The Bright and The Dark

Which side are you going to be on?"

The wind was high, the air drier than the leaves and brambles that crunched under Julian's feet. It was dry as fire, dry as the sun. Dry as drought--but Julian shuddered to even think the word. Drought.

"I'll be with the Dust," Davi was saying, his voice hardly carrying over the wind. "They'll choose me, I know it." He was up on the road, swinging a willow wand in his hand, whipping it around like a flail, like a scythe. He laughed, dry and dusty. "You'll be with the Water men," he shouted back at Julian.

"Then we'll have to kill each other," Julian answered, not listening, really, to his own words. One of the lambs was caught in the brambles and was calling Julian with frightened, mournful bleats.

Then Julian looked up at his friend. Davi should have replied by now, laughing him off or telling him it wasn't true. But Davi only whipped the branch, back and forth in front of him, cutting through the dry wind.

Branches and thorns caught Julian's knees, scratched him, bit through the windings around his legs. He wondered what made Davi talk about it, today, yesterday, almost every day for weeks now. Then he remembered, vaguely, like the smell of a rainfall just before he woke, that Davi's brother had gone only a few weeks ago. Who had taken him? Julian wondered. Dust? Water? He reached the lamb and sank his arms into the brambles, scratching bright blood onto his white skin.

"Or are you staying here?" Davi's laugh came whistling through the wind like the wand striking the air. "With the women and the girls? Tending sheep. Will you wear a dress and a shawl with your beard, like Telan?"

Julian spun around, wanting to chase Davi, race him, make him take it back. The branches caught his clothing and he couldn't move. He watched his friend stride down the road, distant, taller and broader, his copper-flax hair chopped blunt and short. He was nearly grown. He would be taken soon. Julian lifted the lamb over his shoulders and began to pick his way out of the brush.

One day, not long after that, Davi put a stick and a skin of water in Julian's hands, and they walked out from Kiela. They were going to see the men.

Kiela was a large town, larger than they knew. Its fields spread out over acres of land, even up to the mountains. Houses, pens with their crooked-ringed fences, fanned rows of plantings--it seemed to go on forever before they walked out of it. They mounted the feet of the hills and looked down on it, their home, the world of their childhood. How small it was there, distant in the vastness of the land.

They walked northward, very far, farther than Julian had ever walked. His feet began hurting him, he could feel every stone through the thin leather of his shoes, and he began to sweat inside his woolen tunic, beads of water slipping down his sides. Was it getting hotter? The land around him, beneath its tangle of scrub and brush, looked dry and sandy. It was spring, it should have been raining, the clouds heavy and thick. He looked up at the sky. The sun came out from behind the mountain in a blinding swell. Julian ducked, squinting, trying to shade himself with his thin hands.

Ahead of him, Davi laughed. "Is the sun burning you? Pretty Bioran boy. You should be brown, like me."

He wasn't brown, Julian thought loudly. The book-man was brown, although Davi would only laugh at him again for still going to see the book-man. Davi was honey-colored, wheat-colored. His hair wasn't even quite brown. But Aunt Ana said they were brown, and so they were. "We're all brown in Kiela," she would say, then she would smile at Julian, and say to him as if it were a secret, "except Julian."

When they neared the village, Julian did not at first see it. He saw only dark spots on the land, piles of sticks, scattered like a child's toy. Only when they came closer, and the spots began to grow, did he see that they were houses. Shacks, rough and broken, each so far from the next. There were no pens, no rows of grain. The land was unplanted and untended. Behind each house was a tiny scrap of a garden, stuck through with the drooping heads of tired stalks. Here and there an animal wandered, a mangy sheep, a bone-thin chicken. Women stood bent at their doors, and children sat in the shade and the dust beside their walls. Between those walls the dry land stretched out, barren.

And Julian saw that the faces on the one side of the village, where a few shacks were clumped near to each other, were brown, wheat honey and darker. On the north side, farther from them and across the rocky barrens, the women and their thin children were white, colorless as Julian, and their hair was the same white cornsilk gold. It was as if they were not one village of Biorans, but two villages, two different peoples, foreigners to each other. Julian thought of the gatherings in Kiela, the Aunts and all the people together in a circle, and knew there were no such gatherings in this place.