The Broken God Machine (4 page)

Pehr, still trying to catch his breath and struggling to process this sudden
change in a boy who had only ever been good humored, made no reply.

“The Lagos will come, and because of fools like you, we will not be ready.
They will murder us like livestock and drink our blood and put our heads on
pikes. They will take Nani and Sili and even my mother, and hold them down, and
carve them like meat! They will blind them, take their ears and tongues, and
leave them lying in the dirt.

“You can sit here and call it nothing if you want, laugh those drums off as
tales meant to scare babies. Go ahead, Pehr. Go ahead and die. Go ahead and
laugh, and then die like a baptista.”

Pehr lost what little temper he had been able to retain. He surged forward,
grabbing Jace’s scrawny neck and twisting his own broad shoulders. Jace made a
squawking noise, falling sideways, and within moments Pehr had him pinned. Jace
struggled for a moment, but Pehr’s grip proved too strong, and after a moment
he gave up.

“Hit me if you must,” he said. “I deserve it.”

“I’m not going to hit you, wet-head. Get up.”

Pehr let go of the boy and stood up, stretching out his hand to Jace. For a
very long moment there was nothing to be found in Jace’s eyes but abject
despair.

“I’m frightened, Pehr,” he said.

“I know you are. ”

“Will you fight with me, if it comes to that? Will you … I don’t want to be
alone.”

“I will go to my death defending our home. Just like you, and just like
Truff, and every other hunter. If these drums herald the coming of terrible
beast-men of giant size, all filled with black hatred, then so be it. I will
fight on regardless.”

At this, Pehr saw some of the terror leave his cousin’s eyes, and Jace
reached his hand out, taking Pehr’s and allowing himself to be helped up.

“How many arrows do we have in store?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” Pehr said. “Six bundles? Perhaps seven. At least sixty in
all …”

Jace paused, his eyes turned up and to the right, as if reading his thoughts
from the empty sky above. After a moment he frowned, and sighed, and shook his
head.

“It will not be enough,” he said, and without further elaboration he began
to walk toward the village center.

The drums played through the night. It was a time of sparse sleep for Pehr’s
village. In the ever-increasing gloom of dusk, it had become difficult to drive
the old childhood stories of the Lagos out of their minds.

There was talk of flight, at first, but the hunters had quickly put such
thoughts to rest. None among them would willingly abandon their homes, and so
anyone else who left would go without protection. Alone and scattered across
the fields and small forests that lay between their village and the next along
the coast, a place many moons away that few besides the merchantmen had ever
visited, they would surely be easy prey for whatever enemy now threatened
them.

Some of the merchants left anyway, trusting the road and its rigors more
than these gruff warriors whose disdain they were willing to endure only for so
long as it was profitable. There was no market now for shells or linen, or for
the sweet cactus harvested by the nomadic tribes that lived on the edge of the
great northern desert. The only need now was for the merchants’ weapons, of
which every last one had been bought, and information, of which the merchants
had none. Some stayed, others went; to the hunters, the farmers, and their
families, it was of little concern.

Drawn together by the drums, the village families had gathered in its center
without needing to be called, and so it was that the news of Luce’s death
spread quickly among them. She had no family to tend to her body, and her
worthless merchant master had refused the responsibility and fled, so the
hunters had jointly agreed to lead the ceremony of fire. Luce’s body was
tightly wrapped and placed in the dark crypt below the central shrine. There it
would wait for two days, as was their custom, before the burning.

Pehr’s village was made up of a loose collection of families, most of which
were largely self-sufficient except in times of crisis. Truff’s tiny clan was
perhaps the smallest, and the mammoth, fifty-person family to which Nani’s
betrothed, Josep, belonged was without question the largest. In times of grief,
danger, or celebration, the village came together to form a cohesive whole some
four hundred strong between the youngest baby and the eldest member – a title
which had now passed to a man named Kal’Aldus, who had lived for fifty-three
years.

They gathered together now, the women and children nearest to the center,
tending a great fire in the central pit upon which mounds of kampri and ears of
sweet yellow corn were roasting. The hunters and those other men brave enough
and skilled enough to fight stayed on the outskirts, wary of attack, always
watchful. Between them and the fire were the rest, a loose collection of
untrained merchants, farmers, and boys like Pehr and Jace who were old enough
to fight, but not yet truly men.

The farmers and merchants were armed mostly with wooden clubs and a few
flimsy bows. The hunters’ sons were better equipped, carrying greatly superior
bows and clubs with heads of bone. The hunters themselves, of course, held the
best bows, the arrows with the sharpest heads, and large axes or clubs made
from heavy stone, shaped by hours of painstaking labor.

Into the deep of the night they waited and watched, but nothing came from
the blackness save the sound of the drums, which grew ever closer, pounding
their never-ending rhythm and drowning out any hope for peace or serenity. It
was during this time that fatigue began to gnaw at the villagers, and one by
one they succumbed to sleep. Pehr watched it happen, sitting out at the edges
of the firelight, sharpening his bone arrowheads on a piece of stone in between
bites from a chunk of gritty, dried cheese.

“You’ll grind that down to nothing before long,” Jace said. He was perched
atop a boulder, just as before, facing the jungle. If he was feeling any
fatigue at all, he had shown no signs of it.

Pehr shrugged and set the arrowhead aside, picking up a new one. “If we had
more branches, I could be making more arrows.”

“If there were any more branches to be had, I would have brought them to
you,” Jace replied.

Pehr nodded. The yukkiuli trees that dotted the landscape and grew such
fine, straight branches for arrow-making had all been stripped. There were
always more, but only at a distance too great for the scavenging party to have
reached and returned before nightfall. As it was, the last few stragglers had
nearly received arrows in their guts as thanks for their efforts, so nervous
were some of those defending the perimeter.

“Is Nani asleep?” Jace asked him.

Pehr glanced up and over toward the central fire, needing only a moment to
locate Nani’s prone figure, her arms wrapped around Josep’s four-year-old
brother. He could tell even at this distance by the steady, slow rise and fall
of her chest that she was asleep, and he said so to Jace.

“Good,” the boy said. “They won’t come tonight.”

Pehr laughed a little, shaking his head. “Indeed? And you know this …
how?”

“They always attack at dusk. That’s what Luce said. I suppose the drums are
meant to keep us up and make us tired.”

“You’ve become quite the expert.”

“Told you … I listened. I keep all those stories up here.” Jace tapped his
head.

“You always had the mind for those things,” Pehr said. “I could never keep
the stories straight. Grandfathers and Gods and Lagos, the Everstorm, the Great
Destruction … none of it will help me kill a boar that’s decided to
charge.”

Jace nodded. “You would have passed the Test, you know. You were built for
it. Like Josep.”

“There is still time.”

Jace shook his head, still gazing out into the night. “No, there isn’t.”

“We will fight them. Jace, I have no intention of dying when whatever is
banging those drums arrives.”

“Neither does my father, or Josep, or even old Aldus. Pehr, I must ask you
for something.”

Pehr was silent for a time, but finally spoke, reciting another saying: “I
cannot know how I will answer until the question has been asked.”

“When they … when they come for Nani, I …” Jace paused, his throat working.
He had turned at last to look at Pehr, and the older boy could see that his
cousin’s eyes had gone watery, reflecting the firelight in the distance.

“Jace …”

“They mustn’t have her. You must promise me that if it comes to it, you will
take her life. She is my sister, and I can’t bear the idea of … of … I know
that you love her as a sister. I think you would love her as more, if you
could.”

Pehr was taken aback as much by his cousin’s latter statement as by the
request. It was true, he had for many years harbored feelings in his heart
that, though he would never have admitted them to another, had become
impossible to deny to himself. Still, to have been read so easily by this boy
of only fourteen years …

“Jace, I cannot make this promise to you,” he managed at last.

“You can,” Jace said. “Is it not an easy promise to make? If you truly
believe we will survive this, then there is nothing to fear. If in a few days’
time we are all sitting ‘round the table at home, laughing at Jace and his
foolish stories, then I swear to you I will never ask you for anything more in
our lives.”

“It’s not—”

“But if I’m right, and they come for her … Pehr, whatever you do to her will
be like a gift from the Gods compared to what they intend. You’ve seen Luce’s
face. She was the
lucky
one from her village. Promise me that you will
love Nani until the end, and stay with her, and kill her before they can make
her suffer?”

Pehr thought about this. He was neither a fast thinker, nor so cunning as
Jace, but he was also not a fool. He understood what Jace was asking, and why,
and he felt the truth of Jace’s words. Nani was the daughter of a hunter, and
Pehr thought she might even wish for it herself, rather than surrendering to
the beasts.

And so he nodded. “Very well, Jace. I don't believe the end will come, but
if it does, and I'm at her side, I’ll do what’s necessary to keep her from
them.”

* * *

In the dark a girl’s voice called for him, and at first he thought it was
Nani, and that whatever was coming for them had arrived at last. Pehr
struggled to a sitting position, looking around and blinking, and heard his
name called again. This time, though, he realized the voice was not one he
recognized, and it was not coming from within the village’s central circle.
Instead it came from out in the darkness, from an area that he knew to contain
an empty field of grass and a few stripped trees. The moon was obscured by
clouds and there was little light beyond what the fire cast; if someone was out
there, Pehr couldn't see them.

“Pehr, where are you?” the voice asked, and in it Pehr heard such a sad,
plaintive desperation that he could not help but come to his feet. He walked
out into the grass, straining to see into the darkness, secure in the knowledge
that whatever was pounding the drums was to his back and not before him.

Now he could see the figure, tall and rail-thin, female, standing in the
knee-high grass and staring as he approached. He did not know this person. He
did not even know anyone who looked like this person, so unlike the women of
his village.

“I cannot find you,” the girl cried, and Pehr raised his hand.

“I’m here,” he said.

“Oh, Pehr, where are you?”

“I am before you. Just before you.” He was now no more than a dozen paces
from the girl. Surely she could see him.

“I must find him,” the girl muttered to herself, pacing back and forth,
tromping down the grass. “I must.”

“I’m right here,” Pehr said, and he reached out, putting his hand to her
shoulder. The girl spun at his touch, gasping, her eyes going wide, and for a
moment they only stared at each other in the dark.

“Find me,” she said.

Then she was gone. She did not run, or fall back, or even fade from
existence. She was simply gone, and Pehr found himself standing in the middle
of the field alone, staring out into the darkness. He glanced back over his
shoulder at the fire in the central square, checking to see if anyone else had
observed this girl or heard her calls, but it seemed no one else had
stirred.

“A dream,” Pehr said to himself, and surely that must have been right, but
it hadn’t felt like a dream. He felt no more awake now than he had moments
before, when the girl had turned to him and stared. There had been something
strange about those eyes, but he couldn't remember. In fact, all memory of her
appearance was leaving him. He could only remember that she had been someone
unknown, and she had been calling. For him.

Shaking his head, Pehr made his way back to the circle, returned to his
bedroll, and slept.

* * *

By morning, Jace’s eyes were so dark and sunken in their sockets that he
looked almost dead. He ate his breakfast of oat gruel and honey with slow,
listless motions but was otherwise showing no signs of fatigue. He did not yawn
or stretch, did not rub his eyes or nod his head. Pehr, who had slept for a few
hours near the dawn, was growing concerned, but had no idea what to do for the
boy.

Nani had woken with the sun and come to join them. Pehr could see that she,
too, had noticed Jace’s state and was shaken by it. He could read the deep
concern in her glances at the boy and supposed that she was struggling just as
he was to find a way to comfort Jace, to reassure him that they would fight
through this threat. In the distance, the drums crashed and thundered, and the
noise of them seemed to make a mockery of any potential brave
pronouncements.

Jace wouldn’t have believed them, even if he’d had the words, and so Pehr
had said nothing. Jace, for his part, had been silent as well … a rarity for
him, and an event that at other times Pehr might have welcomed. At the moment,
the lack of conversation was growing steadily more uncomfortable, and it was
Nani who finally broke the mounting tension.

“We’ll have to leave the circle soon, I suppose,” she said.

Pehr looked up at her and nodded, then returned to his bowl of gruel. It was
Jace who answered, not bothering to look down at his sister, still staring out
at the jungle as if hypnotized by the sound of the drums.

“Why would we do that?”

“Well, surely we can’t stay here all day. There are crops to tend, fish to
catch, bread to bake …”

“We have enough of those things to last until dusk. After that, we won’t
need any more.”

“The Gods help those who help themselves, Jace. You know that. It’s better
to prepare for tomorrow than to assume it won’t come.”

“The Gods have set the Lagos upon us. We are beyond help.”

Nani glowered at him. “I do wish you’d stop talking like that. The children
are frightened enough as it is without nonsense stories. What if they hear
you?”

“What if they do?”

Nani made a growling noise and hauled herself to her feet, eyes narrowed to
slits, two spots of red standing out on her cheeks. Moving quickly, Pehr stood
as well, and he put a hand on her shoulder.

“Let him be,” he offered, his voice calm and quiet. “Take a walk with me
instead.”

“Where?”

“We’ll go home. It’s not so far that we won’t hear the alarms if something
is spotted.” Anyway, the hunters wouldn’t organize any supply parties for
another hour or more. Nani could make the dough and set it out to rise while he
fed the kampri.

Nani considered this, and then took Pehr’s hand, letting him lead her away.
“Fine. Fine, then! We’ll let Jace stay here and brood by himself.”

“We’ll be back before dusk,” Pehr said to Jace, and the boy nodded.

“Very well.”

“Come, Nani,” Pehr said, and he tugged on her hand again. When she turned to
follow him, he let it go, and together they started toward their home. They had
walked only a short distance in silence before Nani reached down, picked up a
stone, and hurled it with all of her might toward the lagoon to the west.