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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.

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

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