Jáchym Topol - City, Sister, Silver

We got pulverized in that last awful battle, only thirty of us turned up at the agreed spot afterwards, the tribe was devastated. There were just three women left … where’s Eva? we wondered, she was powerful, gave us strength … she was wounded … and one of us had to kill her and bring the rest her hair, so it wouldn’t fall into enemy hands, we divided it up … we have to get back to Svantovít, we’ve got no choice … but the prospects were poor … of us making it all the way through those savage inhuman tribes … we were ambushed by runts in the swamps, we’d never seen such inhumans. They carried wicker shields with a turtle painted on them and their bodies were coated in mud. They attacked screaming Ninja! Ninja! and killed two of our comrades. Then we encountered the Croots, with whom we had once maintained a shaky alliance, since they were as pitiless as us, it made sense to join forces and hunt down those who were weaker … but the Croots turned us over to the Chebeks, whom we’d tyrannized since time out of mind, in return for boofalo and slaves … only a few of us escaped … the women had all fallen, and without their presence, their other fragrance and other agile moves, we were done for … we needed to steal some women … but out of eight men to start with, just five were left, and one of them was Kral … who didn’t even carry a weapon, the nut, he’d only survived by a miracle … for days on end he’d just doodle in the sand … whatcha doin there, Kral … we teased him … hey doodler, come have a dance an jump somebody … the only reason he’d lasted in the tribe was his powerful sister Eva, she protected him … leave him alone … he makes letterz, we’re gonna need them so we don’t forget anything, so we can be with our fallen ones … c’mon, Eva, we remember every bone, every bit of flesh, we’ve got every slain tribesman in our hearts … you do, yeah, but not your children … oh yeah, right, we scratched our greasy manes, and whenever we didn’t happen to be out murdering and ambushing, or being murdered and ambushed, which tended to merge, we pestered Eva and Kral, whadda you wanna remember all that nonsense for anyway … none a your business, said Eva, go hunt me up a couple slaves, I’m gettin kina restless … finally the five of us, Brawler, Sad Man, The One Who Is In Many Places, and The One Who Leaps … and Kral, made it to the statue of Svantovít. And the four of us, you bandits and cattle rustlers, just you recall, the four of us stood there and pleaded with him, and Kral, the poor wretch, broke off a twig and scribbled in the sand while the four of us waited, and Svantovít spoke … remember, you defilers of virgins and slayers of children, you know what he told us … and we went and stood around Kral, remember, you scalpers and censors, we stood around him on all four sides and Brawler struck first and Sad Man tore off his fur and The One Who Is In Many Places spat in Kral’s face and The One Who Leaps speared him … and then we beat him to death.

We obeyed Svantovít, you generals and dispatchers, and when Kral was dead we cut out his heart, chopped it into four parts, and ate them … we sacrificed our brother, you judges and undertakers, so we could survive … and his heart was sweet and pulsing, and our strength began to come back to us … and Brawler looked at his healed arm and screamed and The One Who Is In Many Places stomped the ground and Sad Man laughed … The One Who Leaps dashed uphill, holding his nose … he smelled smoke, and pointed his spear in the direction it came from … and we raced off, no longer feeling hunger or fear, but intoxicated with savage joy, we were eager … Kral’s heart lived in us, we felt it like armor in every artery, every hair on our body … and we ran downhill, four brothers united by sacrifice … at the bottom was a fence of posts … we probably should’ve waited for nightfall … but Brawler whined impatiently, Sad Man nodded, The One Who Leaps licked his lips, and The One Who Is In Many Places rose … and off we went, creeping through the grass like snakes … The One Who Is In Many Places suddenly stopped and spun around, eyes flitting, arrow at the ready … a dog came running out and Sad Man hammered in its skull … The One Who Leaps scaled the palisade and opened up the gate … and Brawler charged in first and cut down two men … they didn’t expect an attack in broad daylight … and the rest of us charged in after him … swift and silent … darting in and out of cabins, killing left and right … our enemies were too stunned to react, they’d never seen a horde or heard the cries of foreign warriors … we slaughtered a lot of them before they rose to the defense … and that only made us more eager, we let them feel our skillfulness and new strength, and then they didn’t feel a thing. Lying glassy-eyed on the ground, chin up, in their beards an arrow, a bloody sword wound, a bite mark … some of the slaves welcomed us and rebelled against their masters … but we slaughtered them too, our strength was great and it grew with the blood … the women put up more resistance … scratching and biting us, some ran themselves through … and we only spared the ones who resisted, beating them till they lay still … any women who begged for mercy we kicked aside and chopped in two and smashed their childrens’ heads open against the cabin walls … then everyone was dead and we went to the few women we’d spared … and raped them and gave them our seed, because we knew our time had come.

And we were never naked and miserable again. We made the women we’d spared dig a pit and burn all the corpses. We watched them closely, taking note of anyone who wept over the body of her man or child. A few of them fled … we let them go. But three stayed. They realized who we were. They didn’t weep. We wanted sons only from them. We forayed through the surrounding area, massacring settlements of soft people. And then we came across a new tribe. They had yellow skin and slanted eyes and rode beasts we’d never seen before. At first we thought it was a single creature with two heads and six legs. Then we slayed a few and realized what they were. They didn’t have any special power, they bled like all the rest. And they too left behind only flesh. They were unsuited as slaves, didn’t like to work. We took their horses and our strength grew. After that the yellow people too avoided our lands.

We were four: the dark princes of Morana, protecting one another from four sides. Our land was desolate, anyone we hadn’t slaughtered or enslaved had fled, so we ordered our slaves to build a tower. It had to be tall so we could see far. We wanted to see like eagles. We wanted the tower to touch the clouds.

Our first women all had died, but not before giving us children. Our sons slept on dung out in the cold. We humiliated and beat them to make them hard. Those who survived did not love us but they feared us. Our daughters could fight as well as our sons. But they also knew how to do other things. They would gather roots, and from them and pebbles and the claws of beasts of prey they could divine our direction. They could heal their brothers’ wounds by applying spider webs and saliva and birch compresses. One of them was powerful. Her name was Soaring and her strength was great. She governed the slaves and directed the building of the tower. Even her brothers obeyed her.

One day she divined a direction for us and we rode a long way, to a great river. We came upon a beaten path and stopped the caravan. Spears came raining down on us. One of our sons laughed and rode forth into the forest of spears, screaming at the foreign warriors in our tongue. They answered him in gibberish. He returned with foam and blood spurting from the flanks of his horse. What to do with such rabble, fathers, our son the wolf called out, they do not even know how to speak, they are němci, they are mutes, and that was how the Germans got their name in Czech. In one of the mute people’s carts was an old woman and a little boy who spoke like us. Maybe that’s why we spared them. The boy had an odd thing. A transparent stone, bright red in color, and when we held it up to the sun it turned gold. There was a fly inside, but it didn’t move. We shook the stone, trying to make it fly. Maybe it was dead. But it looked like it was in flight. Its wings weren’t bent and they still had their colors. Cautiously we examined the stone. It was magic. The stone had stopped life but without crushing it, it had the life inside it. How did that happen … we wondered. And what are you called, boy, one of us asked … respectfully, in case he was a sorcerer. Samo,* said the boy. One of us gave him a dagger and a sword, another draped him in his crimson cloak. We also loaded his bow and arrows onto the cart. To ward off his wrath. After all, we had killed his servants.