The Strange Land

CHAPTER 1

THE SHAMAN AND HIS COUSINS

Things were not good in the house.

There was nowhere to go, inside the low rounded hut, when Dad was on the prowl, picking apart everything that Mom did, and Mom was retreating into stillness and silence to avoid provoking him, which annoyed him all the more. There were bunks along the walls into which you could retreat by pulling a curtain, but this did not block out the sound of their voices. You would be forced to listen to them saying the exact same things, grinding away slowly to the inevitable end. The inevitability was the most unbearable thing about it. Besides, pulling a bed curtain was just as likely as anything to provoke Dad, just as anything at all could provoke him when he got like this. Ikash, who was almost fourteen years old, preferred not to listen. He grabbed the wrist of ten-year-old Sha, and the two of them ducked under the tent flap and scrambled up the earthen step that led out of the hut. They were risking a beating when they got back, but if Ikash had his choices, he’d rather enjoy some peace and quiet first.

It was fresh outside after the warm, smoke-scented hut. Fall was coming. It would be the first fall they’d seen in this, their new camp. The tribe was partly nomadic. They moved camp erratically, not seasonally nor yet every year, but definitely every year or two. They had spent nearly two years at the last place, arriving in late summer, leaving two springs later. Uncle Enmer, who was the leader of their tribal council, had wanted to move the very spring after they arrived but the family had talked him out of it. He had consented to stay one more year, letting them catch their breath.

Moving was no hardship to Ikash, who had never known any other way of life. The other place had been much like this one: evergreen forests full of game and predators; steep hills leading down to a cold seacoast rich with meat. The only difference was that it had been a bit farther west and south, farther away from the now visible, blue northern mountains.

He remembered a great deal of fun and excitement in the other place last summer as the young men of the tribe experimented with making, and taking out on the ocean, sea canoes and kayaks. They had had enough meat stored away (salmon, reindeer, and many other sorts) that the success of the boats was not a life-or-death matter. It had been treated as a lark. Ikash and Sha had been too young to participate, but they had watched avidly as the older teenagers, including their big brothers Jabed and Jai, had each made his own boat and then taken them out and done their best to capsize each other, even sabotaging one another’s boats in fun. It was a deadly, dangerous game, the waves and the tides being what they were, but that was the kind of game that certain young men liked best, and Jai and Jabed were certainly among these. Amazingly, no one had drowned, no one had gotten more than a middling-bad smashing injury on the rocks. Much had been learned in the process. Then as winter approached, the competition became a bit more serious as the young men raced to see who could learn the fastest how to take his kayak out in increasingly cold and rough seas.

And all the while, Sha and Ikash were watching, which was how children learned tasks in that time and place. They had some chores of their own, to be sure, but as younger boys most of their time was free, and they spent itmemorizing every detail of the crafts their older brothers were making, noting which methods and materials worked and which didn’t.

Uncle Enmer had observed all this excited experimenting with an extremely stoic face which betrayed nothing, but which Ikash assumed was hiding deep disapproval. He had been a bit surprised when as fall started coming on, Uncle Enmer had not demanded that the boating games stop, but had rather asked Uncle Melek, who seemed to know something about watercraft, to instruct the younger men a bit, making things safer as the canoes became less a game and more of a serious undertaking.

By the time it was very cold and snowy, each youth was satisfied with the condition of his craft. They spent the winter treating them with pitch to make them waterproof and then painting them with the faces of animals to represent their personal totems or those of their immediate families. Jai and Jabed had each painted on his own craft variations of the bear, which was the animal that belonged to their family. Their father, Endu, had once slaughtered the bear that had killed Mom’s first husband – he told the story often – and come home covered in gore and carrying its head. Ikash was puzzled why such an incident should have made the bear their family’s totem rather than their permanent enemy. But he was beginning to see that in his father’s mind, love and enmity somehow depended on each other.

The day was cool and overcast. The boys first ran to the central fire, where there was a pot of everlasting stew. A tall, slender, white-haired woman was tending it … Grandmother Zillah. She rapped their knuckles affectionately when they tried to reach bare-handed into the pot, and instead handed each of them a wooden bowl with a generous portion of the stew, which they devoured. They set down the bowls and tore off, with Zillah calling after them,

Don’t go into the woods, it’s almost sunset!

Even adults were afraid to go into the woods at night. But Ikash was just perverse enough to do that very thing exactly because it frightened him. He loved Grandmother Zillah, however, and at the sound of her voice, he and Sha turned their steps. They ran away from the fringe of the forest and instead ran east toward the hillcrest covered with high grasses, from where they would be able to see the sea.

When they gained the crest of the hill, they met a powerful wind coming in off the sea, whipping the grasses.

This seemed like a perfect place to wrestle. The boys threw themselves at each other, Ikash adjusting his efforts a bit. He was bigger than his little brother, and he strove not to hurt him seriously, but still to win.

Both boys were built along round, compact lines. Sha was still rather skinny, but Ikash was beginning to fill out with a little muscle, taking on a sleek, powerful shape reminiscent of a dolphin …or, indeed, a bear. They had brown skin, sweet, round faces like their mother, and straight black hair; Sha’s floppy, Ikash’s hugging his head like a seal’s pelt.

They threw each other down a number of times and then decided to play a game of pushing one another down the seaward side of the hill. It was steep, grassy, and at a good angle for rolling. They rolled over and over like logs, about halfway down the slope, until Sha skidded to a stop on his stomach and threw up a little bit of his supper.

We’d better rest, said Ikash wisely.

They found a hollow that was somewhat sheltered from the winds and cuddled up next to each other. Already their bodies were covered in gooseflesh, but Ikash wished to stay away from home for at least another hour, preferably longer.

They had not been sitting very long when Sha fell asleep, cuddling up on his brother as if on a pillow and then growing heavy and warm. Ikash was annoyed because he was now trapped until his brother woke up. Yet at the same time this had been his plan, to spend some time away from home. This place was as good as any. He wished that he had bothered to find a place to urinate before cuddling down like this.

He looked out at the sea, over which darkness was slowly thickening, and then searched about closer to hand for something to look at in order to entertain himself.

A short run to his right, and farther down the slope, a dog was trotting in wide circles, diagonally up and down the hill. It was a handsome black dog, large, shiny, and well cared for. Every so often its head would disappear into the grasses as it dived after a smell, a rodent, or some other creature. Then it would stand up, alert, stretching its neck, looking up toward the top of the hill as if looking out for some danger. Ikash recognized it as Scout, the dog belonging to the tribe’s shaman.

The shaman was Ikash’s older cousin. Ki-Ki was a grown man with a wife and children, and he was an august, mysterious figure. He was a bit glamorous as well, because he was still young and handsome, and was able to hunt and wrestle and build things as well as traveling in the spirit world. The shaman might have been relatable because of his youth, and indeed he had always been kind to Ikash. But Ikash had not registered this. His experience did not encourage him to trust the kindness of adults.

Ki-Ki had always had dogs. This was a matter of public record. Ikash had heard his mother say that Ki-Ki, before getting married, had slept every night with his dog. His first dog, lost in the mists of the past, had been a female wolf pup called Red, and since then he had never been without a wolf or dog companion. Whenever one of his dogs had pups, Ki-Ki was always generous with giving them out as pets and hunting dogs to his relatives and helping them to train them as well. His current dog, Scout, was a male.

Scout walking a circle must mean that he was guarding Ki-Ki, and sure enough, there he was, sitting in a hollow in the hill. Because of the undulations of the hills in between them, all Ikash could see of his cousin was his head in profile and a slice of shoulder.

The shaman was sitting perfectly still, looking out to sea.

Just like me, thought Ikash. He had not actually been looking at the sea for some time, but now he did so again. Though the long northern twilight was still hanging over the sky, here on the eastward slope of the hill the sunset was complete. The horizon was now invisible, and the beaches had reached that stage where the ground, giving back the light of the day, glowed brighter than the air above it.

Ikash could not imagine what his cousin was finding to look at.

What was the shaman doing?

Ikash supposed he was seeing a vision.

The wind had no warmth left in it, and Ikash now needed to urinate very badly. He shivered in the cold.

Ki-Ki did not always seek visions. Sometimes he just needed to sort out his thoughts. He had acquired a reputation for having visions, but visions, on the whole, were not something you were supposed to seek. That was rather like lassoing a wild deer and expecting it would let you ride it. Ki-Ki flattened down the grass and sat comfortably on it, back straight. He looked out to sea and began silently topray. After a few sentences, he lost the thread of his thoughts.

Though he was unaware of it, he was twitching one of his feet slowly, back and forth, where it sat crossed on his knee.

God was a great spirit who was everywhere and who heard you. He began to mumble out loud to keep his mind on the prayer.

There were many things, many people, to be concerned about. Uncle Endu and his rages. Ki-Ki’s father, Enmer, and his despair. The health, always uncertain, of everyone in the tribe. The safety of the children. These did not seem like mundane things to Ki-Ki. They were matters of vital, life-ordeath importance. Saying them, out loud, before God, organized and eased his thoughts about them, besides helping him to remember. Besides enlisting God’s help. No one could say that this young man, for all his visions, was disconnected from his tribe. Their daily concerns were his; he felt them deeply.

Ki-Ki did not know whether in a few years he might become the chief of the council like his father Enmer. It was possible. It was also possible that he would merely be on the council and continue as the tribal shaman. But whichever of these came to pass, Ki-Ki knew that he was already an important stabilizing force in the tribe. As was his father, for good and for ill. As was Grandmother Zillah. A tribe needed many stabilizers, as many as they could get. Their tribe had nothing outside themselves – no outside king, no Tower such as the older generation used to talk about (though that had been a mixed blessing), not even any other group of people with whom they were able to speak. They were so alone that they did not even need a name to call themselves by. They simply called themselves The People. And whenever Ki-Ki spoke to God about the members of his tribe, living or dead, he called them simply by their names, confident that God would know exactly who he meant.

Out on the ocean, something was rising.

Ki-Ki had been looking at the sea without seeing, but now he saw. It began like a pod of whales coming to the surface, but when they broke the surface, instead of emitting spray they emitted light. Then they continued rising, and it was not many whales but one huge creature, bigger than a whale or a pod of whales, bigger than any known animal.

It rose up until it was completely free of the sea. It rose until its height was level, probably, with Ki-Ki, though still far out over the water. It hung in the grey twilight, dripping and shining. It was a great white serpent. All the misty air was lit up by its light and it cast a blinding glare over a narrow strip of the sea like a moon-trail on the water.

Ki-Ki did not speak to it. He did not trust it. It was not his policy to talk to strangers.

Why won’t you speak to me? said the snake, in a voice like music. But he remained silent.

Do you know who I am? said the snake, and its voice was sweeter still, sweet and powerful. It was such music as Ki-Ki had not heard since his Grandfather Nirri died, music that could make you cry with its power. But this was not earthly, human music like Nirri’s; this was otherworldly music. Ki-Ki rather felt that the snake was trying to make him cry.

I am the ancient, heavenly serpent, it said, writhing slowly in the air, making beautiful patterns in time to the music. Me your ancestors worshipped. I and my kind came down on Mount Hermon, and you called us gods. Our children walked the earth, but then they were driven away bythe waters. You little ones built the Tower to bring us back, but now that too has been destroyed. Yet it is not too late. Worship me!

Ki-Ki remained silent.

Pain came and wrapped around him. He had intended to sit perfectly still until the vision went away; now he could not move if he wanted to.

Am I not beautiful? said the snake.

He was silent. The pain increased.

Worship, worship me!

The nausea was like knives stabbing his stomach. Then suddenly, abruptly shocking and black, a raven flew between him and the blinding white vision. Released, Ki-Ki doubled over and retched. He thought he heard or imagined it say, We will meet again, little one! but by that time the light was gone from the sea.

The vision had drained him. He got up on his knees and hobbled to the side a little, so that when he passed out, he landed facedown on sweet grass and not in his own vomit.

He woke up hours – or more likely, a small part of an hour – later, with Scout licking his face. The night had turned darker and colder – perhaps while he slept, but possibly while he was having the vision. These things could seem short and then turn out to have lasted a long time. He got up on shaky legs, arranged his hair, and brushed off his buckskin trousers and tunic. He had not brought water with him, being not far from the camp, but now he wanted a drink badly.

On the way back he encountered Grandmother Zillah coming in the opposite direction. Perceptive though she usually was, she did not ask him what he had been up to. She was on a mission, looking for two of her grandsons.

Sha and Ikash have been out a long time. Endu isn’t fussing yet, but he will soon if we don’t bring them back.

They hunted, helped by Scout, and quickly found the boys a little farther north than where Ki-Ki had been sitting.

Zillah looked at him with knitted brows. Did you know they were sitting here watching you?

Ki-Ki shook his head.

Both of the brothers were asleep. Zillah thought it best if they could avoid waking them. Ki-Ki swung the heavy Ikash partly over his shoulder, holding him gently like a wounded animal, and Zillah, who was wiry, vigorous and strong,carried the skinny Sha in her arms in front of her, like a baby. They made their way back to the boys’ home tent, navigated the down-step with practiced feet, and laid them carefully in their bunks, covering them with blankets. Sari, the boys’ mother, was already curled on her side, apparently sleeping. Endu looked up at his mother and nephew and gave them a little wave and the white, charming smile that he always had ready for anyone outside of his immediate family.

Zillah gave him a sharp look and glanced over at the motionless form of her daughter-in-law.

Is Sari all right? she whispered.

Irritation touched Endu’s face. Of course. She always takes care of herself, doesn’t she?

I will examine her in the morning, said Zillah.

Endu bowed his head respectfully, not quite hiding a roll of the eyes.

When Zillah and Ki-Ki climbed out of the hut they saw a short, dark woman shambling toward them in the starlight. Magya was Ki-Ki’s wife and she was heavily pregnant. Magya and Ki-Ki were cousins; Zillah was grandmother to them both. Cousin-marriage had been a normal and accepted thing since the great flood, all the more so since the languages of men were broken. In those ancient days, before the corruption of people’s bodies, cousin-marriage did not result in deformity and the tribe was so small and isolated that cousin-marriage carried no taboo.

When she saw that they had spotted her, Magya held out both arms towards her husband. Her long, shiny black hair cascaded forward over her shoulders and hid her sweet face in a hood of shadow.

"There you are!" she said.

I found him on the hillside, Zillah said, and smiled.

You should be resting, Ki-Ki said to his wife.

Magya’s laugh was a like a pleasant splash of water. I was asleep, she said, but I needed the stream, of course. On my way back, I thought I’d look around a bit and see where you’d got to. And then I saw the two of you coming out of Endu’s.

I need the stream, myself, said Ki-Ki, remembering. The taste of vomit was still strong in his mouth, and he suddenly felt again his fierce thirst.

I will take Magya back to her hut and get her settled, said his grandmother. "You go to the stream, my dear, but come directly back. You need to sleep too."

She looked so fierce as she said this that both of them obeyed quickly, Ki-Ki hiding a smile. Zillah was a kind and loving and formidable matriarch who could terrify her clan into taking care of themselves and each other.

As the women shuffled off toward the hut, she took Magya’s arm to help her find her way through the dark.

CHAPTER 2

HEADED DOWNWARD

Zillah woke early the next morning. The older she got, the less sleep she found she needed, and despite her straight back and her vigor she was now well into her eighties.

The sky was growing light but the sun was not yet up, not enough to wake those sleeping in their huts. Zillah visited the stream, which was always the first thing everyone did, taking with her a short spear so as to deal with any creature she might find there. Her trip was uneventful.

Returning to the camp, she saw a tall, bearded man carefully building up wood in a box shape so as to light the morning fire. Usually in a permanent camp like this the coals were left to smolder in the fire-circle overnight. As Zillah approached, she saw that he had already used them to light a fluffy pile of tinder, and there were thin sticks for kindling.

The man straightened up and turned toward her, showing a chiseled, lined face of the same golden color as her own. The cheekbones were wide, the eyes set far apart, dark and deep and sad. The beard was as long, straight, black, and soft as the hair on his head, just like his father’s had been. This was Enmer.

Good morning, my son, said Zillah.

Good morning, Mother, he replied. And then, I couldn’t sleep either.

She gave him a gentle, sad smile, approached the fire, and began to warm herself gratefully at it. Standing side by side, they looked very alike, from their height and build to their straight flowing hair down to the lines on their faces. Anxiety, grief, difficulty sleeping: these were the price they paid for being in the older generation, for having seen all the things that they had. Enmer and Zillah – and Enmer’s brother, Endu – had been adults when the Tower of Babel fell. In the twenty-six years since that bright, terrifying, confusing, momentous day, they had seen many changes, more changes than the younger generation could imagine. Both mother and son had suffered many losses. Some of these they had suffered together, some separately; some they had inflicted on one another.

Yet for all the bad things that had happened to their little tribe, they knew that they had it better off than many. Theyhad avoided the worst of the carnage. They had escaped the plain of cities and the new, less efficient but equally brutal kingdoms that rumor told them were growing there. They had found this good land, a land where no giants nor fellow human beings came to bother them, a land where winters were harsh but wood was plentiful and food was easy to find. Enmer thought this was all down to their own – not even cleverness, more down to dumb luck, luck that was certain not to last. But if you asked Ki-Ki, and perhaps even Zillah, they would say that the People had been led here by God.

What I would give for some beer! said Enmer suddenly.

Zillah laughed. They had lost their capacity for brewing when they left behind the lifestyle of farmers. Beer had been plentiful back in civilization. She now hardly remembered the taste of it, and the grandchildren probably would not like it if they had it, but her sons still craved it occasionally.

How about some tea? she said calmly. She set a clay pot to the fire, intending to add dried mint leaves.

Then she straightened and the two of them stood there, watching the pot, warming themselves, while the light crept slowly up the sky behind the tips of the trees. They could be comfortable together from time to time, and stand like this not talking, though in the past there had been very bad tension between them. These days Zillah lived not with Enmer but with the family of her youngest, a daughter, Ninna, she who was the mother of Ki-Ki’s wife Magya.

Endu is persecuting Sari again, Zillah told her son.

Enmer huffed. He raised his arms and scratched the back of his head, then shook it in disgust, then used a stick, unnecessarily, to nudge the fire.

How bad? he said.

I don’t know. Their boys fled the hut last night. When I went in, she was sleeping, or pretending to. I will look at her this morning.

Enmer nodded. The movements of his body were jerky with frustration. Both of them knew how difficult it was to do anything effective to stop Endu’s ongoing war with his wife. Rebukes had worked, once upon a time, but now rebukes had been used so often that he had built up a list of excuses and defenses against them. Meanwhile his treatment of Sari had caused her to draw in on herself, making his list of her failings harder to refute. Zillah could barely rememberthe sweet, quiet, pretty, and above all, competent Sari, who twenty-one years ago had first married her son.

There was a time when Zillah had threatened her son with exile if he continued to mistreat his wife. But this presented its own problems. Exile meant, simply, death: she had witnessed this firsthand and was not sure she had the stomach to see it happen again.

Enmer was apparently thinking something similar.

That brother of mine! he said now. He’s like – like a flea under a garment. Sometimes I wish I could – I don’t know – throw him into the sea.

Zillah nodded. She knew her son did not mean this literally, or he would have done it. And she understood the feeling.

"But he’s so damn useful, Enmer went on. He’s brave, he’s savvy, he’s good company out on a hunt … he has been with us since the beginning."

Endu was also good-looking and funny. He knew how to do all the tasks that men needed to do in the tribe, and he always did his share of the work – just. And, however he might treat them in private, he nonetheless provided shelter and meat for his family. Exiling him would create a whole new set of problems. It would widow Sari for a second time and orphan Endu’s two youngest boys (the older two were nearly old enough to start their own families, but this was not true of Ikash and Sha).

And above all …

… And he’s family, said Zillah simply.

She had long ago established it as a law for herself that no human being should go unaided when it was in her power to aid them, and this was doubly true for her own blood kin. Even for a man who caused a great deal of trouble, as some men inevitably did, Zillah would seek a way to keep him in the tribe as long as it was still possible to do so and keep the tribe intact. Endu was not a madman. Far from unstable, he was highly predictable. In general, he was violent only in contexts such as hunts where violence was called for. He was a threat to no one but his own immediate family. The situation he created was intolerable to Zillah, but at the same time she felt it must be tolerated. In fact, the tribe had once successfully integrated a more dangerous man than Endu … but that was one of those topics that she and Enmer could not talk about.

People were beginning to come out of their huts and notice that the fire was already going. The water was now boiling, so she needed to go and get some dried mint leaves. Zillah took her thought about tolerating the intolerable, and she said it to Enmer thus:

I will talk to him, my son. We will work it out.

Gently and deftly Zillah examined her daughter-in-law. She ran her hands over her head, feeling for blood or bumps, and over her deerskin shift, alert for winces.

Both women were silent as she did this. Sari held very still, eyes glazed, enduring the humiliation. They were standing knee-deep in the stream which was some ways south of the camp. Here it was broad and shallow, flowing wide through tall, tough grasses, but a little way to the east of them it would drop into a narrow, tree-lined gully on its last dash down to the sea.

The women of the People came here several times a day to get water, to bathe themselves or their children, to wash blankets and things directly in the stream. Usually the task of getting water in the morning was left to the younger women, to the teenagers who did not yet have infants to care for, who were not yet elders like Zillah. Sari, as the only woman in her household, always got her own water.

Today Zillah had come along. She was still strong enough to swing a large wooden jar up onto her shoulder, and there were two water-carriers sitting on the narrow pebbly bank, ready to be brought back full when the women had finished their morning ablutions.

Sari hated this ritual. To her it seemed like a needless humiliation. She wondered what it would take, what sort of injury her mother-in-law would have to find, before Zillah felt moved to take action. And she wondered what that action could possibly be. In the past, when Endu’s abuse was only occasional, Zillah would go to him in shock and scandal and shame him into stopping for a month, or six months, or a year. But that was no longer effective. Many things had contributed to this. Zillah’s authority in the tribe had been damaged by something that had happened twelve years before. Sari, meanwhile, was getting older, less attractive, easier for her husband to discount and despise.

Both of them were headed downward, while Endu was headed up.

He was a star that was rising in the tribe. He was the head of the council, together with Enmer. He was one of the most senior of the hunters and the fighters (although it was not he, but Hur, who led the militia that guarded the People against an enemy who was no longer there). He had been with the People through their entire history – was one of their founding members, so to speak – and yet he still looked young and handsome and clever. It was, Sari knew, hard not to like him. Not all members of the tribe knew about his dark side, and those who knew did not wish to make the effort to reconcile that knowledge with their daily experience of Endu. That would be a hard thing to do, Sari admitted. Perhaps it would make their heads explode. Hers certainly felt as if it might, and she knew him better than anyone.

Sari was a slow thinker. While she was thinking these things, Zillah had found some, but not all, of the evidences of her son’s rage and indignation. Endu had first punched Sari on the chest, crying, Stop! What do you think you’re doing? – knocking the wind out of her. Zillah had found nothing that revealed this to her. Then a few moments later, he had banged the side of Sari’s head on one of the flat stones of the family’s hearth-fire. The lump was small, but Zillah had found it. And what she had found, above all, was the crusty dried blood by the slit where Endu had grabbed and twisted, with his fingernails, the lobe of Sari’s ear.

Zillah clucked her tongue in disapproval, looking deeply grieved and angry. She scooped up a handful of icy water and washed the earlobe. Sari winced as it stung.

Was this reasonable? Zillah asked, more to herself than to Sari. She was so angry that her voice recalled her son’s voice when he was ranting.

Sari was silent. She really had no idea what was and what was not reasonable.

Zillah repeated her question.

No, my mother, Sari answered in a tiny voice. She felt as if she herself were admitting to having done something grossly unreasonable.

Of course it wasn’t, snapped Zillah. "Sari, I don’t want you spending the winter with – that man. I want you to come and live in our hut with Hur and Ninna and me."

Sari felt a wild cacophony of emotions, most of them different varieties of fear. The prospect of being left in peace was much to be desired, but too unlikely to inspire actual hope. It was not something she was physically capable ofhoping for. Meanwhile, the plan had many dangers. It would mean leaving her younger boys alone with their father and older brothers, for one thing. And at the end of the winter – what then? She would have to go back and live with him again, wouldn’t she? And if he had, in the meantime, forgotten all her shortcomings, when she went back, he would remember them again. And then there would be hell to pay.

It was also impractical from a living-space point of view. Hur and Ninna had five children living with them at home, besides Zillah who was also a member of their household. They had so much on their hands already.

I don’t know … there are so many of them …

You will be a great help to us, said Zillah firmly. Ninna is expecting another baby in the spring. We can put it out that we need your help desperately. And really, she added after a moment’s pause, it’s true that Ninna could use another hand. She miscarries so easily. I want her to get plenty of rest this winter. Zillah functioned as the tribe’s most experienced nurse and midwife.

It was not clear whether the details of this plan had occurred to Zillah just then or whether she had come prepared with them. Probably the former, for the matriarch seemed relieved in her mind as she took Sari’s arm and led her to the bank of the stream. The lower hems of both their shifts were stiff and dripping, sticking to their shins. Zillah guided her to sit down on the grass. The sun was climbing, the day warming up, and despite the hills that blocked the sea-wind, a good bit of breeze was reaching the women. They stretched out their legs and waited for their skirts to begin drying.

Sari was concerned about her mother-in-law’s righteous anger. Zillah had been known, before now, to alienate her sons when she decided to take up the cause of an outsider. If she gave her son a tongue-lashing, it would hurt his pride and cause counter-arguments and perhaps revenge. It would be better, Sari thought, to wait several days, then request Endu to let his wife go and help Ninna, making no mention of last night’s incident.

Sari put this to Zillah.

You are wise, my daughter, she said. But unfortunately, Endu knows I am here with you this morning. He will be expecting me to say at least a little something to him. What, exactly, happened?

Sari was silent and turned very red. Finally she said in a tiny, brave voice, Endu will tell you that I smeared shit on the wall of the hut.

And did you?

Yes.

And why did you do that, Sari?

Sari had been watching Magya’s two-year-old son Eyli while his mother went to the stream to wash something or other. The child had badly soiled his trousers, and Sari had stripped these off and put them in a scrap of old clay pot near the door, intending to take them down to the river when she got an opportunity. She didn’t want to set the trousers outside because one of the dogs might chew on them. They were good woolen