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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.

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

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