Read Cloud Cuckoo Land for Free Online Page B

she gives a spasm and a mud-brown calf slides the rest of the way out.
    Omeir takes a step forward but Grandfather tugs him back, a question on his face. Beauty licks her calf, its little body rocking beneath the weight of her tongue, and Grandfather whispers a prayer, and a gentle rain falls, and the calf does not stand.
    Then he sees what Grandfather saw. A second pair of hooves has appeared beneath Beauty’s tail. A snout with a little pink tongue stuck between its jaws soon joins the hooves, followed by a single eye, and finally a second calf—this one gray—is born.
    Twins. Both males.
    Almost as soon as the gray calf touches the ground, he stands and begins to nurse. The brown one keeps its chin planted. “Something wrong with that one,” whispers Grandfather, and curses the breeder who charged him for the services of his bull, but Omeir decides the calf is just taking his time. Trying to solve this strange new mix of gravity and bones.
    The gray one suckles on its bent-twig legs; the firstborn remains wet and folded in the ferns. Grandfather sighs, but just then the first calf stands, and takes a step toward them as if to say, “Which of you doubted me?” and Grandfather and Omeir laugh, and the family’s wealth is doubled.
----
    Grandfather warns that it will be a challenge for Beauty to produce enough milk for two, but she proves up to the task, grazing nonstop in the lengthening daylight, and the calves grow swiftly and without pause. They name the brown one Tree, the gray one Moonlight.
    Tree likes to keep his hooves clean, bleats if his mother dips out of sight, and will stand patiently for half a morning while Omeir picks burrs out of his coat. Moonlight, on the other hand, is always trotting somewhere to investigate moths, toadstools, or stumps; he nibbles ropes and chains, eats sawdust, wades in mud up to his knees, gets a horn stuck in a dead tree and bawls for help. What the two calves share from the start is an adoration for the boy, who feeds them by hand, who strokes their muzzles, who often wakes in the byre outside the cottage with their big, warm bodies wrapped around his. They play hide-and-seek and race-to-Beauty with him; they stomp through spring puddles together amid glittering clouds of flies; they seem to accept Omeir as a brother.
    Before their first full moon, Grandfather fits them to a yoke. Omeir loads the dray with stones, picks up a goad stick, and begins to work them. Step in, step out, gee means right, haw means left, whoa means stop—at first the calves pay the boy no mind. Tree refuses to back up and be hitched to the load; Moonlight tries to dislodge theyoke on every available tree. The dray tips, the stones roll off, the calves go to their knees, bawling, and old Leaf and Needle look up from their grazing and shake their grizzled heads as though amused.
    â€œWhat creature,” laughs Nida, “would trust someone with a face like that?”
    â€œShow them that you can meet all of their needs,” says Grandfather.
    Omeir starts again. He taps them on the knees with the goad; he clucks and whistles; he whispers in their ears. That summer the mountain turns as green as anyone can remember, and the grasses shoot high, and his mother’s hives grow heavy with honey, and for the first time since being driven from the village, the family has plenty to eat.
    The horns of Moonlight and Tree spread, their rumps thicken, their chests broaden; by the time they are castrated, they are bigger than their mother, and make Leaf and Needle look slight. Grandfather says that if you listen hard enough you can hear them growing, and although Omeir is pretty sure that Grandfather is joking, when no one is looking, he presses an ear to Moonlight’s huge rib and shuts his eyes.
----
    In autumn word filters up the valley that the ghazi sultan, Murad the Second, Guardian of the World, has died, and his eighteen-year-old son (bless and keep him forever) has