The Girl and the Stars Read online

  There was a wisdom to the pit. A harsh wisdom, but wisdom even so. The burden that Yaz had carried with her out of the north, which had hung from her shoulders each and every mile, was the same weight that set sorrow along the edges of all her mother’s smiles. Years had not blunted the sharpness of Azad’s death. Yaz should be leaving her parents with two sons to support them, but when the dagger-fish broke the waters her strength had not been sufficient to hold her youngest brother, and in what now seemed one long moment of horror he had gone, leaving her alone in the boat. If the regulator had seen at the first gathering that she was broken, Azad would have known his eighth year, and would have many more to come.

  * * *

  A MUTTERING RAN down the column, one passing the news to the next, with a rumble of discontent echoing in its wake.

  “What? What is it?”

  Yaz’s father ignored Zeen and told her instead while the Jex twins leaned in to hear. “The Quinx clan father says our count is out. The ceremony is today.”

  “Why aren’t they there then?” Yaz’s hands began to tremble, a sweat prickling her skin despite the freezing wind. In the months of polar night it was difficult to keep track of days, but she had never heard of the count being out. “Was their count out too?”

  “A hoola attacked their column. They had to observe the rites for the dead. They’re force marching to get to the ceremony in time.”

  The Jexes were already passing the news back. As the sun began to set, the regulator would commence his inspection. He would be finished by full dark. If they missed it Yaz would have four more years, albeit forced to remain as a child. From where she stood four years looked like a lifetime. “What will we do?”

  “We’ll march too,” her father said.

  “But . . . it’s twenty miles or more, and it’s nearly noon.”

  “The Quinx are going.” Her father turned away.

  “The Quinx have dogsleds to carry the young and rest the grown!” Yaz protested.

  “And we,” her father said, “are the Ictha.”

  * * *

  THE ENDURANCE OF the Ictha was a thing of legend among the tribes. The Ictha husbanded their strength. Nothing could be wasted on the polar ice. Not if you wished to survive. But when called upon to do so they could run all day. Yaz began to flag after the second hour. Quell ran beside her as she started to labour, his brow creased with a pain that had nothing to do with effort. He was trying to shield her from notice, she knew that. Somehow hoping that he could drag her along by sheer power of will. Behind her the Jex twins’ relentless strides devoured the distance. Quell could try to hide her weakness. Others could turn a blind eye, perhaps not even admitting it to themselves. But the regulator would see. There was no hiding from him.

  The Ictha could not let the Quinx open too large a lead even if they did have dogs. Old rivalries ran too deep for that. The Quinx didn’t even recognise Ictha gods but held their own, some of them twisted versions of the true gods, others entirely foreign. It was a duty of the regulator and his kin in the travelling priesthood to settle disputes and keep the peace. They witnessed oaths, blessed unions, and ensured the purity of all bloodlines. The priests knew all the names of every god, both true and false, and even had a god of their own, a hidden one whose name was secret. The clan elders told stories in which priests of old had channelled the power of their Hidden God to devastating effect, blasting the flesh from the bones of oath breakers.

  Yaz dug deep. Whatever recipe made the Ictha so suited to their environment had gone astray in her. She lacked what the others had. The cold reached her before it reached her friends. Her strength failed against tasks that others of her age could master. She had begun to notice it about a year before her first gathering. Around the same time that she found the river.

  There are, impossibly, rivers that run beneath the ice. Yaz’s father said they were the veins of the Gods in the Sea and that enchantment made them flow. Yaz had seen though that if you press on ice with enough force it will start to melt where you press hardest. In any case, Yaz’s river was not one of those that run beneath the ice and are seen only where they sometimes jet forth into the Hot Sea of the North or the three lesser seas of the south. Hers was a river seen only in her mind. A river that somehow ran beneath all things, and through them. When she was ten Yaz had started to glimpse it in her dreams. Slowly she had learned to see past the world even when it filled her waking eyes. And everywhere she looked the river ran, flowing at strange angles to what was real.

  Now, as she ran, her heart hammering at her breastbone for release, her lungs full of exhaustion’s sharp edges, she saw the river again. And she touched it. In her mind’s eye her fingers brushed the surface of that bright water and in an instant its terrifying power flooded through her hand. The river sucked at her, reluctant to let her go, but she pulled free before she burst. Heat and energy filled her, flowing up her arm and into her body. This was how she lived. Touching the forbidden magics of the first tribe to beach on Abeth, driving away the cold and the hunger and the weariness. It wouldn’t last and she would not be able to find the river again for days, but for now she felt as if she could run forever with a boat-sled on each shoulder, or dance naked in the polar night.

  “I’m fine.” She made a smile for Quell and picked up the pace, hardly noticing now that she was even running.

  “I know you are.” Relief washed over Quell’s face and he fell back to check the line.

  Yaz fixed her gaze on the sled before her, making sure not to run too fast. She kept her bare hands in fists, knowing that the tips of her fingers would still be glowing with the power now pulsing through her veins.

  * * *

  AROUND THE GULLET that the tribes name the Pit of the Missing the ice is rucked up in concentric circles of ridges like the waves left when a leaping whale has returned to the ocean. Yaz always thought of the ridges as curtains, positioned to hide something shameful.

  The ice around the outer slopes was littered with the sleds of many clans. Dogs stood in groups, tethered to metal stakes, and here and there a warrior stood guard.

  “Don’t stare.” Yaz’s father cuffed his son without anger and pointed the way.

  The Ictha would drag their smaller sleds up among the ridges. Yaz’s people had few possessions and the loss of any of them would often be fatal, so even though theft was a great rarity among the tribes, the Ictha always kept what little they had close to them.

  “Quell will have pretty words for you at the gathering tonight.” Yaz’s mother stood beside her. They were of a height now. It felt strange to stand eye to eye. “He’s a good boy, but be sure he speaks to your father first.”

  Yaz’s cheeks burned, though a moment later sadness washed away any embarrassment. She almost broke then, almost sought the warmth and safety of her mother’s arms and cried out to be saved. But her mother had already turned to go, and there was no saving to be had. The world had no place for weakness.

  * * *

  MORE THAN HALF of the sun’s huge red eye had sunk behind the horizon by the time Yaz started to climb. The energies that had sustained her for hours began to fade, leaving her to labour up the slopes. Suddenly each breath burned in her throat, sweat froze on her skin, every muscle ached, but she endured, and all around her the clan kept pace. Behind her she could hear Zeen struggling too. Unencumbered the boy was the fastest of any of them, his hands were just as swift, falling to any task with blurring speed. Harnessed to a load, however, his stamina was less than the others of his age.

  By the time they reached the top of the first ridge Yaz was helping to pull her brother’s sled as well as her own. By the third ridge she was pulling both almost by herself. She worried that her strength would fail and she would arrive at the testing having to be carried by her father. The fact that she lacked the full hardiness of her people was the first sign of being broken. The next common sign was that a child wou
ld grow too quickly and eat too much. Perhaps these ones were destined to become giants but giants had no place on the ice. Others lived too fast for the ice; they moved more swiftly than anyone should be able to, but they aged quickly too, and grew hungry quickly, and however fast a person is, the cold cannot be outrun. Rarer still, they said, were the ones that developed strange talents. Yaz had never seen such a witch-child but whatever magics they had at their disposal were no match for the night freeze, and be they witch, quickling, or giant they paid a price, losing their ability to endure the white teeth of the wind. Yaz wasn’t particularly tall for her age, neither was she unnaturally swift, but her Ictha endurance had been eroding for years. The river gave her ways to hide these failings. They wouldn’t fool the regulator though. Clan Mother Mazai said that the regulator could see through lies, she said he could even see through skin and flesh to the very bones of a person, and that all weakness was laid bare before him.

  The Ictha left their sleds at the base of the final ridge and Rezack, who was strong and keen eyed, remained to watch over them. Yaz descended into the crater around the hole, exhaustion trembling in her legs. She and Zeen were toward the rear of the column now. Quell had fallen back to watch over them, his brow furrowed with concern, but this was not the time to be seen helping. That would do nothing for Yaz’s chances with the regulator.

  * * *

  THE TRIBES HAD shaped the crater to their purposes, cutting a series of tiers into the ice. The space encircled by the ridges was maybe four hundred yards across and more than two thousand people crowded the level ground, an unimaginable number to Yaz, who had spent almost every day of her life with the same one hundred souls.

  At the last moment before they reached the crowd below, Quell pulled Yaz to the side, standing precariously on the slanting ice while others passed nearby with the practiced indifference of a people with few chances for privacy.

  “Yaz . . .” A nervous excitement, most un-Quell-like, haunted Quell’s face. He released her hand, struggling to make his mouth speak.

  “Afterwards.” She placed a hand against his chest. “Ask me when it’s done.”

  “I love you.” He bit down as the words escaped him. His eyes searched hers, lips pressed tight against further emotion.

  And there it was, out in the open, delicate hope trembling in a cruel wind.

  Quell was good, kind, brave, handsome. Her friend. All an Ictha girl could dream of. Yaz thought that maybe the first sign that she was broken wasn’t the weakness but that she had always wanted more. She had seen the life that her mother lived, the same lived by her mother’s mother in turn and on and on back along the path of years. She had seen that this life of trekking the ice between closing sea and opening sea was all that the world had to offer. In all the vastness of the ice, with small variations, this was life. And yet some broken thing inside her cried out for more. Though she stamped upon that reckless, selfish, whining voice, pushed it down, shut it out, its whispers still reached her.

  I love you.

  She didn’t deserve such love. She didn’t deserve it for many reasons, not least that the broken thing within her called it burden rather than blessing.

  I love you. Quell watched her, hungry for an answer, and behind her the last of the Ictha shuffled past.

  The Ictha knew themselves each as part of the body, and they knew that the body must be kept alive, not its parts. Sacrifice and duty. Play your part in the survival engine. As long as the flame is kept alight, as long as the boats remain unholed, as long as the Ictha endure then the needs and pain and dreams of any one piece of that body are of no concern.

  “I . . .” Yaz knew that if she somehow walked away from the pit this time then she was more than lucky to have Quell waiting for her, she would be more than lucky to resume her trek along the life that had always stretched before her across the ice.

  Her heart hurt. She wanted to vanish, for the wind to carry her away. She did want Quell, but also . . . she wanted more, a different world, a different life.

  “I . . . Ask me at the gathering. Ask me when this is done.” She took her hand from his chest, still worried for the heart beneath it.

  She turned and followed the others, hating herself for the look in Quell’s eyes, hating the broken voice that gave her no peace, that left her dissatisfied with the good things, the voice that told her she may look the same but that she was different.

  Quell followed at her heels and Yaz walked on, unseeing, understanding a new truth on her last day: Abeth’s ice might stretch for untold miles, but there was, in all that emptiness, no room for an individual.

  * * *

  THE CEREMONY WAS already in progress as Yaz caught up with her brother. On the lowest tier, with only the dark maw of the hole below them, the children of seven clans belonging to three tribes queued in a great circle. Every few moments the line shuffled forward as each boy or girl presented themselves to the regulator in turn.

  The old priest stood cloaked in an inky black hide that belonged to nothing that Yaz had ever seen hauled from the sea. Hoola claws reached across his shoulders and fanned out across his chest, threaded on a cord around his neck. His head was bare and bald, marked like his hands with a confusion of burn scars, symbols perhaps but complex and overlapping.

  The Ictha said that Regulator Kazik had overseen the gathering for generations. While the other priests came and went with time’s tide, growing old, retiring to the Black Rock, Kazik it was said remained immune to the years. A constant, like the wind.

  Today he was the regulator, merciless in judgment. Tomorrow he would be priest Kazik and he would bless marriages, and laugh, and mix with the clans, and become drunk on ferment with the rest of the grown.

  Yaz and Zeen joined the rear of the queue with a score of other Ictha children. One more came up behind, delayed by his mother’s arms. At the front, around a third of the crater’s circumference from them, another child escaped the regulator’s scrutiny. She scrambled away to join her parents watching from some higher tier.

  Yaz shuffled forward with the line. The climb still burned in her legs and her chest felt sore from panting.

  “That was tough!” Zeen smiled up at her. “But we made it.” He stood close to the edge where the ice sloped sharply away toward the hole.

  “Sssh.” Yaz shook her head. It was best to avoid any thoughts of weakness. They said the regulator could read a child’s mind just by staring into their eyes.

  “Has anyone been thrown in?” That was Jaysin behind them, just eight, as young as any Ictha were tested. The younger children remained at the north camp with the old mothers. “Has anyone gone down yet?”

  “How would we know, stupid?” Zeen rolled his eyes. “We just got here too.” He moved behind Yaz to stand with Jaysin.

  Yaz glanced at the hole and shuddered. Even here in the south the ice lay miles deep. She wondered how far she would fall before she hit something.

  “Are they down there?” Zeen kept glancing at the pit. The closer they got to the regulator the further Zeen positioned himself from the edge. “Are the Missing watching us from down there?”

  “No.” Yaz shook her head. Most likely all the pit held was a sad pile of frozen corpses, the broken children properly broken at last and removed from the bloodline. Some of the southern tribes spoke of the Ancestor’s Tree and of pruning it, but Yaz didn’t know what a tree was and her father, who had spoken to southerners at gatherings across the years, had never met any who had seen such a thing.

  “But they call it the Pit of the Missing,” Zeen said.

  “It’s the children who are thrown down there who are missing.” Little Jaysin spoke up again from behind Yaz. It seemed fear had made the boy brave. He rarely had the courage to speak outside his own tent.

  “It’s a different sort of . . . Oh, never mind.” Yaz would let someone else explain it to him after she’d gone. Instead she
looked up at the sky, pale and clear above her, laced with strips of very high cloud, their edges tinged with the blood of the setting sun. The Missing had lived on Abeth an age before the tribes of man beached their ships upon its shores, but they were all long gone by the time men navigated the black seas between the stars and came to this world. Many southerners treated them as if they were gods, though the Ictha knew that the only gods were those in the sea and those in the sky, with the ice to keep them from warring upon each other.

  “I’d rather just be left out of the tent,” Zeen said. “If I was broken I’d rather just be left out.”

  Yaz shrugged. A quick death beat a slow death, and at least this way you gave honour to your tribe. Also there was the issue of metal. Clan Mother Mazai said that the priesthood was the only source of metal in a thousand miles, and not just pieces of it as might sometimes be traded between the tribes, but worked metal, fashioned to meet demand, be it knife or chain. The ceremony honoured the god of the Black Rock and that in turn earned the clan favour with the regulator. Dying here would help the clan.

  A sudden cry jerked Yaz from her thoughts. The regulator was standing alone, the wind tugging at the tattered strips of his cloak. There was no sign of the child that had failed his inspection, just the faint and diminishing echoes of their screaming that still escaped the hole. A stillness pervaded the watching crowd, and they had already been still.