At our feasts, where there's hardly food enough for each soul to hold a bit in their gob, the drink and dance take center. Loran pours me a mug of swill before I even sit down. He's always trying to get others to drink so he can put ridiculous ribbons in their hair. He clears the way for Eo to sit beside his own wife, Dio, her sister, twin in looks if not birth. Loran has a love for Eo like her brother Liam would, but I know he was once as taken with her as he ever was with Dio. In fact, he bent a knee to my wife when she turned fourteen. But then again, half the lads joined him in that. No sweating it. She made her choice right and clear. Kieran's children swarm him. His wife kisses his lips; mine kisses his brow and tousles his red hair. After a day in the Webbery harvesting spiderworm silk, I don't know how the wives manage to look so lovely. I was born handsome, face angular and slim, but the mines have done their part to change me. I'm tall, still growing. Hair still like old blood, irises still as rust-red as Octavia au Lune's are golden. My skin is tight and pale, but I'm pocked with scars—burns, cuts. Won't be long till I look hard as Dago or tired as Uncle Narol. But the women, they're beyond us, beyond me. Lovely and spry despite the Webbery, despite the children they bear. They wear layered skirts down past their knees and blouses of half a dozen reds. Never anything else. Always red. They're the heart of the clans. And how much more beautiful they will look wrapped in the imported bows and ribbons and laces contained in the Laurel boxes. I touch the Sigils on my hands, a bonelike texture. It's a crude Red circle with an arrow and cross-hatching. It feels right. Eo's doesn't. Her hair and eyes may be ours, but she could be one of the Goldbrows we see on the holoCan. She deserves it. Then I see her smack Loran hard on the head as he throws back a mug of Ma's swill. God, if he's placing about the pieces, placed her well. I smile. But as I look behind her, my smile fades. Above the leaping dancers, amid the hundred swirling skirts and thumping boots and clapping hands, sways a single skeleton upon the cold, tall gallows. Others do not notice it. To me, it is a shadow, a reminder of my father's fate.
Though we are diggers, we are not permitted to bury our dead. It is another of the Society's laws. My father swayed for two months till they cut his skeleton down and ground his bones to dust. I was six but I tried to pull him down the first day. My uncle stopped me. I hated him because he kept me from my father's body. Later, I came to hate him again because I discovered he was weak: my father died for something, while Uncle Narol lived and drank and squandered his life. "He's a mad one, you'll see someday. Mad and brilliant and noble, Narol's the best of my brothers," my father once said. Now he's just the last. I never thought my father would do the Devil's Dance, what the oldfolk call death by hanging. He was a man of words and peace. But his notion was freedom, laws of our own. His dreams were his weapons. His legacy is the Dancer's Rebellion. It died with him on the scaffold. Nine men at once doing the Devil's Dance, kicking and flailing, till only he was left. It wasn't much of a rebellion; they thought peaceful protest would convince the Society to increase the food rations. So they performed the Reaping Dance in front of the gravLifts and removed bits of machinery from the drills so that they wouldn't work. The gambit failed. Only winning the Laurel can get you more food. It's on eleven when my uncle sits down with his zither. He eyes me something nasty, drunk as a fool on Yuletide. We don't share words, though he has a kind one for Eo and she for him. Everyone loves Eo. It's when Eo's mother comes over and kisses me on the back of my head and says very loudly, "We heard the news, you golden boy. The Laurel! You are your father's son," that my uncle stirs. "What's the matter, Uncle?" I ask. "Have gas?" His nostils flare wide. "You little shiteater!"