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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.

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CONTINUE.....................

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