The Road of Bones Read Online Free

have no idea whether you’d lost the message or the messenger. Line us all up, and you’d not believe we are one nation. You would see men in beards, and men for whom even the sight of hair on the face of a man is an abomination. At one end we have women dark as nuts, and at the other, women white as lard. We have whole lands of different peoples: merry and taciturn, careless and ardent. In this great country there will be people going to bed while others are rising. There will be people freezing from the cold while others are parched from the heat, and villages that starve while other villages are packing away the grain for seven years.
    And few will know the slightest thing about eachother. So it was easy to intersperse the things I wanted to know (‘How many?’ ‘When?’) with the things that I didn’t (‘And do they wear the same sorts of clothes as us?’ And is their gruel made out of oats, like ours?’) and, over the days and weeks, gather a list of numbers – numbers so huge they’d make your hair stand on end.
    When I was ready, I lifted my head from my books at last. ‘Go on,’ I ordered my family. ‘Sing the anthem. All together. The anthem.’
    â€˜Go bother someone else,’ my mother said. ‘I have no time for singing.’
    â€˜Hush, Lily!’ said my father, glancing at the wall we now shared with the Litnikovs. Clearly he feared that, if she were overheard, she might be thought ‘unpatriotic’, and rumours were coming in that more people than you might have guessed were being arrested under the new Acts of Loyalty signed in that summer.
    I made the most of my father’s uneasiness.
    â€˜The anthem’s different!’ I said loudly, almost nodding towards the thin wall. ‘Let’s sing it as we think of Our Leaders.’
    They stared. But now they had no choice. Only that week the papers had praised a man to the skies for boring a tiny hole to eavesdrop on the neighbourshe suspected of plotting to wreck the Next Great Step Forward.
    So we all sang the song we’d learned so thoroughly – Grandmother over sixty years ago, my parents thirty years back, and me only a few years before.
    And it was exactly as I had thought. Grandmother sang along cheerfully and stopped where she always had, at the end of the second verse. Mother and Father kept on for one single verse more before they came to a halt.
    And only I could keep the song up through the last eight lines.
    I lowered my head to my books again. Maybe they thought that, having wreaked my mischief, I’d returned to my lessons. But not a bit of it. I was copying out figures. How many lived in this republic here? How many Kurds were there? How many Tartars? How many Yuseks had we liberated on the western front? How many Germanics had the annexation of Sirelia brought us?
    And the numbers! The numbers!
    This ‘Cradle of Peace’ in which I lived had, it seemed, since my grandmother’s childhood, added at least two hundred million souls.
    Two hundred million souls!

C HAPTER T HREE
    SO AM I sly? Because I said nothing to my parents or grandmother. I just started to think about this ‘Fairest of Lands’ of ours, and open my eyes a little wider. I saw the rags on our beds. The mouldy turnips in our pot. The glances between my parents whenever a slogan exhorting us all to even greater efforts went up on one of the factory chimneys we could see from our window, or news came in of yet more wreckers unmasked. (‘What’s to wreck?’ Grandmother asked sourly, using a filthy old footcloth to coax our last handleless pan away from the fire.)
    I looked out of the same old window, but now I saw things very differently. Where I’d seen busy people scurrying to work with their heads down against the wind or sleet, now everyone looked
furtive.
I watched the endless parades and, instead of admiring the banners, I noticed the dutiful faces