Sing to Me

by Jesse Browner

Genres: Coming of Age

Synopsis

After the fall of Troy, an eleven-year-old boy sets off for the razed city once his father and sister fail to return home; an extraordinary, intimate retelling of a familiar legend, for lovers of Circe.

His family farm and the surrounding community now emptied by war, young Hani embarks on an epic quest – assisted by a brooding yet brilliant donkey – to find his lost sister in the ruins of Troy. Some war stories transcend time and circumstance, and so it is with the resourceful and heartbroken Hani, who must employ every bit of intelligence, every scrap of ingenuity, and ultimately every ounce of his spirit and humor to withstand the forces of civilization’s collapse.
 
Hani is no ordinary boy, however, and a character unlike any you’ve ever met. His interior world is one of startling depth and complexity. His insights into life, lives, and history are breathtakingly fresh. And his hope for survival--not a given, and in fact, less than likely--will propel you to the startling conclusion of this brief, elegiac, and singular work.

Release date: May 20, 2025

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 224

Sample

“SING, FROGS!”

Hani scans the horizon of the pond through the bulrushes. It’s been a long while since he’s had time to hunt frogs, but it’s not a skill you forget, especially when you’ve been doing it ever since you can remember. He was always good at it—good at keeping still and good at creeping up barefoot behind them—even when he was barely more than a toddler and had to compete with the older boys, who never let him win at anything and never wasted a chance to remind him of how small and pathetic he was. All those boys are gone now, his brothers and their friends, and most of them will probably never come back, but the frogs have been plentiful ever since the last of the wading birds were eaten or scared away. It feels like years since Hani last saw an egret, a stork, or a heron. Now he has the frogs all to himself, just as the spring floods are cresting and mating season is in full voice. A boy frog singing his heart out, or a girl frog in love with the beauty of his song, will barely notice the approach of a cunning hunter, even one as large as an eleven-year-old boy.

“Sing to me now, you frogs who hold the shores of the pond!”

Hani crouches behind one now and scoops it up in both hands. Resigned to its fate, it does not struggle as he grasps both hind legs in his fist and swings it in a looping, overhead arc against the flat stone that he has brought with him for that purpose. The frog’s skull cracks against the stone and Hani slips the limp corpse into the hemp sack slung across his shoulder, heavy with prey. Even as a little boy, Hani took no pleasure in killing harmless creatures or showing off his hunting skills the way the other boys did, but this is no child’s game he’s about to embark on. This is serious business, a man’s business, as Father might call it. He squints up at the cloud-veiled sky and decides that the afternoon is far enough along to call it quits for the day. He rises from his squat, grabs the stone, and heads for higher ground, free of reeds, where he drops the stone and empties the bag beside it. He counts twenty-three frogs in total. He hopes they’ll see him through the first leg of his journey, but the truth is he has absolutely no idea what lies ahead. Seeing as how he barely even knows where he’s going or what hidden dangers lie in the way, the question of whether he has enough smoked frog legs to get him there is likely to be the least of his worries.

The family’s only bronze dagger is too precious to use for anything but slaughtering livestock and sacrificing sheep, and in any case Father took it with him when he went away, but Hani’s flint blade with the bone handle is more than sharp enough for the job. He plops a frog on the stone, belly down, and saws off its feet. He makes a shallow gash across its back from shoulder to shoulder, holds the frog’s head against the stone with his left hand, and peels the skin away from the flesh with his right, rolling it down the length of the torso in one smooth movement until it pops off the legs, inside out. He cuts through the two bones of the lower back, splits the carcass in half at the hips, and flings the inedible portion over his shoulder into the water. Using a sturdy cattail sharpened to a point at one end, he skewers the thighs at the top, where they meet at the crotch. Once he has repeated this task twenty-three times, Hani has a string of frog thighs hanging from the bowed reed like a necklace of glistening ruby pendants, and the earth beneath his feet is spongy with blood. He washes his hands, the knife, and the stone in the pond, then proceeds uphill and along a winding path to the farmhouse. He suspends the cattail over the hearth fire in two notches cut into the chimney stone, where the kettle used to hang. Father took that with him, too. Hani flops down onto the three-legged stool by the hearth, tipping it to rest his back against the warm stone.

The room is not big, but on cloudy days like this it can be so murky that the far corners are lost in shadow. There’s only the one doorway to the outside and a narrow slit for a window. There’s an opening in the roof above the hearth to allow the smoke to escape, and another doorway to the room where the family used to sleep, all six of them and the dogs in the winter. It’s hard to believe that they somehow all managed to cram themselves in here not so long ago, together with the long table and benches that were chopped up for firewood several years back. Now there’s nothing left but this stool, the frog legs roasting over the fire, and the rucksack that Hani has prepared for his journey. And Hani himself, of course. When he’s gone, and the sheep have been let loose to roam and fend for themselves, it will be as if all of this—Mother and Father, Arinna, his brothers, the farm, the livestock, the lord of the estate and the manor house up the road, the echoing stables, the emptied village farther on and the abandoned settlements beyond that, all the way to the sea—as if none of it had ever existed. Unless he manages to find Arinna and bring her home. If he can’t, there’s nothing left here for him to come home to anyway.

Once at a harvest festival, the village priest grabbed Hani roughly by the upper arm and rang a brass bell in his ears.

“Hear that?” he told him. “Think you can tell when it’s stopped ringing? You can’t, can you? You know it’s still ringing even when you can’t hear it anymore. That’s what your prayers sound like to the gods.”

The priest was a drunk with a dog’s eyes and a fawn’s heart, and nobody expected to understand the things he said, but Hani thinks about him now as he sits in the empty farmhouse. He can’t help feeling that the stone walls are still ringing with the voices of all those who have vanished; he could probably hear them if his ears were as good as a dog’s. All those people, there were so many of them, and they were so loud, and so laughing, and so scolding, they bellowed with pain or outrage, and sobbed, and mewled, and argued and barked for so long. Father and the boys were never quiet unless they were asleep, and even then they snored like bears. Arinna sang from morning to night, and her song found its way into every ear and every crack in the masonry. With all the noise they made, they must have left some sort of a trace of themselves, even a tiny one. Hani turns his head and plants his ear against the chimney stone, but he hears nothing. It’s not the stone but his head that’s still ringing with their voices, and that will go on ringing forever, he supposes.

If he lives forever, which who does? And when his head stops ringing after he dies, as it’s bound to do, all those voices will be lost forever—Father growling and snapping at everyone, for any reason or no reason; Mother humming as she sews or rocks the babies to sleep or chops vegetables on the hearth; Huzzi and Arnu snickering and plotting, or sniveling after a thrashing; Arinna singing songs to herself that only she knows the words to; Zizi laughing at everything and everyone; Hushoo wheezing or barking in his sleep. It will be as if none of them ever lived because Hani will be the last one to remember them. The only reason we remember some people who lived long ago, he thinks, is because other people tell stories about them. If we stopped telling stories about them, no one would remember them either. That’s what happens to most people, and it happens to all of Hani’s people because no one tells stories about farmers and children, and everyone Hani has ever met is a farmer or a child, or maybe a miller or a horse-breaker, but it comes to the same thing. When they die, and when the people who knew them die, they’re as forgotten as if they’d never been born. That’s the way it is—it’s what the priest and the pious call fate, and you can’t do anything about it. Hani has never seen anything in this world to persuade him that fate is a real thing, and he wouldn’t do anything about it even if he could, because he’s only eleven and hasn’t had a chance yet to do anything worth remembering, nor does he ever expect or care to, unless you count his knucklebones triumphs. Nobody he knows has ever done anything worth remembering, either. If they had, he’d remember. Hani knows how young and green he is, but he has seen how rock-stupid most grown-ups are and how little they’re able to profit from their age and experience, and he’s not impressed. Why anybody would want to be remembered for being too dumb to get out of their own way is beyond him. He retrieves five knucklebones from the pouch hanging on his belt and plays jump-the-ditch with half a mind while pursuing this line of thought.

A lot of people just can’t bear the idea that no one will remember them. Hani is old enough to recall when the farm was teeming with grown men, and how, at harvest time and on feast days, they would gather around the fire in large, blustering groups and tell stories of violence and war, of epic voyages across the seas in pursuit of riches, glory, and honor, of men whose fame would never die because they had been brave warriors favored by the gods. And when these farmhands got into fights, as they always ended up doing on a bellyful of wine, they would insult and taunt one another with long-winded boasts of their own bloodlines and adventures, as if they, too, were glorious champions from a time when men were not so puny as they are nowadays. When he was little, Hani never understood what these grown men found so fascinating about it all, the ancient deeds and the insults and the violence, when none of them had ever traveled farther than a half day’s cart ride from the cottage they were born in, when they all lived exactly the same lives and died exactly the same deaths. People are always saying that every person is different and unique, but nobody really believes it. Men like Father—and they’re all like Father—like to see themselves as stallions or bulls, proud and alone at the center of their herd, but in their hearts they know full well they’re all as exactly alike as heifers down the generations, no matter how hard they try to pretend otherwise. There’s only one way to come into this world and only one way to live in it, as far as they’re concerned, so the most they can hope for is to be allowed to choose how they’re going to die. They never have a whole lot of imagination for that, either.

Hani returns the knucklebones to their pouch, then turns toward the hearth and pinches a frog’s leg between his thumb and forefinger. It’s just about done. He lifts the cattail, now charred, from the hearth and gently lowers the legs onto a rush mat on the plinth. Once they’ve cooled, he’ll pack them in straw to mask their scent from hungry prowlers, wrap them in an oiled cloth, and add them to the other necessities in the rucksack. They won’t last long, given the hardships of the journey ahead. One problem with catching frogs in the spring is that they’re skinny, compared to fall frogs, so you need more of them. But the real problem is having to rely on frog legs to feed yourself in the first place.

Even when a farm is well run and the soil is rich and the climate fair, there’s not a lot to eat in the spring. But Hani’s farm, like all the farms of the valley, has barely had any able-bodied workers for several seasons, let alone managers and overseers, so the pickings have been slimmer still. No wheat was planted last year, and none will be planted this year. Any cattle or swine that weren’t rustled in last summer’s raids were salted and eaten over the winter. The goats turned feral and disappeared into the mountains, and the few remaining sheep will follow them soon enough. The vineyards have been untended for years and have reverted to the wild, while there’s barely a fig or olive tree left standing from here to Mount Hazzi. And even if there were any seed left to sow, every last plow and axe was hauled away for the war effort long ago. The only crop the estate continues to produce is the winter barley, and Father took every last grain of that with him to market when he disappeared three weeks ago. And as for the stables—once famous throughout the empire for producing the best Nisean stallions in the land—they’re no longer fit to house a rat, let alone a horse.

So Hani is reduced to frog legs, stale bread, and beer. There are still some of last year’s beans and lentils in the storehouse, but with the kettle gone he has nothing to cook them in. He could probably manage to slaughter and butcher a sheep by himself, but what would be the point? He can’t very well carry all that meat on his back where he’s going, and even if he loaded it all into Ansa’s panniers he’d just be making her a juicy target for every half-starved wolf or leopard within ten leagues. In any case, although he’s never been to the city himself, he’s pretty sure it can’t be more than a three- or four-day walk from here. Five at most. If he runs out of food on the way, it won’t be the first time he’s gone hungry for a couple of days. And once he makes it to the city, he can surely earn his keep by picking up some manual labor. He reaches for a frog leg and nibbles at it.

Growing up on a farm is the best. You learn how to do everything on a farm. Hani has no idea what city people know how to do, but it can’t be as many things as farmers know. There’s nothing a farm boy can’t do. Hani tries to imagine what the city will be like, what its people are like, but it’s all muddled, fluid pictures in his mind that dissolve and flow away whenever he tries to focus on them. He has a vague memory of having once been told that it sits on top of a hill overlooking a vast plain that slopes down to a raging, endless sea at the edge of the world. His friend Tudha says that city people are blind and have white hands like mole paws, but Tudha has never been to the city and has no idea what he’s talking about. Someone who had been there in real life once told Hani that the houses were so close to each other that there was nothing but narrow gaps between them, like gullies or ravines where the sun shines only at noon, but when Hani tries to imagine what that would be like, he keeps seeing these canyons as rivers, and the city people as fish. He knows that can’t be right but he still can’t figure out the correct way of imagining them. Someone else once said the city walls were twenty cubits high and ten thick, and that people lived on top of each other in buildings where your ceiling is someone else’s floor, like honeycombs in a beehive. Hani has been to the mountains and seen trees that were at least twenty cubits tall and maybe more, and he knows perfectly well that no one could ever build a rampart as high as that. And as for the beehive people, that’s plainly just an out-and-out lie. So he has only a very confused idea of the dangers ahead and of what is waiting for him there, and he knows that he will have to make a special effort to keep his cool and not allow himself to be flustered, because he’s going to be more than frightened enough already, all alone on the road except for the donkey, without throwing dreamed-up terrors into the mix. The one thing he has heard from more trustworthy sources, and which he can well believe, is that the people of the city are so plentiful that. . .