Free Green Monkey Dreams by Isobelle Carmody Page A

Would have been, except that her mam had died of the bloat only two days before the song swelled on the winds, summoning them all to the road. That had left Kora responsible for her four little brothers: Rill, Mif, Lekkie and silent, solemn little Floret, just out of his blinddays.
    It was hard to know who to pity more – the mam for missing the pilgrimage to the Great Blue, or Kora, saddled with the younglings. She could have left them to fend for themselves. The old Kora would have. She was big and strong and athletic, and she had run further and faster than most. When the Piper called, it was clear to anyone with half a brain that she would be one of the first to reach the Great Blue – maybe even the Firstcomer, who it was said would sit at the right hand of the Piper at the celebration in Evermore.
    Her decision to pace her brothers was received with incredulity, for it meant sacrificing her chance to be the first. A lot of the others thought Kora a fool, and had said so loudly, as if personally affronted by her decision. She might have made someone else stay back with her little brothers, they said. No one would have blamed her. After all, everyone was supposed to run their own race.
    But Kora had run along with the little ones, chivvying them and encouraging them, falling further and further behind.
    Sim wondered if she regretted her decision now.
    It was different for him. Even if he had not been pacing Sorah, he would never have been near the front. In the ritual runs which he now understood were training for the greatest run of all, he had never managed to be anywhere near the front. His mind would begin to drift and before he knew it, he would be running with the stragglers. The elders called him a lazy dreamer who ought to have run harder.
    â€˜He does not put his heart into the run; the Piper knows,’ his da had once sighed to his mam in Sim’s hearing.
    Even now, it was all the same to him if he was last or nearly last. Surely all that really mattered was getting there, and he would not leave Sorah to limp last and all alone.
    Any more than Kora would leave Floret.
    Sim had always been more than a little awed by Kora before this. She had never so much as looked at him, of course, and that had been as it should be. Each according to their place in the race , each to run the best they can.
    But in choosing not to run the best race she could, Kora had made herself into something different. He was not the only one who thought it. The day the exodus began, a fight had nearly broken out when one of Kora’s rivals said loudly that she ought not to be allowed to come. That had ended when Kora hunched her shoulders, and snarled the traditional prelude to a challenge. The other had started back in alarm and lifted her head in submission.
    Kora had turned her back insultingly, as if her rival’s life was nothing.
    She was still formidable, though now streaked with sweat and road dust, but something had changed. Ordinarily as things went, Sim would not even have dared think of Kora for fear the Piper might strike him dead on the spot for his insolence. But her deliberate slowish lope and her gentleness with her brothers separated her from the haughty frontrunners who had only days before been her comrades.
    He wondered how she felt about the Piper finally sending the song of summoning so soon after her mam died and before her little brothers were old enough to fend for themselves. A month more would have done it, yet she had never railed at her fate and even now, when the stragglers were falling further and further behind, her face gave nothing of her thoughts away.
    â€˜If the music stops,’ Lekkie was saying now to Floret, ‘we will have to run and run forever until we fall on the road and die and maggots come to gnaw at our innards and big birds with knife-beaks come to peck our eyes out . . .’
    â€˜That is enough,’ Kora said sharply. ‘There is no need to frighten