The Boy Who Stole Attila's Horse Read Free Page B

same. They retreat.
    ‘You got him!’ says Small.
    Over the next minutes a few of the wolves return to the hole, but without conviction. Most of them back off, regrouping several metres away where the rocks don’t reach. Eventually, they leave.
    ‘Can you hear them?’
    ‘No. They’ve gone.’
    ‘You frightened them.’
    ‘Yeah. I frightened the wolves. With rocks!’
    Small lets out an astonished laugh, still gripped with fear.
    ‘Let’s sleep for a while. They won’t come back. There are still a few hours till the sun comes up, and we have to preserve our energy. You go first. I’ll stay awake a bit longer, just in case any of the bastards show their faces here again.’
    Small thinks, he said ‘bastards’. His brother has beaten the wolves. Tonight he’ll sleep like few nights before, and it will be the last night, too, that he rests peacefully.
    Big settles down in the middle of the well, rocks in either hand, and he doesn’t take his eyes off the hole. Tonight he’ll ask himself how he would fend off the wolves if they got out of the well, and the thought won’t let him sleep. In his head terrible images will take shape of his brother’s skin separated from the bone, of his own, ripped apart in a bloody ritual, his mind still alert to the sound of the beasts as they chew.

11
    F OR FOUR DAYS the sun scorches the fields, dries the well, and marks the trees with great strokes of copper. The water that filtered through the earth turns first to sludge, then to clods of black sand. When there is nothing left to drink, the two brothers break their daily routine to suck on the roots that poke out from the walls until their mouths taste of coal.
    ‘I’m not well,’ Small says.
    ‘It will rain.’
     
    They know this land well, the motions of the sky under which they’ve grown up, the cloud cycles. They know that a ferocious sun this month heralds an imminent downpour. It will rain because it always rains when their skin starts to peel, and because the land seems to be governed by a mechanism of suffering that works against every one of nature’s decrees. As such, the people here are tough in skin and character, and they meet the exigencies of the land with unbending patience, without demands or complaint. This, however, presupposes a rupture in theiremotional communication, in their shows of affection and in the human contract of cohabitation. The brothers are living proof of it. They no longer look one another in the eyes or search for themselves in the other as they did in the early days. Displays of affection aren’t called for in a world dictated by the need to survive. Love is like a vow of silence, where cruelties befitting a reptile, a prehistoric crocodile, are meted out freely.
    ‘Do you love me?’ Small asks.
    ‘It will rain.’
     
    By the time the sun sets on the fourth day of drought they have gone hours without drinking a single drop of water, and Big is showing signs of dehydration. Even his urine has dried up. A silent rage throbs in his temples and for a moment he wants more than anything in the world to strangle his brother, to put his hands around his neck so that his eyes pop out of their sockets and he can bite into them and suck out the white jelly, as if they were salt-water sweeties.
    ‘Don’t ask me any questions.’
    ‘I haven’t said anything to you.’
    ‘Don’t talk to me either.’
     
    Small closes his eyes and thinks about rivers, lakes, puddles of rainwater that he could splash and dance and jump aboutin. He imagines torrential floods in all flavours: lemon clouds that release their juice over the meadows and marinate the livestock; deluges of sweet orange to swim and dive in with his mouth open, never drowning; hailstorms of purple grapes; supernatural ice melts; underwater meadows. He digs a hole in the darkest part of the shade and puts his head in up to his ears, in a place where the soil retains a cool cover of blackness and silence. And in this ostrich-like