Shannon Hale - Book of a Thousand Days

We survived. And with Mama's singing, we stayed healthy enough. We may've eaten mudfish more than rabbit and stick birds more than antelope, we may've watered the milk gray and slept with our mare inside the gher for warmth, but times there were when we laughed enough to shake the forest and ripple the rivers. Times I thought, good riddance to my brothers. They don't know what they missed.

Here's a memory of my mama and home that my fingers long to draw:

[Image: Picture of Woman Cooking and a Hut in the Background]

And then I get to remembering when she died. I was fourteen. I'd been crying too much and was weak as wet laundry. But I laid her out on the open steppes under the Eternal Blue Sky, with her feet pointed at the Sacred Mountain so her soul would know which way to walk. I sat with her another day and night. I told her stories about our life together so her soul could remember who she was, then I sang her the parting songs. The songs that tell her spirit that she's ready to go, that it's all right, that she can leave me now and walk up the Sacred Mountain and back down again into the Ancestors' Realm. In cities, singing the soul out of the body is a shaman's work, but we muckers had to learn those songs ourselves, with no shaman around for miles.

I guess singing the parting songs to my mama was the hardest thing I've ever done. I would've rather had her ghost haunting my every footstep than be alone. But I felt proud after I did it. And now she'll be waiting in the Ancestors' Realm, ready to sing me in.

We were camped a long way from the city that summer, so far it made my legs hurt just to think of the distance. I took apart the gher and loaded as much as I could on Weedflower's back and the rest on my own. I had to leave the gher's heavy winter coverings behind, cast off to rot on the ground. It wasn't easy to do. Mama and I had pressed the wool ourselves to make the felt --aching work, longtime work. But what could I do? The load was already heavy enough to make me stagger.

As I walked toward the summer pastures, I offered Weedflower as a gift to everyone I met. None robbed me, thank the Ancestors, but none accepted my gift. If they had, it'd be the same as consenting to make me a member of their family and agreeing to one day find me a husband. It'd been a hard winter. None wanted another mouth to feed.

Maybe if I were prettier. Maybe if I didn't have the red blotches on my face and arm, the sign of an ill-fated life.

I always thought I'd be a mucker bride, become a mama like my own one day. It's only now, as my brush touches this page, that I'm realizing I never will. I wish My Lord the cat were curled up in my lap and purring.

Eventually I found a clan headed toward the city, and I exchanged my gher for a place in their Long Walk. It was summer, so I could sleep on the ground. I had Weedflower's milk to drink, and I hunted for roots and birds and rodents when I could, and traded milk for a bowl of food from other people's pots. I'd never been around so many folk before, and yet it was the loneliest I ever felt. Is that strange? Well, the loneliest except for now in this tower.

I miss Weedflower, whom I had to sell in order to buy myself employment and lodging at the house of chiefs. I miss myself, how I used to be. How I used to feel under the sky. I miss the time when I could believe I'd die old with my own husband beside me, one who wouldn't think of me as a mouth to feed or leave after a standing-death winter.

I just looked at the dump hole and saw light outside. Morning? Did I write all night? Time is a wind that keeps blowing in my face and mumbling words that don't make sense.

My lady's calling. She says she's hungry.

She's always hungry.

Day 795

There's an odor about my lady, like a dung heap on a hot day. If my script looks ill, it's because I closed my eyes as I wrote that. I shouldn't even think it. But she does---my lady does smell like hot dung.

Day 812

It's my honor to serve. It's my honor, I know it is, and yet... Ancestors, don't read this, but I begin to wonder, is it right? The lady is jailed for neglecting her duty, but I'm jailed for fulfilling mine.

I miss My Lord. The cat.

Day 834

Under, god of tricks, keeps thinking of new ways to bully us. I cooked our meal from a new sack of grain, one that was buried under crates and the rats hadn't yet touched. My stomach wasn't feeling round and open, so I only nibbled, but my lady ate any quantity of flat bread. She grumbles as she eats, like a beast feeding on short grass.

Ancestors bless her.

After dinner, I noticed how colors seemed to wave around me, so intense I thought it was real. The bricks were orange and moved like fire, though there was no heat. Strangely, I didn't feel worried till my lady screamed and pointed up, where I only saw the wooden ceiling and darkness.

"It's coming down," she screamed. "It's falling in!"

"What is? What?"

Then she turned to the hole in the wall, screaming anew. "A wolf! A wolf eats through our wall!" There was nothing there.

I held her and sang to her while she screamed and vomited. By the time my eyes no longer saw orange fire rippling over the bricks, my lady had collapsed into a soggy, though quiet, mess.

Bad grain. My mama warned me once that if eating stored grain makes you see things that aren't really there, then it's gone bad, touched by Under, god of tricks.

I suppose I should be grateful the bread didn't kill us, though it near killed me to have to dump the entire bag of grain out our hole.

Day 852

Sometimes I spend several hours by our hole calling to the guards. There's been no answer since the night the wolf howled. If Lord Khasar did kill them, why didn't my lady's father send others?

[Image: Picture of Rats]

Day 912

I can hear the rats squeaking madly down there. When I'm half asleep, it sounds as though they're holding a party just to laugh at me. I can't sleep in the cellar again tonight. Though the smells from outside speak of spring, it still gets mighty cold, and my limbs are frozen by half, my jaw sore from chattering.

There are so many rats, I can't think what to do. I can't think much. I'm so cold from sleeping in the cellar, my head feels like ice, and I imagine that all the worry is cracking it. It's only been two years and a half. I call outside, shouting of how we've not much time and to send more food or please break us free. I have to think that no one's there.

Maybe my lady's family doesn't care if we die, or even remember us at all.

Later

I've moved most of the remaining food up to our ground floor. It'll spoil faster out of the cold cellar, but at least the rats won't get it as easily. I've counted and measured, and we can't live four years on what the rats left behind.

If I'm not too cold and tower-addled to do my figures, then we don't have enough to last a month.

I won't tell my lady. I don't think she'd understand. She barely speaks of late, barely notices me at all, even when I'm singing to her unknown ailment. Besides, I don't have the patience to hear her cry again.

Day 918

I've decided. We're going to live. It's such a relief! I begin to feel more my mucker self just to settle my mind on it. A mucker survives. No matter that we've not enough food. We'll find a way.

Day 920

Yesterday morning, I sat scraping at the mortar between two bricks. I didn't make breakfast. I didn't do the washing. I just scraped, scraped, scraped. I broke our kitchen knife. It never was a good knife, but now we've got none at all. Today I tried a wooden spoon and grated the handle down to its bowl. I'll keep trying everything till the wall breaks or my fingers do. So what if the guards are ordered to kill us on sight? They may not even be out there, and that death isn't as sure as the starving death awaiting us.