barracks. I wept in fear nightly.

But, dragon blessed, his fever broke.

At the cusp of his seventh birthday, Ebani-basa Caldekolkar left the barracks and was given a mat in one of his father's huts. He was also given his true name: determined one. As vowed, he asked that his father's name precede it. His request was granted on the condition that he drop the paternal prefix when he claimed a woman of his own, for no adult man bears his father's name, and Yeli was uncomfortable with his seven-year-old man- child's request.

So my seven-year-old playmate entered manhood with the name Yeli's Determined One. In the Emperor's language: Yeli's Dono.

It was he, at age nine, who had summoned the dragonmaster before him with three assertive coughs.

The dragonmaster stood before Yeli's Dono, emanating fury. Dono rose to his feet slowly, moving as one does when one's bare foot has inadvertently come within inches of a kwano snake.

The dragonmaster bent a little, for Dono was short for his age, shorter than me by two knuckles. He breathed rage into Dono's face, and I imagined tremors shivering up the boy's legs. I knew what Dono stared into: unnatural eyes marbled white where no white should be.

Dono lifted a hand to his own face and coolly pulled a lower eyelid down. Demanding, silently, to be examined.

A still, giddy moment ensued as everyone absorbed his audacity. Then the dragonmaster threw back his head and roared. I shrieked and covered my eyes. My heart galloped several alley lengths before I realized the nature of the roar: laughter. The cinai komikon was laughing.

I looked at Mother and she at Waisi, and Waisi shrugged but could not conceal a fierce grin.

What? I wanted to ask, as indeed everyone in the temple wanted to shout, for they looked at one another nonplussed.

"Open your mouth!" the dragonmaster bellowed. Like an idiot, I opened mine. So did many within the temple, before we all snapped them shut again, feeling foolish.

"What's this? The gums of an infant?" the dragonmaster roared, and this time there was no humor in the bellow.

"No, komikon!" Dono shouted back, and his childish voice climbed clear to the domes. "Thith ith the mouth of one who didn't wait for time to make him a man. I pulled my milk teeth out two yearth ago; infection rotted the man teeth. A thmall price to pay for claiming my own manhood, hey-o."

Incredulity and astonishment touched every face, even those of the pottery clan, for although the story was familiar to us, the strength and arrogance in the boy's voice was brash and new. The dragonmaster threw back his head and roared a third time. My nerves, jangled about since morning, went taut as the wire a potter uses to slice through a block of clay.

"Sit down!" Mother scolded, jerking me back onto my seat, while Waisi simultaneously whispered, "She's pissed herself!"

The dragonmaster's laughter covered our noise, but still my cheeks burned with shame. Waisi shifted away from me. And I realized, with something akin to disappointment yet colored with relief, that the dragonmaster had turned his back on Dono without striking him dead. Indeed, he was walking away, leaving the pottery clan's orphan boy standing there, more naked than if his loincloth had fallen to the ground. He was still cackling, the dragonmaster, still chortling

Then, as he began to climb the temple tiers, he raised an arm.

Crooked a finger.

Beckoned.

Yeli's Dono had been chosen.

The yolk-brained glass spinner didn't know what to do; he remained oafishly in place until Dono ascended to his tier and clapped him on the back as if they were equals, which they were not; Dono was half the idiot's age and size. Dono then magnanimously gestured for the idiot to lead the way after the dragonmaster, who by then was paring the crowd outside.

"Re spare you, Ebani-basa Caldekolkar," Mother whispered, and I looked from Dono to her. Red rimmed her eyes and tears threatened her cheeks. She caught my look.

"I suckled him alongside you, Zarq. He's my milk son, your milk brother. Pray for him. Pray for his safety. Please."

My milk brother, Yeli's Dono? The pottery clan's fierce little orphan pup? Impossible!

But her words rang true, and, as if buried somewhere deep in my memory, I realized I'd heard such a thing spoken before.

I looked back at Dono, but he had ascended the tiers and walked into the crowd beyond. The toothless nine- year-old man who was my milk brother vanished from my childhood.

FIVE

What happened next is difficult to recount. I don't know where to start. With our triumphant return to our compound from temple? With the press of the crowd and the ululations of women that accompanied us the entire way? Or with the pottery clan men who vaulted onto each other's shoulders like acrobats, bellowing praises to our illustrious bull dragon?

The thing of it is, I remember that afternoon and evening like a series of images hung upon a wall, like one of Mother's famous four-tile panels. Static pictures captured in clay: It's safest to remember events in that manner.

Understand, Temple law states that the clan of a boy chosen by the dragonmaster as apprentice must give away all possessions at sundown on Sa Gikiro, in recognition of all the boy has lost and in preparation for the riches Temple will bestow upon the clan in eight days, as recompense for the life the dragonmaster has taken from them.

Such an event had not occurred to any clan within our zone for more than two generations. We knew what we had to do, as per Temple Statute: give away all our goods. But we did not know how the giving would unfold. Perhaps a blessing, that.

So, the first image in the clay-tile-panel in my mind:

Kobo's twins, Rutvia and Makvia, kneeling on the floor, rolling tikken buds and their hoard of Mombe Taro swatches into their sleeping mats, so as to press the swatches of satin smooth and impart them with the buds' peppery fragrance. Not for one moment do the girls wonder why anyone would want their stained, worn sleeping mats and their swatches of cloth; they are following Temple Statute and offering what they believe to be treasure. Their innocent pride is poignant and sweet.

In the second panel sits a ragged, somewhat greasy lump of sage-colored cloth, featon chaff spilling from a tear. This cloth bundle is my fu-lili, my soft honey, a nondescript stuffed toy that belonged to my sister when she was a child and that had proudly belonged to me since I was two. I was determined not to give that particular treasure away, and was furtively stuffing it behind a stack of boxed pigments in the women's pottery shed when Mother found me. We exchanged a look; I thrust out a defiant lip.

"I need fu-lili," I said defensively, even though I hadn't slept with the smelly thing, nor played with it, in years. "Some things you just can't give away, Mama."

She nodded curtly, then walked out, leaving me to my crime.

In the third panel stands a group of grinning pottery men, all their worldly possessions laid on mats before their hut doorways: heirloom pipes, burnished machetes, new sandals made of stiff leather, and destiny wheels carved from gharial bone, the wheels' large dice nestled in leather drawstring pouches. The men are swelled with generosity, eager to obey Temple law.

The fourth panel contains one image only. A ceramic figurine, squat and obese and baffling to a nine-year-old girl. The twins and I saw it on Big Grum Grum's mat among a jumble of drinking pipettes, an urn of maska, and a cedar box filled with tobacco. We stared, at liberty to do so because the men had backs turned to us, guffawing over each other's wit. Captivated by the object's mystery, I boldly picked up the figurine.

It was heavy, like a terimelon, but with a tunnel carved through its center. I turned the figurine this way and that. A brooder dragon, that's what it was, but the strangest likeness of a brooder I'd ever seen, for instead of the mottled greens and reds of a real brooder, it was glazed a soft beige, like the skin upon my inner thighs where the sun never touched. Stranger, its thin tail was lifted high, revealing a rump much like my own, complete with an aperture just large enough for me to squeeze all the fingers of one hand into.

I withdrew them, frowning. The tunnel running through the length of the brooder was glassy and knobbed with tiny bumps.

With a grunt, I lifted the object to eye level. Three things immediately became apparent: The figurine was hollow and liquid sloshed within its base, the aperture was a tunnel that gradually narrowed to the brooder's open mouth, and the thing stank, a sour-salt stench that reminded me of the ocean weeds we sometimes burned in our kilns to obtain certain lusters on vases.

"What is it?" Kobo's Rutvia breathed, her chin at my shoulder.

"A drinking cup," I announced authoritatively, though in truth I hadn't a clue what the figurine was. "A man's drinking cup. Must be. See, the eyes are cork. You pull them out, like this, to put the maska inside."

"But what's the tunnel for?"

"Oh, that," I said airily. "Uhhh ... it keeps the maska cool? Yes, you know, the air goes in and out, to cool the drink. Everyone knows that."

Kobo's Makvia wrinkled her nose. "But how do you drink the maska once it's in?"

"Straws in the eye holes, you cracked egg. Maska straws." I gestured to the tarnished pipettes on the mat.

"Ah," the twins said, finally bowing to my superior knowledge, for it is true; men drink maska through long metal pipettes to filter out fermentation residue.

I turned the brooder figurine onto its back, looking for the potter's seal. I'd never seen anyone craft such an object before and was powerfully curious who might have done so.

"It's leaking," Kobo's Rutvia said. It was.

That's when I noticed the inexplicable: The maska within the figurine leaked from dozens of pinprick holes inside the tunnel. When I hastily turned the brooder right side up again, the maska that had sloshed into its back while upside down now drip-drip-dripped from dozens of similar holes in the tunnel roof.

I knew a ceramic cup could leak by way of a crack, but by hundreds of tiny holes? What strange phenomenon was this?

"It must be really old," I breathed in wonder. "Absolutely ancient—"

"Know what it's for?" a voice said. I looked up and saw Korshan's Rutkar and his cronies leering at me. Ranging from six to eight years old, they were the sworn enemies of the twins and me by mere dint of their ages.

"Wager you don't," Korshan's Rutkar goaded.

"Do, too," I said haughtily. "It's a drinking cup, a maska drinking cup." I lifted it to my lips to demonstrate. "See?"

The lot of them erupted into laughter. The men all turned at once; Big Grum Grum saw his prized "cup" in my hands and roared with fury, and the twins and I shrieked. I dropped the cup on the ground and we fled.

I have since learned the device is used by men during the fertility rite Ka Cinai ki Gourfi, Ride the Brooder's Back. The figurine is filled not with maska, as I'd thought, but warm water—or warm oil, if one is wealthy—and lined with a perforated leather insert. The figurine is said to increase both the fertility and sexual prowess of the user. Odd practice, no? Especially for folk who despise the Djimbi for how they interact with dragons.

I shudder now to recall how I'd so blithely held that figurine to my lips. Big Grum Grum did not often bathe, and that figurine, by the stink of it, had been well used.

Hey-o. I suppose that's more than a static picture of what I recall of that Sa Gikiro, isn't it? Perhaps I remember it in detail so well so as to put off recording what occurred the rest of that day and night. How else might I prolong this avoidance? By remembering Mother, I suppose, and all the other giddily glad pottery clan women, scurrying to and fro, baking sweet cakes, soaking dried plums in maska water and stuffing them with crystallized honey and ground nut paste. Not that we had many plums to stuff, nor honey with which to make sweet cakes, but every last luxury in our cellars was brought forth, and what we lacked we purchased from neighboring clans with promissory notes. Our neighbors knew how affluent we would be in eight days and saw no reason not to give us foodstuffs on credit...With an exorbitant credit charge attached, of course.

The smells that day! The sizzle of renimgar crackling!

The heady perfume of shredded orchid rolls! The pungency of liver wreaths!

And I can tell you, the little red congle nuts above the mating shack were scarcely out of their gourds, for in and out the closets went flushed couples all day, putting the nuts on the lintel inside the gourds to request a blessing from Re, should the bull dragon be watching in spirit. Thus a child might take root in the garden of the women's wombs.

Strictly speaking, it was Sa Gikiro, a day of abstinence, so such revelry should have waited until sunset. But just as our clan never fulfilled its Proclamation that day—for how could we slash vines or make coil bottles when so much preparation awaited to honor the bull and fulfil Temple Statute?—so too Greatfather Maxmisha overlooked the comings and goings in the closets.

How quickly the promise of wealth subverts.

So. A portrait of the pottery clan compound on the Sa Gikiro of my ninth year: It gleamed with oiled men and perfumed women; it steamed with the fragrances of cooked rarities and lovemaking; and it glittered with our polished, paltry possessions, laid out for any to take from the courtyard floor at sundown, as per Temple Statute.

When did we potters first notice that the other clan rishi waiting outside our entry arch did not laugh along with us? At what point did the unwavering intensity of their eyes unsettle our nerves, make us pause, bite a lip, and frown? Maybe when those foremost in the crowd outside refused to leave their places even when nature's functions pressed: they chose instead to evacuate their bowels and bladders in full view, right beneath our clan arch, rather than give up the place for someone else. Perhaps it was when one of our women, Kobo's Dash, began reciting statute aloud—understand, out very loud, not just her usual mutters, accompanied by a determined, inward look.

I know for certain that as the sharp tangerine sunset stung the dusk clouds purple, the fights breaking out beyond our archway had fixed all our smiles on our faces. Scrubbed clean and dressed in our worst, for our best lay neatly folded on our sleeping mats before us, we stood side by side, ringing the courtyard. Waisi stood on my left; Mother, my right.

As for Waisi, well. She looked breathtaking. Really. The sight of her caught your breath in your chest, where it tangled with your heart and slapped a flush against your cheeks.

She had found face powders and color sticks and blended them and applied them so carefully that she appeared to wear none at all. Yet her eyes, her cheekbones, her lips, her neck ...! The threadbare bitoo she wore was far too small for her and hugged her breasts and tummy and rump splendidly, barely reaching midthigh. Even Father couldn't stop staring.

"They won't wait until sunset," Waisi said. "Not much longer now, and they'll charge us like bulls in rut."

"Close your fast lips, girl-who-looks-like-kiyu," Kobo's Dash hissed. "Dare you speak ill against bulls on a holy day?"

"Bulls do charge when in rut—"

"Hush, Waivia," Mother murmured, and Waisi for once didn't argue. Mother frowned, chewed distractedly on a lock of hair as she studied the crowd uneasily.

Several heartbeats passed. The crowd at the entry arch had turned into a boiling mass that reminded me of black and red ants at war.

"She's right," Mother said breathlessly. "Waivia, Zarq,

go—"

Then they were upon us.

It happened that quickly, Mother looking down at me, speaking my name, a strange urgency on her face as I looked up at her. And then a rush of noise—shouts, cries, screams—and people were everywhere, pushing and grabbing. That fast, it was.

The mob was thick and frenzied, crazed by greed. Mother tried to grab me, but I was shoved beyond her reach. I saw her horror as I fell among the churning feet. A knee hit me in the mouth as I went down; a foot landed on my left shoulder. I screamed and tried to scrabble up, out, away. Strong hands clawed at my shoulders and tried to pull me upright again.

"Stand up, stand up!" a voice shrieked, and then those helping hands were also yanked from me.

Shins, knees, feet. Grit scraping hard against my cheeks, blood from my nostrils. Roaring in my ears. I couldn't breathe.

Then I was yanked up and crushed against a soft, heaving chest. Mother. I clung hold and squeezed my eyes shut.

"Get them under the barracks!" Mother yelled. She tipped over and I wailed and clung tighter, certain she was falling, and she did fall, but only to her knees, and it was deliberate, for now we were under the stilt-raised women's barracks, with the twins crawling frantically before us, after their mother, Kobo's Dash. Big Grum Grum's kids were already huddled in the dark center beneath the barracks. Korshan's Limia scrambled in beside us, her eyes wide and glistening, her screaming baby clutched tight to her breast.

"Go on, follow them," Mother shouted, pushing me after the twins. "We'll be safe under here."

But I refused to move.

"We can't," I said.

She stared at me, stunned.

"We can't," I repeated. "They'll take our things. All our things."

"They're supposed to," she said unevenly.

I shook my head with all the certainty youth can muster, tears rolling down my cheeks. "Not like this."

"Zarq." A pained expression crossed her face. "Some things we must accept, yes?"

"But our pigments!" I howled, loud as the mob outside, suddenly overcome by the injustice of the pillage, thinking only of my beloved fu-lili hidden behind the boxes of pigment in our pottery shed. They would take those pigments, discover my fu-lili behind them, and take my precious toy as well. "They'll take everything—they will, they will!"

My howls froze everyone cowering under the barracks. The adults exchanged uneasy looks. There was truth in what I spoke, for the crowd was so wild with greed, they would take whatever they could, regardless of its worth to them.

And while the adults exchanged those portent looks, I bolted. Yes, I did. I scrambled out from under our safe refuge and hurled myself blindly into the seething mass of legs and feet, intent only on rescuing my fu-lili.

Mother screamed something behind me—at least, I think it was Mother—and someone grabbed at my neck. The cloth of the old bitoo I was wearing tore like wet, rotten twine. On I ran.

Dodging elbows, knocked askew by hip and rump, shoved by hands and trod on by bare and shod feet alike. Noise all around me, disorienting, overwhelming, and motion that seemed to spin me round and about like a bug in a mixing vat of clay slurry. I could have been anywhere, I comprehended so little of my surroundings. Feet and shins and knees, all kicking and churning and scrabbling like bizarre, bedeviled beasts ...

Then the crowd briefly parted for no discernable reason—just briefly, mind—and I glimpsed our men grappling with each other in the courtyard. The elders were fighting our youngest men, who appeared to be trying to limit the pillage. But our elders, Father included—and this is what scared me most, understand—held our youth back with blows and curses. To allow the holy plunder to continue.

In that terrifying glimpse, in that brief parting of the crowd, I could see where I was, could orient myself in my surroundings. I made straight for the women's pottery shed.

Others were there. Strangers clutching pots of glaze and sacks of white kaolin to their chests, eyes wild with greed. I was stunned that they had dared violate the inner sanctum of our guild clan, had sullied our smooth, fine trestle table with their grasping fingers and wanton avarice when the goods they were taking were of absolutely no use to them.

I darted into the shed and snatched up a dragon's fang, that short, wicked knife potters use for fettling and cutting clay.

"Get back, all of you!" I shrieked. "Get out, get out!"

I slashed at those closest to me; the rending of cloth and the shriek of one wounded graced my ears.

"Out!" I yelled. I leapt atop the trestle table,brandishing the knife in one hand, and hurled a jar of pigment at a pillager. It bounced off her head and she gaped at me for several heartbeats before falling, concussed, to her knees.

"You're not potters!" I screamed hoarsely, passion boiling up from the day's emotional events. "You don't need these things!"

I flung my knife at the nearest person, then sprang monkeylike from the trestle table to the shelves and started hurling jars and amphorae wildly at faces and napes.

I was quite off my head with emotion. Quite. I do believe, had I been capable, I would have readily killed all present and never suffered a whit of remorse afterward.

But Mother appeared, hair disheveled, bitoo torn, one cheek scratched from eye to lip. Pushing through the doorway, she took in the scene with one swift look— me clinging to the shelves like a spider monkey, hurling missiles upon ducking and fleeing pillagers—and then fell to aiding me by screaming at those still within the shed that I was rabid, was demon possessed—run for your life!

People were trying to enter, despite the crush of those trying to exit, and during the melee Mother pushed her way over to one shelf, rooted behind the wooden boxes stacked there, and retrieved my beloved fu-lili.

"Zarq, Zarq, it's fine now. Stop!" She grabbed at my waist, pulled me down to her. Shoved fu-lili into my hands. "Are you hurt? Are you well?"

Even as she spoke to me, her eyes roved wildly over the wreckage of the shed. One hand smoothed my hair too fast, over and over.

"They're going to take everything!" I shrieked at her. I threw fu-lili away, suddenly couldn't stand the thing, wanted nothing to do with it. Just wanted these people gone, our things safe, our life orderly.

My mother's face changed then. Hardened, became something foreign. She took me by both shoulders, shook me.

"I want you to go back to the barracks, understand? Get underneath it. Stay there. You're too small for this. Tell Kobo's Dash and Big Grum Grum's Li what happened here; tell them I need help."

Her expression darkened further. "You were right, Zarq. There are some things one can't give away."

She turned me about, sang out words that sounded like gibberish, like a foreign tongue, like an illicit pagan chant, and pushed me toward the door. Miraculously, the crowd briefly parted, just as it had once before, and I slipped out the doorway and darted through the seething mob outside. Dodging and ducking and sprinting as fast I could, I returned safely to the barracks.

Once there, I scrabbled along cool dirt and around cob- webbed stilts to the very center of the barracks' underbelly. Big Grum Grum's children clung to each other, a knot of snotty tears, and the twins clung to their mother, Kobo's Dash.

I spoke rapidly, my words tripping over each other.

"What can they possibly want with potters' goods?" Korshan's Limia cried, hugging her baby to her breast.

"There's no reason left in them," Kobo's Dash said bitterly. "They just want to fill their arms. They'll strip us bare."

Big Grum Grum's Li pushed her children from her lap.

"Zarq is right," she said. "We must go to the workshop. Hey-o, Limia, give your baby to Zarq and come with us. We have to save what we can. None of us expected this. Not this."

The screaming baby was thrust into my arms.

"Stay here," Limia ordered me. "Don't move." She touched her baby's nose with a finger, and then she, too, was gone.

Gasping for air, clutching the arch-backed babe to my chest, I stared at Kobo's Dash. She glared and began chanting stanzas from Temple scrolls.

Above us, foot thunder and dust rain. The barracks' floor shuddered from a human stampede.

Limia's baby continued to scream in my arms. Fists balled, mouth wide, face puckered, he screamed and screamed. I hated Kobo's Dash, who sat at arm's length from me, squeezing the twins against her, for not taking my burden from me. Obtusely, I also hated her for staying behind, for not going to help my mother and the other women save what clays and tools she could.

My legs cramped. I couldn't sleep. I was too exhausted for tears. The night dragged on.

Slowly, slowly, the crazed swarm outside diminished.

By dawn, it was gone. We stayed put. Indeed, we didn't crawl out from our hiding place until Korshan's Limia crawled in. Hollow-eyed, bruised, and streaked with thin scratches, she hefted her baby from my lap and cradled him to her breast. He rooted languidly, exhausted, then once the milk touched his tongue, he nursed frantically, fists and feet kneading her belly with vigor.

"Where's my mother?" I asked huskily.

"Go with Big Grum Grum's Li. Go now."

"Where's—"

"Go!"

I crawled after the other children.

We emerged into a silent, humid dawn. Big Grum Grum's Li and her goiter-necked mother counted us all. I stared hollowly at the courtyard.

Our men moved about stiffly, through shards of vases and dishes dropped from overfull hands. Eggs, too, had been broken in the crush, and the shattered shells lay upon the ground in a fine confetti trail, the earth churned in spots into an albumen-rich mud that buzzed with flies.

The garden was no more. Every inch of it had been hacked to the ground and carried away, and roots had been yanked up for replanting. Of our fuel stores, so carefully stacked, nothing remained.

The doors had been ripped off our renimgar hutches, and the fat, lizardlike mammals within had been taken away, save for a few trampled corpses. Scraps of torn cloth here and there, a bangle, a broken sandal, a snapped comb, a soiled baby's wrap, spilled pigment, and, inexplicably, a woman's thick, black braid caked with dirt: This detritus was all that remained to us.

It was hard to remember we'd been dragon blessed.

Though we tried, throughout that awful morning, tried to remember we'd been favored by the bull. Over and over we told each other that we had done what was expected of us, as set out in Temple Statute, and that in a clawful of time—a mere eight days—our riches would roll in, wagonful after wagonful, until we would be just as bewildered by our excess as by our current lack. We said these things to each other in various ways as we cleaned, trapped in a listless stupor, loath to touch the refuse yet desperate to see it gone.

Every moment of that horrible day, I wanted my mother. Or Waisi, or even ... yes, even a glimpse of Father, however frightening and enraged he'd looked last night. For the first time in my life, despite being surrounded by those who'd raised me since birth, I desperately needed to be held by someone in my immediate family: Mother, Father, or Waisi.

But they were nowhere in sight, and no one would answer my tearful questions concerning their whereabouts.

Around midday, Greatfather Maxmisha made a belated Proclamation: The pottery clan would search every corner of the men's huts to see if any mislaid chits could be found. Should any be discovered, our men would purchase from neighboring clans the food we needed to see us through the next eight days.

I looked at Korshan's Limia for an explanation, because chits were for men's hands only, and as no one but a man could enter a man's domicile, what did Greatfather mean by telling us all to join the search? But the high color in her cheeks and the glassy look in her eyes bade me to remain silent.

Of all wonders, quite a few chits were found; it was days later that I realized the miracle only meant the pottery clan men were more canny and less devout than I'd believed. Off a group of them went to purchase food from our neighbors.

That evening, they returned with precious little.

Our neighbors, knowing our plight and fully aware of our impending fortune, had deemed the worth of their foodstuffs, even the goods taken from us during the night, at five times their true value. We had only enough food to see us through a day or two, and nothing else of value to our name.

And Mother still hadn't reappeared.

I found Father, though. I came upon him as he was ducking out of a latrine, tugging his stained loincloth into place. The look on his face was peculiar, as if I'd caught him stealing temple oil. We stared at each other for several heartbeats; then I could contain myself no longer. As bizarre as such an action was between a girl and her father, I hurled myself at him and clung to his waist.

He stank of maska spirits, and his skin was oily and rank. He patted my head awkwardly and tried to extract himself from my embrace, but when he realized no one could see us, he crouched to my level and spoke kindly.

"Now there, Zarq. There really isn't any point soiling the ground with your dirty tears, is there?"

"But Mother's gone!"

"Is she?" His brown eyes, usually so beautiful, were all bloodshot and surrounded by wrinkles. His gaze turned distant. After a brief spell, he shook his head as if he'd had an argument with someone and lost. He cleared his throat. "Your duty is to wait for her in silence. That's the proper thing to do."

"But where is she?"

"Hold your tongue, Zarq, hey-o? Too many questions. I'm sure she's around somewhere—you just haven't found her yet. Busy cleaning with the other women." He awkwardly smoothed my cheeks, an atypical gesture for a man.

"But—"

"Look, what have I found?" He plucked from behind my ear a strip of renimgar jerky. I noticed then that underneath the sour stench of his maska breath, he smelled of oily meat. Saliva rushed into my mouth. He pressed the jerky into one of my hands. "Eat up, all to yourself. Good. Now run along, hey-o?"

He stood, patted my head once, and strode away.

I ate the jerky greedily and had the wits to chew on a bitter weed to disguise the smell. I didn't obey my father, however; as twilight settled upon us, I continued to ask others if they'd seen Mother. None of the women answered my inquiries. Korshan's Limia, whom I'd followed all day like a pup, was disinclined to even look my way.

Big Grum Grum's Li finally clouted me. "What are you trying to do, draw attention to the fact that your mother is missing?"

That had been precisely what I'd been trying to do. But such a response died in my throat as Big Grum Grum's Li crossed her twiggy arms over her narrow breasts and glared at me.

I curled into a ball on the bare floor of the barracks and shivered. I would never be able to sleep again, never

I woke to movement, to a sense of an impending event. A clawful of women were rising like mist from their sleeping places and drifting soundlessly out the barracks door. Car Manopu's Wasaltooltic was just rising from her spot nearest me. I sat up, pulse skittering along my veins.

"Go back to sleep," she said, frowning.

I shook my head: no.

"Zarq—"

"I'll scream if you don't tell me what's happening." Instinctively, I knew that whatever these women were about was illicit, and silence was therefore imperative.

She glared. "Why do you want to know? You're a child. You should be sleeping."

"I want my mother."

"She'll be here by morning."

"You know where she is," I said, suddenly intuiting that these silent shadows drifting outside were connected to Mother, to her disappearance, to her decision, spurred by my wild insistence, to save what glazes and clays and tools she could.

"Stay quiet," Car Manopu's Wasaltooltic finally hissed. "This way. Not a word until I say."

I blinked in the darkness, reflexively glanced down beside me, looking for Waisi. Sometime while I'd slept, she must have reappeared, for there she lay, curled on her side, back to me.

"Not her;" Car Manopu's Wasaltooltic whispered, clapping a hand over my mouth to stifle my cry of relief. "Leave her sleep. Now come."

So I did.

Outside, stars like flecks of fine glazed porcelain glittered upon the dark table of night. I couldn't say the sky looked black, for it was so bright with luminescence it looked as if white slip had been gently swirled through it. Twisted Foot Ryn's Tak, Big Grum Grum's Li and her goiter-necked old mother, and Korshan's Limia awaited us in the courtyard. Nervous as caged mitewings, the lot of them were, save for Goiter Mother, who champed her toothless gums and eyed me with disgust.

Car Manopu's Wasaltooltic made a placatory gesture. Goiter Mother lifted her nose and turned her back on me.

We went off under our compound entry arch, its ceramic liana vines, flowers, and miniature dragon eggs even more beautiful by starlight. The ground beyond was antithetical to the archway: Human waste and detritus from yesterday's mob fouled the earth. We picked our way around it.

Through the alleys of Wabe Din Sor we walked, silent save for the whisk-rasp, whisk-rasp of our bitoos snagging upon the brick walls of narrow strictures. I dared speak up.

"Where are we going?"

"Your mother," Car Manopu's Wasaltooltic said, which wasn't helpful, as I'd already intuited that much. The terseness of her reply, however, held in check further questions.

Our little group paused at one juncture and consulted in furious whispers before turning down the narrowest alley we'd yet entered. From the rancid, smoky smells coating the air, I guessed we walked the outskirts of the leather tanners' clan. Despite the stench of dead gharials, my stomach lurched and gurgled. It recognized the smell of meat, however inedible.

The alley ended. Dense black towered before us. Jungle. Just like that.

The black was a solid sheet, yet from the corner of my left eye I thought I saw a section shiver, and maybe also to my right, and also somewhere above and before us....

The whole jungle was alive.

A crick-ben gave a piercing scritch near my forehead. I lifted my hands and swatted, expecting the fat insect to whir into my eyes in its quest for a warm, damp place to lay eggs.

Scritch, scritch!

The thing was right above me. I swatted the air furiously. In return, I received a swat from Big Grum Grum's Li. Looking directly at me, dandruff-flaked eyebrows furrowed, she pursed her lips and ... scritchl

"Haaa!" I breathed in admiration. That was some talent, that.

One of her fierce eyebrows twitched, and she turned away.

Then something did move at the jungle's edge, filmy and sloth slow. A gigantic kwano spirit! I tried to shriek a warning, but only a squeak came out. Good thing, because heartbeats later I realized it was Mother, stagger-picking her way through liana vines and slippery palm, and over great buttressed tree roots.

I hurled myself at her. She caught me up as though I were much smaller. I burst into tears, then was furious and pounded her with my fists.

"Still, now. I had to leave you, Zarq. No harm done."

"She'll wake the leather tanners. Close those lips, tupu!" Goiter Mother husked, calling me little brat as if she were Waisi. "Should never have brought her."

"Better she make this noise at the jungle's edge than back in the women's barracks," Car Manopu's Wasaltooltic said dryly.

"Zarq, listen now," Mother said, setting me upon the ground. "Listening?"

"You shouldn't have left me!"

"I told you I would return. Enough noise for now. Fine?"

I wiped snot across one arm, sucked in a quavering breath, and nodded shortly.

"Good." Above my head, to the others, she said, "We'll form a chain and pass everything along the line, yes? Reduce the chances of stepping on something nasty."

Murmurs of agreement.

"Work quickly," Mother said as she retraced her steps back into the jungle. "Something prowls."

A gasp of dismay from us all.

"A cat?" breathed Tak.

"Stinking afterbirth mess, this," Goiter Mother spat. "Come now, move, move, and let's be done with this place!"

They tried to place me at the safest end of the line, beside the leather tanners' walls. I refused. I wasn't letting Mother out of my sight again. Realizing the futility of insistence, they complied, and so we sweated hard the night through, Mother disappearing back and forth into the ebony jungle, each time returning with a heavy packing urn, the widemouthed kind used for storing palm oil.

That was how it went: Mother would pick her way toward me, hiss at me to stop scratching, foist an urn into my arms, and I in turn would stumble a few feet over crushed foliage and thrust my burden into the arms of Korshan's Limia, while Mother retrieved yet another urn. A thousand biting things eagerly partook of my exposed ears, neck, arms, and legs.

"Stop scratching," Limia hissed at me as she turned and staggered to where Tak awaited, several feet away.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven urns ...

"How many more?" I whined. My arms felt soft as undercooked paak, and my legs trembled.

"Courage," Mother grunted.

Her next burden was not an urn but a heavy block of clay wrapped in damp leather. I couldn't carry it; she barely could. The women worked in pairs after that, hoisting huge blocks of clay between them from Mother's cache in the jungle, and I was mercifully exempted from labor.

At last they finished.

"Can we open one, please?" I begged, eyeing the oil urns as we all leaned against a wall to scrape spitfrog foam from our calves and slug slime from our soles. "I'm so hungry."

The others exchanged looks. Sadness turned Mother's starlit face into a clackron mask. "No food in these, Zarq."

"None?" I said in disbelief. "None at all? You hid no food?"

"Food, gaaa!" Goiter Mother spat. "Pigments and glazes, clay powder and gold leaf, fluting and modeling tools and sieves. Things we cannot do without, that's what we hid."

"But we need food!" I felt betrayed that Mother had risked her life in the jungle solely to save the tools of her art and hadn't given a thought to saving so much as a scrap of food for me while she was at it.

"Food we'll find," Korshan's Limia murmured. "Help carry something, little one: Dawn comes."

She was right. The stars were dimming in a clay-gray sky. Mother found me the smallest, lightest urn to carry and tried to stroke my hair, but I ducked out of reach.

We staggered back to our compound, urns balanced on hips and heads and clay slabs hoisted with leather straps over bent backs. Once in the work shed, we unpacked the urns, placing a tool here, a brush there, trying to make them appear dropped and overlooked. The urns of liquid glaze we tipped onto their sides, after first ensuring they were firmly stoppered, and rolled them into corners and under the long pottery table, which was still with us only because of its weight and length.

It was a poor guise at best. Mother felt sure that none of the men would report our transgression to Temple, and the other women concurred, relaying to her in undertones how the men had miraculously found so many chits buried in their huts earlier.

"Ah. So glad to see their common sense is stronger than piety, after all," she said dryly.

Finally, we slipped back to the women's barracks to sleep. No sooner had my eyes closed than a flametail gave its morning cry; moments later, birdsong shattered the silence of dawn.

"Time to get up," Mother whispered. She stroked my hair. I rolled away from her.

In daylight, Mother's overnight stay in the jungle announced itself to all: Her ankles were striated and puffy, as though thin wires encircled them, bites festered on her arms, and one eyelid was swelling to the size and color of a plum. I was aghast. All that from a single night in the jungle?

To my astonishment, no one remarked on her injuries. Children who stared were slapped into looking the other way by navel aunties or mothers. Even Waisi kept her lips closed, though it seemed as if she hadn't even noticed Mother's appearance. Strangely, she wore the twin of Mother's swollen eye, and crimson welts marked her arms, too.

My anger at Mother's disappearance was nothing compared to the cold hostility Waisi showed her. Mother took in Waisi's injuries with a swift, searching look and opened her mouth to speak. Waisi flared her nostrils, spat at Mother's feet, then stalked to the latrines.

I gaped.

"Oh, Zarq," was all Mother said, and she gave a sigh so full of weary ache that my grudge against her dissolved.

Greatfather's Proclamation that morning surprised no one: Our clan would slash vines and make fuel bundles to trade to neighboring clans for food, while a party of potters set off to the Grieving River to collect clay.

Hunger and fatigue had made me featherweight and easy to startle, and during the Proclamation my eyes fixed on one thing and then another, blinking infrequently. I didn't see how I could carry green liana vines. But I was a Clutch serf, born and bred. I accepted my lot without protest. Well, without much protest.

No one had yet ventured into the work shed. The "overlooked" treasures that lay in wait still remained undiscovered.

Frayed nerves, hunger, and callous heat: a bad mix. Tempers flared as we slashed encroaching liana vines from the outer walls of our compound.

Liana vines must be thoroughly dry before they can be twisted with dragon dung and resinous macci leaves for fuel. Our labors were worth little in the way of food at day's end, with only green vines to sell. Everyone knew that. Still, we worked the day through, squint eyed and grim, snapping like feral dogs at each other.

Hard work and vine sap disintegrated the bandages around my wounded hand, the one touched by venom from the dragonmaster's whip at Mombe Taro. Soon my palm throbbed, was rubbed raw. Still I worked, the fumes of the bleeding vines coating my teeth and tongue like bitter chalk. The humid air filled with the crush of fat beetles trodden upon, the distinctive wet rasp of machetes decapitating snakes, the whining of hungry children and the arguments of surly men.

I worked with Kobo's and Car Manopu's kin, alongside my friends, Rutvia and Makvia. Old Kobo and his kin had duly laid their machetes upon their mats for giveaway Sa Gikiro night, but all of Car Manopu's kin had buried theirs. As the day progressed, resentment over this grew between the two families. Exhausted from ripping vines from walls with bare hands, Kobo and his brothers began grumbling about the impiety of others. Car Manopu's lot griped about the dismal quantity of vines some had cleared away compared to their own.

Words turned into violence and violence into death when Car Manopu spoke heatedly against the Emperor.

He should have known better, to speak thus before Kobo the Zealot. But it was not for nothing he was named danku Re Car Manopu, Junior Iron Fists of the Pottery Clan, for he was as muscled and rebellious as his legendary namesake.

Danku Re Car Manopu was a broad-shouldered, thick-waisted man with navel ties to the silversmiths' clan. Like so many brawny Malacarite men, the name Iron Fists had been given him during his Call-the-Name-Out Ceremony. Many Car Manopus lived in Clutch Re. all named after Zarq Car Mano, Malacar's infamous warrior hero.

Perhaps you have not heard of him, though I find that difficult to believe, for tales of his exploits travel with sea merchants and slave traders even beyond the Ocean of Derwent. But as the story of Zarq Car Mano is crucial in understanding Malacar's history, indulge me in a lecture.

Malacar, our beloved, beleaguered nation, has been invaded so frequently that of necessity we Malacarites are able to apply a short view on history and oft use forgetfulness as a survival technique.

We have been invaded twice by those on Lud y Auk, back when that island was known as Messer and its fierce, brown-skinned people were not yet under the Emperor's yoke. We have been invaded repeatedly by the Xxeltekers, the blond foreigners who share our continent yet are separated from our coastal nation by the glacial mountain range to the north of us. Selut y Din, the crescent island westernmost in the Archipelago and home to the throne of the Emperor, has reared our most frequent invaders. There is even evidence that the legendary race that inhabited the rocky isle of Nan y Nan once landed as an army upon our shores.

Yet of all these invasions, none have caused as much strife and hardship to the common Malacarite as the warring of our own people.

We've always had a macabre, almost necrophiliac love of the dead, we Malacarites. Over the centuries, this perverse obsession developed into geographical politics: a man who died in such-and-such a place performing such-and-such a great deed became an icon that forged a small country, solely from the fervor devoted to protecting the hero's sepulchral tower from thieves and rivals. Thus the first Roshu Paras were formed, the private armies devoted to protecting the dead from the living.

Ridiculous, really, but then is there any claiming of ownership of dirt that isn't ludicrous, when stripped of all romanticism? So we fought each other as we ourselves were being attacked, all for the love of cadavers. And borders were formed.

Until Zarq Iron Fists.

Ruthless, arrogant, and immense with muscle—the ultimate Malacarite man—Zarq Car Mano bullied the various quarreling countries into a single nation and named it Malacar, Land of Iron, in honor of himself. A feverish time of intense national patriotism ensued, a time we fondly and erroneously call the Dragon-Blessed Blossom Days. Under Zarq Car Mano's rule, Malacarite armies even invaded the isles of the Archipelago, though tales of the battles fought and plunders gained are exaggerated.

Alas, Zarq Car Mano was only mortal. He died a painful death after a long, debilitating bout of blood poisoning, caused by poor hygiene, indiscriminate sexual habits, and an advanced case of mating pustules. His demise, combined with the ascension of a new, wily Emperor in the Archipelago, plunged Malacar back into its woeful habit of being invaded; this time, Malacar was thoroughly conquered.

It was after Car Mano that I was named.

I asked Mother many times why she'd chosen that name for me.

"It's a good name, an honorable name. Is it not?" she said.

"It's a boy's name."

"A name has neither breast nor beard."

"Yes but... but..." It was at that juncture I always gave up. Until one day, it dawned on me: "It's not traditional to name a girl Zarq. It's wrong."

I was flushed with pride at my clever response. Mother was not so impressed.

"Tradition is always right then, hey-o?" she murmured. "'But did not Zarq Car Mano defy tradition by uniting rival countries into a nation? Tradition is not something to be followed without question, Zarq. It's rarely as pure and correct as it's made out to be. All tradition means is that something has become accepted over time. That's all. It's good to question such things."

Good to question tradition. Mother? Perhaps. But perhaps only in the safety of one's thoughts, or with navel kin that one can trust with one's life. You would have to be a fool to question the current version of tradition before a hungry, devout traditionalist. Worse than a fool to belittle his beliefs if he has just lost everything through adhering to a particularly questionable custom started by an unloved foreign dictator.

Not that danku Re Car Manopu was worse than a fool. No. He was hungry, muscle sore, thirsty, and sun scorched. His pride was deeply festering from the double blow of watching his clan pillaged by neighbors, and by the refusal of his own navel clan, the silversmiths, to sell eggs and oil at a reasonable price.

And he had that name—Car Mano—to nudge his thoughts against the Emperor's Temple.

Yes, it was at the backs of many potters' minds that day, the thought that if each clan could own an egg-laying dragon, as in the Dragon-Blessed Blossom Days of Zarq Car Mano, then no Sa Gikiro, no eve celebrations, and therefore no resultant eight-day poverty need plague a clan. Perhaps I did not think such things, but then I was only a naive nine-year-old.

But I'd overheard such thoughts spoken aloud elsewhere, by drunk potters sprawled about the courtyard, arguing politics and smoking until dawn.

Many held the belief that dragon ownership should not be monopolized by Temple; there were stories about how, a hundred seventy years ago, dragons were not considered divine. This was before Malacar was ruled by the Emperor, before his theological dictatorship, before Temple decreed how and by whom dragons could be used.

Like all serf children, I was raised with the implicit dream that things could be otherwise; within my blood and with every beat of my heart was the hope—rarely voiced aloud by adult or child—that one day, a clan might own its own egg-laying dragons. Might free itself from poverty and Temple's might. One day.

So in fairness, let it be known that Car Manopu of Re's pottery clan only spoke what had been quietly spoken before, only voiced what many thought about Temple. That he did so to old Kobo the Zealot was the curse of kwano.

It all happened so quickly. I was less than an arm's length away, squatting on my haunches before a bundle of vines. I heard the argument, witnessed the shoving, saw the machete slice into Kobo's flesh. A fine spray of blood misted my feet, my knees, my arms.

Shrill screams. Shouts. The thud of fist striking flesh. Dust was kicked up and vine bundles were trampled and scattered as legs and feet flashed about me. Curses, wails, bellows ...

Waisi pulled me free. She dragged me through the tight knot of chaos by one arm, as though I were a bundle of vines. She sat me before her, my back to our brawling clan, and fiercely started cleaning my face.

"I hate them," she hissed. "I hate them all. I hope they kill each other."

And she kept saying that, over and over, until I screamed at her to stop.

SIX

Kobo died.

Never before in the history of Re's pottery clan had one potter murdered another. More than grieved, we were appalled. Not so Mother; fury radiated from her like porcupine quills. I'd never seen her so angry. Such emotion belonged to Waisi. I followed her throughout that afternoon and evening like a burr stuck to her hem, fascinated by her rage.

Night fell. Corpse and liana vine bundles lay within our courtyard.

Mother stalked to the work shed and slammed the door on the death keens of Kobo's kin. I slipped in after her. By moonlight, she snatched up the tools we'd artfully arranged earlier and thumped them down on the wooden pottery table. She dropped to her knees, rolled an urn out from its hiding place beneath empty shelving, and heaved the bung from its neck so violently that the resultant pop sounded like a branch snapping.

She didn't drop the cork bung, but hurled it—in my direction. I ducked.

"Stay out of the way!" Mother cried. Then, contradicting herself, "Fetch water."

I scurried to the cistern squatting in the Wet Season corner of the room. It's a testament to how sure I was of my mother, then, for I knew she hadn't thrown that bung at me but had hurled it aimlessly. She raged not at me, therefore I didn't tremble or cry as I heaved off the cistern's heavy wooden cover. Though I did hurry; no need to provoke a bull already in a fury.

While I fumbled in the dark for the cistern's dipper bucket, Mother banged this and that onto the table. I heard another bung squeak-popped from its urn.

SEVEN

As soon as dawn broke, we went to see Waisi.

The celebrations that had started when the first Temple wagon had rolled into the korikapku, the glass spinners' clan, were now finished, and the place glowed with the satisfaction of a recently sated python.

The few korikap women who were awake and in the courtyard watched us with heavy-lidded indolence. They were not in the least concerned with our presence. From what I could see of them when I dared glance up from the ground, was that every last one was red eyed from lack of sleep and red cheeked from overeating.

I grew bolder, looked longer.

A cluster of women sat upon the ground amid a luxurious pool of pillows. They lazily raked soft oils through their uncoiled hair with lacquered ebony combs. A little ways off, two women lifted a long sheet of gauzy netting off a table made from upturned paak barrels clustered together; honeyed cakes briefly glittered upon the barrels like dozens of sticky miniature suns. My stomach roiled as saliva flooded my mouth.

Mother approached one of the young women draped across the pillows. The woman was nursing a baby that had recently been massaged with oil; its limbs gleamed as it chuckled at her breast.

"I'm waiting for bull wings to bless the herd of Re," Mother murmured in polite greeting.

"May your waiting end. May bull wings hatch," the woman responded, revealing a horribly yellow front tooth among her upper teeth. It reminded me of a toucan's beak.

I was immensely pleased that one so recently blessed had to bear such ugliness throughout her life; not a noble thought, but perhaps you can forgive me, given my age.

Our clan was hungry and desperate enough to face those dangers, to skirt on that knife-edge of death. We journeyed to the sesal fields, my blood-Uncle Rudik acting as clan elder, for Greatfather Maxmisha had fallen into a deathly sleep from hunger and was not likely to wake.

We rode to the sesal fields in wagons that usually transported gharial meat and oil from the Re slaughterhouses, and buzzing flies and the rancid stench of grease and old blood accompanied us the entire way.

In the searing sun, the brooder dragons pulling our wagons stank as badly as the wagons themselves. The old brooders' moss-and-rust-colored scales reeked of decay and regurgitated food, but despite the fetor, I could see the beasts as nothing short of a food source. Throughout the long journey to the sesal fields, I kept inanely hoping a brooder might drop an egg, and that the daronpuis driving our wagons would permit us all to eat it on the spot. Raw.

Even the thought of eating the shell appealed, I was that hungry.

None of the old brooders dropped a single egg during the journey, though. Of course not. Their egg-laying days were long over.

That didn't stop me from crooning to the old brooders, pleading with them to drop an egg. Despite Mother's murmurs that I hold my tongue, I kept up my songs; I was delirious, see, for the hand that had three months ago touched dragon venom during Mombe Taro was now pudgy with rot, the arm streaked crimson. As the hot day and interminable wagon ride to the fields wore on, I slipped into a feverish puddle at Mother's feet, my inane pleas to the dragons unintelligible.

We arrived at the sesal fields at dusk. Murmurs of dismay rose from our clan at the manner of shelter so generously supplied by our warrior-lord: a cluster of slipshod structures, each one different from the next. Mismatched planks, sheets of woven reeds, bolts of improperly cured gharial hide, and mud-straw bricks stacked and strapped together haphazardly had all been used to create temporary housing for the replacement pickers, to protect us from the nocturnal cats that prowled the fields. In my feverish mind, I saw the camp as the ruins of a hamlet, masticated by some great creature, then spat out again upon the earth.

Mother hoisted me over a shoulder as if I were a sack of chaff.

"Hey-o, wake up," she said, pinching me. Three months ago, such a pinch would have made me howl. But hunger had sapped her strength and now the pinch was just a flitting irritation. I closed my eyes. My head bump-bumped against her knobby spine. I just wanted to sleep.

Clunk\ The back of my skull thudded against hard ground and my eyes flew open. Mother's face loomed over me. We were in a tent, a floating tent, the gharial hide shifting this way. dancing that way....

"I'll be back," Mother sighed, and then hands were pinning me down, soft large hands smelling resinous and acrid.

A bald woman with no eyebrows knelt astraddle my waist.

"Her hand, is it?" she murmured in a baritone. "Nasty."

I bucked and yawed like an unbroken yearling, trying to throw the woman off, and I grabbed her throat and dug in my nails to rip out her larynx.

"None of that!" the woman boomed, and she rose off me in a whoosh of green cloth, turned, and dropped back down on me, sitting bottom-naked upon my face.

Ah. This was no woman. An empty scrotal sac devoid of all hair, and a humid little penis that smelled of astringent soap, squashed roundly against my chin.

The man neatly pinned my arms one apiece under his knees. At his order, someone else sat upon my thrashing legs. Then he started picking at my hand, for all the world like a big green carrion beetle. I passed out.

If it hadn't been for that gelded creature, I'm sure I would have died that day in the warehouse.

Mother had found a chanooi, a proselyte of the Chanoom Sect, administering to the new sesal pickers. All chanooi are castrated, the women circumcised in the manner of convent holy women, thus the man was permitted in the tents of women and children. My hand, with its necrotic flesh, was a clarion call to the chanoom zeal for cleanliness.

What better way to fulfill a holy vow to rid the world of filth than to carve away a child's gangrenous flesh and save the life of the pus-pocked, feverish skeleton?

It's funny to whom we owe our lives, hey-o.

I passed the next few days in delirium.

While I sweated and hallucinated in fever, the rest of my clan picked sesal nuts and hintoop buds and tart widik fruit from the fields. When everyone returned at nightfall, they found me asleep outside, at the entrance of our clan women's tent, my fever reduced somewhat more each day, my arm a little less red, and my hand swathed in clean bandages that imprisoned fresh maggots against my dead flesh.

They ate well, those maggots. My wound began to heal.

Afternoon of the third day, my fever broke.

I became aware of my lucidity gradually, as though stupor were some viscous coating melting off me. I slowly understood that the moans and pantings about me belonged not to otherworld spirits, but to wounded and ill people sprawled, like me, on the threshold of their assigned clan tents, for by midday, each tent turned into a kiln beneath the relentless sun and the heat drove the ill outside. I also realized that no shape-changing demons hovered over me, but instead, clouds of buzzing flies. And no massive carrion beetle was presently picking at my hand, merely the compulsively clean chanooi.

"Feeling better, are you?" he said, and he looked well pleased with himself as he placed fresh maggots upon my wound and began bandaging it anew.

I became aware of a mumbled chanting, now even and clear, now hoarse and unsteady.

Without rising, I turned my head and looked about me. Wending his way through the camp was a daronpu acolyte. With crucible and brazier, he swung droplets of consecrated gharial oil over the ground while intoning purifying stanzas. Every now and then he ducked into a women's tent, then ducked out shortly after, still swinging his holy instruments.

The chanooi cleaning my hand followed my gaze, squinting a little in the bright sunlight, sweating in the oppressive heat.

"To cleanse the earth, hey-o," he said with a sanctimonious sniff. "Roshu-Lupini Re is so concerned about the harvest, he disregards the profanity of women sleeping directly upon Clutch soil. An outrageous sacrilege, that."

I thought the chanooi brave and foolish to so openly criticize our warrior-lord, but I also understood his repugnance; no women's barracks existed in this camp, therefore no stilts and no raised wooden floor separated our womanly waters from the dirt. Women wept tears, nursed babes, and dripped menstrual blood directly upon the soil within their respective clan tents. An outrageous transgression of Temple Statute, that, to befoul Clutch soil with female secretions.

I felt shamed by it, was glad the sin was being corrected by the adolescent acolyte's chants and holy oil.

"Now you sleep," my chanooi said. He patted me on the head with a sweaty hand, rose, and moved to a tent adjacent to ours, to his next patient.

I continued to watch the daronpu acolyte swing oil hither and thither over the ground as he ducked in and out of the encampment's coarse mud-brick structures and lopsided yurts. Gradually, he drew closer to our clan women's tent.

Hey-o, was he handsome! He was the perfect result of Archipelagic and Malacarite breeding: broad shouldered, skin the color of aged ivory, eyes the color of rich, wet loam. His beauty made me acutely aware of my sorry state and my nonexistent hips and breasts.

Our eyes met as he approached our tent.

My gaze lingered overlong on him; I did not drop my eyes as I should have. I couldn't; his beauty held me in its thrall.

Still swinging his oily instruments, still droning stanzas, he came toward me.

He moved with an easy confidence; he knew the power of his looks, and that reminded me of Waisi. Indeed, he was exactly the type of self-assured, attractive young man that would have cast eyes at Waisi while at market, and she at him. But here he was, looking at me, and as he continued to step over the prone sick and pick his way round refuse, a flush started up my cheeks and my heart beat faster.

He stood before me. He continued to regard me, and up close, I could see his look was not what he would have directed at Waisi, not at all. There was too much poise and amusement in his mien, and I knew, in my secret heart, that he was merely diverting himself, momentarily, from his tedious task of purifying soiled ground.

But I didn't care.

I was thrilled by the stir of emotions his attention evoked. His eyes direct upon mine stirred some small animal within me, a creature that not only sought food and light, but seemed, in fact, ravenous. No man had looked at me that way before, in jest or otherwise, and yet here stood the most beautiful young man I'd ever laid eyes on, his whole attention focused solely upon me.

He smiled; my heart nearly burst with joy, and a peculiar heat bloomed near my bladder.

"You're beautiful," I whispered, not realizing till the words left my lips that I would speak.

His smiled twitched. He lifted a foot. Dropped it gently down on my closest leg. Stroked.

I held my breath, was lost in the sensation of his skin gliding over mine and the magnificence of his eyes.

"Like that?" he murmured.

I could not speak, felt faint, would have done anything that he asked of me, instantly.

A bead of his sweat fell slow-slow through the air and landed on my cheek. I touched it with a finger, brought the finger to my lips. Savored the briny taste.

His look altered somewhat, darkened briefly, and his foot fell still on my leg, and I knew, I knew, that for that moment I held him in a thrall much the way Waisi usually entranced men. Exhilaration swooped through me; I felt desirable and female and canny with seduction for the first time in my life.

I opened my mouth to ask for more, to again say I found him beautiful, but the words choked in my throat. The moment passed. The acolyte regained his senses. With a curt laugh, he withdrew his foot from my skin, stepped over me, and performed his cursory purification of our women's tent.

I lay at the tent's threshold, staring into the cloudless, sun-seared sky, overwhelmed by a maelstrom of emotions.

The acolyte finished inside our tent. He stepped over me. The smell of male sweat and temple incense flushed over my skin like heat. He walked away, still swinging his brazier beside him. Just before he disappeared behind a neighboring tent, he paused. Glanced back at me. Winked.

And I knew I would never forget him, that daronpu acolyte who'd caressed my skin. I knew I'd treasure forever the memory of how I had, momentarily, entranced the most beautiful man I'd ever laid eyes upon by bringing a drop of his sweat to my lips.

That night, I ate for the first time in days. Jungle weeds, brought to me by Mother from her gleaning in the fields.

At the first nibble of the bitter stuff, I gagged and retched. Mother grabbed my chin and glared into my eyes.

"You will eat these, understand? I don't care how bad they taste. You will eat them and get better and join me in the fields."

"But—"

"You'll get nothing else while we are here if you don't. I mean it, Zarq. Nothing."

I stared, barely recognizing her. Flakes of dried blood clung to her filthy chin and neck, as if she'd suffered a nosebleed while in the fields. Her pupils were tiny black points of fury, her lips sallow and drawn back in a snarl.

Bewildered and frightened, I forced the bitter weeds down. Mother nodded in satisfaction, then fetched a bowl of yanichee from the massive communal cauldrons simmering somewhere in the middle of the camp. Carefully, patiently, she tipped the broth little by little down my throat.

I fell asleep promptly after, as exhausted as if she'd forced me to run laps about the tent.

The next morning, I woke rational and clear-eyed.

The encampment was plunged in that expectant, densely silent gray peculiar to the cusp of dawn. Even the ever present hordes of flies that zoomed round and round the inside of our tent like angry miniature tornadoes clung now to the walls in silence. The snores and heavy breaths of the other women and children from our clan, crammed back-to-back in the tent, seemed quieter in the dawn's gloom, calmer, even.

Mother sat beside me, one hand upon my arm; she had prodded me awake.

"Today you come with us, hey-o," she whispered. "Pick nuts, earn chits."

Her grip on my arm tightened.

"This coughing sickness is our way to buy back Waivia, Zarq. As long as sesal and hintoop are being gathered, Roshu-Lupini Re disregards the touch of a woman upon his Temple-sanctioned notes. Whomsoever picks is paid. Simple as that."

With a quick look left and right to make sure no one was yet awake and watching, she parted and lifted her bitoo. I was shocked at how thin her thighs had become, at how much her belly protruded. All the pottery clan children, myself included, had a little of that potbellied look. After several months of hard labor cutting vines to sell, without eggs and meat to sustain us and living solely on a diet of coarse roughage that swelled the belly but didn't satisfy the hunger, of course we looked that way. But I hadn't noticed such a potbelly on an adult before.

It was the object strapped above her belly that Mother wanted me to look at, though: a belt pouch, fashioned from some sort of broad leaf that had been stitched together by fibrous strands of a plant. The belt hugged her hips and the pouch hung just above the cinnamon arrow of her sex.

"It works like this, see," she whispered. "One picks sack after sack of nuts and fruit, and these are tallied, and at day's end chits are placed before you at collection table."

She dropped her bitoo, spread it back over her thighs.

"Your father doesn't know I have this pouch. No one from the danku knows. They think I'm too busy looking after everyone to pick, so no one is surprised by how few chits I give to Rudik at day's end. We'll buy Waivia back yet, Zarq! But I need you, understand. I need you to pick for me. For Waivia."

Her speech, her need, drained me. I closed my eyes.

"I'll get you some yanichee, yes? Hot-hot, just fresh made this morning by the camp cooks."

She rose, tiptoed through the tent, and ducked outside.

By the time she returned, people were stirring throughout our tent. Babies mewled and children were asking for food and the latrines. By the time I finished drinking the bowl of yanichee Mother had fetched for me, the ubiquitous clouds of flies once more buzzed above our ears, as if our presence enraged them.

"You stand now, yes? No more peeing in an empty gourd for you. I'll help you to the latrines. Then we go to the wagons that will take us into the fields. You come picking today."

Leaning heavily on Mother's arm for support, I shuffled to the latrine, which I discovered was no more than a flyblown trough on the western outskirts of the encampment, running right into the sesal fields.

"Hurry, Zarq," Mother hissed as we both straddled the fetid sewer with our bare feet, along with clawfuls of other women and children. "The men are coming; women must do their dirty business first, before they wake."

"I am hurrying," I muttered.

Overhead, dawn stained the sky lavender. Birds trilled and cawed from the sesal bushes surrounding us, and the astringent green scents of jungle foliage vied with the salty aroma of simmering broth and the ashy smell of woodsmoke. The sun sluggishly crested the eastern mountain ridge; instantly, the whole of Clutch Re was plunged in sultry heat.

I didn't feel like working; I wanted only to sleep. Sleep and eat. But I was no longer delirious and I could stand, therefore I was well enough to pick.

Mother wove her way through the chaos of milling men, fussing women, and agitated children gathering round a long line of brooder-pulled wagons. I stayed close to her, overwhelmed by the noisy horde and still weak after my illness. The smell of sweaty bodies and unwashed hair mingled with the leathery reek of the dragons harnessed to the waiting wagons.

Our clan was gathering around two of the dusty wagons in subdued silence—perhaps reminded, by the crowd, of the mob that had descended upon us Sa Gikiro eve. I espied Rutvia and Makvia, and they came to my side, grinning. Though coated in grime, they looked remarkably hale. As did everyone else in our clan.

Everyone save Mother. She alone looked sallow and hollow-eyed, and the neck of her bitoo was stained brown from the nosebleeds she'd suffered while in the fields.

"We've been lining up six or seven times each night for food," Rutvia giggled when I pinched her round cheeks.

"We eat as much as we want, even if it tastes pretty awful. Which it always does, hey-o."

"But don't try eating more than six slices of paak in one night," Makvia soberly advised. "You'll vomit all over the place. Trust me. I know."

I was itching to brag about my experience with the handsome acolyte, about how he'd actually touched me, actually stroked me. But just then everyone began climbing into the wagons.

Mother pulled me close to her. "Remember," she hissed into my ear. "You pick for Waivia. Pick lots, pick fast."

I nodded wearily and climbed into the wagon alongside her.

Moments later, the daronpu driving our wagon cracked whip upon dragon hide. With a lurch, our cart creaked forward.