Free The Glass Mountains by Cynthia Kadohata Page A

Artroro and Soom Kali. Before I left camp I permitted myself a deep breath through my nose, so I would always remember what the Formans had done to my people, and I let my eyes search for anyone that I might recognize. I saw only one—Tarkahna’s brother—and then I couldn’t bear to see more.  
    “Mariska, hurry,” said my mother, and I ran to follow the others.  
    I usually loved sleep and dreaming, and this was the first night ever I could remember that I didn’t dream at all. The Bakshami see sleep as another one of their necessary rituals. I’d never slept so little. Leisha and Jobei looked pasty, but Maruk, if anything, appeared flushed. He no longer pulled out his knife repeatedly with a flourish, yet he struck me now as stronger and infinitely more lethal than he had when he used to show off his knife by whipping it out of his robe. Now he looked as if he could use that knife.  
    I carried a knife, too, the one my grandfather had given me from Soom Kali. It was the only one of my possessions that had survived the attack.  
    For the last few days, Katinka had refused to walk, and she rode now on Artie’s sled with some of our charred possessions. Katinka’s eyes scared me, the way they stared at nothing and the way the whites had taken on a yellow cast. My parents had already lost several children, including three after I was born. Deaths of children were solemn but expected events. But now, having lost many of our neighbors, I didn’t think I could stand it if anything happened to Katinka. When it came time for a short break, I gave her my water ration, which she drank voraciously without even noticing where it came from.  
    I’d never been so tired and thirsty. If this trip was like other long trips I’d taken, we were not yet living our hardest moments. But I couldn’t believe that. I knew that if things got harder my eyes, too, would turn yellow, and I would have to hope weakly that others would take pity on me. There were certain types of brutality that one got used to in Bakshami: the brutality of the sun, the brutality of the sand and dust, the brutality of living two hundred years in the sun and sand and dust. But I think my people always tried to make up for the brutality with their kindness, their fortitude, and their peaceful ways. We kept no jails; we bore no murderous thoughts. So this hate I felt rising in my heart was new to me. Just as the sight of the flea-bitten man’s weapon had made Maruk’s eyes flame in a new way, so the smell of hundreds of dead Bakshami had created a malignity in my heart that I would not have believed possible just a short time earlier.  
     

 
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    I think we’d all believed that the day we arrived at the first lake on our journey would be a day of triumph. Instead we plowed despairingly through a weedy, dried-out forest and sat around a lake so small I almost felt I could swallow it in a single gulp. We dropped our packs and fell upon the water, taking huge gulps with a fervor and passion that at times made me forget what had happened and feel a type of gluttonous joy. The dogs yelped with pleasure, and we had to prevent them from jumping into the lake at least until we could fill our bottles. When we finally let the dogs go in, they splashed furiously to rid themselves of the fleas that tormented them.  
    We ourselves bathed in the warm water and then sat quietly near the lake. I swore the water level looked lower than it had when we arrived. Ansmeea’s daughter, alone now but for Sian, sobbed uncontrollably, and it was as if she sobbed for all of us as we sat stoically in our new camp.  
    Finally someone spoke, the woman who’d been the oldest in my village after Grandfather. She hadn’t uttered a word since we left our village. “I go no further,” she said.  
    We all looked at her without speaking, since speaking wouldn’t have been our place. But her daughter placed a hand on her mother’s arm and said gently, “But you must.”