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Taya’s first take of the season was a soft, brick-red fox. Her fingers trailed along the delicate cable, its tightly wound steel fibers, and the ground caressed the soles of her feet as she followed the line to the little place of blood. There, the animal thrashed and pulled desperately at the trap its hind foot had been caught in, wailing. She felt sorry for it, but she was proud of herself for catching it.
“You’re only crying because you lost, shuu dee,” she said playfully to the fox as she approached it. “Shh, it’s okay. Odoo be shamdaa uidangaa umkhaya. Nomkhol blogti.” As she knelt and gripped the back of its head in her hand, it stilled. “It’s okay,” she repeated, more gently, producing a curved silver blade from her belt. “Aikha beshe.” It closed its eyes and she opened its neck, spilling an offering across the earth that melted away a dusting of hoarfrost.
She felt sorry that she didn’t know how to use the long, house-type traps that people used to get foxes with. There were still some in Shekhen, with moss growing over their stones, and the ones out on the steppe were used as burrows sometimes by small animals, whether or not they recognized the irony. Those traps were better in general and wouldn’t hurt the foxes so much while they were still alive, but all anyone could remember was that there was a delicate art to baiting and arming them– no one knew enough to teach Taya. There were plenty of people in the Town, on the other hand, who could make these foot traps out of spare parts. So when foxes had first started stealing from the food stores in Shekhen, whatever the method, Taya had decided she was going to learn how to get them back. She had proved to be good at it.
Her knife was hilted with bone, inset with silver; she was careful to remove the fox’s skin all in one piece, her head bowed over its little bloodstained body in a performance of sorrow. At one time, she had decided that she would invent a new way to arm the stone traps if no one could remember the old way. That was what she did with most things. But the truth was, even if it was better and it would hurt less, she didn’t like the idea of leaving a little fox locked away in a stone house, crying at the walls and waiting for death. She wouldn’t have liked to die that way, herself. She would rather be under the open sky, even if it was wicked; on the steppe, even if the grasses never bent themselves to help her. So she kept using Bad Grief’s coil spring traps with the bell lines that ran all the way back home.
She removed the head, throat, and organs in one piece. That was a difficult skill that her family had taught her, which she hadn’t been good at right away. The offal she left on a flat stone facing the Sky for birds to come and eat. The rest she carried back through the twilight, along the line that connected her trap to the most luxurious yurt their town had ever seen.
Frost roughened the fabric that made its walls, but inside was warm and thick-smelling. Taya pushed her way inside, the fresh fur bundled in her arms and the body hanging from one of her hands. Although it was early in the morning, a Bride was already awake, stoking Taya’s stove with argal.
“What are you going to do with that fox meat, basaghan?” Maral asked, almost reprimanding. Fox meat was no good unless you were starving, which they weren’t. Maral smiled at Taya.
“Ime beshe,” Taya assured her, smiling back. “I’m going to give it to Notkin; the dogs will like to eat it. Did you wake up when I left?”
“The bell woke some of us,” Maral admitted, “but I didn’t want to go back to sleep. I promised to make urme, didn’t I?” On top of the stove, a wide pot of milk sat at a low boil. Around the sides of the yurt on floor-mattresses, a few more people slept soundly, half of them children, the conversation nothing more than a pulse of white noise.
Taya’s smile became more reluctant. She did love urme, but it was the sort of thing she would demand when she was younger; the sort of thing people kept giving her now because she used to demand it. Now, at the big age of twelve, she was torn between earnest appreciation and a new, bitter desire to provide her own treats. She didn’t like being treated like a baby, but in some ways her family here couldn’t help themselves. They needed her to be that, for reasons she didn’t completely understand. “You did…” she said without expression, hanging up the meat and fur near the door. She would stretch the skin and butcher the body later, and that would make her feel better, she told herself.
“Did the frost come?” Maral asked. “I haven’t looked outside.”
“Khaya dee,” Taya replied, sitting down on a cushion near Maral. “Just when it was supposed to. And how quickly! This morning is uubshentay, tegdegh.” After slipping out of her big coat, she rubbed her hands over her triceps demonstratively.
“Then you’ll be able to make good use of that fur.”
“It won’t dry fast enough,” Taya agreed, eyes fixed on the wooden spoon with which Maral stirred the urme.
“Will you be going into the Town today?” Maral asked, unable to prevent the shadow that crossed her expression at the question.
“Unente,” Taya said, pretending she didn’t notice. “I’ll go soon.”
“The urme will be done when you come back. Galsan will want some too, won’t she… If you stayed longer, I would give you some to bring to Sarnai.”
Taya hummed in agreement as she climbed to her feet and pulled her coat back on. “We should bring the water barrels inside so they don’t freeze. It’ll be colder tomorrow night…”
“I’ll make sure we do. Put on your boots,” Maral warned.
“That’s funny coming from you,” Taya muttered under her breath as she did so. Despite her stubbornness, she was glad for the warmth.
Outside, butchers and tanners were congregating; they shared warm buns filled with mince beef from the recent protocol at the Ragi Barrow. As she joined them, hands reached out to touch her head and shoulders as though she was a good luck charm. Before she left with them, she checked on one of the barrels in question, which sat beside her yurt. Lifting the lid from the steel drum, she could see it was nearly full of rainwater, which thankfully hadn’t frozen over in the cold night.
The workers were delighted to hear that she was going to walk with them, and she told anyone in earshot about her early-morning fox as they followed the footpath towards Town. Before they had even passed between the bull stones, one of the odonghe patted her shoulder. “Good to catch a fox before it finds the smoked meats,” they said, and then patted their own shoulder meaningfully.
Taya smiled sheepishly, but let Kooseh kneel so that she could climb up onto their shoulders. Few of the men or women in Shekhen could carry Taya any meaningful distance anymore, but the odonghe easily could. “It’s a good omen for the winter, too,” she said to Kooseh as they stood and resumed walking.
“Tiimel uu?” Kooseh asked, having never heard this before, their mittens grasping her shins to keep her steady.
“Tiimel daa,” she affirmed with a playful imperiousness, checking that her silver knife was secure at her hip. “I just decided it.”
On the walk to the Gates of Labour, news and gossip circulated like ink through a pool of water. A new odongh had been born from the river just south of Shekhen yesterday afternoon, and hadn’t been given a name yet. Galsan asked Taya if she would name it, and she replied that she hadn’t thought of anything good. A tanner had killed himself three weeks ago, and people speculated about why he had done it. His sister had been inconsolably angry with him since she found his body, they said.
When they rounded the corner into the long shadow of the empty Termitary blocks, Taya climbed off of Kooseh’s shoulders and said goodbye. She couldn’t go with them into Olonggo, even though it was her job. There couldn’t be any Overseer but herself– but the young Master had banned child labor, effectively barring the Gates to her. Olgimsky’s humanitarianism was always most beneficial to himself. Never mind that she hardly labored there; the butchers wouldn’t let her. So whenever she came within sight of the Gates, she chewed the inside of her mouth and made sure not to let on how her blood boiled at being kept away. There was no point inciting a riot over it.
Instead, she stood aside and watched the rest of them leave, wondering about the difference between the Gates of Labour and the Bulljaw. When the last of her friends disappeared into it, she turned and picked her way deeper into the tangle of metal and brick.
Taya knew that Maral hated the Town and wanted to be free of it. She wasn’t alone in feeling that way, especially in Shekhen. Many people felt that the Town was a tumor on the steppe, poisoning it the same way it had poisoned the Sugagh Khadugh. A thing better off excised. But the Town and the Kin had become so conjoined that they shared some vital organs– including the one that could be found in a modest house just south of the Skinners.
Taya let herself into the Burakh house as she always did, without knocking. Like the doors of the yurts and chums at Shekhen, this one was almost never locked. Just inside, she kicked off her boots and nudged them to the side of the hallway. She found her friend lying on a couch, listening to fuzzy music on the old phonograph Taya admired so much. Not really the kind of music Taya liked. “How fares your kine, Khatanger?” Taya asked playfully when Murky turned to look at her.
True to form, Murky didn’t say anything in direct response or greeting. She sat up and stretched her lanky arms, making room for Taya on the couch.
“Where’s Burakh?”
“Doing laundry. Yeah. He’s at the river,” Murky said disinterestedly. “I think Sticky is working. Everyone’s out. I think Sarnai was here a while ago. She brought soup from somewhere. We don’t need any more food.”
“That’s okay,” Taya said. She was supposed to talk to Artemy, but at that moment she decided she didn’t need to. “I didn't bring any food. Are you bored?”
“Yeah,” said Murky as if it was obvious.
Taya pulled off her fur-lined coat and sat beside Murky, pulling her feet up under herself. “I caught a fox this morning,” she told Murky.
“In your traps?”
“M-m,” she affirmed.
“Cool,” Murky said, making Taya swell with pride. “Did you skin it and everything?”
“Tii, I’m going to clean the skin today. And give the meat to the dogs.”
“They like fox meat. It probably smells different,” Murky told Taya, then bared her teeth and shook her head in imitation of a dog that likes fox meat. Then she rolled her eyes and settled back against the arm of the couch, making the wooden floor murmur.
Taya leaned over her side of the couch to mess with the phonograph. She stopped the disc and deftly exchanged it for something she liked better, a jazz record she’d heard here a thousand times, then melted into the cushions herself. Their legs tangled together, bent at the knees; Murky, like Taya, was wearing loose felt pants, gathered at the bottom, over which was a long linen undershirt that had been handed down to her. Her hair nestled in a mess around her head, unbrushed for who-knows-how-long. Taya just laid there, listening to the music and the sounds of the house adjusting to her weight, until Murky’s boredom overcame her too. “Why is Sticky working?” she asked.
“Ushaa tere khuzun,” Murky remarked with another roll of her eyes.
“Tere sayn khuudilmeriley. Amrazha balkha nii zuub.” The weeks between the end of twyre season and the omul run were meant as a period of rest and slow movement, for everyone’s body to recover from the fervor and trauma of the twyre bloom that split the steppe– not that everyone could afford the time, anymore. Brides weren’t allowed to dance between the frost and the omul run. For children, whose bodies recovered faster than others, the inaction could be excruciating, but they were encouraged to do their share of resting to help the whole udurgh heal. A menkhu family particularly was entitled to do nothing at all after the endless demands of protocol and physical and spiritual exertion that defined the twyre season for them– the whole of the Kin would provide for them from the autumn that the menkhu had opened.
Artemy had always been bad at resting, according to the aunts who knew him as a child, but now at least he usually wouldn’t speak or leave his house at all for about a week after the air changed, before he would be seen doing his family’s laundry in the Tanners. It wasn’t so much that he was bad at resting now, Taya thought, but that he was bad at letting anyone do anything for him. Stupid, Murky would say in her infinite wisdom.
“He slept for two days after the air changed,” Murky said of her brother. “I told him he did a good job, gebesh uuner huralsaandaa duukhakha khureter, tere uunenshiegee itgekheguui baiba. But now he’s working again. Stupid.”
Taya smiled. Despite her reticence, Murky understood the Kin’s language better than anyone else in her family– she could easily construct phrases like that one, complex enough that her father probably wouldn’t be able to put it together at all. She had studied the language passionately for years, and still came to Shekhen with urgent questions about conjugations. Once, she had confided in Taya that she felt like she could express complicated concepts better that way. That meant everything. “Be khara, that’s just like Rubin.”
“M-m,” Murky grunted, then shifted around. “They’re out of candy at the store. Otherwise we could go get some.”
“Maral was making urme at my house. Do you like it?”
“Yeah. Not always. But she makes good urme.”
“Wanna go there?”
“Sure. Beats sitting here, yeah.” She sat up again. “I have to get dressed.”
Taya kept laying on the couch, tapping a pen against the tip of her nose in time with the music, until Murky came back in her outside clothes, tugging on a coat. As Taya put her own coat back on and both girls laced up their boots, Taya asked, “Where are your gloves?”
“I grew out of my old ones. Sticky gave me some that were his, but beeliinuud namaig taatanguuy blogodog. They’re scratchy.”
Taya tilted her head to the side, then said, “I’ll make you new ones. With the fox I got today. They’ll be so soft!”
Murky’s eyes widened slightly. “Okay.”
Since Murky didn’t have gloves, Taya stuffed one of her own mittens into her pocket so she could hold Murky’s hand. The two girls walked south together, mostly in silence.
“Can I help you clean the pelt?” Murky asked as they crossed the train tracks. “You can show me how.”
Taya nodded. “I’ll show you how to make the gloves too. Kayura taught me last year.”
“Okay. I can watch you while I rest. Then I won’t be so fucking bored.”
That made Taya giggle. She was glad to feel the cold earth under her boots again, and she knew Murky felt the same way as they struck out into the steppe, not following a beaten path. “Have you been studying?”
“Studying what?”
“I don’t know… What Sticky studies.”
“I don’t study like Sticky does. He’s so…” She grunted irritably, rolling her eyes. “He wants to go to university. Yeah.”
Taya nodded again. She knew about this, of course; she had approved it. “What about you? Do you wanna go to university?”
“I don’t wanna go anywhere for now. And I definitely don’t wanna go to university. I don’t care about any of that stuff. Latin is for morons.”
“But Sticky studies our medicine too, right? Not at university,” she pre-empted Murky’s inevitable clarification, “but by himself, and with Burakh.”
“M-m,” Murky agreed. “He had all his notebooks and stuff for weeks before the protocol at the Ragi Barrow. Aba said he was gonna have a nervous breakdown. I don’t study like that either. But I learn it. I’m good at it.” Her tone became defensive, like she had to prove something.
Taya looked up at her, understanding. "Be medeneb. I’ve seen that.”
“I want to help,” Murky insisted.
This was exactly what Taya had intended to talk to Artemy about. "Be medeneb," she repeated, and paused in her tracks to wave at a bull that wandered over the frozen marsh. Murky did the same. “And you want to be a menkhu?”
“Yes,” Murky said. “That’s what I want. Oyun can bite me.” Oyun was the loudest of a group of voices who insisted that, while Murky was undeniably a member of a menkhu family, only men could actually be initiated menkhu. She could make an excellent Herb Bride, if she was so inclined, they said, but she could never be allowed to cut flesh. Sarnai said she heard Artemy had nearly broken a table the last time he’d been forced to discuss this with the Foreman– but it hadn’t been brought to Taya for judgement yet.
“He’s worried about tradition,” Taya said thoughtfully. “Everybody wants to make sure things are done right. It’s more important than ever.”
“I can do things right,” Murky said. To hell with tradition; the next generation can have one menkhu, or it can have two, Artemy would say. It’s that simple. “I know the herbs better than Sticky does. And I can hear the Lines. And we know menkhu were women anyways. We know it. Because Burakh’s great-great-grandmother made the Crow Stone. Everyone knows that.”
Taya nodded. “I do know that.” Taya had only the faintest memory of her own grandmother: a smell and a silhouette, three notes of a lullaby, more than anything, but she knew what she would have decided in this situation. Several of the women in Shekhen had confirmed as much, in quiet comments invoking that huge shadow. Taya often imagined her grandmother as an aurochs. “You can do the same tests Sticky did, of course. If you aren’t supposed to be a menkhu, you won’t succeed.”
“Be yabalkhab,” Murky said.
“Be medeneb.” Taya smiled.
Murky nodded, staring at the ground. “...Thanks.” As they started walking again, Murky commented, “I wish the omul would come already.”
“Oh, me too… Yamar goe bee, so tasty!” Her mouth tightened a little. “Be buugedye dulaankhab,” she admitted.
Taya couldn’t be more excited for the next season: in a few weeks, when the omul migrated up the river, heavy with eggs, she would have them fried or fresh– they were her favorite fish, if not her favorite food– and share the roe with the little children like candy. Of course, it was a bittersweet excitement. When the omul rolled back down the river, two of the yurts that now sat on the outskirts of Shekhen would fold up and follow them to the lake ice in the west, and Taya wouldn’t see her fingers again until they returned just before the grouse season with jars of seal fat and piles of fur left over from their winter hunting.
This had happened because one of the stories Taya heard in the Termitary was from an older woman named Bayrma, who remembered that she used to be a little girl who lived at the lake every winter, and her parents would bring home a seal bigger than Taya and teach her how to process it. So when they got to Shekhen, Taya had declared they would do that again, and Bayrma would teach the people who didn’t remember how to catch and process the seals, and so they did. Now, even though Bayrma was dead, there were plenty of people who could live on the lake in winter and bring home seals that were still, so they said, bigger than Taya. She was proud of that.
It wasn’t just that she would miss the people who left. Shekhen was quieter in the winter– while some went to the lake, still more would drive their cattle to Eghe-Gola for the winter breeding, although those herders would come through Shekhen again sooner. In the quiet, Taya would imagine the fun they all were having and nurse a gentle desire to go sealing at the lake herself– something she had always known better than to demand, even at her most imperious. The Kin were mostly nomads, but her place was here, only here. Ironic. But there was work that needed to be done, and Taya needed to oversee it; here, at the Kin’s heart, where the odonghe rose from the bloody river clay downstream from Olonggo, where twyre bloomed in the month after the buboloshen cried. This place was more magic than most, and even though she wasn’t made of magic like her odonghe, she was as tethered to it as they were, by lines of love and blood.
“Be endee huukhab,” Murky said.
"Unente." Taya smiled and squeezed Murky’s hand. “Bide negedey ende baihabdi,” she agreed.
They held hands all the way to Taya’s yurt, where they argued over pieces of urme and worked together to stretch and flesh the fox pelt, beating and scraping it for hours to the amazement of the little children who wandered in and out on their play-errands; until it was time for Murky to return to the stone house in the Hindquarters. As Taya wrestled the rain barrels inside and out of the cold, she started preparing a decree on the subject of protocol and tradition, and before the workers returned from Olonggo, she went out on the steppe to bait and set her steel-jawed trap. She was looking forward to a generous autumn.