Free The Boy Who Stole Attila's Horse by Iván Repila Page A

you.’
    ‘Yes. But before that you must keep your promise,’ says Big.
    ‘I know.’
    ‘I hope you can.’
    ‘I’ve thought about it a lot. I won’t be afraid.’
     
    Small gets to his feet and collects Mother’s bag, which landed a few metres from the well. Then he goes back to the edge to look at his brother for the last time.
    ‘Kill her for what she did to us,’ Big says.
    And also:
    ‘Remember that she threw us in here. You don’t love her anymore.’
    *
    With those words still sounding through the forest, on the mountains and along every path, Small departs. And huddled in a corner of the well, alone now, Big surrenders himself to a torture that will go on for hours and days, and he utters one last message, which nobody hears, in that capricious language of tears and laughter:
    ‘Amam cor…’

97
    S MALL ARRIVES DRENCHED in the orange light of the afternoon. He lets the things he brought with him drop to the ground: a rucksack, two ropes, a small stick, several stakes and a hunting knife. It wasn’t hard to find the way back: an invisible cord pulled him from his navel.
    Seeing it now, with new eyes, it is a beautiful place to die.
    He remains painfully thin. His eyes are still sunken deep in their sockets, as if they were tired of looking. His cheekbones could cut right through the flesh that covers them. He has, however, recovered the olive colour in his face and managed to separate the animal from the man.
    He walks slowly towards the well, giving each step its due importance, gauging the distance that separates him from the mouth and which grows shorter with each new step. He stops two metres from the well. He still can’t see. Nor does he say anything. Another step. The bottom of the well glistens in the corner of his eye.
    The next step is the last. With his hands holding on to the edge, he leans over.
    *
    The previous days were very strange for him. Not because of the trouble he had finding the way home, or the nights he spent out in the open, imagining himself lost. Not because he went back to eating ripe fruit, but because he bore his brother’s absence like a necessary void. He felt as if a shark had ripped his body at the waist, and as he walked along like that—so incomplete, his organs hanging out for all to see, powerless to hide the emptiness and with no way of preserving his dignity—he felt ashamed.
    The previous days were very strange for him, with that shame seeping out of every pore on his skin, leaving him slippery for any human contact. Along the dirt paths, in the copper mines, in factories destroyed by desperation, in the cities left to ruin, people made way for him. None of them could stand the glare of his eyes since in them it was still possible to see the well. And yet the people assumed his shame—the obscenity of so many years spent in a daze—and in silence they began to escort him—an unassailable throng, a mob of men and women emerging from their cages.
    The previous days were very strange for him, visiting Mother, who seemed to have expected the parting and neither screamed nor put up resistance. He didn’t want to know her reasons for doing what she did, but seeing her happy and without remorse was enough for him to understand that there were stories he didn’t know. Hesuffocated her with the old food bag she had left them with in the well—that bait that never broke their spirit—so that she understood, before she went, that they didn’t touch a morsel of that false charity, that they overcame every urge, that they did not surrender.
    The previous days were very strange for him; the family home surrounded by an expectant crowd, and him, inside, alone, avoiding their gaze. And ultimately leaving, because that place could no longer be his and because he knew that his spirit was no longer close to what it had been before.
     
    ‘I’m back,’ he says.
    He unravels the ropes and secures the ends to the stakes nailed into the ground. He takes the opposite end