Pulse hammering in her throat, Neyali looked over her people again, desperate to understand what she had missed. Nothing at all.īut Otharri wouldn't have risked giving away their location if it wasn't important. There was no sign of encroaching Phyrexians, no telltale scratch of skitterling claws on stone, no moan of steam from a Goliath. She was startled from her brooding by Otharri's clarion scream.Īt the firebird's screech, Neyali's cellmates closed ranks, a perfect synchronous motion, tensing immediately for an ambush. Neyali wondered if the honor would ever stop feeling so heavy. It wasn't long ago when she'd been alone, wandering the ruins of Mirrex with her firebird Otharri, looking for some sign- any sign, no matter how small or improbable-that there were others who had survived the Phyrexian massacre of her village. Neyali vowed to herself that she'd do her best to find them what respite she could. They had so little resources and what they had, regardless of its form, was shared without reservation. Elham, the Auriok woman who had led before Neyali, stomped behind them with more bags than she needed to bear, freeing her comrades to move unencumbered. She had only one eye now due to a recent skirmish. If you could help it you had nothing to do with people you did not trust – they might very well be working for the other side.Īnd so we used that trust to pay for our freedom, and we’re still collecting the change to this day.Saheena, an old Vulshok woman, back straight despite age, walked with a stiff pride, a son at each shoulder. You didn’t use a dentist whom you didn’t trust, you didn’t ask someone to pass a letter to your Swedish relatives if you didn’t trust them. If you trusted someone, you could share your books, your telephone numbers, your smoked sausage, your summer house, anything you had, even trust itself – names, places, times. Because in the end it was impos- sible to trust anyone if you hadn’t gone to school together, shared the same sauna, gone scrumping with them, studied together, worked in the same of ce, done military service together, stolen something, eaten and drunk with them, slept with them. Some may use simpler terms such as acquaintances, contacts, but nothing would have counted without trust.

There was however another important currency in circulation – trust. The printed money wasn’t worth much back then, even if there were plenty of sweaty-palmed people with no scruples about handling it. But there is no point in asking if things could have been oth- erwise, only why those people’s descendants are the same to this day, even if they have changed their colours. In the place of trenches there was something more like the circulation of blood, or mushroom spores: thousands, hundreds of thousands of little frontlines, passing through meeting rooms, wedding parties, family photographs, through individual people, who could be upstanding Soviet functionaries from nine to ve and then turn into fervent idealists watching Finnish television in the evenings. There was a quiet war being fought, but without a frontline moving backwards and forwards on demarcated territory. That is until the newspapers told them quite how wrong they had been, leaving them unable to explain exactly what had happened. There was a quiet war being waged for sure, but it was so quiet that even the sharpest ears might not pick up the rumble of its cannons, and the clever chaps abroad had concluded that peoples’ backs were so bowed that they would never stand upright again. Neither were things as some people like to remem- ber them today: cinders glowing valiantly in every hearth, ready to blaze up into a tall, proud ame as soon as the rst bugle call was heard. Things weren’t exactly how the authorities thought they were back then: that a multitude of isolated, downtrodden people were embracing a vision of happiness and a histori- cal mission which required them to speak a foreign language and to celebrate a foreigner’s victories – a vision which promised to unite them, to restore them, to make them greater. Also available in Russian, Finnish and Latvian.

It is above all a first-rate work of fiction, but it also provides a view into Estonia’s recent history which is witty and thought-provoking, leaving the reader not knowing whether to laugh or cry.' - Estonian Literature CentreĮstonian edition published by Mustvalge in 2015, English translation by Matthew Hyde published in 2017 by Vagabond Voices.

'Rein Raud is already known for having written a number of highly varied and multi-layered novels, and his latest work is no exception.

Cinders sentence