The Broken God Machine (2 page)

“The swinging stones did this to me,” Pehr’s uncle Khana’Truff told them,
and not for the first time. He pointed to his mangled left leg, the shin and
thigh both obviously broken and not set right. “Had I not such strength in my
arms, I would not have been able to drag myself to safety. I would have been
ground to paste.”

“You were lucky, Father,” Jace said in a tone that seemed to lack the
breathless awe and attention Truff had been expecting. The man whirled to face
his son, giving that familiar glare that Jace and Pehr so often imitated behind
his back.

“Lucky?! I trained for that Test, boy! I trained every day. I was the only
one of my year to make it through the Test at all, and that’s why they softened
it up.”

“Stefan says that’s a rumor,” commented Pehr through a mouthful of gruel and
chunks of sweet, red fish, not looking up from his plate.

Truff grunted, belched, and drank from his stone mug of ale. “Stefan is the
witless son of a witless merchant and knows less about the world even than his
coward father. Rumor? My arse.”

“It’s just what he says, Uncle.”

“My
arse
, I said! What nonsense. If they hadn’t softened it up,
there wouldn’t be five, sometimes six boys from most years to make it
through.”

Nani, Jace’s elder sister by one year, entered the room carrying a basket
holding two loaves of bread and a crock of kampri butter. She was wearing her
most prized possession, a necklace of polished jade chipped with painstaking
care from the edge of Nethalanhal by the hunter Khada’Josep, two years Pehr’s
senior, who had passed the Test first among his peers. The necklace’s creation
was as much a rite of passage as the Test itself, and to gift it to a woman
meant nothing short of the most sincere intent to marry.

“You shouldn’t curse at the dinner table, Father,” Nani said, setting the
bread down and looking at Truff with an expression of playful reproach.
“Especially not in front of the children!”

“We’re not children,” Jace said. Nani ignored him.

“I didn’t curse,” Truff protested, grabbing a loaf of bread and breaking it.
He handed the first piece to his wife, Anna, who bowed her head in thanks. Anna
had taken a vow of silence upon the news of Nani’s betrothal. This was their
custom; she would not speak again until the eve of the wedding, using the
period of silence to meditate, pray to their gods, and gather her thoughts for
the speech she was to deliver at the wedding.

“You said ‘arse,’” Nani informed her father. “I heard it from the
kitchen.”

She took a seat between Pehr and Jace, reaching for the dish of salad in the
center of the table. Using her eating sticks, she brought some to her plate,
and then selected a leaf from the pile and brought it to her mouth, still
smirking.

“Arse isn’t a curse,” Truff grumbled. “But if it offends your delicate ears,
my sweet, you’ve my permission to take your dinner in the pasture with the
kampri.”

Nani stuck her tongue out at him, giggled, scooped fish-gruel from its
wooden bowl with a palm leaf and deposited it on her plate next to the salad.
Pehr glanced over at her and smiled. Nani was a beautiful girl, her brown skin
tanned dark by the sun, her hair plaited and partly bleached with lye-stone,
dyed oranges and reds to layer in with its natural browns. Since her
engagement, she had been in a near-constant good mood, and her grey-green eyes
seemed to sparkle. They crinkled at the corners, when she smiled, in a way that
had always made the back of Pehr’s neck feel warm and prickly. She was smiling
now and he found he had to look away.

“We’re not children, Nani,” Jace said again, elbowing her.

“You’re not men,” Nani said, not looking at him.

“So?”

“So until you’re Tested, you’re children. That’s how it works.”

“You’ve never been Tested.”

“I’m a woman. As you know perfectly well, we don’t take the Test.”

“Don’t see how being betrothed to some hunter who’s made a stupid necklace
makes you a woman …”

“Don’t call my necklace stupid. I don’t have to explain to you how it makes
me a woman. You wouldn’t understand anyway.”

“What about Luce, then?” Jace asked, grinning.

Pehr snickered, and Nani rolled her eyes. Luce was nearing her sixtieth
year, ancient by their standards. She was twenty years older even than Truff,
who was one of the few living hunters who had survived past his thirty-fifth
year. Luce had come to their village as an orphan refugee, her face deeply
scarred during an attack that had decimated her home. Some whispered that it
was the work of the Lagos, the weapons of the Gods, but Luce had never
confirmed it, afraid to be shunned by her adopted people. She had never wed.
She made a living working for the merchantmen, cleaning their homes and sewing
their blankets.

“I think they grant an honorary title anyway, once you’ve seen forty
winters,” Truff said dryly, and the others around the table laughed.

“Perhaps Pehr can take Luce to bed,” Nani said, giggling. “His Test is
nearly here … soon he’ll be a man!”

“If he passes,” Truff said, turning an eye on Pehr, who was still shoveling
gruel into his mouth as if it was his last meal on earth.

“I’ll pass,” Pehr said between bites. “You’ve taught me.”

Truff smiled, nodded, leaned back in his chair. “I have. You’ve not the
arm-strength I had … I’ll say it will take you a bit longer to open the sow’s
brain with your club … but you’re faster and wield a bow better than I did. You
will pass.”

“You said Paul would pass, too,” Jace said, and before he had even finished
the sentence Nani reached out to swat him on the arm. Jace’s face went pink and
assumed an expression of regret with which they were all familiar; his mouth
often went off before his brain could catch up to it.

Truff made an expression that was almost a grimace, as if remembering that
other boy had filled his mouth with some foul taste. Pehr understood the look;
whenever he thought of Paul, and what the Test had done to him, he was filled
with a vast sense of anger and futility and helplessness. Paul had been a young
phenom, and Pehr had worshipped the ground that his older brother walked on.
Still, the Test had taken him.

“I’m sorry, Father,” Jace said. Truff shook his head.

“Don’t apologize for speaking the truth,” he said. “Men make proclamations.
We predict the future. In the end, though, the Test sees the truth in us
all.”

Truff seemed on the verge of saying something further and then shrugged.
What more was there to say? Paul had been the son of a hunter. As such, he had
been tested. It was the only judge of hunters’ sons their people had ever
known, and though it was a harsh one, it had served them well for many
years.

The Test killed, but it did not kill indiscriminately. Paul, dead two years
now, had been a force of destruction with the club, but his strength had come
at the cost of foot-speed, and the caves had judged him. It was not enough to
be strong; only those who were strongest, fastest, smartest, and best with the
bow could survive. All others perished, and in some years this left only a very
small few. In some years, there were none at all. This was Uru, their world,
and this was the only life they knew.

There was silence around the table for a moment, and then Pehr spoke.
“What’s passed is passed. I am not Paul. I will live.”

Truff nodded. Nani favored Pehr with a smile that was all hope and belief
and excitement, and it sent a warm flush swelling across his skin.

“Then you’ll be a hunter,” she said. “You’ll find some nice girl, and give
her your necklace, and then there will be many little Pehrs running about.”

Jace made a gagging noise. Nani reached out and smacked him again, not even
bothering to turn in his direction. Pehr shrugged.

“After the Test there is naught but the will of the Gods,” Pehr said. It was
a saying taught to all hunters’ children, and it was the truth. Pehr had only
vague ideas about life as a man. He would give his necklace to Sili, if she
would have it. He would hunt, she would make bread. They would make children.
What else was there?

“Worry about what comes after the Test some other time,” Truff said.
“Tonight, I need you to help me re-thatch the roof of the chicken pen.”

“Yes, uncle.”

“Good. Jace, you will repair the hole in the kampri fence.”

“But Father—“ Jace began, and Truff held his hand up.

“I’ll not hear it, boy. Your foolish games spooked the beasts and put the
hole there. It’s been two weeks, and a pile of rocks is not a fit solution. The
kampri will shove them aside eventually, and then we’ll be chasing them from
here to the jungle’s edge. You will fix it. Tonight.”

Jace rolled his eyes, sighed, slumped in his chair. “Yes, Father.”

“You would think he had nothing to do with it,” Nani commented, and Jace
glared at her. The boy maintained that he was not at fault, that he had been
performing an experiment when he impersonated the call of a jungle cat, and
could not possibly have expected to trigger a minor stampede. Stupid beasts to
begin with, kampri seemed to lose even their limited brainpower when spooked.
They had hammered a hole in the fence with their horns, and six had escaped
before Jace had built his pile of rocks. He and Pehr had spent an entire
afternoon hunting the fugitives down and returning them to their pen. Truff had
been unimpressed.

“I don’t care who is at fault,” Truff said. “Even if the Gods themselves
hammered that hole in the fence, Jace is the one who is going to mend it.”

“Fine. I’m done anyway,” Jace said. “May I be excused, Father, that I might
carry out this important task you’ve given me?”

Jace’s mother, restricted by her vow of silence, shot her son an angry
glance. Truff noticed this, and the left corner of his mouth curled upward in a
smirk before breaking out into a full grin.

“A little spirit is never a bad thing in a hunter, Anna. Not so long as he
knows when to silence his foolish mouth and do as he’s told. You’ve learned
that lesson well, have you not, my son?”

“All too well, Father. I sometimes wonder if I’ve yet woken up from a few of
your more … zealous teachings,” Jace replied, standing up and collecting his
dishes. He left the room, to deposit them in the washtub, where they would
shortly be attended to by Nani and her mother.

“Is there any bread left?” Pehr asked, glancing around, and Nani laughed at
him.

“Go do your work. If you get it done in time to go out for a swim with me, I
will bring you some bread.”

Pehr turned a questioning look to his uncle, who only laughed. “Don’t ask me
for permission to go, boy. You heard the girl. Get to it.”

Pehr nodded, stood, and followed Jace into the kitchen.

* * *

“How long have we been friends?” Nani asked him, and Pehr glanced over at
her in surprise, eyebrows raised.

“I’ve known you all my life.”

“That’s not what I asked you.”

They had gone to the sea after dinner and their chores were done, swimming
slowly out to the very string of rocks that Pehr and Jace so often visited. The
younger boy hadn't joined them, preferring instead to stay home and work with
his father on techniques with the club.

Nani was lying on her back on the smooth rocks, looking up at the stars
above them. She yawned and said, “When I had five years and you had six, you
used to pull my hair and call me ugly, and I hated you. I
hated
you!”

Pehr, who hadn't thought of those days in so long that they seemed now to
have happened in some other life, laughed a little. “Yes. Do you want me to
apologize, Nani?”

“No. I want you to tell me how long we’ve been friends.”

Pehr thought about it for a moment, looking back through those years, trying
to recall when his relationship with Nani had changed from antagonism to
something else.

“Tenth year,” he said at last.

“Yours or mine?”

“Yours. It was just five years ago. It seems longer. Do you remember
it?”

“I … no. Remember what?”

“When you told Stefan he was no better than kampri shit. You said that
because he was insulting Jace, and he shoved you, and you skinned your
knees.”

Nani’s eyes lit up and she grinned. “That’s right! I didn’t want to cry, but
I couldn’t help it, and you hit him so hard his nose burst.”

“And then he ran home,” Pehr said, nodding.

“You helped me up, and the two of you climbed up in the palms and picked
berries for me. You pretended you were monkeys and made me laugh.”

Pehr shrugged. “Jace made you laugh. When I tried to be a monkey, I nearly
fell from the tree.”

Nani was smiling, her eyes far away. “I remember.”

“That … that is when we became friends, I think.”

“Yes, that was it. I don’t think we ever fought again … not like we did
before.”

Pehr sat in silence. He did not have the words to explain how, in her tenth
year, Nani had made some fundamental step in the transition from the awkward,
obnoxious child she had been to the woman that she would become. It was not
simply her appearance; it went far deeper than that. When Stefan had shoved
her, Pehr had understood in that moment that Nani was
right
. Stefan
was a puling, cowardly bully, and she was better than him, and he had no right
to put his hands upon her.

Though equal in years, Pehr had always been bigger and stronger than Stefan,
and he had settled matters in the way that hunters most often did. Stefan had
fled crying to his merchant father, who had in turn made clear a simple fact of
life: in their village, as in all Uru, it was best to avoid incurring the wrath
of hunters. Stefan had never been more than a minor annoyance to Pehr or his
cousins again.

Nani sighed. “I'm afraid for you, Pehr, and for Jace. Will you speak to me
as a friend tonight? Not as a woman or a girl, not someone to be protected from
the truth, but only as a friend?”