The Boy Who Stole Attila's Horse Read Online Free PDF

lace you with poison like a spider’s legs. Let the drop spread through your veins, showering you with razor-sharp stones. Let it cut you to the marrow with one foul slash. And then, sleep. And then, dream.
    The last thing is will. The morning of the crime you won’t be able to eat for the terrible dreams that will have plagued you. You’ll do everything under the spell of a dazzlingly brutal violence, but a bubble of uncertainty will rove in circles around you, as if you were afraid to drink water for fear of breaking the glass. Don’t worry. Take each step as it comes, feel your feet open up dark trenches along the bends of your soul, advance as if the earth turned and looked you directly in the eyes. And when at last, starved and terrified, you face your enemy, honour your resolve with the killing. Be quick, ferocious. Don’t cause pain other than with your look. Give them a just, worthy death.
    Killing, the act of killing, the force of your hands around the neck or the exact place where the knife sinks in, this can’t be taught because it’s already understood. Blades, firearms, sticks or stones, it’s all the same. But remember that as men we must be there, watching as the light intheir eyes goes out, living the crime at close range. We kill in seconds because we don’t know any other way to kill. We’re direct, impatient. Don’t hesitate: it’s your soul that will decide the precise movement, and once the deed is done you will be as great as all the great men who inhabited the earth before you.
    These are the things you must know.
     
    Small, who during the first few lines of the monologue didn’t move, has set about sketching each of the concepts, drawing up symbols on the walls and the well floor which only he can make sense of, using his fingers and elbows like palette knives to translate these new teachings. He howls with wild abandon, testing out new sections of his brain with each revision of those terrible maps. The architecture of an unknown pleasure makes him drunk to the point of retching; it transports him to an archipelago of poisonous islands that roar like sea monsters. Shaken by earthquakes, he scans his wicked city again and again, memorizing it like a creed to which you give yourself with total devotion. He amends any miscalculations with the correct formulae and pales, horrified, before the flames spreading like wildfire through his childhood. Big observes him, satisfied.
     
    At dusk the breeze and the water start to slowly smooth away the tracks that Small has worked so hard to putdown. Like a sleepwalker, tired but with the conviction of someone who remembers everything, he decides that for the rest of his life he will carry writing paper and pencils, ink, quills, old books; tools that will allow him to attest for all time the miracles of his enlightenment. To translate the unpronounceable.

29
    I MPRISONED NOW for an entire lunar cycle, hunger and desperation have broken both communication and their sanity. Big gets on with his exercise plan. Meanwhile, Small has descended the last steps of madness into a cellar devastated by hallucinations. He hums to himself repeatedly: popular songs whose lyrics he twists, making them obscene. He gives absurd speeches, which his brother has stopped listening to, whether out of boredom or a feeling of wretchedness.
    ‘I think no one hears our cries because they mistake us for animals. You and I haven’t noticed till now, but for days we have been talking like pigs. Tomorrow we’ll shout in Latin. So they understand us.’
    On other occasions he remains in silence for hours until an idea or rational thought snaps him out of it and compels him to shout out odd words, barely human sounds, nonsense poems.
    ‘Today might be the eve of my self.’
    Skeletal, unmoving and shamefully underfed, he cannot collect food like before, and now his brother undertakesthis role, with the determination of a father. A sensation of bestiality governs them. The hunger