Beasts Made of Night Page 6

  “So you know your formulas.” I don’t know where the edge in my voice comes from, but suddenly, I don’t like the way this apprentice is talking about us and where we come from. “Well, scholar, that doesn’t mean you know anything about the dahia. Or about what we do.”

  I grab a glass and pour myself some tea, then, with a spoon, add a dollop of honey . . . and my fingers are still sticky. I take a sip of the tea and grimace. It’s cold.

  Aliya is quiet for a moment, watching me stubbornly slurp down the tea.

  “You’re right,” she says finally. “I don’t know anything about being an aki, but I want to learn. Would it be all right if I spoke with you two further? I’ve never conducted an Eating. I haven’t even seen one in practice. But to be able to reconcile these images with what’s spoken of in the texts would greatly advance my studies and—”

  “Hey.” I don’t bother to keep the edge out of my voice this time. “We’re not experiments. We’re just bodies. Collecting all the horrible things the royal family thinks or does so that their pure spirits can rejoin Infinity. They lie and cheat, and we pay for it. Meanwhile, we’re left to gather the city’s sins. Is that written in your archives?” I get up without bothering to finish the tea. “Come on, Bo. Let’s get out of here.”

  As soon as I’m outside, I tighten my cloak around my neck. The wind has picked up. Bo appears at my side a moment later. The setting sun bleeds red in the streets. Just as we’re getting ready to head off, I hear someone huffing behind us.

  “Wait! Please, wait.” It’s Aliya.

  We both turn. She’s out of breath. Despite my earlier outburst, I feel a little sorry for her.

  “Please, I didn’t mean to offend. I’m not used to talking to people, to anyone really, outside of the archives. But this is how I see the world. All of it. Trigonometric functions and equations, that is how the Unnamed speaks to me. It is all connected. It all makes up Infinity, and I know that the aki are a piece of it. A necessary and important piece of it.” She steps closer to Bo and lowers her voice. I can tell she’s looking my way when she speaks, even though I keep my back turned. “On your bodies, I don’t see sins, or anything to be ashamed of. I see functions. Equations. I see poems.”

  “Mage, what we do is difficult, awful work,” Bo says. “We find very little solace in our lives because of it. What peace we do find, we are very likely to keep to ourselves or share only with others like us,” Bo says. “It’s easier that way.”

  “But can I see you again?”

  Bo smiles at her and slides his hand out to her, palm up. “May the Unnamed protect you, Aliya.”

  After a second, she slides her palm over his. “And you as well.”

  Then he turns, and the two of us head toward home. We don’t get very far when we hear footsteps behind us.

  “Wait!” Aliya shouts, running up to Bo. “One question. Please, before you leave. Why are your sin-spots faded and your friend’s are not?” She pants between each word.

  Bo looks to me, and all I can do is glare back. It’s easy to forget sometimes. We all become white-pupiled. But everyone else’s sin-spots fade away with time. Except mine.

  Bo turns back to the Mage. “We don’t know. We never ask. Maybe someday, you’ll find the answer.”

  “Bo!” I shout.

  Without another word, we leave the Mage behind. The lamplights have begun to turn on.

  My red drapes flutter in the breeze. The prayer call echoes over the city. A low baritone voice that trills. It’s the only sound to be heard for miles.

  I’m tired. Too tired to wrap myself in that moth-eaten blanket and stretch my legs out over those threadbare pillows that sport patches of dried drool. Behind me, someone nudges the door open. I lift my head to see it’s that little aki I thought I lost in the Baptism. Omar. I’m mad at myself for losing track of him, but a bigger part of me is proud that he made it out alive on his own. He’s learning.

  “Come in, brother.” I make space by the window for him, and he shimmies up to my side.

  “It still hurts.” The kid hasn’t reached for his wrist once since he came in, and I’m proud of him. “It hurts,” Omar says again. Quieter. To himself.

  “It won’t forever,” I lie.

  I don’t say anything else. I just look out and watch the setting sun throw gorgeous colors over the northern dahia. The Hurlers earlier made the place look like broken teeth. But the purple and red cutting through the clouds like a daga still make the slum look beautiful.

  In the near-silence of the prayer ceremony, families sit in quiet meditation, forming concentric circles around their shrines. Apparently, it’s all supposed to mean something. According to that nosy apprentice, it matters how many sides there are to a shrine or the fact that we sit in circles or the way my sin-spots are arranged on my arms and legs and chest and back, but it’s all lahala. I wish I knew why I’m so angry at her.

  I can see kids from the neighborhood clambering over the rubble. One of them is carrying a ball, and they start playing.

  Another small group crowds around a girl as she arranges shards of colored glass and stones on a wall as the others watch. The sun angles itself just right, and colors—green and blue and yellow—splash against the rim of the dahia. The children gawk, rapt at the way the lights dance against the wall. Like the dancers in the Ijenlemanya.

  I glance at Omar next to me, and for the first time, he’s smiling too.

  CHAPTER 6

  OMAR SLEEPS UNDER a mountain of blankets. I’m in the doorway of the room in our aki compound where most of us eat, and I’ve got Bo and Ifeoma and Sade behind me. A couple littler aki crowd behind them in the hall. Ifeoma stifles a snicker. Sade shushes her.

  Then I pounce.

  “WAKE UP!” I shout, snatching off Omar’s blankets and tickling under his armpits. In an instant, he leaps up and swipes at my face. He lands in a fighting stance, but his eyes have barely even opened yet.

  Sade doubles over in laughter. Ifeoma can barely hold herself up against the wall.

  “What?” Omar mumbles, wiping the sleep from his eyes. “What is going on?”

  Bo walks to the boy’s side, all stately pride, and grins down at the little aki. “Today’s your Daga Day.”

  Omar looks confused, but we’re all beaming.

  There is never any graceful transition between the rain season and the summer. There are a few days, maybe a week or two, of relief from the monsoons, the flooding, and the sewage overflow, then all of a sudden the sun returns. The Forum bursts with color; it blinds the eye. And everyone comes out to enjoy it. The streets are crowded with people—children playing and animals brought out after months of being cooped up indoors.

  Chickens flap wildly in cages held by their handlers. Some let out their last cries before the meat-man chops off their heads. Goats roam, tethered to their owners by rope. Exotic birds preen for everyone watching. They spread their wings, and their feathers join to resemble multicolored faces looking right at you. Anyone who spends enough time in Kos can tell which birds have dyed feathers and which ones are natural. On really hot days, the dye flakes, and everyone knows who’s full of lahala.

  We head south toward Gemtown, where all the jewelers peddle their wares. They can’t put their shops too close together, because people walk up needing to close their eyes to keep from getting blinded by the jewelry and wind up at the wrong jeweler’s stall. So they give enough space for shadows to fall. Here in Gemtown, you pull your cloak low over your eyes. With our white-pupiled eyes shaded and with baggy clothes hiding our sin-spots, we aki can walk around just like everyone else.

  Gemtown forms a small semicircle toward the bottom end of the Forum. In some stalls, Kosians can buy fasteners for their ear-stones. In others, families who have been saving up can purchase family stones or gems for a young girl’s Jeweling ceremony. But we’re here for something darker.
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  There’s one storefront that’s barely a storefront at all. From the overhang, a tent flap swishes in the breeze. I hold it open, and the others walk through. Omar hangs back, shifting his weight from foot to foot.

  “Eh-eh! Hurry up! Time and tide wait for no one.” I give him a soft kick in the backside, and he chuckles as he scurries in. When the tent flap falls behind me, we’re shrouded in darkness.

  Then a beam of light sneaks through the roof, and the entire room is alight with the rays reflecting off the obsidian knives and gleaming swords and cutlasses hanging from the walls and ceilings. All types of dagas, some with bejeweled handles, some with plain wooden handles, sit neatly arranged on plush cushions behind glass displays.

  Bo nudges me, and I notice Omar gawking at the wares.

  “Eh-heh. You want your new nickname to be Flycatcher?” I say, laughing. The rest of the room chuckles. Omar smiles, chastened, but still very much in awe.

  From behind a curtain in the back, the stonesmith emerges. The jewels he wears around his neck and ankles clink as he walks toward us. His skinny arms poke out from billowing sleeves. He clutches a cane with one gnarled hand and moves with his head down. Everyone clears a path for him. He stops a few steps in front of Omar.

  The stonesmith towers over the little aki, then lowers himself, knees cracking as he does, so that they’re face-to-face. When he pulls back his hood, the stones embedded in lines along his cheekbones mirror the light in his eyes. He looks like something more than human, and the sight of him always leaves me breathless. I feel the same sense of awe I did when it was my Daga Day and I saw him for the first time.

  “Child,” he says in his breathy voice. “What do you see here?”

  When Omar doesn’t respond, the stonesmith tilts his face in closer.

  “What do you see?”

  “I see . . . I see gemstones. I see jewels and cutlasses and dagas. I see canes with jeweled handspots. I see fasteners for earstones. I see all the colors that ever were.”

  Bo and I look at each other, our eyes wide. We’re both shocked at what the boy says. I don’t think either of us have heard him say more than three words at a time.

  The stonesmith hums his assent. “That is interesting. I see all of those things too. But I see something else also.”

  He rises, then looks around at his shop and smiles with all of his teeth. They look like they’re made of ivory. “One gray morning, a stonesmith was working in his shop. And a woman came to him. She held in her hands a broken heart and laid it on his table. The man wore a dark apron and had soot and dust covering him from his work, and the ruby jewel on his table was precious and unblemished. But it was broken. The woman asked if the stonesmith could repair her broken heart, and he replied that he would. He mended it and returned it to the woman, and she left him to his work. But she returned the following week to tell him it was still broken. It did not glow. So he worked on the heart for another week, used his best tools, and recalled the wisdom of stonesmiths before him. And he gave it back to the woman. But when she returned again to say it still did not glow, he realized what he needed to do.”

  The stonesmith turns back to Omar. “So he reached into his chest and took out his heart. He put the woman’s broken heart back in his chest and gave her his own. After this, she never returned.”

  He does this every time. Every single time we bring new aki here for Daga Day, he tells the same story the exact same way, walks the same few paces, stoops at the exact same height, looks at the exact same bits of jewelry. And every single time, it’s like I’ve never heard it before.

  “So, little aki,” the stonesmith says. “Look around again. Tell me what you see.”

  Omar stands in silence for a few seconds. Then he says, “Sacrifice. I see love.”

  “Yes, child. Love.”

  We all know to remain in reverent silence for this part.

  The stonesmith retreats to the back room, then returns a moment later with a daga inside what will be Omar’s armband. He holds it out with both hands, and Omar lets it fall into his own. Slowly, he slides the daga out of its sheath and turns it over in his hands, gazing intently at the way it shines. How smooth it is.

  Bo steps out of the circle we’ve formed, and we all unsheathe our dagas. This part is new. Originally my idea, but I let the others think Bo came up with it. I can’t have them looking up to me like I’m some responsible older brother bringing them together and building morale.

  “This is my daga,” Bo says.

  “This is my daga,” we all repeat, surrounding Omar.

  “There are many like it.”

  “There are many like it.” Omar’s voice, at first a whisper, grows louder and firmer with each response.

  “But this one is mine.”

  “But this one is mine.”

  “I must master it.”

  Our voices are rising so loud all of Gemtown can probably hear us, but I don’t care. “I must master it.”

  “As I master my life.”

  “As I master my life.”

  Then all together: “May the Unnamed preserve us.”

  Silence hangs in the still air. Nothing, not even the jewelry hanging from the ceiling, makes a sound. Until Ifeoma practically tackles Omar and everyone else joins in ruffling his hair, nudging him, and grinning so big that he can’t help but grin too.

  I hang back a little. Satisfied.

  They jostle him until Sade hoists the boy onto her shoulders and dances in a circle while the others dance around them, singing a song about a boy and his new daga.

  Omar’s still smiling when we leave Gemtown. He doesn’t seem to care about anything other than the daga he keeps holding with both hands. He won’t stop looking at the thing.

  So he doesn’t even notice when we get to the ridge of the Sabaa dahia. The cluster of homes and estates in the valley below spreads wider than most of the southern dahia. Small villages dot the outskirts beyond the larger compounds, some of them nothing more than huts, others full clay houses with wells and pens for animals. I realize which village is Omar’s when he stops and stands completely still, looking down at what was once his home. We’re maybe a couple hundred meters away.

  Outside one house, in the backyard, a group of men lounge. Some of them are young, a little older than us. The rest of them are older. And most of them stand by tables, pounding away with hammers.

  “Come on,” I tell Omar, and wave him along. The others follow as we skid down the hill, one ledge at a time. We get near enough that we can see some of the people inside the house. The sky is darkening, and someone has lit a fire beneath a tree in the home’s front yard. The men pound and pound, and the metal clanks, and golden flakes fall to the floor. Then, they slide what remains on the table into calabash bowls filled with just a little bit of water and stir and crush some more.

  One of the younger men is given a bowl, and he heads into the home, and I realize with a start that that’s probably Omar’s older brother. Omar hasn’t said a word. Hangs back. He looks on so shocked he’s forgotten to put his daga back in its sheath. I bet he never expected he’d get to see home again. Certainly not during his sister’s Jeweling ceremony.

  The young man heads into the home, and I follow Omar’s line of sight to one of the windows. Inside that room sits a crowd of women. I can’t hear their words from here, but I know they’re praying over the girl at the center of their circle. One of the women takes the bowl from the boy’s hands and a few moments later dips her thumb into it. I know she’s going to draw a line across the girl’s forehead, and so will all the others.

  A goat burns over a fire pit somewhere nearby. The neighbors must be cooking for them.

  I look around and see that Omar’s found a tree to hide behind. I haven’t seen him this terrified since that first day, after we’d buried Jai. Bo stands next to Omar, and Sade and Ifeoma stand
to the side, in the shadows. Even covered in darkness, their eyes glisten with envy.

  The smell of the goat cooking wafts our way. My stomach hasn’t been this loud in a long time.

  Quietly, I head over to the tree Omar’s standing by and rattle the branches. A whole bushel of plums showers us, and when Ifeoma and Sade glare at me, I mouth, Sorry, then start picking up the fruit.

  Nobody else seems to want any, not even Omar, so I stand and eat by myself.

  The women all come out of the house, the oldest at the head and the girl at the rear. The women all wear bloodstained cloth around their right hands. The ritual goes like this: Each family member uses the Family Stone to cut their palm, then they mix the blood with the gold dust and form small lines down the girl’s forehead.

  Neighbors stream in from nearby, and the smell of good meat almost overpowers me. Maybe if I bite deeper into these plums, I can force myself not to give in to temptation and rush over there and eat that entire goat.

  The music starts so suddenly I jump and drop half my plums. Everyone starts dancing. Three of the men have drums between their knees, and the others clap to the beat, forming a ring around Omar’s sister. In the center, she twirls and spins. Neighbors reach into their baskets and toss small gemstones onto the ground at her quick feet.

  She’ll dance until her feet are bloody. Until the minerals from the gemstones and other precious metals are bathed in her essence. And then the women will tend to the girl’s feet and smile and tell her now she will bear gilded children.

  Marya told me that’s how it happens, but this is the first one I’ve seen in person. I turn to look at Omar, who is peering out from behind the tree,

  It was supposed to be a surprise, to give him some peace and closure. But his bottom lip is trembling now, and he’s sniffling, holding on to his daga too tightly.

  Bo puts a hand to the little aki’s shoulder. “Hey, we don’t have to stay,” he says quietly in Omar’s ear. “We can go whenever you want.”