The Staying
This is not a fixed text. The Radiunai keep no scripture and draw no map; their history lives in those who keep it, and changes with every telling, because — they say — a thing that has stopped changing has started to die. What follows was set down by an archeomonk who rode a season with a salt-band as its spiritual advisor, a post the Radiunai grant to monks who have learned their ways, and who heard the telling from both keepers a band carries: the singer, who reads the world to cross it, and the shaman, who reads it to know what it wants. He wrote it whole. The singer told him the writing had already made it false. The shaman told him the writing did not matter, the true thing being elsewhere. They did not agree. They rarely do. The band needs both.
I. The Staying
When the sky burned, the world ran. Some went down into the rock and let the rock make them hard. Some took the dead into their mouths and let the dead make them quick. Some crawled together into heaps so large they called the heaping safety. We did not run.
Not because we were brave. Put that out of your mouth before you cross. We did not run because there is nowhere that is not burning, and a people who believe in elsewhere will chase it until it kills them. We did not believe in elsewhere. This was the land. The land was on fire. The land is always on fire now. Where would we go? So we stayed. And the staying killed us.
II. The Paying
It killed us for a long time. The land took the children first, then the slow, then most of the rest — took whoever could not hold the burning, and took them before they could carry young, so that the only ones left to make the next of us were the ones it could not quite finish. A hundred lifetimes of that. More. There was no first of us. No name to thank, and none to curse. There is the long dying, and us at the end of it, still here, holding the ground that everyone else agreed to call empty. Do not call it strength. We are only what was left when the weak had been burned out of us.
III. What the Land Made of Us
And it did not leave our bodies as it found them. First the skin. It laid a grey plate over the throat, the spine, the places that matter — a lead grown into the flesh, our own armor against the burning. Every Radiunai carries it. It is why we walk where you die. Then the deeper work, which runs in the blood of certain lines and not in others. A third arm below the shoulder. A second head that wakes when the first one sleeps. A small hand, the size of a child’s, folded inside a larger one. Three fingers where you have five, and stronger for the missing two. The cities have a word for all this. The word is abomination. They wheel us out in the freak-leagues and pay good coin to be disgusted. Then put one of us on the ice. A third arm is a stick and a glove at once. A second head sees the whole sheet and is never caught looking the wrong way. The small hand tends the puck while the big hands fight for it. The three fingers close on a shaft like a vice and never tire. The empire grows its giants in vats and calls it engineering. Ours are born — by the land, for nothing, in the ordinary way of a child arriving wrong and arriving perfect at the same moment. The most-changed bloodlines are our oldest hockey houses, and a Radiunai child born with the extra arm is not pitied. He is spoken for before he can skate.
IV. The Beasts
The herds paid the same price. The cattle that could stomach the bright growth lived; the rest bloated and went down, and we bred from whatever crossed. Now their breath freezes into masks of ice over their faces and they haul all day through ground that kills a city animal by noon. The dogs we do not love. We feed them the dead and the salvage, and when a driver goes down in the open they do not wait to be told. There is no cruelty out here. There is only what crosses and what does not.
V. The Two Keepings
The land let us live. It would not hold still, and it would not hold quiet. It would not hold still: the winds turn with the season, the clean road of one year is the flaying-road of the next, and a band that forgets the wind does not get lost — it gets flayed. So we keep singers. A wind-singer reads the world to cross it — the turns of the poison-wind, the sailable ice, the routes sung and handed on faster than people die. We could never write it; a mark on a hide is dead the moment it is made, and a way that cannot learn is a way that lies. So the singer carries the routes in song, and the ways are cut into her own skin, and when she dies on the ice she is read off her body and the next takes up the singing. A singer’s skin is the whole library of a band. It would not hold quiet: the world is always saying something, and someone must say what. So we keep shamans. A shaman reads the world to know it — the feather that drifts against the wind, the glint that wakes in the steel of a blade, the tracks a thing leaves in the sand and does not come back for. The high glaciers are holy to them, and the few stunted gardens the desert suffers to grow. Before a match the shaman reads the omens, and on the bench beside the one who calls the plays sits the one who calls the meaning. The singer keeps you alive. The shaman tells you what it was for. Do not ask a singer what she makes of shamans, nor a shaman what she makes of singers. A band needs both. That is the end of the argument, and the argument never ends.
VI. The Under-Ice
We do not give our dead to the wind. We never have. It is the oldest thing about us — older than the singing, older than the omens — that what is ours, the wind does not get. So when a great one dies, we do not raise a cloth to the rafters and call the empty cloth an honor, as the cities do. We do not strike the name from the record, as the empire does to the ones who leave it. We open the home ice, and we lay the body beneath it, under the very place the game is played, and we close the ice over them. They are not gone. They are under the one thing that ever mattered to them, watching every match to the end of the world. The cities think this the most savage thing we do. It is the most tender. Ask which of the two is truly kept: the one who lies beneath the ice his people skate every night — or the one whose name a stranger in a broadcast booth has been ordered never to say again.
VII. The Name
The cities call this land Nullaterra — no-land, the empty land. It is the emptiest word there is, and it is theirs, not ours; it means only that they cannot read what is written here. They call us the radiation-people, because the burning is the one thing they can think when they think of us. That word is made of their fear, and we let them keep it. The monk asked the singer what we call ourselves. She gave him a word, and told him afterward that the word was a lie, given to end the asking. He asked the shaman the same, and the shaman only looked at him. But the lie, when you turn it over, means only this: we stayed. Maybe she did not lie after all.
The Keepers
A Radiunai band carries two callings, and so does a Radiunai hockey club. The wind-singer is the secular keeper: navigator, route-master, historian, her skin inked wrist to throat with the sailing-ways of half a continent — the safe geography the cities swear does not exist. The shaman is the other keeper: reader of omens, tender of the sacred glaciers and the desert’s starved gardens, and tender of the dead. Every team fields a tactics coach beside a spiritual advisor, and the advisor is the shaman — or, where a band has come to trust one, a culture-versed archeomonk standing in the role. The two keepers are different temperaments and frequently at odds, and no band would dream of going onto the ice, or out onto the waste, without both.
The visible mutations the cities recoil from are, at home, an inheritance and increasingly a pedigree. The florid changes run in bloodlines, and the most-changed of those lines have become the Radiunai’s prized hockey houses, their many-limbed children spoken for before they can stand. This is the needle the purebred Omnidemocratic clubs can never feel: a third-armed Radiunai forward is not augmented like their vat-grown giants, not tuned in a lab or stamped to specification. He was born — by the land, for free — and the federation that bars him from the Golden League as an abomination is refusing the one player on the ice whose gifts no engineer made and no sponsor bought.
And the under-ice burial is no metaphor. Where the corporate cities raise a retired jersey to the rafters and the empire converts its defectors into unpersons, the Radiunai lay their honored dead beneath the home rink, so the player keeps his seat at every match forever. It is the faction’s whole creed in one act — what is ours, the wind does not get — and it stands as the exact opposite of erasure.
Beneath all of it runs the thing the cities will never admit they owe. The archeomonks who walk the poisoned lands unharmed do not cross that ground without Radiunai stock, Radiunai sails, and a singer to read the wind; the famous digs that gave the world its game back — the statue plaza in a dead city of the old people, the trek into the frozen mountains they called Switzerland — were carried across the burning on Radiunai runners. The blade the whole world now cheers is only the small cousin of the sail-runner this people has ridden across the no-land since before anyone thought to keep score. They were a people of the blade before hockey had a name, and no one in the cities will ever be told so.