Breath by Jackie Morse Kessler

Author:Jackie Morse Kessler
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (www.hmhco.com)
Published: 2013-05-19T07:02:45.620000+00:00

Death

The boy’s eyes widened. “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” he said breathlessly. “From the Book of Revelation! The sun turns black and the moon turns red, the seas boil, the skies fall!” Sheepishly, he added, “Okay, that’s either from the Bible or Ghostbusters.”

“The words in the Bible are about us,” he said, “but we’re not from the Bible. The first three Horsemen were humans from Laconia.”

“Where’s that?”

“Greece.”

There was a moment filled only with the sounds of the wind and the static crackling from the baby monitor on the floor, and then the boy said, “The Horsemen of the Apocalypse are Greek?”

“Spartan, actually. Specifically, they were helots.”

“Zealots?”

“Helots. The forced-labor class. You know.” He smiled. “Slaves.”

“The Horsemen of the Apocalypse are Greek slaves,” the boy said under his breath. “They definitely didn’t teach us that in Sunday school . . .”

“The original Horsemen were Spartan slaves, yes. Since then? Well, the Horsemen have come from different ethnicities, from different parts of the world.” He smiled toothily. “I’m all about workplace diversity.”

“Why did you pick three slaves to be your companions?”

He hadn’t. It was the girl who had picked him.

“This was about twenty-five-hundred years ago,” he said. “The helots were poorly treated by their Spartan masters. Beatings, rapes, torture—all of that was quite standard. They had hard lives. And though there were whispers of rebellion, none stepped forward to incite the helots to rise up. Until someone did.”

He could still picture her face, sweat-slick and thin, her eyes feverish, her mouth curled into a ferocious snarl. He had never seen a human more fetching than that girl at that moment—back bent, hands fisted by her sides, ready to fight for her life.

“The girl was sixteen. That very same morning, her older sister died of starvation—ironic, given that the girl’s role was to help in the kitchens and make black broth for the soldiers. And not even an hour earlier, a friend of hers, an albino boy, had died from fever. The surviving girl, in mourning over the deaths of her sister and her friend, didn’t show up to serve her Spartan master. Her master didn’t take too kindly to her defection.”

“She was grieving,” the boy said.

“So? It wasn’t like she could take a sick day. There weren’t any wages for her master to dock. She was a slave, and even though helots had some measure of freedom, they weren’t free to live their own lives. She was supposed to work, and she didn’t. In his fury, her master beat her to death.”

On the railing, the boy’s knuckles whitened.

“She didn’t go quietly,” he said, remembering the sounds of flesh striking flesh. “She fought back, but in the end, it didn’t matter. She fought until she couldn’t fight, and then she took the blows until she couldn’t take them any longer. She died, and her master left her corpse where it fell.”

The boy’s eye twitched.

“You look sick,” he said to the boy. “Don’t you know by now just how cruel you people can be? You’re liars.

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