They Came to Buy My Sister, So I Went in Her Place as a Boy novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Paper
Two Larrea riders come to the sheepfold for sixteen-year-old Amaia; Itziar, in her dead brother's coat and cap, says the paper names the Etxeberria child and takes the second horse herself.
Two men on horses came up the track to our sheepfold at dusk, and one of them carried a paper with my sister's name on it.
I knew the colors on their saddle blankets from every valley road.
They were the Bear's men.
I was at the pen gate in my dead brother's coat, counting ewes into the fold with the dog at my heel.
My uncle stood in the yard behind them with his good black cap in both hands.
He was wringing it like wet wool.
"Etxeberria?" the older rider said.
"There are three of us here," I said, in my brother's voice, which I had practiced for five years until it stopped sounding like practice.
"The house is Etxeberria."
The rider looked down at me from the saddle.
He saw a cap pulled low, cropped hair, a coat too wide for a boy and a face weathered brown.
He saw what everyone saw.
He held the paper out to my uncle instead.
"Here is what you signed, old man.
"Eleven hundred francs owed to the Larrea house.
"Four hundred in this purse, paid on the child, and the rest forgiven.
"The child comes with us tonight."
He read the name off the page slowly.
"Amaia Etxeberria, sixteen."
My sister was standing in the kitchen door with her braid over one shoulder and a bowl in her hands.
The bowl went to the ground and broke on the stones.
She didn't scream.
She looked at Uncle Pantxo, and I watched her understand what her own uncle had done to her.
My uncle Pantxo kept his eyes on the cap in his hands.
He did not look at her, and he did not look at me.
"It is a small price, little one," he said to the cobbles.
"They will feed you.
"I could not keep you through another winter, with the flock so thin."
The flock was not thin.
I had counted it that morning, and we had lost none and gained six lambs since autumn.
I did not say so.
I had learned long ago that the first rule of passing as a man is that you do not speak until you know what the room will do.
The younger rider swung down and went toward my sister.
I put my hand flat on his chest.
He was a head taller and he stopped, more from surprise than anything.
"Let me see the paper," I said.
"Boy, step aside."
"I can read my own house's name."
I could not read very well.
I could read names, because my father had made me learn them, and I knew the shape of ours.
The older rider sighed and held the page down to me.
It was thick, cream-colored and stamped with a seal in black wax.
I found the line.
It did not say Amaia.
It said the Etxeberria child.
"Amaia is a name your man read out," I said.
"The paper says the child of the house.
"I am Xabier Etxeberria, nineteen, and my father's only son.
"I'm the child of this house who can work.
"She is sixteen and has never carried more than a bucket.
"If the Larreas want a debt paid, they want hands that can pay it."
The riders laughed.
They laughed the way men laugh at a boy who plays at being a man.
"The Bear doesn't take boys for a girl's debt," the older one said.
"The Bear takes what is written.
"And I say the paper names the child of this house.
"You've a purse of four hundred and a debt of eleven.
"I carry this whole flock through the snow every winter, and I count every ewe.
"Any lord would rather have me than a girl."
I turned my head and looked at my uncle.
"Is it written the girl, Uncle?
"Or is it written the child?"
Pantxo's round red face went gray in the dusk.
He looked at the ground, at the riders and at the paper, as if it would tell him what to say.
"It says the child," he whispered.
The older rider looked at the younger one.
The younger one shrugged.
"A boy can break rock," he said.
"The Bear has a quarry."
"Take them both," the older one said.
"The Bear can sort out what he wants."
He looked me over a second time, up from my brother's patched boots to my brother's cap.
"You walk like a girl," he said.
"I walk like a man who has been behind sheep since I was five."
He laughed again and let it go.
I let him.
I went to my sister and put both hands on her shoulders.
She was shaking so hard that her teeth clicked.
"Listen to me," I said to her in Basque, low, so the riders couldn't follow it.
"I am going in so you are never alone in there."
"Itziar," she whispered.
"Not that name.
"Not from now on.
"I am Xabier.
"I will come out and so will you.
"Get your shawl."
She went inside for it and came out with the little bundle of clothes she had been given for her saint's day.
I whistled the dog to the pen gate and told him to stay.
He whined, and I did not look back at him.
I walked to the second horse.
It was the younger rider's spare, a big bay mare with a saddle blanket in the Larrea colors.
I put my boot in the stirrup and swung up on my own.
My uncle took a step toward me.
"Xabier, my boy, you don't have to," he said, and his voice cracked in a way that was almost very good.
I looked down at him.
"The paper says the child, Uncle," I said.
"I'm the child."
The older rider set Amaia up in front of him, and we turned the horses up the track toward the high pass.
I looked back once.
Pantxo stood in the yard with his cap in his hands and my father's flock at his back, and he was already counting the purse.
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