The River and the Book Read Online Free PDF Page A

songs, and I hadn’t heard it sung since she died. I stole a look at my father, but his face was blank and inscrutable. The young man was listening with his hands shading his eyes, and when he looked up, his eyes were bright in the golden lamplight. He stood then, awkwardly twisting his hands as he struggled to speak, looking around at our upturned faces. At last he said, “Thank you. I had forgotten people could be kind.” Then he sat down and turned his face into the shadows. Grandmother sharply chided Tiak, who was pulling Shiha’s hair, but I knew it was to give Kular time to recover, because he was in tears.
    The
tar
was put away, and the smaller children were sent to bed. And then Kular told us what had happened to him.
    It began, he said, with cotton.

9
    There was, Kular said, a great land called Tarn, which stretched north to the snows and south to the desert, east to the mountains and west to the ocean. It was bigger than any of us could imagine, the biggest nation in the world.
    We all nodded: we had heard of Tarn from Mizan the Trader. Tarn had once been ruled by a cruel king and his nobles, and all the people were slaves, bought and sold and beaten like livestock. But many years ago there was a great uprising, and the slaves killed the king and his family. After a long war, a soldier called Tariik from the mountains became the new leader, and he decided to rebuild the land, so everyone would be free of the shackles of the old ways. There would be no more nobles, and everyone would have enough to eat.
    Mizan had told us that Tariik turned out to be as cruel as the old king, and had made the land of Tarn a giant prison where children were forced to work in the mines or factories or to serve in the enormous army. And it wasn’t true that everyone had enough to eat: there had been dreadful famines, because the soldiers came and took the food away from the farmers, and they died, and then there was no one left to work the land. But even so, many people still thought it was better than being a slave of the nobles. Which showed, said Mizan, how bad the nobles had been.
    Tariik was long dead, but Mizan had said that Tarn was still the same. “Now there are new bosses, same as the old bosses,” he had said. “Whoever is in charge, they are always rich.” We remembered Mizan’s words when Kular told us about Tarn. Mizan’s stories had made it seem a strange and frightening place, but we didn’t think it had anything to do with us. Kular’s story made us realize that Tarn wasn’t so far away, after all.
    Kular said that a few days’ journey upriver, the River ran through the southern reaches of Tarn. That was arid country, inhabited only by a few villages and herds of small deer and desert foxes. One day, the boss of a big company looked at a map, and he saw the empty spaces of the Upper Pembar Plains and the blue line of the River running through them. And he put his fat forefinger on the map, and said, “We will grow cotton here. There is water. There is space.”
    So the company had sent engineers and agriculturalists and workers south to the Pembar, hundreds of them in wagons and trucks, and they built settlements along the River and began to dig a series of canals to irrigate the fields. The workers were white-skinned and spoke a strange tongue, and they were dressed in shabby clothes that didn’t keep them warm. The men in charge wore polished boots and clean grey uniforms, and they carried guns and whips. The locals thought the workers must be prisoners from Tarn.
    At first the Pembar people took no notice of the foreigners, since they settled at a distance from the villages. Some even said it might be a good thing, bringing money and trade; but those with foresight prophesied trouble.
    The first sign, as always, was the River. The earthworks muddied the drinking water, but that wasn’t the worst of it. Downriver from the cotton fields, animals and crops began to die of mysterious sicknesses that no