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Twins die. That is the truth that Hunger says. So when Sebirak brought forth three babies, there was utter confusion about what to do. Neved had heard of three babies, when he lived with the band at the Sun River, but they had come forth in such violence that they solved the problem themselves by accompanying their mother to the Otherworld. Sebirak had been uncomfortably full throughout her quickening, and ravenous, so the babies were whole and cantankerous. She took in the discussions about the children with them all coiled around her belly, eyes narrowed, breasts leaking. For a time, it was decided that it was twins and a real child, but which child consisted of the real one left them all at a loss. Neved said finally that they couldn’t determine such things, and they’d have to guess that they were all real, and the assembled nodded. Secretly – secret, so Hunger wouldn’t hear their reticence – they were relieved to be dispossessed of the duty. Sebirak adjusted to set one child and then the other to suck. The third howled in jealous rage til the first one filled itself, and then it was given its due.
Sebirak, gaunt with nursing, was filled with such a rage that she flamed from the inside. She still smelled of the blood of the afterbirths, which had been taken to be smoked, in case of such a verdict. Her hair was unbound. It spilled over her shoulders down to the ground in a wave of shining black that resembled the starlit sky. The others around the fire coughed and averted their eyes. Sebirak wouldn’t say it, in case Hunger heard, but they knew it. She wouldn’t talk to anyone for a few days, which was reasonable. This happened every time the life of a child was discussed. It was reasonable to be angry that the others might consider your baby unhuman.
Sebirak means “rock dove.” The sire was assumed to be Ebixa, which means “golden oriole.” Ebixa accepted the responsibility with a speed that put the other sires along the Brittle Ridge to shame. Twins didn’t have sires; they were accidental couplings of the mother spirit and the spirit of the growing things, the trees and the scrub, that sent out many seedlings. Ebixa laid claim to mimicking a tree, which can be cut down and burned and Changed into things but always has its roots down deep in the ground, as it was Created. So Ebixa glowed in the same way that Sebirak glowed. Impossibility feathered them. The disbelief gave way to admiration.
There is a story. Sebirak’s story was visceral. Two babies tied to her breast, a third in her arm sucking at a piece of soft leather dipped in expressed milk, stuffing herself. The story formed a shining cord, wet-red as the string between afterbirth and child, and it braided into the stories of Sebirak’s lineage and of Ebixa’s. It threaded into the babies, and the threads joined with the other numberless braids weaving the invisible roof of protection over the mammoth-bone fence.
And Azbis tried to unpick it. Which one was the baby chewing on the leather?
Sebirak said, “I’m not telling you. You’ll obsess over it.”
Ebixa said, “We rotated. That’s not it. Stop asking.”
“There are no reasons for such things,” Neved said.
Nothing had happened at the yearling ceremony, either, when they received their souls. Nothing of importance at their fiveling ceremony, where the soul graduated from a child-bloom to the doughty oak of a long-living person. Sebirak grew angry again, for there was resentment from others at Brittle Ridge, and even travelers who had heard of such a miracle, that Sebirak’s triplets though slender and short had passed fiveling when so many other babies didn’t make it halfway to ensoulment. Sebirak was spiteful at their spite, and, Azbis held, justifiably paranoid. She pushed all the hunting-tasks to resigned, obedient Ebixa so she could watch her fledglings through narrowed eyes.
Rock dove and golden oriole raised three birds of great magnificence. Hawk and Eagle and night-feathered Crow, bi-bi-bi the cry of fledglings. They ate the same, in the same rotation as babies, and they tumbled with the other children, and had the same winter coughs.
It didn’t make sense. Only one of them was a real human.
“Who says anything makes sense!” Neved was the most willing to put up with Azbis, and with Kebiro when she tried it on, but after a decade of the same question he had reached his fill. Neved was a giant of a man, thick-legged, and, to a child, revolting: he collected and fried insects in the fat of carnivores and pounded them with berries and tallow and sat them out to dry. That’s how he powered his loping, uncatchable gait, or so he claimed, which Azbis had believed until he spotted Ebixa frying grubs for his own hunting rations. Neved drummed a tattoo on the mammoth skull that protected the fire and shot a sharp look at Azbis. “A person runs out of luck. Nebime might have run out of luck at birth and lived too long beyond it, or you might have had an excess of it that will overpower you and kill you tomorrow. Or maybe it’s Hunger hiding deep in one of your hearts, so deep that it won’t bother pouncing. Or maybe a hundred and hundred things. What does it matter? Do you not think you have enough luck, even in comparison? Do you want to change Kebiro to Nebime, or Nebime to you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Nebime would get very angry at you.”
Azbis, unsure of that, made a sound between a no and a yes. Neved’s eyes squinched up.
“I just want to know,” he said, “which is which.”
Neved said, “There is no reason to know, Azbismyboy.”
He said it that way on purpose, his eyes rolling like those of an upset herbivore. Neved meant “a woolly rhinoceros,” and in second-meaning it meant a person who is too loud for his own good. Azbis shut his own mouth and inched his way towards the firepit. Neved said that too wisely, as well, with a hard wink: he knew something. Someday, Azbis figured, he or Kebiro would break the dam.
Nebime wouldn’t ask.
Nebime wouldn’t need to.
Nebime was, these days, apprenticed as Rock-Baker. The mud of the newborn rocks rimmed the wide forehead. Nebime squatted in the hot kiln hut with wise Jetevi, shaping and unshaping the river-clay. Nebime and Jetevi had together figured out that wrapping woven-strings around the exterior of the mud and peeling them carefully off would make a pattern like the stars, like the welkin. And so they grew their earthpots in the kiln hut until the sky erupted from them. Brittle faces in pieces at the hut door.
Hunger feared Jetevi and Nebime, for Jetevi and Nebime knew how to Create, and thus, as a man fears a hyena stalking the edge of winter camp, it hunted them on swift legs. So Nebime was disallowed to leave the hut without escort, and, like Jetevi, disallowed to share the secrets of the rock-baking. Jetevi was forbidden from striding past the boundaries of the mammoth-bone fence. The band hunting Sun River carved rocks and hyena bones, and the band haunting the reaches of the Charcoal Hills scored their stories into sticks and treetrunks. But they could not Create. They could only Change. Changing meant nothing. The earth Creates the fruit and the mammoth, and the man Changes it to dung within his body, only for it to be expelled, where it will foul the waters. And the sire and the woman lie together for pleasure but they do not Create, only Change their spirits into ones that can combine and from this combination Create itself. And the Hunger haunts, and it Destroys, which is an antithetical Creating. That’s why twins die.
Nebime knew which one. Azbis was sure of it.
Nebime meant Crow.
It struck him then and there, at the firepit, watching Neved drumming half-consciously on the decorated mammoth skull, struck him like a stone hurled from a sling crashes into the raven. How silly he was not to know this before. Nebime had to be the real child, the true-souled one. Hawk and Eagle and Crow all built nests, but only Crow collected shining rocks, or used sticks to lever grubs from the log.
Azbis felt sick, awfully so. Neved noticed the change in his face. Neved, bull, insect-eater, had wisdom behind his gigantism, and Neved frowned with his lips open to show teeth.
“Azbis,” he said, gravely. “Do not speak it aloud.”
He pointed at his ear. What he meant was: Hunger is listening. Azbis chattered with squirrel terror behind his hands. He had not meant to do this. Had not meant to stumble upon it so. Neved's herbivore eyes rolled in thundering fury and said "Do not, Azbis, do not speak it out loud. Especially not while your brother is where he is."
And Azbis didn't. He let it fester inside himself instead.
The people at the Brittle Ridge had long-long-long ago been taught by a wise one. The wise one held memory and it held memory of a time before, on the dry plains, where the people did not have to shudder and shake in the cold of the winter. Before Hunger had eaten the dry plains, they had lived unclothed and uncloaked, hot but free under the starlit skies. This was a place that could not be returned to until the Hunger had eaten itself, which it could not do as long as there was world to hunt. And so they wore animal skins. They built huts, and mortared them with mud. They hid the huts behind the mammoth-bone fence. Unlike the Charcoal Forest band, and the band on Sun River, they built their shelters well enough not to hide in caves in winter.
Azbis and Kebiro, as siblings unmated, had built their own hut the autumn previous, one adjacent to but detached from where Ebixa and Sebirak lay. Sebirak had lost some of her spite after Jetevi had taken Nebime. As far as she and the rest of the camp were concerned, this was a crime, a thieving, the culmination of the promised twin-death. Having at last received pity, she had calmed down. She would let Azbis out of her sight these days, him having passed into twenty.
Azbis lay in the bitter dawn, watching his sister’s chest rise and fall under the bearskin blankets. He didn’t know what he should say to her. Perhaps she’d figured it out years past and not said it to him. Kebiro was a calm, measured person, the sort of woman who would break a pot and shrug for at least she hadn’t dropped it on her foot. If they had been sired by Ebixa, then she took after him, except that she smiled more. Azbis took after Sebirak, for he was suspicious and mournful. He put his hand over his heart and counted the thumps. Twins die, and he was nervous to discover himself the walking dead.
How had his parents discovered this?
Or had they known instantly, and just told him and Kebiro different to protect them all from Hunger?
He felt the emptiness where a soul should be moving around inside him, fretful as worms in a rotten mushroom.
The more he thought about it the stupider he felt. Of course it was Nebime who had the natural soul. The same day Jetevi had darkened the door of the hut with a grim but excited look set on her face, Azbis and Kebiro had gone out with Neved and the rest to follow the trail of the fatted reindeer. And yet it was only when Kebiro and Azbis stayed behind in the hunter’s camp to knap arrowheads that the rest had come over the hill with the deer slung between them on pine-poles. The reindeer knew to shy away from creatures void of soul. They knew to run away from Hunger.
His failures as a person swam before him.
In summer the bands came to the meadow and paraded their youth in front of each other for joinings, as it was known that blood unmixed attracted the spirit of deformation. Kebiro had been ill that day, and slept at home with the old men. Azbis sat on the rock with the other youths of Brittle Ridge, at first hopeful, then desperate, then resigned, as the giggling young women from river and forest came to plant flowers in everyone’s hair but his.
The hunting-tasks that Sebirak had pushed upon Ebixa became the province of the triplets. The one of primary import was the taking of ravens, for their meat was sweet and their shining black feathers, when rimmed around a hood, caught any heat that the reindeer fur trimming could not. Azbis’ stones clattered again and again. It seemed the rocks struck true only by accident.
And so on and on. The soulless horror of his life yawned before him.
It hadn’t just been the tripleting that made him feel so separate. His entire life he had floated like a breeze along the ground-rooted folk at Brittle Ridge. This must be it. That he was not human. That he was not even animal. That he was thronged with Hunger.
The wise in him said, now, don’t panic, for you found a girl in the winter parade, and you killed a bear with Yuskit and Murr in the long dark, and look at Kebiro, with her long eyelashes: doesn’t she have good hands to make the flat woven-strings? Doesn’t she smile and laugh as she squats with the other women at the flensing-pit, shucking the sinews from deer? Perhaps your soul was just installed a bit later, at the yearling, or perhaps at the fiveling.
But Hunger had eaten his reason. What was good in him he could not see, and what was ill in him crashed in boundless waves, drawing him down into the dark.
Kebiro, next to him, smiled in her sleep. Azbis was jealous of her stupidity.
The next morning Jetevi emerged from the kiln hut with Nebime. There was an interested muttering among the band at Brittle Ridge, for it was still rare that Nebime was allowed out. The apprenticeship of the Rock-Baker was brutal, to teach them how to steel themselves against Hunger’s teeth. Nebime was thinner than was reasonable at this time of year, and shading towards pale from lack of natural light, but Jetevi had taken off the mammoth-gut ropes. Kebiro, delighted that all her siblings were out in the open, came with arms spread for a hug, and Nebime jumped in. They chattered like squirrels, placing their hands on each others’ faces, but Azbis sensed better than a wolf on the blood that Nebime was deeply nervous. He patted Nebime on the shoulder to be friendly, and Nebime made some colorless polite comment about his brother's new-made necklace.
Neved said, politely, “Where is this honor from, Rock-Baker?”
And Jetevi flapped her hand, as if shooing a fly. “It’s stuffy in there,” she said. And she laughed, and Neved did too. Nebime pointedly ignored her. He gently disentangled himself from Kebiro’s embrace and went to put his chin on Sebirak’s shoulder. Sebirak cuddled him like a doll.
It had to mean something, that Nebime had come out on the morn of his revelation. It had to mean something that Nebime turned glassy eyes on Azbis over Kebiro’s shoulder across the firepit, as if searching him for sinning. But nothing happened, and no one confronted Azbis. No one told him he was laced with Hunger. The novelty of their appearance faded and then it was just the band, all thirty-odd of them, eating roast tubers and smoked aurochs jerky over the feasting trough, bathing in the sweetness of an aromatic early fall morning.
“Before I forget to say it, Nebime has become the Rock-Baker,” Jetevi said, in a pleasant lull in the conversation. “The apprenticeship has concluded.”
She said this casually as announcing her fondness for roast tubers.
The silence that followed was broken only by the hissing of insects.
Jetevi stood. She was a tall woman, even despite the hunch forced by the smallness of the kiln hut, and elegant, swan-necked. She had lighter patches on her hands from constant burns. As the band watched, she shucked off her wolftooth necklace. Her cloaks and furs puddled around her feet, and she stepped out of them. For a moment Azbis forgot his revelation and looked with shameful curiosity at the body of Jetevi, who had been eternally childless and still had slim, unruptured hips. Jetevi was older than his mother, but Jetevi’s skin had been preserved by the constant slurry of clay coating her body. Jetevi had never been initiated as a hunter, and Azbis had never seen a rock-baker’s tattoo before: it was a (to his eyes) monstrous, raised arrangement of awl-marks and criss-crosses.
“I have given Creation,” she said, “as Wajos before me gave it to me. And as some day Nebime will give to the apprentice. And as was given to us since the wise on came to tell us of the lost memories of the dry plains. We are the Rock-Baker, the only one that ever will exist. We are not separate from each other. We are I.”
A crow called far away.
“And what did the wise one tell us? The necessity of escaping Hunger. We must bait it, and draw its eye.”
Nebime rose. Nebime was a small person, ugly, hunched, one leg shorter than the other; gifts from his traumatic birth, as Kebiro had a slight droop to her left eyelid. Nebime’s face said, I hate this woman, but I don’t want to do this, but Nebime shuddered a sigh and took a long, gruesome flint knife from the folds of his fox-fur tunic.
Jetevi smiled the smile of the sleeper.
“To you I give my body,” she said, to the goggling band. “And to you, Nebime, the new Rock-Baker, what do I give you?”
Nebime, unwilling as the day he’d been taken from Sebirak’s hut, said, tiredly, “Your soul.”
He slit Jetevi’s throat, down almost to the spine. He held her in his arms as she sputtered and coughed. Azbis saw her trying to clutch at the gaping wound, her sleepy eyes huge and terrified. And Nebime rubbed her blood in the triangle of his crotch, mimicking where a womb could be.
“I am the Rock-Baker,” he said. He still sounded tired, when he should have sounded awed or imperious.
“We shall feast," Neved said, in his best gravelly voice. "We shall feast, tomorrow night. Find our neighbors."
He hooked Jetevi’s body over his broad shoulder and carried her off. One by one the band, some of them blood-sprinkled, unfolded from their sits and left their breakfasts alone. Kebiro was weeping silently, and Sebirak’s face had frozen in a rictus of revulsion. Only Ebixa, tired-looking as Nebime, kept picking at the tubers. Ebixa was, as always, resolutely pragmatic.
But the pebble of revelation from the slingshot of the spirits hit him soon after. Kebiro, along with three other young adults, had been sent off to call the bands for a meeting. Azbis had not been asked to go. Azbis sat with a flint scraper in his hand, staring at but not seeing a deerhide almost dressed. Two souls. Two souls. Azbis’ hands shook over his hide-scraping. Creation must be taunting him. Hunchback, hideous Nebime, toasted and roasted by his imprisonment in the kiln hut, had intaken the soul of Jetevi.
He had two souls.
Two souls that should have gone to him, and to Kebiro.
He was surprised by the depths of his hate.
Nebime had been nothing to be jealous of. Sebirak nested on top of him like a broody hen, so he’d hardly made any friends. His leg gave him the pains, so he never hunted more than a few of his namesakes out of the tree. He knapped flint passably but had no real talent. Before Jetevi had chosen him, he had seemed doomed to never be assumed even a potential sire. And now he had two souls. Two souls, to protect him from Hunger.
A spike of ice came into Azbis’ throat, sharp as the flint knife.
No. He had three souls. Because he was the Rock-Baker.
Or maybe Jetevi’s soul hadn’t been hers ever since Wajos had handed the Rock-Baker’s soul down to her.
Not fair, Azbis thought. His hands made fists of their own accord. Not fair.
The sweet scent of pine smoke wafted through the air. Jetevi was no longer Jetevi. Jetevi, hung upside down in the smoker-shack, had crisped black, and her hair had burned away.
Not fair, and that tolled in his head with the infuriating regularity of an all-day rain. I want to be a human. I want to be a real human.
Thief.
The wise one had told them to hate a thief. The wise one told them that a thief unpunished let Hunger gobble them all.
Azbis, head roiling, did not notice when the scraper slit his palms.
Nebime was having sex in the kiln hut. He was having sex with Uspel, which means “the wild boar,” and in second-meaning means a person frantic for closeness. Nebime’s tendency to have sex with Uspel was of prime importance when Jetevi felt the call from Creation to find the apprentice, as Wajos had noticed Jetevi’s boundless lust for the unmated maidens at the summer parades. Nebime hadn’t seen Uspel since months before Jetevi had taken him from his parents’ hut, and they had not bothered with pleasantries when Uspel came with the rest of his grim band through the mammoth-bone gate. Uspel smelled like he always had, but his face had broadened, matured, Changing his childish prettiness into the strong features of a real adult man. He was handsome as Creation. His black hair hung in soft curls. He had been dressed in a foxtooth necklace for the occasion of three bands feasting. Like all of the adults in the Sun River band, he had a tattoo of a heron on his neck.
Uspel said “Stop, stop,” as if he wasn’t doing most of what needed to be stopped, and Nebime detached from him like a burr pulled from a foxfur jacket. Uspel wrapped his arm around Nebime’s shoulders and squeezed. “What’s the matter?”
Nebime felt the bile and gall sloshing around in him. He pressed his forehead into Uspel’s broad arm. Upset trilled the back of his hand across the nape of Nebime’s neck. “Is it the feast?”
“No,” Nebime said, muffled. “Yes. I don’t know how to explain it.”
“I can’t blame you. I can’t imagine being trapped behind that fence forever.”
“You are not helping,” Nebime said.
What he wanted to say: that he felt true disgust that the soul he had been given came from Jetevi. He had figured out long ago that neither he nor cow-eyed, docile Kebiro had been the single-child. This he had suspected from his short leg that ground an eternal pain into a hip and was proved easily when Jetevi stole him. This was proved easier when handsome, quiet, wonderful Azbis had hunted the bear with hardly any help from Yuskit and Murr. Kebiro, sweet, pretty, he had wavered on - perhaps there’d been two single-children, and two twins compounded into one? But that made no sense, and eventually he figured that Kebiro’s eyes were so cow-kind because she, bereft of soul, could not think at the level of a real human.
He felt extreme guilt. He felt guilt that he had endangered handsome Uspel on the banks of the Sun River: the sucking pull of Hunger within him, seducing the most righteous of men. And he felt further guilt still that he felt like he did not deserve what cruelties Jetevi had done to him in the dry hot darkness of the kiln hut. He should have been grateful to her, for teaching him to drive back even his own Hunger. He had crossed into twenty years in this mud and dust womb, but only less than a day as a real human. He should not be Rock-Baker. The soulless should not Create.
“Tell me how to help,” Uspel said. He licked Nebime’s neck. That felt insincere, or perhaps desperate, but it was at least a warmth. Nebime curved back into him, aware of both of their erections fading, not minding overmuch. Uspel’s warmth was soft and moist and did not flake.
In the middle-night, they would emerge to the fires tended now by all three headmen, Neved with his mammoth skull as a seat, and take within themselves the flesh of the sacrifice, so they could take in her knowledge to stave off Hunger. Nebime did not want to do that. Nebime wanted to burrow into Uspel’s broad chest and to never touch clay again. He didn’t want to shape the small clay figures of the band and explode them in the kiln so as to trick Hunger into thinking they’d already died. Do that over and over and over again until Hunger wised up. He didn’t want to torture some wide-eyed little girl who had committed no crime but to be chosen by Creation. If this was what having a soul was -
The hut door clashed open. Uspel sat up, alarmed: he put a steadying hand on the bird-oil lamp.
“Give it to me,” Azbis said. Azbis looked a horror, though he was wearing a foxtooth necklace and a new deerhide wrap. His hands were bloody, he was holding a massive flint hide-scraper that had broken to be jagged as teeth, and his eyes were weird and jittering.
Nebime gaped at him. He was keenly aware he was nude in front of his brother, which was a large affront to custom. “Give…what?”
“You know,” Azbis said, and he laughed. He waved the scraper.
Uspel understood before Nebime did the danger of those wild-rolling eyes. His hand found a stake, used typically to spike the wet clay figurines upright before their firing. Nebime floated away from his body in the same way he did when Jetevi pushed him through ordeals. He could not believe this. He could not process the sight of his brother and his lover wrestling - hadn’t he only had the both of them back in the past turning of the sun? Hadn’t he only been ensouled around them for barely that long?
Azbis screamed, eagle-scream, as was his name, when Uspel connected the stake to his hip. Uspel held him to the hut wall and screwed the stake in as hard as he could, but Azbis caught him in the throat (like Jetevi, Nebime thought, and a strange happiness flooded through him), and Uspel falling trapped Nebime’s legs flush to the floor.
Azbis towered over him, woozy and starving. The stake had caught one of the bigger blood-channels and he was spurting. His tongue was already gray.
“Give it,” he said, “to me.”
The bird-oil lamp tipped over, as did Azbis, and the teeth of the broken scraper met his chest and dug in like tree-roots, and he felt Uspel shifting, croaking, crawling, gagging -
and, in the suffocating bright of the flames, eager to chew on the bodies, Nebime thought, suddenly angry again: that’s it?
The hide blankets flamed.
That’s all it’s like, having a soul?
He began to cough.
That’s all I have? That’s not - that’s not - fair -
Kebiro, as the sole sister, had the duty of arranging the bodies in the earth. She dressed them in their finest - she’d had someone run back to Sun River to fetch Uspel’s finest. She had put the ochre on the Rock-Baker, as was proper, and she had left the stake in, as to punish the Life-Thief as he limped away from the Hunger in the otherworlds, and she moved the Lover’s hand, to show the everlasting desire.
She had, in the silent isolation of the burial-duty, licked the wound on her brother’s hip, and licked at the wound on her other brother’s chest.
She had a soul.
At last.
She was a real person.
She looked at her hands. They were as they had always been, brown and calloused, but they seemed to glow.
Kebiro wanted to laugh. She wanted to dance. She breathed out through her teeth, as to not attract Hunger. She had figured early on the danger, and she had pretended to be dim and pleasant, so not to attract Hunger. She had arranged her entire life around not attracting Hunger to the place where her soul should have been. And oh, oh, oh, was she tired of it. Tired of being the kind one to Azbis' worried arrogance. Tired of being stupid to beat against Nebime's sharp eyes. She was free now.
An awful price, but she was free.
Tomorrow the mothers and sires would come to add in foxtails, pottery, raven wings. And then they'd have to hunt for another Rock-Baker, one wise enough to assemble the technique out of broken pots and shattered effigies. This had happened before. People were jealous of Creation. Kebiro didn't know why. It seemed an awful burden. She felt sorry for her brothers, that this had happened. Presumably one or the other had discovered the other one had been ensouled.
"Thank you for giving it to me," she whispered.
The bodies did not stir.
Kebiro spread the deerhides over the grave. She walked away, into the night.