CHAPTER 6

Life remained easier than the worst. Neither her husband nor his mother treated her cruelly. They gave her a dress to wear, a cup, bowl, spoon and an iron knife engraved with the family name of a neighbor, his first wife, who had died in childbirth. Closer, moment by moment, than the strange place and the strangers of her new family, was the familiar habit of work. She labored in the house, in the fields behind it and in the forest from the time she rose before dawn until the sky was black or starred at night, so although everything had changed for her, all things remained the same.

Mother and son lacked friends. There was no wedding when Berthe came, but a feast of chicken, which the two devoured almost entirely between themselves and in silence. When they were finished, the mother pointed to their three bowls and to the water jar that stood beside the door.

Berthe understood, but she sat still. The old woman signed again. Though a crone with big purple veins under yellowed skin, dark eyes sunk deep and a back slightly hunched, she kept a full head of cloud-grey hair. Her lips parted now to reveal healthy teeth. She knocked her bony hand against the plank that was their table, but still Berthe watched her, thinking, I must call her tongue to life or hear no word of human speech again.

The bridegroom, a big lanky man with a high forehead and square face, squirmed in his seat. He gave Berthe's shoulder a push with his hand, but not a hair of her head moved.

The mother's lips fumbled. At last she said, "Wash these."

"Yes, mother," Berthe said.

She did it and they went to bed, the old woman on a pallet near the fire, the newlyweds on a second mat under the hut's single window. Berthe lay clenched, her legs drawn up while her husband poked under the stranger's dress with his fingers, but she could not have moved then even had she given herself permission to flee, so she bit her lip and turned her face to the earth lest he see the tears that came when she thought of her weakness. She, who had resigned herself to so much retribution, could not bear even this minor outrage humbly.

In the end he desisted and they slept. Neither had said a word to the other yet. Berthe resolved to break the silence in the morning. She would awaken him gently and say, as earth's daughter said to Fatayad, god of farming, in the days when he begot the human race: "Husband, let us people my mother's house."

He must have noticed the silence also, though. On waking he spoke first, to tell her he was called Glukish, meaning lucky. She heard this with a lonely pang, because Lucky was only a nickname. It meant he had never been to a priest or a temple to be commended by name to the gods.

"Why do they call you that?" she asked.

He shrugged. Names were for other people, not oneself.

Later, when she was gathering wood to build up their stock for winter, Berthe realized she had forgotten to ask the mother's name. By the time she learned that the crone was called Hovenun, meaning hope, she no longer cared. There was so little conversation in that house that names were an extravagance. Hovenun turned out to be so shy that, although she went every day to draw water at the well, she knew almost nothing about the other women who came there. Sometimes when Berthe tried to pray for her husband she could hardly remember what to call him.

Glukish treated her with the same casual humor he showed the dog and would have shown a mule. One sunny morning, Hovenun gone to the cow they shared with a neighbor, he challenged her to lift-ups. They faced away and locked elbows. Bending forward, each tried to lift the other, a contest that naturally favored the woman. When she had won a few times, he switched to arm wrestling, then leg wrestling and then to free-style with their whole bodies until they lay breathless, laughing, and the rest came naturally and they were married.

Wood was even more plentiful here than at home, so there were no tracts in the forest assigned to a village or family. Everyone wandered and cut at will any tree not young enough to be protected by Fey nor so old that it was sacred to earth. Certain of the uko were girded with a purple cord or hair to show that some god or spirit or wandering priest had claimed them, and these Berthe did not cut.

A little rutted trail that served as the tax road passed a half-hour's walk from the house. Berthe would go up the road over the next hillside to where it crossed a deep stream and along that to the north or the south as fancy took her, wandering like Fea with her stone axe, rope and clay jar of coals. From time to time she found a tree already downed, and although it would have been theft to take the wood herself so she left it, the sense of companionship she derived from looking on the work of other hands eased her own, and she always came back later to see that the other woman had been able to finish the cutting. Berthe herself could almost always drag or carry her own tree in one trip.

One day, as she cut high on the hillside above the stream, Berthe heard a voice singing in the valley below her. She hurried toward it, the axe and the coal jar swinging behind her from the rope. Even as she came down the hill the song ended, but after a moment the unseen singer began a familiar ballad called the Air of the Mountains, about someone's childhood lover gone to settle new province lands.

The voice was not a strong one, and it failed at the high notes of the chorus. When she got to the last line, "And the air of the mountains--" the singer gave up. Berthe only just stopped herself from adding, "Will bring you my love."

The unsung line still sounded in her ears when she came to a clearing and saw where the woman had gone. It was a tiny house with five walls, one descending only as far as Berthe's chest to leave a gap that sufficed for a doorway, and another with a window at wiast height so the smoke of the incense, and the light of altar flame and the sound of prayer might issue. The five cornerposts were decorated with braided ropes and cords, beaded strings that rattled musically together, and cloth ribbons snapping in the breeze. Garlands of what had been flowers rustled on the posts and trailed across the thatch, some faded, others bright against the straw. Berthe stole to the entrance, holding the jar and the axe so they would not swish in the grass.

Inside, the woman chuckled. "Sprite, I have presents for you and for the child god. Fey has heard me and soon I will bring a little one of my own to do him honor. He makes the--makes the stones burst forth and ripen. He teaches me joy--in a desolate place."

The woman sobbed. Berthe, moving closer, saw that she had collapsed at the altar, her hands clutching the dirt floor, face pressed to the stone, hair trailing in the votive ash. "Fey!" she cried. "Let this one grow till birth and come out strong! Don't take this one back again! Don't!"

Berthe knelt. She was in the presence of gods. She let the axe and the jar slip from her hands and the rope slide along her arms to fall on the ground. Moving forward on her knees, she came into the shrine and put her arm over the prostrate woman.

"They hear you," she whispered. "Not only the sprite, but the ear of every god is turned to you."

The woman lifted her head to look from under a screen of ash-strewn hair. "They will kill me this time. Six! Oh! Six of them I've lost, all early," she wailed, dropping her head to the stone again. Frail and small, fewer than twenty years of age, she had skin so light that all the veins showed through. Her light-colored hair was sparse, her grey eyes rheumy, eyes and nostrils red with sores, but her quick motions and her cries and tears showed her unbroken by her suffering. She has withstood the retribution I deserve, Berthe thought. Drawing the woman to her, she whispered, "You won't be killed. I promise it."

The woman raised her head again. Berthe knew she had spoken an enormity, a promise she could not keep without violating all the laws of kinhood, laws that kept her and the frail woman and the old ones and children alive in their helplessness. She had promised a stranger, had said she would defend anyone, and for nothing. The woman did not consider this. She fell on Berthe, sobbing out the story of her life.

Her name was Meta, a corruption of Meteling, meaning butterfly. She had been born somewhere not far away, to a village of the ninth generation. That meant the land was so subdivided among the sons and daughters, the grandsons and granddaughters, that only the eldest of families could inherit and the rest must marry land or undertake a Voyage. She had been the second daughter, one of the generation fated for suffering, travail and discovery, raised on thin porridge and tales of the wilderness. When the time came, however, she was too small and weak, only ten years old, so they left her behind with the firstborn and the grandparents and toddlers. Meta described the ceremony of departure--it was the only time in her life she had seen a priest--the midnight singing, dark rites and magical symbols, and the incantations in a tongue of which she learned just one word: Go.

The next summer there were not enough people in the fields, so she worked from dawn till past dark, heartbroken and hungry and exhausted, and the harvest was poor. Her parents died that winter. The next harvest and the one after were plentiful. Her elder sister married. Soon there was a host of inlaws to do the work so although she was still a girl, they sent Meta in betrothal to another village.

Two brothers lived there with their parents. The elder brother was married, but his wife sickened and died, toiling in the field while heavy with child, so she was married to the elder and the younger had to wait another year. He was waiting yet, and though at first she had liked him they were now bitter enemies. She had become pregnant twice each year since her marriage and always miscarried. Each time there was a family row, and the brothers beat her until their father interceded, and their mother threatened to kill her. The father was her friend in the house. He was now looking for a woman to marry the younger son. "They brought a woman here not long ago and he asked her father for her, but the woman's mother heard from the neighbors how it is in our house and said no."

Berthe wept.

She was pregnant again, Meta went on, but this time she would not tell them. She had hidden food for herself in the wood and the fields against the later months when she would need it, and in the spring when when she was heavy she would lie down to rest among the corn or the rye as she needed, never minding if they beat her.

Berthe told her own story, except Akiva's name and that he was a priest. They parted until the next day of prayer, when the two moons came into the sky together and women were allowed a few hours to visit the shrine. This happened about once in ten days.

When she came again, Berthe brought the axe and the rope and jar as before, but this time there was food in the jar instead of embers: a cake made of flour and egg and nuts, a piece of dried fruit and a little bladder of milk. There was no meat, but even so Meta flung her arms around Berthe and kissed her. Berthe was pleased but she felt how the woman had grown thinner and the hard lump in her belly stretched the skin tight. Though the weather was cold now, Meta wore only a tattered gown of coarse cotton that abraded the running sores on her hips and shoulder. Berthe examined those evil-looking wounds, and seeing that small creatures lived in them, she told Meta they must be burnt clean. They did that outside the shrine where the odor of singed flesh would not offend the gods. Two young women who were there came to watch and hold Meta's hand. It seemed a horrendous operation and Berthe trembled as she brought the glowing stick close, but Meta only started a little and said, "It's hot."

Hovenun worked less and less as winter came on. Berthe rose early to make breakfast, built up the fire, set the evening meal in one corner to cook, and spent all day readying the family for cold weather while her mother-in-law sat with her feet on the warm stones. If she did not fall asleep, Hovenun watched the supper, carded wool with burrs and spun it on a distaff, or matted leaves and straw to make ticking for quilts and jackets. She wove, but only rarely, and when she did, she seemed unable to concentrate.

At times she spun, but then the spindle would escape and roll around her feet, unwinding and rewinding until they had to cut the heavy line to free her, it was so knotted and tangled and impossible to undo.

At night Berthe dreamed she was following the cord through fields and woodlands, over mountains, along a roadway, ever hoping and ever more certain that Hovenun had left it to show her the way, that she held the distaff in Ayekar, the holy city, still spinning. Drawn by this hope, winding and winding, she followed over the passes of death, she thought, and it was the road the cart had taken from her home across the mountains, the wheels that had touched every bit of the way between this place and home--happy were they! And it seemed she was twisting that track around her spindle, winding up the cord those wheels had laid. In the dream she found Hovenun standing on a high cliff and she saw her childhood village in ruins, smoking, her family in the ashes babbling like the old priest, Akiva's near-father, struck mad. Instead of mourning, Berthe raised her arms and flew like a bird, like a goddess. Waking, she thought for a long time of the path and the wheel and the spindle.

One day Berthe came in from milking to see Hovenun, her feet and ankles tangled, weeping. "My hands are good," she insisted while Berthe slowly rewound the cord. "I'm still good. I can spin." It was a long speech for a woman used to being understood at a gesture. Later she added, "It's this imp of a spindle always slipping away."

Berthe thought of her own mother and took the old woman in her arms. She remembered her dream of the spindle, path and wheel. There was a little cart on the farm. It was snowing outside; no one would use the cart today. Dragging and tilting and yanking, she got the thing indoors and turned it on its side by the fire so the wheels spun free. She fixed the spindle to the end of the axle with a lump of pitch and then, as an afterthought, tied the distaff to the frame. They fussed with the arrangement all afternoon and by evening, when Glukish came back from hunting and drinking in the forest, Hovenun was spinning as fast as any young girl.

He stopped short in the doorway and took off his straw shoes slowly, pausing to wipe his face on his sleeve, then advanced to the fire to warm his hands. The big cart on its side there frightened him because it meant his mother was really so old now that the rules of the house no longer applied. When he saw how the work delighted Hovenun, though, he took up the idea. For three sleety mornings he sat beside her on the warm stones with the axe and a piece of wood, making a free-standing wheel with an axle. They set it between forked sticks and slapped it to make it turn. Mother and son, smiling oddly, watched like spellbound children, nodding together as though they had known this before and forgotten. Berthe spun the wheel faster and faster, but it seemed slow to her. There was something dissatisfying about the invention. She puzzled over it, trying to see what was wrong. It unsettled her, as had the nodding heads and ghostly smiles.

She thought about the cart's wheels, turned by the earth, turned by the path they followed, the path that was a cord leading home in her dream. This wheel might lead back to something wonderful forgotten, back to girlhood for Hovenun and for herself, to where? Verloring, the lost god, came to mind and she dedicated the invention to him when she went to the shrine. But on her way back, the sky reddening behind the blue-gold masses above and trees bright black around her, she thought perhaps it should have been to earth. Earth turned the wheels, earth and the bright path turned them. While she was thinking this, it occurred to her to loop a cord around the wheel to turn by pulling it, and then to keep it tight by running the cord around a stick and soon after that she made a second wheel. Now, with the two attached by cord, she turned the big one and the small one turned the spindle.

"Fea, behold your daughter!" she shouted, the ritual cry of new mothers. Hovenun sat up in her pallet, confused. Glukish, already awake, only grunted. He had lost interest in the device.

By the time the snow was knee-deep around the house, Berthe had spun all the wool they laid in for winter. She patched the gowns and blankets, and began weaving straw into mats with a needle. There was no loom in this house. The village relied on one weaver who, having died some generations before, had bequeathed his great loom to Fey. It sat in the shrine now, and women took turns at it.

When a thaw came, Meta waded through the mud with a load of spinning and Berthe made yarn for the hated in-laws while the smaller woman curled around her and slept like a cat. They carried the yarn together to the shrine and lit the altar fires and let their coats steam dry on the stones. Peasant coats, padded with chopped straw, chaff, leaves and grasses, dripped mud when they were wet and the warmth of a body made the scent of rotting grass waft off them. Often the seeds trapped inside would sprout as the coat dried by the fire. In spring they were ceremoniously buried.

In the shrine, while the dead weaver's loom rattled and sang, Berthe did everyone's spinning and they made clothes for her. A local beauty called Schwalbe offered to turn the bottom wheel, a stupid arrangement because Berthe was stronger and Schwalbe's long fingers better for spinning, but the most any woman would do was provide the power. Nobody wanted to learn the new way.

Meta ruled at the loom. Morgen and Ube, two neighbors, could shift the warp-rods up and down, but their hands were too swollen from fieldwork to manipulate the shuttle deftly. Meta, who had been a sickly child, had cooked and mended instead of digging so her hands were like Berthe's mother's, the knuckles small, and she could make plain cloth or even simple patterns so fast it was funny to watch her. Together the women spun and knit and wove and talked about religion, husbands, in-laws and winter.

Then for twenty days the snow was deep so they stayed at home, looking after the animals, sleeping, making twine and baskets and fighting with their families. Berthe ground and baked and watched Hovenun, who sat rubbing her purple knees by the fire, and wondered about her new invention. The women were afraid of it. Morgen had said it was against religion, and she thought the rest agreed. Berthe knew for certain it was permitted.

Shurat, the old dead priest who raised Akiva, said invention was permitted. Priests had come from the capital to tell him so and tell the whole province, or so she thought. She had sat as a child by the old man to hear him recall the time the lovely men came from Lir Temple, a parade of rich embroidered gowns and overcoats with the mandala of the gods in gold and silver on something Shurat called velvet, a wonderful stuff as soft as lambs' wool and deep-colored as ugewa petals in full bloom at twilight, with a nap like close-cropped hair. The elaborate speeches the priests had made were like poetry to her, full of sweet promises and awful threats and mysteries, and she remembered well that they had said invention was permitted. The speech was an epistle of joy in her village, because it promised that handicrafts, like weaving and the copper jewelry and even the bone and iron knives, if they were fine, would be as acceptable as grain and ugewa for taxes. The price of the artworks, decreed by the tax-collecting priests, was low, but it might buy a family out of starvation in bad years and in good years the tax train was like an enormous market, selling the crafted things it got along the way for grain or ugewa, this time at a higher price.

She knew the wheel-spun yarn was good, too, smoother and stronger than what came off a dangling spindle. The wheel stretched out the thick places and slowed to let the thin spots build up, as the finest spinsters did, but quicker.

Berthe laid aside a piece of the best woven cloth, three times her height and wide enough to wrap around herself, nicely dyed, thinking they might sell it next year. They could buy the other two thirds of the calf from the neighbor's cow so it would not go for taxes, and so increase their stock against the time when they had children to feed or when the crops might fail.

One day she came in from drawing water to find Glukish looking at the cloth. "What's this?" he demanded.

She told him her plan, watching his face for any sign of a response. "Do you think they might use it, in a temple?" she suggested. "Priests might walk on it in the Lir Temple, or--" she hesitated to tell him she imagined it warming the feet of gods.

"You want to give it to priests?"

"Instead of grain."

"No." He fingered the cloth, frowning. His gaze fell on Hovenun. "Make a coat."

"We have one."

"Make another."

Berthe took the cloth, willing herself to obey, and sat with it on her stone by the fire, not facing him, trying to hide her escaping tears. She laughed at herself as a silly girl who wanted her work to go to Ayekar and win a goddess' praise, but her laughing only made her weep the more.

Glukish was watching her. He went to her wheel, now taken down, and she heard him pick up the two disks and the connecting cord. She sat rigid, holding the knife and the needle to make holes and sew but not moving. If I listened to the knife and the needle, the cloth and the thread, with a willing heart, I would not be afraid now, she thought.

He brought the wheel to her and she turned as if to ward off a blow, though she knew he would not provoke her. She would not look away from the cloth. He yanked at a corner. It fell on the ground. She grasped after it.

He held out the wheel. "This thing is how you spin so well."

She nodded.

"Better than the others...makes trouble," he observed.

She could not look at him. It stung her deeply that this man should so correct her and be right, and she was ashamed of her obstinacy.

"Put it in the fire," he said.

"No!" It was out before she could stop it, and Berthe knew she would not repent. She sprang up and then she stood rebuking herself. Why could she not obey even in this minor thing? She was too strong to be beaten. Could nothing force her to be good? The contraption lay in her hand. Only let it fall and the act is done, she tought. Only drop it into the flames. She held it over the fire until the heat singed her arm, but she could not bring herself to drop it. Let go, she willed. Let go.

The afternoon sun shone on her husband's face. He was looking past her through the chink in the mat at the doorway to where the trees and brambles stood dark against the snow, that must be turning blue now as the shadow of the hill between their farm and the neighbors' crept toward the hut. She felt bereft. All was as it should be in the world, except for her. She sat down on the stone.

Her husband tired of the contest and went out, snarling a little but not upset. He would not compel her. Still holding the wheel, she sat and trembled with indecision. She toyed with it, plucking the cord. Its sound thrilled her.

Eventually, she made a shirt for Meta with a part of the blue cloth. The pleasure she drew from her friend's delight seemed purely wicked. Meta chortled and danced around the shrine. When she stopped, she pointed at Berthe.

"Ho! You tricked us. You're pregnant, too!" she yelled.

Berthe looked down. She had thought she was growing fat from winter idleness, but now she realized she had counted a hundred days since her marriage, and thirty before that, with no blood. She had been pregnant a long time, perhaps even before she came here. She felt weak from happiness.

Meta caught her and sat down, with Berthe's head in her lap. Berthe looked at her and the other women, all laughing. She reached up to yank at Meta's hair, saying, "You are an imp, little butterfly."

"Berthe's pregnant. I can feel it," Meta sang. She put her hands on Berthe's belly and shook it from side to side. "You will have a baby when I do. Have you told him?"

"I didn't even know it."

Meta giggled. "You'd have a stomach ache and plop! Out comes a surprise. Your old mother-in-law would roll back her eyes and die. Her teeth would fall out."

That night, while they ate porridge and bean cakes Berthe said, "In summer, we'll need enough for four."

Hovenun put down her spoon.

"The child will eat from my bowl for a while," Berthe told her husband.

Hovenun was on her knees. "Oh Fea, come into this desolation so we may pour out our blood before you and garland you with flowers," she prayed.

Glukish put out his hand to touch Berthe, stopped, gave her shoulder a squeeze, and turned his back. That night he slept with his head on her chest, his face pressing into her belly.

When he was asleep, she rested his head on the pallet and went to stand in the doorway. The heavy mats dropped little flecks of frost on the ground when she pulled them aside to put her face out, and the air was cold, but the thick woven straw protected her from the wind.

Both moons shone tonight, the small one full and the big a waxing quarter. Their light fell evenly on the snow. She could see through the windbreak a white and lifeless panorama. The notion of birth and children seemed alien to it, the idea of families and husbands foolish. A human being in this frozen world was a miracle, one that might at any instant give way to the limitless silence. Yet she had carried into that night Akiva's child--only her opinion mattered, she reasoned; it was so if she thought it so. Despite the death season, despite the void of white about her and of black overhead, she would nurture and bear a child of love. The night and the winter could not prevail against it. She looked up at the moons again and felt a strong kinship to them. They had been in eclipse when she and Akiva became lovers; now they were parted. As the black trees foretold the doom of winter, so did the two white moons in the night seem to promise that love survived.

There would be obstacles. The sign of dark urine, which she had concealed in herself with ease, would be difficult to hide in a child. Still, her own mother had done it, and she would also. The baby might look like Akiva, but no one here had ever seen him. Stories abounded of women who had conceived by ghosts and spirits and traveling priests without their families ever guessing. And even if they suspected she had come to them pregnant, they must have thought of it before they took her.

~*~ Winter lingered that year. By the time the earth was ready to be plowed, the spring hunger had begun. It was not terrible. They had at least porridge every day and though the cow was dry the hens laid often. Still, the field work pressed them hard. Sometimes Berthe sank down in the mud and wept from weakness.

She and Meta were big then and always hungry. If the moons were bright in the nighttime or their families permitted them a few hours respite in the afternoon, they wandered through the forest together, hunting for edible shoots, nuts, fish and worms. Berthe dug holes in the ground and set crude traps. A few times they caught something, cooked it there and had a feast. Late in spring, when their breasts were swollen and the lilies and babytears and the pink and golden starflowers bloomed all along the streambed they would sit among them and nurse each other to relieve the soreness and the hunger.

It was on such an afternoon when they sat under a moody sky in a nest of pale blue speedwell that Berthe felt her inside cleft by a sudden pain, not like the kicks and punches but sharp, and sundering. Meta, her head on Berthe's belly, also felt it. She jumped up and pulled Berthe along with her to the herbalist, a fat dissipated-looking woman with skin darkened by years of sitting in her doorway chewing intoxicating herbs. At times the herbalist would get up and wander into the forest under their influence, not to return for days or weeks, but of late, with two customers near due, she had kept more or less sober.

"Hoo! Here they come, the both. Which is it? The fat one? And the other not far behind, I guess. Don't start in now, Meta, I've got my hands full with the other one. Well, Berthe, have you got your courage to hand? Good. Fetch your man and go bring me some sparrowtongue."

Berthe and Glukish went, as was traditional, to pick a handful of the tranquilizing leaves, while Hovenun built up the fire and laid out the mats where the labor would take place. Berthe, knowing she and the baby would be so covered with blood and dirt that any urine must go unnoticed, was calm. Glukish muttered uneasily.

Meta and their five friends came along, together with the neighbors who owned the rest of the cow, half a dozen children and some middle-aged women Berthe knew vaguely as people's mothers-in-law. It was a hot afternoon and they wanted a holiday.

Everyone laughed at Glukish. "Who's birthing, you or her?" somebody asked him. Another said, "It's all these women around him makes him nervous." He grumbled and shrugged as one pestered in his sleep.

Berthe put her hand on his stomach. "I'll teach you a prayer. Pray for me."

He looked up at her with a puzzled, vexed expression. It was a sign, not quite of compassion, but of some new subtle emotion springing up from the hunger, fear, pain and loyalty where rooted his inner self. Fear made part of it, because his first wife had died in childbirth, but so did hope and pride. He looked down.

"Here's sparrowtongue," he said, pointing. For the husband to find it was good luck.

All the way back with half the village traipsing gaily behind them, Berthe repeated, "Fea, be kind," over and over in the church language, and she made her husband say it until he had it by heart. Another pain smote her and he paled with fear when she stiffened, but it passed quickly and she set him to praying again.

By tradition the father might remain in the birth house until the baby began to emerge, or even beyond then if the mother asked it, but when the herb woman saw Glukish, she slapped her thigh and bellowed, "Look at him! White as a snowflake. Somebody take him in for the night and give him rest. Come back in the morning, fatherling. It won't be over yet." Him dispatched, she tossed most of the sparrowtongue into hot water and retired to the doorstep to chew the remainder beneath the rising greater moon.

Berthe paced outside the little hut as she had seen women do. When the pains became more frequent, she went in and Hovenun brought her the soothing tea mixed with honey. At dark, Hovenun led her to the mats and rubbed the back of her neck and shoulders between pangs. The herbalist went to sleep by the fire, mumbling, "Wake me if you need me."

The night was not as terrible as Berthe had imagined. Pains came and went, often sharp but never more than she could stand. She groaned or shrieked as the spirit moved her, and Hovenun echoed these sounds according to custom. Sometimes she heard her husband outside, groaning too or repeating the prayer. After dawn she began to feel a new, steadier pain, and in midmorning the herbalist told her to push. The women in the house--Hovenun, Berthe's friends and others who came and went--chanted, while Berthe pushed and pushed until she worked herself into a fury, plowing the hard earth of the floor into a mud of dirt, blood and sweat. One mat ripped down the middle. Shards of it mixed with the mud or worked themselves into her calloused soles. Finally someone whispered to her that the child was born. Hovenun gathered up the baby, gently pulling its legs free of her, and said, "Domafamilia, a son."

The women began to laugh and sing. Bits of meal, bread and part of a honeycomb appeared. Those who had witnessed the birth were making ready to go from house to house with the news when suddenly Meta straightened up and uttered a cry.

There was havoc. Meta's husband and his family were fetched to go looking for sparrowtongue, but when they came to the house the women had already decided there was no time for that and sent her home with a cupful of Berthe's drink. Finding her house empty, Meta ran about in distress until pain overwhelmed her. A labor so violent the whole village could hear it was in progress when the family returned. Meta screamed for more sparrowtongue. Her brother-in-law ran to find it, but when he came back the herbalist had banned all men except the husband from the house, and she would not give her patient the drug because it was too late and Meta must be awake to push.

The young man tried to force his way past the herbalist, but his father intervened. Meanwhile the house was racked with sobs, howls and moans as the women echoed Meta. The father-in-law covered his ears and fled to a neighbor's home where he sat in the corner, trembling at each new cry.

The brother-in-law succeeded in reaching Meta, and tried to feed her the herb, but she caught his thumb between her teeth and bit deep until her friends pried open her jaws to let him run away. People jeered at him a long time afterward. Sometime past midnight in the midst of the racket the family became aware that a girl was born.

The next day, heaps of dried moss and straw soaked in blood were gathered up from the two birthing beds, rolled into the mats and buried with great merriment. The mothers were brought outside to watch. The herbalist stretched out between them on the earth by the ritual burial ground. Glukish sat next to Berthe all the while, not much affected by the new baby but keeping hold of his wife's forearm as though she might sink into the ground otherwise. Berthe's child stayed at her breast, while Meta's passed among the men of her family. First the new grandfather held her clumsily in both hands and the two peered at one another in a silence nearly as unusual for the old man as for a newborn, then the brother-in-law set the little one on his thigh, studied her and made faces the infant could not have seen, and finally the husband cradled her while Meta watched and giggled.

"Each one thinks she's his," she whispered to Berthe.

"What? Have you--?"

"Each one," Meta affirmed.

"But--"

Meta laid her head on Berthe's shoulder to bring her mouth close to the other's ear. "My husband's not meant to have children. They were unlucky. Six of them--I nearly died. But the old man had two sons, and four more were born alive that died. And the young one, before, he hated his own brother. Now they're friends again." She shrugged.

Berthe lay back and laughed. "The little butterfly pierces flame. You have the heart of Gevore."

"Who's that?" Glukish asked.

This was a children's story. Berthe replied automatically, "He died on the walls of the castle Emsayi in the times before."

"Castle?" Glukish's curiosity was piqued.

"Castles were where the people lived in the times before the gods when there was fighting every spring," Berthe told him. "There were dragons in those days--monsters--that were as big as tall trees, and would rampage through the country belching fire. Gevore and his family were surrounded by dragons and friends of dragons. Their enemies were like mules to the dragons, and they wanted to make him like them, so he would be yoked to their plows and all that he grew would be given to them, but he refused. He fought them on the walls while his family ran away."

"Where did they go?"

"They hid in the forest."

The herbalist shook her head. "They went east into the mountains, up to the source of the Lir. They founded a city that's there yet today. There's never any work there. Just drinking and dancing all day long."

"How do they eat?" Glukish asked.

She yawned. "They don't. They just drink."

Glukish frowned. "They just drink." He shook his head.

"It's not really true," Berthe told him. "It's just a story."

"A story." He tugged at his chin, a beardless mass that sagged when his mouth was shut because for many years he had let it drop half-open. "Is Gevore really true?"

"Yes, but it happened long ago."

"Long ago." He plucked a blade of spring grass and ran it along the baby's skin, tracing the little shoulder and back. "You'll be telling stories to the boy? When he's older?"

"I suppose."

Glukish nodded. That night, he turned to her and said, "Tell me about Gevore again."

She told him.

"What are monsters?"

"Beasts are creatures of the gods. Monsters are creatures of the evil ones. The dragons had claws as big as the teeth in a harrow, and they flew on wings as wide as this house that made a sound like thunder."

"Where are they?"

"Dead. Hath the father led an army against them and killed them in a battle. The whole earth was soaked in their blood. That is why Fatayad and the daughter of earth conceived farmers, to bring out food from the earth so the gods could live. Otherwise, the blood from dragons would poison them. Only one dragon is still alive, and he is the one who hides Verloring, the lost god."

These stories that any child in her old village knew fascinated Glukish. He made her repeat them again and again over the next few weeks until he had them by heart. She ornamented the tales with descriptions of the temple where she had heard them, in hopes that he might agree to bring the baby to the parish center for naming at the next harvest festival, but he only shook his head.

"Why can't we give him a name ourselves?" he demanded, leaning on his hoe.

She guessed he knew but wanted time to think. "In my village all the children were named with church names. You bring the baby to the temple and the people's priest blesses it. He presents the baby to Fey and the mother goddess, so they will know it if it dies, and then he chants over it to keep it healthy."

Glukish returned to work. "Pah! Keep him out of temples. They make dreamers. He'll run away. You chant. You keep him healthy."

The baby cried. Berthe put her breast in his mouth. "But I'm not a priest. The priest's chant gives health."

"Health. That fat sow of a midwife got named," he observed.

"And she's not religious," Berthe argued.

Glukish paused, hoe in air. "No," he said finally. "She's worse."

The next week Berthe went to get a constipating herb from the woman, and she asked her, "What's your name?"

"Who needs a name at my age? I don't get talked about," the woman answered while she loooked among the jars and sacks that cluttered her hovel.

Berthe sat down on the doorstep. "I hear you got a name in a temple."

The woman turned. "What of it?"

"I did, too."

"Eh? Don't noise it around. They don't like it here."

"Why?"

"Because they're a bunch of sheep-headed ignorant dolts, that's why. Here it is. Just chew a little."

"Do priests ever come here?"

"Are you serious? Who'd come here if he didn't have to? Even the tax wagon only goes through the city."

"I want my son to have a name."

"I'm not taking your brat four days' walk to the city and back for a sack of barley or a blanket. Take him yourself. Better yet, don't. Never did me any good to have a name," the woman said.

"I didn't ask you to take him," Berthe snapped. She picked up her baby and went. At one month of age, he already showed the sign as black as night, so he could not be left with anyone.

The midwife dropped by a few mornings later to say she was going to the city and ask whether Berthe wanted a charm or spirit doll from the temple. Berthe received the offer coldly. "I don't have any money. How are you going to get me a doll? You'd try to sell me one that hadn't been dedicated by priests. I'm not a village girl. I know better."

"Haven't got any money." The woman glanced around the hut. "What's that?"

"For spinning," Berthe said curtly, but then she relented and showed the woman how the spinning wheel worked.

"Clever, clever. That's good." She sat down. "You're smart, eh? How does the yarn come out?"

Berthe pointed to Hovenun, who sat on the doorstep watching the visitor. "I made mother's coat."

Hovenun was hard of hearing, but when Berthe pointed, she smiled and said, "Warm."

The woman examined the cloak. "I could get you silver for cloth like this at the temple."

"We pay our tax in grain!" Hovenun said. "One in three. And ugewa, one for one of grain." She pulled the wool around her though she was sitting in the sun.

"Go on, I didn't say anything about taxes. I can sell your weaving in the city."

"My mother did that," Berthe said. "It was terrible overwork."

"Well, just the yarn, then. With this invention--"

Berthe turned the second wheel. "If I could send this to my mother--" Without warning, she burst into sobs.

The baby howled. Hovenun got up and came to stand beside her. The herbalist gave her a filthy piece of rag she kept in her sleeve.

"Here, dry off. I'll bring you wool."

"He won't allow it," Hovenun said.

"He's your son," the herbalist told her.

Hovenun folded her arms. "He's her husband."

"Domafamilia loves a tranquil home," Berthe put in.

"Pah!" The herbalist said it just as Glukish had. "She's not even a temple goddess. If your mother wove for money, why shouldn't you spin?"

"Silver," Hovenun mused. "What would we do with it?"

"Buy chickens. Buy goats. Buy a horse or a feather mattress. A year's supply of rye whiskey. A leather shirt. I'm off. People around here call me Hex," she told Berthe, and she walked away at her usual amble, talking to herself.

"She's an old slut," Hovenun said. "But you'll do it. For silver." Her eyes brightened with anticipation.

So I'm defying my husband again, Berthe thought. We find ourselves doing evil at every turn. She prevailed on Meta and the four others to learn to use the wheel. They were slow, but she told them over and over during their fortnightly meetings in the shrine that invention was permitted, that humankind was the gods' only means to draw sustenance from the tainted earth, and that earth's hope of regaining her purity rested as much on her children as on Verloring.

Every year, a ragged family of shepherds passed through the village with their flock and few skinny goats on the way to a summer pasture in the northern mountains. The visit was a holiday. As soon as the first sheep appeared on the southeastern horizon, a chorus of children sprang up to run whooping and yelling through the fields and among the houses while their parents put away the work things and brought out the beer barrel, the whiskey jars and the dried fruits and flatcakes.

They came on one of the first hot days, when there were no clouds. Leaves in the field glittered harshly until the dew was gone and then hung limp. Hands sweated a thick black grease on the hoe and scythe handles and bucket poles as men and women weeded and cut grass and hauled water from the stream to wet the fields before the sun rose too high.

The shepherds had a horse, which was the envy of the farmers, and the horse drew a wide cart laden with the family's belongings, babies and bundles of flax from the capital or the Middle Plains or the parish city, they wouldn't say which. People wandered among the flock to choose the sheep whose coat they wanted. Others sat or leaned on the cart and bargained for flax and cheese and whatever goods of leather and iron the shepherds had brought.

When everyone who would do so had marked off his chosen rams and ewes with bits of yarn, the women of the family--a wiry grandmother, her plump daughter and two solid granddaughters everyone joked about--brushed out the coats with heavy wooden brushes. Then the father and his three sons, one full grown and two boys, sheared them with the big knives that flashed as quick among the wool as shooting stars and cut as deftly as Shis, the blade of fate.

Sunset had turned the sky to shining pink and grey, and the raucous nighterings had begun to roost in the windbreaks when the chosen sheep were all done and sent to graze naked in a sheltered clearing. The youngsters of the village came in little groups from the forest where they had passed the afternoon flirting and dreaming and gathering wood, and they made a bonfire.

Hovenun spent the day marking out one ram and ewe after another, bustling among the flock like a minion of Fatayad among farmers. Glukish stood about with his arms folded, admiring the sheep and the trinkets and the strangers, teasing the lambs, glancing now and then at the other villagers. There was a game with bones and some contests of strength, and a battle was organized where two punched at each other's heads until one fell over, but Glukish did not take part. When the eating began, he gorged quickly.

The town ate roasted sheep that night, with bread and cheese, and the woman who owned a three-stringed fiddle, with her daughters playing wood flutes, performed the local version of Spring's Dance. When the eating was done, the music stopped. Everyone gathered around the shepherds' patriarch to hear about the family's travels and the news from the capital.

Glukish pushed close to the wagon, jostling the other men. Hovenun and Berthe sat with the women. The young wives from afar shouted the names of their parishes, in case the shepherds had passed through there. In a few minutes, Hovenun was asleep. Berthe lay back on the ground with her baby on her shoulder.

"Middle Plains," cried Morgen.

There was some murmuring, and the reply came, "The little capital. The peasants are rich, the weather is good. Who's been to the Middle Plains here? No? Well, there are bandits and witches there. The whole plain is a cauldron--a cauldron, like a pot, boiling over with wealth and want. The land is rich, wonderfully fertile. Many poor folks come there, across the mountains, into the plains to the city, and die. There's no pity there. It's a cruel place. The landless may starve. The city's on a hill, you know, and the poor live outside the walls of the city in the bogland. This winter there was a plague among them and a band of the priest folks burned the bogland houses to the ground and the dead and some of the living with them to stop its spreading."

"Did it spread?" Morgen called.

"No, the priests say it didn't. The herb-witches say it did. A crone I know in the south told me people were dying of it at the seacoast. They must have fled there with it. They say it's died down now, but it's just waiting to spring up again."

"What kind of plague?" asked a boy who lay on his stomach in the dirt by the fire, his chin propped in his hands.

The old shepherd flung out his arms. "What kind of a plague? A horror! They waken screaming and never sleep again!"

"Do they blister?" the boy asked.

"They moulder. Their flesh is eaten away," came the answer, but now Meta was calling the name of her parish and the old man started a grisly tale about a village that underwent Division in the tenth generation. The half that went off were lost in the mountains and lived by eating their dead until a few walking skeletons found their way back. Meta began to cry.

"Do you think that happens to a lot of them? Maybe they're still--lost!--in the mountains, my brother and sister and--oh!--all of them," she wept. Schwalbe brushed her tears away.

"Sure," Hex was saying. "They're a lot of them get lost. They say you can hear them when the wind's off the mountains, wandering around. Wandering and weeping, trying to find their way home."

All the children and many grownups were crying. Berthe noticed her husband, still beside the wagon, staring at the patriarch in foolish credulity while great tears dripped off his chin. We are all dreamers, she thought.

"Itscriye, now, on the seacoast," the shepherd went on briskly. "In Itscriye they've had the best spring anyone can remember. The pirests say it's a sign. Overpriests came from Lir Temple to see the crops there and they're changing the apportion. More ugewa. They're raising it from one in three. It's been one in three there since they started giving tributes. Now it's to be halves, straight. Half ugewa, starting next spring. People say they won't do it. There's been a bloody fight at Itscrid Genshiye. Come next planting time, there'll be more."

Some people clucked over the rebellion, some nodded their heads in agreement with it. All gathered close to hear about the fight.

"They sent Pahid--you know him? High priest, from up this way, I think. He was born up here and ran away to the great temple and they took him as a student. He speaks with gods face-on. Studied night and day ten years, bathes every morning at sunrise, winter and summer, in flowing water. Well, they've sent him to Itscriye to take a part of the seed grain. Because they aren't to plant as much, you see. They want to make sure."

"The greedy dogs," Hex put in.

"Shut up, hag," someone told her.

Several women on both sides got to their feet, including Morgen and Meta.

"Well, they're raising the portion because the weather's been good," the shepherd said.

"The weather's been good," Hex mocked. "It's blasphemy against earth to say that. And they're taking the seed grain so the peasants will starve."

No one disputed the point. Seed was not taxed, so they all held back a little extra for the spring Fool Days, when they lived on the grain they had fooled the priests out of.

"Well, it may be they're too harsh just at first," the shepherd conceded tactfully. "It's a weighty question. Is there any parish not heard from?"

"Nichayu," Berthe called.

He was in luck. "I did hear something...we've gone there, but we didn't get that far north last summer. Oh, yes, it was a girl that told me. The peasants' priest was killed. They said the priest's apprentice did it, to get his place. An old reprobate he was, anyhow, fallen into bad ways. He got up in the temple to tell a lie--they say he was going to call our mother goddess a name, saving her. More likely something about the apportion, or some incitement against the taxes. Priests want to keep more for themselves, a lot of times. Well, they don't know what he would have said. He opened his mouth and a blast of fire hit him. A bolt hurled straight from Ayekar. Struck him clean dumb. He opened his mouth and nothing came out. All round his head there blazed a fire like his soul was burning before he even died. Soon afterward, his boy turned on him and killed him. It was a boy he'd raised like his own son. Seems the boy was a bad one, too. They caught him at the field girls."

Berthe heard them laugh at that, and she saw the stars flicker and move as she looked at them through swelling tears. The old women's tongues were working.

"It's an evil thing."

"Evil priest, born to soulfire."

"Born to the fire, all right."

Hex laughed loudly. "If priests never did worse than that, I'd be the religionest old bag in the province. I'd go to the temple every day for prayers and I'd stay the nights." She sat down at Berthe's head. "What was your priest really like?"

Berthe shrugged.

"What are you crying for? Look, the baby's shivering, he's wet. Here, bring him by the--"

Hex had lifted the baby and held him in the firelight. A stream of black urine ran down his leg and collected in droplets on his toes. "--fire," she ended in a whisper.

"Put him down," Meta said.

Hex did it.

Ube, who was a little deaf, wanted to know what was wrong. Soon all five of Berthe's friends had clustered around. Berthe lay still, watching the stars shift apart and then run together as her tears distorted their light. Perhaps they are always longing to approach one another, she thought, but can do it only when someone weeps. Will I die now, she wondered. She doubted it. Religious law said an infant with the dragon's blood-sign should be killed, but its mother could be left alive so long as she did not conceive again. Her husband was free to remarry and drive her out of his house as an evil being unfit to farm.

Evil. She could not think of herself as that, but it might be, she thought, that those possessed by evil no more controlled their destiny than those called to good. As the gods might use a human being to their own purposes without consent, so might the evil ones. Perhaps the two sides had devided up the world, and Berthe and her son must be given to evil in order to preserve some virtue elsewhere. These were the thoughts that would console her if she were driven out. But the chance remained that there might be mercy. As farmers draw food for gods from sullied Earth, so these women might learn good through her and thus win a double victory over the evil ones. Was it also because she feared death? Berthe wondered whether she would ever learn to suffer.

"Who is still with me?" she asked.

For a moment there was silence.

"I'm with you," Meta answered, giving her a little kiss on the forehead that felt like a bright little star on the face of night.

"I am, too," said Schwalbe the beauty, tossing her head.

The rest nodded.

"Don't worry, I'm not running anyplace with the story. My goddess doesn't care," Hex told them. She might have gone on to one of her lectures about the supremacy of earth above all other gods and goddesses, but Meta suddenly gave her a hug, and she retired in embarassment.

"And the roads," the shepherd was saying. "They're good but they need mending. You can walk all day in ruts up to your shoulders. They're drafting a crew from the farmers now for after the harvest. They say winter may catch them on the way back, and many die when that happens. Without the roads we may as well be beasts, though..."

In the days of constant work between then and midsummer, Berthe scarcely had time to worry about her son, but sometimes after Glukish had thrown himself on his bed for a few hours' rest between midnight and dawn, she lay awake listening in the hot breeze for the voice of evil to call her. She thought of her life, so hard-won by work and secrecy, so given over to nursing the fruits of her misdeeds, and wondered whether it were possible for a soul to pass through even a single lifetime and not be charred beyond recognition by its passions.

Midsummer's Day began with a fine clear morning. Women and children began to haul wash water from the stream. The full buckets felt light, the sun sparkled on the droplets that flew behind as boys and girls raced back and forth. The young women sang gaily and the older ones chattered.

The men left their houses. Each made some contribution, carrying blankets or mats to the stream, dragging a sack or barrel too heavy even for the mother of the family, or leading the cow or the mule, if there was one, down to the water to be washed. Then the young men retired to the barns, where they spent the day drinking and playing games and cleaning the hoes, scythes, harrows and plows and repairing them and debating their worth in grain, in copper, and in gin. The old folks sat under the trees around the shrine and told stories. The young women and children worked as the young men did, and about as quickly.

Berthe took Hovenun to the shrine, and sat a few minutes there herself. The neighbor of the cow had established himself under a fan-nut tree where he was building a small fire for his in-laws and father.

"Tell us about the golden people," his boy was pestering.

The man's old father leaned against the tree with his eyes closed. "How does that one go?" he asked.

"Rani..."

"Yes. Rani...thought he was the only child of Fatayad and the Mother Goddess...and the only man in the world. This was long ago, before the battle and loss of Ayekar through Ather's treachery against Verloring...Rani lived happily in the forest. The whole world was forest then. He played in the shining Lir."

Berthe knew this story well. But what was this about "the loss of Ayekar?" She sat down to listen to the local version.

"What is the shining Lir?" the boy asked.

"A river, like our stream but much bigger. This stream is a little child of the Lir. One day, Rani met Rania, the first woman. He began to learn many things. The first was that he might want something and not get it. He wanted Rania--"

"Why?"

"Because she made the light light. He saw for the first time that there were things around him. Now, he asked her to come and live with him and she said, Why? He said--"

"Because you made the light light."

"Make. And she refused."

"Why?"

"He didn't know. When you understand why, you'll be grown up. Now then, one evening he sat watching the moons, and the big moon swallowed up the little one. We saw that happen last spring, didn't we? Well, Rani was very surprised. He said, 'The moon has swallowed his little brother!' But there was no one to hear him. He thought that if Rania were there, he could say it to her. So he learned about lonleiness. He went to Rania again, and asked her to come and live with him. She said, Why? And he said--"

"He said he was lonely."

"That's right. And she agreed and came to live with him."

"Then what happened?"

The old man's eyes were closed.

"He had a dream," another boy prompted.

The old man opened his eyes. "You see, Rani had thought his dreams were real, just as the world is. And one night he dreamed that Rania was wading in the Lir and she put in her hand and pulled out a fish. He called to her to show him the fish, but she ran away. He chased her, and she dropped it back into the river.

"When he woke up, Rani said to Rania, 'Why wouldn't you show me the fish?' And she said--"

"What fish?" the children chorused.

"Why, just now, we were wading in the Lir..."

"We were not!"

"But I saw it--"

"You had a dream!" they shouted.

"Rani thought that perhaps it wasn't true. Perhaps she was hiding the fish and didn't want to tell him. He got angry. He shouted, 'I'll get the truth from you!' and he hit her."

"Then what happened?"

"Did she run away?"

"Oh, yes." The old man watched a yellow worm crawl across his finger. "She ran away and lived somewhere else for a long time."

"Did he miss her?"

"He did." The man shook his head. He was a widower. "So he went to look for her. He looked a long time, but no, he couldn't find her. Then one day as he was searching, he saw a man dressed in white with golden skin and golden hair. Rani didn't know what to say. He hadn't known there were other men at all. The stranger spoke to him. He said, 'Behold your brother.' Rani was surprised. Behold your brother. So the Mother Goddess had two sons. He said, 'My name is Rani.' The stranger said, 'My name is Zatoye.'"

The old man paused to rub his chin. The children leaned forward.

"'Zatoye, have you seen a beautiful lady hereabouts?' And Zatoye said, 'Rania has come to live with me.'

"Rani sat down. He thought about it. Then he got up and he said, 'Brother, will you ask her to come back to me?' Zatoye just walked away. Rani thought he was angry, but the next day Rania came back to his house. She was pregnant. When the child came she went away. She came back without it. Rani asked her where it was. She said, 'I gave it to Zatoye.' She had another and gave it to Rani. Then another for Zatoye. This went on for some time, and Rani worried. Why should she stay at his house if she had his golden brother, Zatoye? Sooner or later she would leave him for good. Zatoye's children would have a mother and his children wouldn't. He said to Rania, 'Ask Zatoye to come and see me.' When he came, Rani said, 'My wife is sure to leave me for you some day.'"

"Zatoye said, 'Why are you complaining? You have a wife. My children and I are alone, but I always send her back to you.'

He studied the children's faces. "So it was Zatoye who sent her back. She wanted to leave him, but Zatoye sent her back. Rani couldn't stand it. He followed Zatoye home, and killed him and all his children."

The children sat quiet. Finally, one asked, "Was that the end of the Golden People?"

"No, because that same night Rania had another child, one of Zatoye's. She went to bring it to him, but she saw what had happened, so she ran away into the forest. So Rani lost both his brother and his wife."

"And the Golden People?"

"Well, the little son that Rania carried away grew up and came back. One of Rani's daughters went away to be his wife. And half their children were golden, and some of their grandchildren."

"Are there Golden People now?"

"Every once in a while a child is born golden. They come and take the child in its seventh year, or thereabouts. It happened once in this village, long ago." He looked up into the leaves of the fan-nut tree. "The Golden People live in the forest. They don't work, they walk among the trees all day, singing. They wear flowers in their hair and dress all in white. In summertime, the birds flitter around them, just amazed at things so beautiful. And in the wintertime they live in big castles, stone houses, in the mountains. They fly on wings so fine you can't see them, far above us. If you look very close in the sky, you might see one. People take them for birds."

"There goes one!" a boy shouted.

All day while Berthe scrubbed the house, blankets, clothing, pot and dishes and tools, she pondered Rania, the spirit caught between two beauties. Days in the field with her husband, nights in the forest with the Golden One. So was she caught, Berthe reflected, except that instead of a golden demigod, she had a fat old herbalist and the memory of Akiva.

At noon, Hovenun brought her a pot of gruel and beer to wash it down, then went back to the shrine where the old folks still sat in the shade of the house and surrounding trees, cooking the evening's feast and talking about the old days while the babies crawled among them. Older children staggered to and fro outside Berthe's house with ever more water. Spring grit was washed away, then winter mold and dust from autumn. Finally everything was clean and the utensils and grannies were restored to the houses, the tools and animals to the barns. The men were sent home while the women and children bathed in the stream.

The children's bathing was accomplished with noise and splashing as they tried to sink each other. Sometimes one went out too far and had to be rescued by a mother wading in deep. Berthe and Meta splashed their babies, patted them dry and left them with Morgen's eldest, who had had her head held under too long and climbed up on the bank to recover. When they were all tired, the older women came from upstream where they had been washing, singing and looking out of the corners of their eyes at one another's breasts and stretch marks. Everyone was de-loused with sour mash liquor and they rinsed and went home reeking of cleanliness, while the men came to bathe.

When the children had been put to bed, people gathered at the shrine, where the food awaited them. Berthe went with some other women to the brewmaster's house while others arranged the roast fish and fowl, loaves of bread, wild fruits and nuts. A shout greeted the first keg of beer. Morgen and Ube followed Berthe with the second keg between them, chanting, "Midsummer! Midsummer!"

The men came up from the stream, chanting the names of crops and sprites and Fatayad to the great drum's beat. The drummer's daughters, the flutists, ran to eat and assemble for the dance.

Half the people fell straightaway on the feast. Men and women capered in the grass to their own singing. The flutists siezed handfuls of barley cooked with chunks of meat, mugs of beer and slices of bread, crammed their mouths full, gulped and began to play. Morsels clung to their cheeks and hair, but in the wealth of food there no one noticed. They piped furiously. Berthe got up to dance while the others sat down to eat.

"Here's to the fat-assed priests!" a man shouted.

"Oh, have some shame. Never seen one in your life," a woman told him.

"I pay taxes, don't I? But what I can get in my stomach between now and then is mine!"

"That's my boy!" Hex called out. "Don't let a bit go to waste."

Berthe sat a little apart from them, eating to her heart's content. She stopped to ladle out a bowl of soup for Hovenun.

"Thanks, daughter. Fetch me some rye. Put a little water in it." Receiving her cup, she went back to the fire.

Hovenun had never called her "daughter" before. Berthe lay back and watched the small bright clouds scurry to the west horizon while wide sheetlike ones spread slowly out behind them, and listened to Meta giggling over a joke with her husband's brother. Soon the dancing would begin. Gelukish would dance to her, mother of his children, in front of the whole village. She watched him set into the meat, the bread, pudding, beer and then the meat again, serious, packing his stomach. When someone spoke to him, he would stop and grin, blush a little and go back to eating.

She jumped up and began to dance. Others were jumping up, too. The piles of food were diminishing now and the sky turning faintly orange with sunset. She leapt high in the air, her arms fluttering out like wings, hair flying.

"Midsummer's round!" voices shouted. "Midsummer round! Midsummer round."

The dancers' circle stretched all around the feast, then grew to enclose the fire, surrounded the old people, and finally the whole field was inside. The drummer stopped. "What is it?" he cried.

"Midsummer!" answered all voices.

This was the signal for the drummer's wife to come up beside him, wiping her hands on her apron and scattering its load of crumbs over her daughters. The drummer made way as she drew out the master of the occasion, a four-stringed fiddle and bow. She began to ply the instrument as delicately as a butcher carving a dewiebird.

Her family joined in. The dancers were off, their arms linked and legs kicking, jerking now left and now right at the fiddle's command. Berthe flung her head back to watch the trees circle above, now to the right and now to the left.

There had been nine babies born that year, including Veluchin's dead. Each mother danced in turn to the center of the ring, than danced a little circle there. The husband broke from the ring, flung up his arms and danced around her, and the two rejoined the circle.

When Meta and Morgen and Ube and three older women had been danced to, Berthe felt a little push against her back. She danced clumsily forward and made two small circles, trying to spot her husband as she went. Someone gave him a push also. Glukish stumbled toward her, keeping his face turned away. He began to dance without raising his arms. He was denying fatherhood. Someone yanked him back into the ring. Berthe staggered but danced on.

"Go back and wait. He'll be sober in a minute," someone called. People were shouting excitedly. She thought she heard a voice say, "Witchcraft." Her husband came toward her again, stomping first on one foot and then on the other, his arms rigid at his sides, face grim. Evil's child was not his. It was hers and it bore her sign.

Was she that terrible? Now as she thought of it, she couldn't remember a time when she had not hated someone in her family, from childhood feuds with her elder brother to her defiance of her husband and her wish that his mother would die.

Hands grasped hers. She found herself back in the ring. The sky had darkened. Dancers moved in and out of the firelight, their shadows looming and retreating over the trodden grass. Berthe was dragged back and forth, her arms wrenched this way and that with the dance. At times she could not make the steps, but rested on her neighbors' shoulders, always moving though tufts of grass reached up to seize her trailing feet and ankles.

At the end of the dance, they dropped her. She lay where she was left, half expecting people to kick her as they went by. A hand grasped her hair.

"Witch!" Glukish breathed. She could feel that he was trembling. "You've ruined me for women. Is my mother in league with you? Get that--that thing out of my house or I'll kill it and I'll kill you."

So he will keep me, Berthe thought. I have only to conceal my children.

As she walked home through the forest, the other women came out of the underbrush to meet her, first Ube and Morgen, then Meta and Schwalbe and even the standoffish Veluchin. Last she found Hex sitting on her doorstep with the baby, smoking her pipe. Dreamer's kiss and mad-dog weed smoke enveloped them both.

All five young women were a little drunk. They tried to cheer Berthe by singing bawdy carols while she carried the infant to the stream, and stood around singing while she dug out a little cave for him.

"Make them be quiet," she whispered to Hex.

Hex answered dreamily, "What for? If anybody hears them, he'll think they're just drinking...season sprites having a spree."

Ube, whose father-in-law was a proficient trapper, set snares around the cave. Veluchin arranged a door of mats and she and Morgen draped vines over it so that no one would stumble on the baby.

"He needs a name if he's going to live alone," Meta said. "Let's call him Mole."

Hex guffawed. The others tittered.

"Spring," Berthe said, remembering a picture in the temple at home, the daughters of Autumn hide the infant Spring.

"Can you call someone that? Spring might not like it," Meta said.

"How about a bright name, like Sunshine," Hex suggested.

Berthe shrugged. They thrust Sunshine into his new home. At first he howled for his mother, but when Hex gave him a pinch of dreamer's kiss he fell sound asleep.

The baby could crawl and grasp, so she left food for him and he ate even when she could not come to feed him, but often he devoured all she brought on the first day and when she returned he was weeping with hunger. The other women also brought him bits of fruit and bread whenever they could.

Whenever she went to see him, Berthe listened first at the little door to hear if he laughed or gurgled or cooed, but he never did. It gave her a sullen pleasure to know he missed his mother.

"He'll be fair as a baby priest with no light on him," she told Hex one evening when they had slipped out to the shrine. The herbalist liked to meet her there on moonlit nights and drag her through the forest in search of particular medicines while discoursing on theology. Her religion consisted mainly in a dislike of Hath and a sort of physical passion for earth. Berthe was too embarassed by it to make much answer, so she usually followed in silence, the baby slung on her back and a torch in her hand, while Hex, knife at the ready, directed her. Once they startled an adulterous couple. The woman explained her screams with a pious report that she had seen earth, Fea and the infant Fey in the woods, searching. This story grew into a myth of a Golden One in the area that persisted for many years.

"Listen," Hex told her one day. "I'm going to the city. Do you want me to take the boy and give him to shepherds? They might raise him."

"They might kill him!"

"Well, he can't live here," the herbalist observed. Berthe suddenly noticed, as for the first time, how dirty she was.

"You're all tired of him because you thought he would die here and he hasn't," Berthe said, and she knew it was true, but she took it back for that reason.

Hex went off without the child on her medicine-trading expedition. It was a holiday for Berthe because she slept at night instead of trudging through the forests, but they were harvesting in earnest now, so there was little time for sleeping anyway, and she missed the special excitement of secret learning. When there was time to rest, she slept in a corner of the house instead of Glukish's mat.

Though she had found his attentions a burden, this was worse. Whole days passed in silence, the pair or even the three of them working as fast as they could from dawn till dark without stopping to eat and then falling asleep as soon as they came home. The neighbor's youngest child brought their share of the milk in the morning and they gulped it down in a porridge of oatmeal and fruit before returning to the field. They stored their grain in a part of the neighbor's barn, and a few times when the owner met them there they paused to exchange thoughts about the weather, but then Glukish spoke for all.

On the last day, Hovenun did not work afield but went to the neighbor's house to prepare the harvest supper together with the other grandparents and children. Exhausted past all restraint, everyone celebrated that night by getting too drunk to stand. After midnight they took to heavy-handed dalliance. Hovenun went star-gazing with the father of the family and Glukish staggered off to visit a prostitute.

Berthe was sitting by the fire trying to fend off the neighbor's son without silencing him altogether, when Hex appeared. She sat down and helped herself to a chunk of bread cooked with nuts.

The son interrupted his flatteries to say, "Hex, give me some dreamer's kiss."

She filled her pipe with leaves from a bag in her pocket. "Here, I'll lend it to you. You've trusted me with that pipe of yours; I'll trust you with mine. Go find a quiet place to smoke it." Searching among the dirty bowls, she found a few handfuls of barley and wrapped them in one of her grimy handkerchiefs. "No more food? Some harvest. Get up. We have to go." She picked up a jug and walked away into the field.

Berthe followed her.

"I went to the province center," Hex said between draughts. "There was a man preaching in the street, a wandering priest. Preaching to the city people, right in their own language. So I waited and talked to him. He told me he was looking for a red-haired woman named Berthe."

Hex looked around. They were standing in the middle of a mown field that stretched almost to the horizon and for a moment, under the jug's influence, she lost her bearings. The greater moon's light made the terrain of her clothing look vast and jagged and full of shadows that could have been holes right through her.

"A red-haired woman," Berthe echoed.

The herbalist began to walk again. "I told him to meet us at the shrine."

"Ah!"

"Show him your boy and tell him how it is--"

"Ah!" Berthe cried again.

Hex gripped her shoulder. "What is it?"

"Is he--" What to ask? "Is he well?"

"He is for somebody that's spent the winter outside. He's a wandering preacher. Blessings and brats."

"Prostitute!" Berthe wailed. The thought of him in strange women's hands made her want to lie down and wash into the mud.

"Look, Berthe. No, look. Look around you," Hex urged.

Berthe looked at the empty field.

"This is earth, the goddess. Her priests are the plants and the animals and the wanderers. Her altar is life. A man who scatters his children is her priest. Come talk to him."

"No! I am married."

Hex bent close to look at her. Berthe grasped her hand, saying, "Hex, I know he is worthy. Bring my son to him."

"But I told him I'd take him to Berthe. Come on."

She pulled, and Berthe fell on her knees. "What did he preach?" she asked.

"He--I couldn't understand his preaching." Hex squatted by her. "Don't cry. He's a good man, I tell you. He said--it was all city language. But you speak his own. You used to talk to him in it, didn't you--never mind. He'll teach it to your boy. A priest! He'll take your son to the city. Here." She wiped Berthe's cheek with her palm. "I'll tell you something he told me. He said a kind word is dearer to Fea than blood."

Berthe rose. "I want to speak to him alone," she said.

Hex sighed. "All right."

Berthe watched her stagger away in the moonlight. Then she hastened to Meta's house.

Harvest had been over for two days there. Everyone was asleep. She crept up to Meta and clapped a hand over her mouth. Meta sprang awake. They hurried out of the hut.

"Metteling, I need you to give my son away," she told her. "Come to the shrine with me. There is a man inside. Tell him your name is Berthe." She was holding Meta's wrists so tightly that her fingers tore holes in the twiny fabric of her sleeves.

"Why--?"

Berthe glared down at her. "Because I beg you to do it."

Meta bowed her head.

First they went to Berthe's house. It would be weeks before the taxes were collected, so she pilfered boldly. They took a sack of corn, strings of vegetables and fruit and a whole cheese, and made their way to the baby's cave.

Little Sunshine was used to being fetched out at all hours. He kicked and giggled to hear them. Berthe nursed him for the last time as they walked back to the clearing.

A lamp was lit inside the shrine and orange light glowed through all the cracks in the walls. A shadow moved by the altar. Meta dropped the food.

Berthe thrust the baby into her hands and went to stand at the window, bending her head close above it, her body curved around the light so no one inside would see her.

When Meta came in, laying Sunshine by the door, Akiva backed into the corner opposite the window. His look of fear and expectant joy so bespoke a year of searching despite cold, hunger and humiliation that Berthe nearly abandoned her resolve and ran to him. It is the look of Rani, meeting the brother to his race, she thought. Ever after, the mention of Zatoye recalled this scene to her.

Akiva turned away, again disappointed.

Meta's voice quavered. "I am Berthe."

He took her hand and said in the temple language, "Oh, Berthe, tell me your name again. I think her name has a power in it. You look at me with understanding. You look as though you had been touched by her radiance. You don't understand me, do you?"

Meta was silent. I had forgotten how softly he speaks, Berthe thought.

"When I left Nichayu, there was a roaring in my ears no sound could penetrate. It took me three nights to crawl to the stream where I used to play. When I came there and saw the fishes gleaming in the black water, I thought I had come to the Lir and the fishes were pure souls going to Ayekar. I praised the gods in my mind and the roaring subsided. I heard the sound of the water. I heard your name. Now, after a year of wandering, I have found Berthe. Maybe you are Berthe, in another guise." Now he saw the baby, and asked in the peasant language, "Yours?"

Berthe clenched her fists. If Meta told the truth, he would demand to see her and she would be lost. A life of adultery and privation, an early death, and hell awaited.

Luckily their mutual anxiety kept them from understanding each other. Meta asked, "Are you hungry?"

Akiva did not answer.

Meta ran out and brought him a broken loaf of bread they had taken from Berthe's house. He devoured it. She brought the rest of the food and set it before him. Then she held out the baby.

If he looks first at the child, I will give it to him, but if khe looks first at Meta, I will take back my son, Berthe promised herself.

Akiva took the baby in his hands. Berthe crammed her sleeve into her mouth to keep quiet. One of her tears fell and gleamed in the window light. Akiva saw it.

"Who is there?" he asked in the peasant language. "Is it the father?"

Meta whimpered.

Berthe's heart beat so fast she could scarcely breathe. Another tear fell, but she dared not try to move away lest she collapse and he see her.

"Who is it?" Akiva demanded again.

"Mother," Meta said.

"The mother," Akiva repeated in the holy language. He faced the window. "You could not bear to give him up, so Berthe does that for you." He looked at the altar. "Forgive us, godling. We are afraid of your benificence. This little outcast, your gift, I take with praise. I will call him Neshar, after Berthe, and her spirit be reborn in him." He pronounced the ritual and Sunshine became Neshar, meaning spirit.

Chapter 7

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