is what they called us. They had no better words for it, not knowing whether we were beasts or men. We knew no better than they did what we were, for we had little language of our own—no names, back then, few habits of civilized living. But we didn’t steal. Dirty vagabonds, the lot of us, back then, but not thieves.
Back then, I say, meaning a past moment I can postulate must have existed, but can’t in truth remember for itself.
We might have become more human—sooner than we did, if indeed we ever have—did we move according to the rhythms of human beings.
We hear the bells of the chapel on the blossom-scented winds of May, and we realize it’s time to pray. If we are to be human we must pray as humans do. So we put down our tools and scour the muck from our nails, for we have learned you must not come to chapel smelling of corpses and shit and gold and blood and the juice of whores. We scrub and arrange what passes for our clothes, and mat down our manes to look more like human hair, and we tuck our cloven feet into sacks of soft leather called boots, and we traipse to the chapel to pray.
And when we arrive the candles are dark, the doors are closed and bolted, the crowds of faithful are snoring their lusty dreams under every swaybacked rooftop in the village. We think, oh, so this isn’t the time to pray, then. And we go home, trying not to laugh at the dreams of humans, which are draped like tattered clouds above their homes until the sunlight bleaches them invisible. As we trudge home, the snow crunches under our feet, the icicles dangle like white marble fringe on the pines. Time moves differently for us.
This happens again and again. After some decades I think—I think it was I who thought this, though the notion of an I is still a confusing one—I think this: When humans hear the bells of faith, they are there at once. When dwarves hear it, they arrive too late.
But our lives are longer than human lives. Just yesterday Primavera Vecchia was slipping off the lap of her grandmother and landing in the basket of onions and pissing on them. They made a better soup for it, those onions. Today Primavera is hairy of chin and tomorrow no one will remember who she was.
Our lives are more secret too. Humans shorten their lives by gossip, and dwarves can barely talk. Speaking uses us up, speeds us up. Without prayer, that act of confession for merely existing, one might live forever and not know it.
I was in the shadows on the night of the copper moon. I had been following her father to lay a bargain at his door, to spend my words in the hope of an exchange, to negotiate for the return of what we’d lost. But he was frightened of the coming dark and spurred his tired horse up the last slope before I could trudge into his path and confront him.
So I followed behind, and heard what I saw, and saw what I heard. As he and the girl-thing came down from the orchards, the moon and sun both witnessing, a horseman arrived on a stallion, caparisoned in black and red, and said, “Have you readied the house? He’s here.”