Shuy, for the overwhelming percentage of readers who'll have never heard of it before, is one of a half dozen small hamlets clustered in the Himalayas, in that region where Nepal and India and Bangladesh and Tibet come together. The ethnicity that lives there is called the Mocheyn, and at times their various villages have been possessions of different states, but they see less of the hand of colonialism than most. Historically the lines around them on the map matter almost not at all. Ancient tradition for every group that's ever neighbored theirs is to let them go about their business without interference. During many eras the Mocheyn received food tribute. The Mocheyn have a duty which comes before the worldly things like taxes and foreign wars: they have to placate their gods while everyone else gets out of the way.
The specific Mocheyn village I was visiting has a distinct claim to fame besides just being one of the settlements occupied by this ethnic group, though. Some quirk of their upbringing, native tongue, or possibly even genetics makes Mocheyn people gifted translators. It's not just an isolated savant who can pick up Finnish in a few weeks - they churn them out on a routine, if slow, basis, and the chosen few wind up exported all over the globe, interpreting between the most obscure languages in the world more easily than the average high school Spanish teacher can order a burrito. Shuy is the village where would-be translators gather to fly the nest. I was invited along on a trip to collect a batch of two, by a local correspondent whose agency places a couple of Mocheyn every year.
My correspondent, though, fell ill before the trip, so I proceeded alone, or as alone as one can be when accompanied by porters and guides to help me up the difficult terrain. I had to communicate with them through guidebook phrases and gestures, but I didn't hire an interpreter: once in Shuy I wouldn't need one. Most likely the people I was going to pick up there spoke English already, and if they didn't, they'd pick it right up, or so I was given to understand.
Shuy looks at first glance a lot like your stereotypical developing-world village in abject poverty. People, demographically skewed very young, cram in ten per cramped stone cottage. They wear T-shirts from alternate timelines in which the other guy won the Super Bowl, over those same shirts but altered into skirt-like garments, the sleeves turned in and sewn shut for pockets. They free-range their children beyond anything you see in the West. I spent my stay talking to a particular set of kindergarten-age triplets every day and never did figure out who they belonged to.
The translators that they dispatch wire remittances home. It's within the Mocheyn's power to make large durable purchases sometimes, and they do: they have modern, if not Western, plumbing, shared between everyone and parked right in the middle of the village. I saw first aid kits that could have come out of a Walgreen's and the midwife was nearly as well equipped as the more globalized clinics downhill. The village owns a pickup truck with a snowplow attachment. They even have a generator with associated outlets, to run various essential devices, and by its light I drafted this article. What I didn't encounter was evidence of luxury spending. The people and the buildings were undecorated and severe. There was enough food, but I didn't need to brace myself for a culinary adventure: they had meat and grain and beans and milk and presented all these things in the most obvious and least labor-intensive ways possible. Typically boiled.
They need to save on labor because their child to adult ratio is so immense. A typical Mocheyn woman gives birth around fifteen times and has multiples as often as not. The kids can and do occupy themselves once they're ambulatory, but that doesn't close the gap if you've got enough babies to exceed legal staffing ratios in an American daycare. And the mothers are operating alone, much of the time: the men are at war.
If you haven't heard of the Mocheyn's war, you're not alone. It gets far less attention than the typical warlordism in Africa or dustup in the Middle East. Even for the people who live near them, it's background noise; by ancient tradition, the Mocheyn fight one another and die to appease the gods on a specific battlefield and do not involve outsiders. I didn't arrive intending to view or remark on the war. I was there to collect some conscientious objectors.
Pekhee and Zou-zuen were presented to me as a married couple, with Pekhee, the wife, being a touch older than her husband - they're fifteen and fourteen. That's an unusual age of marriage even in Shuy. Actually, marriage itself is unusual in Shuy. They have the concept, but usually the children come from some combination of the women visiting the war bands and the war bands coming home on leave, with no real effort to avoid mixing up who's spending their vacation with whom or track which children belong to which father. Not so with these two, though. They both intended to leave Shuy and all the other Mocheyn behind and start new lives together, translating. "He has no stomach for war," Pekhee told me, describing Zou-zuen. "And I have none for death." They'd met an English speaker before. They had Indian accents at first, but were copying my mid-Atlantic by the time I'd spent one night there.
Zou-zuen was born in Shuy, but Pekhee came from another Mocheyn village much like it, a four-day hike under ideal conditions. Shuy is the most accessible, and therefore the one that the translator's agency collects from. Most kids don't get the option. The remittances, while helpful, are not as central to their way of life as the endless battle and the endless production of soldiers to die in it. While Mocheyn women are frequently occupied in raising children, nothing stops them from becoming warriors. Any who want to and some who don't join the warbands. There is no tendency to send them home if they wind up pregnant during their campaigns, although if they manage to survive to give birth, the babies are remanded to their sisters back in the villages at the first opportunity. Pekhee explained to me that she was curious about the outside world, and that she wanted to see all her children turn thirty. These desires aren't stigmatized, per se, among her people: it's just understood that not everyone can indulge such whims when duty calls them to battle.
It dismayed Zou-zuen at first, when he saw that I'd appeared without the translator agency representative. He'd met the fellow before, a year previously, and seen his cousin and her hastily-assigned husband depart. (I was unable to find where exactly they'd been placed, which might mean they've landed sensitive diplomatic or intelligence positions.) In introducing myself, I assured him that I was capable of (with my porters and guides) showing him and his wife the way to the agency, where they'd be connected with jobs as they expected. Zou-zuen could tell that I wasn't an Indian like the person he'd been expecting, and wanted to know if I was American or European or Chinese. (Visitors to the Mocheyn are rare, and media penetration almost nonexistent, so it's entirely possible that pale-skinned Chinese officials have there been mistaken for "white" in the past to some embarrassment.) He calmed right down when I confirmed that I was an American. "Americans count," he said.
And then he asked me to cut off one of his fingers.
Lost in the shuffle of logistical preparation, I had not been informed of this observance. Zou-zuen and Pekhee explained: their duty, from birth as part of the Mocheyn, was to the war. Natural deformity - not uncommon, with a limited diet and all these twins and triplets squeezing each other in the womb - marked a person as being of particular interest to the gods, even if their presence in combat amounted to human sacrifice more than anything else. No one with a club foot or cleft lip could be allowed to leave. Mocheyn maiming one another outside of ritual warfare would offend the gods likewise. But, Zou-zuen explained, if I, an outsider representing a great distant culture, were to cut off one finger from each of the couple, they'd be marked as interesting to foreign powers, and the gods would consent to let them depart.
This practice emerged, I was told, less than thirty years ago. A tourist with more hiking ability than sense all but stumbled into Shuy, where he became infatuated with a local girl. The Mocheyn taboo on intermixing with outsider blood is intense. His advances, however romantically intended, quite literally threatened her life. The likeliest outcome if she were to fall under any suspicion for sex with the stranger would have been an amateur, fatal hysterectomy before any mixed child could implant, performed on the battlefield so that her blood would appease rather than rile up the gods. Accordingly, a couple of the girl's brothers had gotten into a lethal fight with the visitor. The visitor died. Followup investigations by various jurisdictions that technically consider Mocheyn territory to be within their remit found the brothers blameless. But one of the brothers, Eosht, lost an eye in the fight.
After some kind of consultation with the gods, they determined that Eosht was allowed to leave. It was unprecedented. Mocheyn legend says that whenever their people have attempted escape, or been forcibly removed, from a certain distance from the ancestral battleground, ruin has befallen the escapee and whoever accompanied them. Policies that at least don't contradict that belief seem to be in place for everyone who has ever taken a turn administering this patch of the Himalayas, insofar as fact-checking could discern. But this man, one-eyed through the attack of a foreigner from a national power sufficient to give the gods themselves pause, could go.
Eosht went, found work as an interpreter, and - chafing at the celibacy needed to avoid fathering any half-Mocheyn children - came back along with a colleague, to check if he could bring a wife out with him. The colleague was somehow convinced to chop off a girl's little finger, she survived the process, and she left Shuy with her new husband. When Eosht's bride too demonstrated improbable linguistic talents, entrepreneurial spirits began siphoning off one or two couples every year or so from the villages. This was the program Pekhee and Zou-zuen were expecting, eagerly, to join; better, in their eyes, to sacrifice a finger to America than their entire lives to the Mocheyn gods. The usual agency man wasn't there, but I was, and I was American as you please.
I did not agree immediately to bring down a cleaver on these teenagers' hands. I planned to stay a full week, and needed a little while to get used to the idea.
The first departing Mocheyn couple have lived in India for twenty-eight years as of this writing, mostly in Uttar Pradesh with stints in New Delhi. Sources disagree on whether Eosht and his wife (who has adopted the Indian name Jaya) have seventeen or twenty-two children. Those children have been aggressively matchmade with the equally full-blooded Mocheyn diaspora, those of their counterparts who work in the Amazon basin, or the Caucasus mountains, or the Native American reservations in the United States, learning and translating and preserving every dwindling human language. Several restive adolescents have been deemed flight risks from their ancestral duties and delivered back into the laps of their cousins up in the mountains: better for them to never see another movie, never eat another chocolate bar, never live to see age thirty thanks to their participation in the endless blood sacrifice, than for a Mocheyn child born and raised in Arizona to marry out. There are no records of such Mocheyn-Americans (or Mocheyn-Irish, or Mocheyn-Brazilians) walking back down the mountain from Shuy once they arrive. But provided the whole family understands their ultimate responsibilities lie with the gods wherever they make their homes, they approve of having Mocheyn scattered across every country that will have them: this way, if something wipes out all the villages, an emergency repatriation effort can repopulate them and appease the divine.
The children, too, even though they're born outside the traditional Mocheyn stomping grounds, must be promptly physically identified as being of interest to a great power. Most of the translator families pursue this by circumcising their boys. It's commonly enough available in the United States, and their deal with their agency includes trips and services to get the snips snipped as a necessary expense. But when they bear their children under unsupportive circumstances - a war zone, or an airline complication, or a bank issue, preventing them from getting plane tickets - they settle for having the nearest white or Chinese person chop off a baby finger. America considers it a religious freedom issue, ever since an attempt to remove a baby girl from a second-generation Mocheyn family in Texas resulted in the parents murder-suiciding the girl, her three older brothers, and then themselves, rather than surrender her to someone who wouldn't chop her finger off and raise her in the faith. There are rumors that fact-checking couldn't substantiate, but which suggest a possible shape of the behind-the-scenes conflict, that the agency pulled some Mocheyn who were working on CIA projects until they could be guaranteed their religious rights as a matter of American law. They're good cryptanalysts as well as translators.
Pekhee and Zou-zuen were quite cheerful about the prospect of being down a pinky each. (Pekhee, left-handed, wanted the right one off; Zou-zuen planned to lose the left.) There were antibiotics on hand, and the midwife saw finger amputations every year and would be able to stitch them up. It would hurt a lot less than giving birth a dozen times without an epidural (a convenience they do not have available in Shuy, but have no religious objections to) or getting disemboweled to feed the gods their fill of blood (a fate Zou-zuen, at least, could avoid only by leaving his finger behind). Only I could do it; my porters and guides were Sherpas, and while it wasn't guaranteed that they wouldn't count as belonging to an adequately great power to subdue the wrath of the gods, if they didn't, another maiming would be called for. So why ask one of them instead of the convenient American?
Plagued with fears about bringing the knife down onto the metacarpal instead of the finger alone, I asked if there was anything else I could do. I wasn't competent to perform a circumcision, and Zou-zuen didn't look thrilled at the prospect of me trying, but eventually Pekhee said I could try piercing her ear, and they would ask the gods about that. If, and only if, I promised to chop off her finger should an ear piercing not suffice.
The Mocheyn don't practice any form of body modification amongst themselves; they either have no desire to decorate their bodies with scars and inks and jewelry, or it would offend the gods if they did it to one another without hauling in a subject of a great foreign power to wield the implements. Should they have thought of tattoos and piercings earlier? The ones who've grown up in the States surely could have. But - notwithstanding the wayward teens, deported to the villages to protect the ethnic gene pool from contamination and usually chewed up right away by the war - most Mocheyn who've left feel a considerable aversion to returning home again. They integrate, accent and all, into whatever part of the world their agency emplaces them. They don't send letters. Shuy doesn't have a phone line. And the gods won't be able to tell them "not good enough, try again" from too great a distance; ethnic Mocheyns claim that they are more sensitive to this sort of thing than outsiders, who it is said can only feel the gods when they're agitated or during a visit to the battlefield itself, but even a Mocheyn can't get a clear omen from more than twenty miles away. Apparently me and my rhinestone studs were going to be the first to find out if there's a way to spare all those babies the loss of their fingers.
I'd never pierced anyone's ears before, but they had disinfectant, and I had earrings, and it requires both less force and less precision than severing a digit. I put one of my earrings through Pekhee's ear, and left it there, since all the Mocheyn agree that it probably won't work at all if the piercing is allowed to heal closed and she'll definitely have to keep the stud till she can get one of her own. And then I got to witness the villagers calling for the verdict of the gods.
"I think we should just cut the paragraphs after this," said Joel, tapping the marked-up draft. "If we can't get ahold of Lisa -"
"Yeah, we can't, she's still in the hospital and nobody from work is on the visitors' list," replied Bill. "I called her mom and her mom cussed me out."
"If we can't get her to edit it into something less sensational we can still print most of what she wrote before the breakdown, but not what's after it. No amount of fact-checker insertions will salvage it."
"It ends too abruptly."
"Well, then I don't think we can run it at all till she's back at work," Joel said. "It's a great piece, we'll sell a million issues, but the last section isn't worth it. You can't publish a nonfiction article about Lisa having a nightmare."
"Religious experience," said Bill.
"If that's what you want to call it! Does 'The choking, crawling certainty that malevolent entities had fixed their attention on Shuy and those of us ants who stood there.' sound like a religious experience? It's not even a complete sentence." Joel dripped with contempt for sentence fragments. "Or 'The battle! The endless bloody battle, fought not by enemies but ally against ally, all to hold the breach against their wrath!' Religious experiences are about oneness with the universe and Jesus telling you to build a cathedral and shit."
"Lisa's a good writer, she's just going through it right now. It sounded bad enough I'm impressed she managed to write anything," said Bill.
"Right, so, if she hadn't, the piece would end here, and we'd print it with a little note mentioning that tragically, Lisa passed out around this point but we're hoping she makes a full recovery. That's cool and spooky and it wouldn't be bad journalism, if she'd passed out. Instead she wrote this little horror poem thing, so if you don't want to cut the piece and she's not out of the hospital in time for the June issue's deadline, I think we have to kill it. We can't shoehorn it into July, that's the Japan issue."
"You're right," sighed Bill. "When you're right, you're right."