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Chapter 1 –Ruhan
"Where shall we put him?"
"Oh, good Lord! He looks near death already, do you think it's any use?"
"Shh! You'll wake the children, Sylvia!"
I blink and slowly open my eyes. It's pitch dark; it must be the middle of the night.
"Careful, now… We do not want to cause him more pain than he already has." That's my Papa's voice. I sit up. My eyes get slowly used to the dark, and I can see three shapes moving around on the other side of our little one-room shack. What could they be up to?
"Where did you find him, Cirion?" I hear Mummy ask Papa quietly.
"Not far from the work camps. There was another uprising there this morning; he must have been sent with the soldiers to suppress it."
I hear someone moving the table. Then I hear something like a weak groan.
"I can't believe we're helping him, an Elvish soldier of all people!" Sylvia exclaims. "If I were you, I'd kick him out and leave him to die! It would serve him right for what his people have done to us!"
Papa sighs. "Please remember, Sylvia, that I am also one of his people."
"Well, but you're different!" Sylvia huffs.
"Do you think he'll survive?" Mummy asks, and she sounds almost worried.
"The chances are not high," Papa replies. "We can only help him as much as we can, and hope for the best."
I lie back down and turn around, staring at the wall. There's an Elvish soldier in the house… I know what Elvish soldiers are like. They march down the roads in the elf city below our hill, and they carry scary weapons like spears and swords and arrows. If anyone from the human village we live in does something wrong, they'll be ready. They like to punish us, or even if we do nothing to hit us or shove us over and laugh at us, or spit at us. All elves do that, but while most of them are scared of touching us, the soldiers aren't.
What if this one is the same?
"It is all right. You will learn," Papa says. "You are already better than I was at your age!"
"Yeah, right!" I exclaim, taking another arrow. "Like I'll believe you on that one!" Elf fathers have so much more annoying things to make jokes about. Of course he was far better at archery than me when he was nine years old; he's an elf so naturally he learns much faster! It's not fair!
After practising some more we walk to the target on the other side of the field to fetch the arrows. I decide that it's high time I should ask. "Papa, who's that elf man you brought in yesterday night?"
Papa hesitates. Then he says, "Look, Ruhan, I do not want you to be afraid of him. He is a wounded soldier; his comrades must have thought him dead and left him behind. Mummy and I will take care of him until he is well enough to return to his people."
"Why's he wounded though?" I ask, tugging the arrows from the target and gathering them into a bunch like strange pointy flowers. "What happened to him?"
Papa sighs. He squats down so that he is at the same height as me, and takes my hands. "There is something you should understand, Ruhan," he says. "I am sure your Great-Grandmama and your godmother Sylvia have told you many times how bad elves are; have they not?"
I nod my head. "Aunty Ophelia and Aunty Saaiwen too. Aunty Saaiwen said they were really mean to her and wanted to force her to marry some mean murderer from Mars. She's an elf, so she'll know, right?"
"Yes," Papa sighs. "Those things they told you are all true. Elves can do very bad things to humans, and their marriage rituals are horribly cruel. But I want you to know that humans can do bad things too. They also hurt each other and the world around them. When the elves came, the world was falling into ruin because of what humans, not elves, had done. Many animals had disappeared, the oceans were flooding, and many people were dying from their own mistakes.
"I know that our arrival made everything worse. I know how much the elves hate the humans, and how much the humans hate the elves. I know what suffering elves have inflicted; I can see the pain in the eyes of every human on this hill, can see it etched into every line on their face and built into every flimsy shack of this village. Yet before now, humans took everything the elves did to them quietly, too afraid to fight back. But now…"
"They're fighting back now?" I interrupt, remembering something I heard him tell Mummy not long ago. He nods. "But isn't that a good thing? If they fight back and don't let the elves keep them down, then they'll all be free again. Then we can be richer and live like the elves in the city. We'll all be happy again. Won't we?"
Papa shakes his head. "Look at our family, Ruhan. Mummy is a human, she has spent almost all her life here in this village. She knows what it's like to suffer under elves. But she did not wait to marry another human." I look up at him. "You trust me, Ruhan, do you not? And I am an elf."
"But…" But you're different, I want to say. I stop, noticing that Sylvia said the same thing just last night.
"Sometimes it is better to be quiet, and suffer, and wait for the injustice to end. Aunty Saaiwen did not poison her husband; she just ran away. Mummy did not bribe anyone to set Granny free from the work camps. They waited, and their wishes were answered. Learn to wait, Ruhan, and learn to trust and hope. It is better to hope for all your life than do a rash thing and feel sorry forever after."
I nod, even though I don't really understand.
"You are very fortunate to be a half-elf," Papa says, stroking a strand of hair out of my face.
"I don't think so. Myra from next door keeps laughing at me because I have one pointed ear. And the other children don't want to play with me because they say I don't belong here, that I'm too elf-like to fit in. And the elf children don't even look at me twice when they see me in the city."
"Well, even though you might at times think of it as a curse and hope to belong to at least one group, I think your mixed race is a blessing, Ruhan. You can see things from both sides, and do not have to live with the ignorance of one race against another. You will be torn between the two sides, and at times you will feel hopeless as to which you should choose. It will hurt you, but it will also strengthen you. When you go beyond just looking at skin colour, nationality or ear shape, you will realise how senseless such a battle really is, and will see how similar we all are. All of us suffer. All of us sin. I want you to remember that, Ruhan."
I'm not sure what he means. But I nod anyway. Maybe one day I'll understand.
"Ew, how are we ever going to fix this?" I hear Aunty Saaiwen squeak. She moves away from the others, her face all white.
"Well, whoever did this to him did a very good job," Great-Grandmama is saying. "Katty, pass me the kitchen scissors. Clean them first, girl, for goodness' sakes!"
Mummy quickly wipes the scissors on her apron before handing them over. She looks a bit disgusted – a bit very disgusted. I don't think I want to know what Great-Grandmama is doing.
"I never knew you studied medicine, Cecilia!" Sylvia exclaims. "Thank God you have experience! What would we have done otherwise?"
"Wash this," Great-Grandmama just says, handing Sylvia a bloody rag. Sylvia looks like she's going to puke but takes the rag anyway.
I sit down with Granny and take Moses onto my lap because I know he doesn't like it. He thinks he's too old for it, so he kicks around like mad until I put him down again. "Ruhan, be nice!" Granny says, and pinches my cheeks, because she knows that I don't like that. We giggle a bit, then she goes on with her story.
"The Egyptians were very scared of the Israelites," she says. "They thought that one day, the Israelites would fight back. So they took away all the men to work for them, but that wasn't enough. While the men were away and couldn't help at home, the Egyptians came and took away all the little boys. And if their mummies tried to stop the Egyptians, they were taken away too, to work as slaves and never know what happened to their little boys, or the little girls they had left behind." She stops. Somehow she has a faraway look in her eyes.
"Ruhan! Great-Grandmama needs water, will you go get some?" Mummy asks, coming over.
"Why can't Moses do it?" I complain, getting up. "He never does anything!"
"Ruhan, you know well enough that Moses is too young to go to the city alone. And you know how dangerous it is!" She hands me the old wooden bucket. Somehow what she's saying reminds me of the story of Moses. I'm sure his big sister also had to do all the work for him when he was small and his Mummy was hiding him. I go out the door.
Our house is one of the last on the hill. Mummy, Papa, Moses and I live there together with Granny. Sylvia, Great-Grandmama and the aunties live in a shack further down, which is the one closest to the city. I'm glad we live down here, and not further up in the middle of the village. Here I don't get attacked by the human children…
"Hey! Half-breed! Dirt!"
… or at least not as much as further up.
I walk faster, not looking back. I don't want to see the wicked grins on their faces. They've been wronged all their life, and now here is an easy target to pour all their anger out on: me. No one's going to feed them to a dragon just because they're bullying a half-elf. Sometimes I wish I was an elf, just so they'd be too scared to tease me. Or I wish I was a human, so they'd make friends with me and treat me like a normal person.
But that's not who I am. I'm a half-elf to my human neighbours, and a half-human to the elf children who see me in the city. I belong neither here nor there. If at least I were like Moses and looked a bit more like a human than an elf, it would be much better… But I'm exactly half: one pointed ear, the other rounded; golden-brown hair; skin that is too pale for a human and too dark for an elf; and my eyes are a type of green that doesn't fit with any of the two races.
"Little prissy elf princess!" I feel a glob of mud hit the back of my head but I don't turn around. I don't care about being dirty. I'll show them that I'm not as finicky and silly as the elf girls who cry when they fall down and throw tantrums when they don't get what they want. I'll show them that I'm just as much a human as they are. And I'm not going to cry! I'm not! Seriously!
My eyes are just sweating. That's all.
I'm glad when I reach the bottom of the hill. The other children won't dare leave the village without their parents knowing, and anyway, most of them are younger than me and much more scared of the elf soldiers.
I stay on the mud path, like any obedient human. Even though I'm not a human it's better not to break any rules, because I'm a half-elf and an outcast. Mummy once told me that Papa only got his job in the city because the elf prince here liked her a lot before she got married, and promised to help our family even though all the other elves hate us. And actually… Mummy told me never to tell anyone, but the prince is actually a half-elf, just like me. But because he's a son of the elf emperor, he can do what he likes and even the emperor can't get rid of him. Lucky him.
There are some elves on the clean sidewalk to the left of the human path. They don't look at me, they look through me. I know that most of the time they pretend that half-elves don't even exist. If I were human, they would at least shout insults. But ignoring me like this is somehow even worse. I don't like to feel invisible.
At last I'm at the river. I bend down and fill the bucket with water. Mummy told me once that it used to be really dirty, and that the elves made it dirty on purpose for us. Just on the other side of the wall that keeps our part of the river away from theirs, the water used to be really clean, but we weren't allowed to use any of it. But now the prince has made a new rule that the water should be clean for us too, and I'm happy about it. I can't imagine drinking brown water with bits of slime and dead insects in it. I don't know how Mummy and the rest survived with it.
I look at the sun and see that it's quite early. So I sit down on a stone at the riverbank and take off my slippers. I like to feel the mud under my feet, and dig my toes into the ground. Great-Grandmama always tells me I shouldn't do that because there could be glass pieces or other rubbish, but nothing has happened before, so I'm not scared.
No one's around. Even the Elvish sidewalks are empty. I reach up and loosen my hair, then shake it over my shoulders. Humans are supposed to keep their hair up at all times in the elf city, I don't even know why. But I don't think it matters when no one's looking. Mummy also sometimes dresses Moses up as a girl when we take a walk to the river together, but if no one's around she sometimes doesn't because she knows how much he hates it.
I look at my reflection in the water. My face is a bit muddy, my hair is a bit muddy, my skirt is a bit muddy, everything is a bit muddy. Not that I care. I like being muddy. It makes me feel like I'm part of another world, of the river-world, a water-animal that isn't torn apart about where she belongs and doesn't have to worry about fitting in anywhere. I wish my reflection and I can change place.