The Breeding

Note from Joe. Tuesdays and Fridays are still free. Sunday is a longer essay, heavily researched, for paid readers. Saturday is new. Saturday is for my advertisements. This is one.

It begins with a fall. Ten climbers come off a half-mile cliff in the time it takes to draw a breath. A girl named Maxtla, 12 years old, watches them go without crying. The man who owns her packs swings at her face, and another man’s hand catches the fist in midair before it lands. She does not flinch. Neither of them, the book tells you, has been here before.

This is the People. They migrate with the seasons. They pray to the Sun. They live by what has always been done, and what has always been done includes a ritual called The Breeding, which is exactly what it sounds like, and which no one in their language has ever needed a word for refusing.

Above them, hidden in the high air, a ship has been watching for years. The watchers tell themselves they do not interfere. That is the kind of thing watchers tell themselves. Their commander breaks her own rules when she cannot live with them. Their man on the ground has been mistaken for a god, and finds, to his surprise, that he is not in a hurry to correct the mistake.

The book moves slowly, the way a season moves. A girl learns not to flinch. A woman waiting for a man stops waiting. A quiet woman in a back room, year after year, takes a merchant’s private shorthand and pushes the marks out into the plaza, until any girl in the Lowland can write this is mine and have the mark hold after she is gone. None of these women is rescued. None of them is a saint. They are tired, and they keep going, and the ones who come after them inherit a world the mothers did not have.

40 years pass inside the book. The Breeding does not end by decree. It ends the way customs end. The midwives retire. The old men die. A generation of girls walks past the ritual without attending. The word for the thing falls out of the language. After that, no one has to teach the children not to say it, because no one knows it.

The book closes on a roof at dusk. Stone houses Maxtla watched rise brick by brick. A granddaughter inside arguing with another girl about the cookfire as if the stakes were the world, which, for that girl, they no longer are. Far above, the ship is preparing to leave. The watchers have made their report. They will not be back.

What happened on the ground is what people did.

68,000 words. Paperback and ebook at ArrakisPublishing.com.

Of everything on my shelf, this is the one I would hand you first.

If you read it, write to me. I read everything that comes in.