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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."

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

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