The Girl and the Stars

An older woman with dark hair that fell in a strange curling way came in hefting a huge bowl that seemed to be made of iron, blackened with fire on the outside and steaming from within, the source of the wonderful aroma. Yaz was as amazed by the woman’s curls as she was by the fact that metal was so plentiful here that it could be used to make bowls to keep food in.

Arka held up her hand. “Two things. One: don’t touch the pot, it will burn you. We serve food hot here. Madeen will bring bowls. Two: this is Madeen. She cooks the meals. Never upset her or you might get something nasty in yours.”

Madeen gave the lie to these words with a motherly smile as she hefted the pot onto the table, then swung round suddenly to aim a narrow-eyed scowl at Maya, who jumped and nearly fell from her chair. Laughing, Madeen went to fetch the bowls.

“Oh, and three: these are spoons.” Arka showed off a metal scoop.

The pot contained what Arka described as stew. Yaz stared at the steaming and complicated pile of . . . pieces . . . in the strange bowl before her. “But what is it?”

“Stew. Eat it. It’s good.” To prove her point Arka scooped up a lump and put it, still steaming, into her mouth.

“But . . . won’t it burn me?” Yaz could feel the heat rising off the stuff.

“No.” Kao spoke the word oddly, trying to fit it around a large mouthful while rapidly sucking and blowing air into and out of his lips. “Is good.”

Yaz, Maya, and Quina joined Thurin, Kao, and Arka and started to eat. Yaz had only ever eaten fish before, hot from the sea or cold on the journey from a closing sea to an opening one. The Ictha ate their travel rations frozen. As far as she knew all the other tribes did too.

The warmth was delicious on its own. Whether it made the slices of fungi taste so wonderful or whether they tasted that good cold Yaz couldn’t say, but she knew for a fact that a burned mouth was a small price to pay. She ate with a dedication that nearly matched Kao’s. She’d never tasted anything so full of flavour, so complicated, savoury with a slight saltiness to it.

Toward the bottom of the bowl, as Yaz mustered the strength of will to slow down, she discovered small chunks that seemed familiar, though far more tasty hot and soaked in the stew’s dark juice. “This is fish!”

“It is.” Arka nodded. “You can’t live on the fungi alone, not for too long. Without fish and salt you fall sick and die. Fish livers hold most of what you need to live.”

“And where do you get fish? Where do you get salt down here?”

Arka met her gaze with serious eyes. “Where do you get iron up there?”

“I . . . the priests trade it with us.”

“And we trade it with the priests.” Arka had all their attention now, though Kao still pushed in another mouthful as he stared at her. “Some say it’s the only reason they put us down here.”

“But . . .” Yaz ran out of words.

“Broken children die if they stay on the ice. A slow, cruel death,” Quina said. “That’s what the pit is for, to keep the bloodlines pure.”

Arka shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. Have any of you ever seen a gerant, hunska, or marjal child given the chance to try?”

Nobody answered.

“They throw us down here,” Yaz said slowly, “and we search for metal from this city, and in return they give us some salt and fish? We work for the priests. Slaves in a hole?”

“Stars too,” Arka said.

“What?”

“We mine the ice for stars too, and trade them for the food we need, and sometimes skins. Though mostly we use rats for that.”

“Rats?”

“Like tiny bears . . . only different.” Arka waved the question off. “But yes, you’re right. We’re slaves working for the priests of the Black Rock.” She pursed her lips. “I’m impressed. It normally takes several days for wets to figure it out, and you’ve just dug most of the answer out with a spoon from a bowl of stew!”

They finished eating without further talk, each held by their own thoughts.

“Is there more?” Kao was the first to speak again.

Arka snorted. “Gerants! Three times as strong, five times as hungry.” She shook her head. “You got the largest bowl. There’s more later. We eat when we rise and again just before we sleep.”

“How do we know when that is?” Maya asked. “The light never changes here.”

Thurin frowned. “You just know.”

“You’ll learn to ‘just know.’” Arka walked to the door, beckoning for them to follow. “It can take a while, but you have the rest of your lives to learn.”

9

   IN THE STORY days the first of men, Zin, who climbed from the sea to Mokka’s tent, rose from his sleeping hides and found himself old. He saw in his hands the lines that told a lifetime. With a sigh he set down his dagger-tooth beside the many kettan he had carved in the long night. Zin left his shelter and saw a brittle dawn in the east. The cold had bound itself tight across the ice. A knowing came then into the first of men, a shout and a whisper, carried by the cruelty of the wind, borne by the strangeness of the sea. This would be his last day. And so Zin walked into the whiteness that was the world, seeking to know what had become of his many sons and daughters.

Though he had grown old Zin bore the wind and the miles upon his shoulders and in the morning of his last day he found three of the four tribes that had sprung from his seed. In the west the Axit had grown broad, their eyes dark, their hearts fierce, and they knew him not. They followed the seas and their fine nets caught small fish in great number and variety. With octar ink his Axit sons tattooed the flames of dragons’ tails across their necks, licking up over their cheeks. Their threats cracked the ice. His daughters wore bones through their eyebrows and came running before their men with spears in hand.

In the east the Quinx had found a dog and it had become many, as dogs will when fed. Zin’s Quinx sons were tall and wore their hair in warrior braids. His daughters there drove dogsleds and with their teams hauled even the Green Whale from the sea. No memory of Zin remained in all of the Quinx. They prized stone beads from such rocks as the Gods in the Sky sometimes cast upon the ice, and because he wore none they counted Zin as lesser, despite his age and the whiteness of his beard.

Far to the south Zin’s Joccan sons walked beneath strange stars in such heat that sometimes molten ice would run and flow even outside a tent and delight the children before it froze again. Joccan wives painted their eyelids black and their hair grew in many shades. The Joccan had forgotten the face of their father and replaced the stories of their mother with lies of the green world that only the gods know.