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Luckily, most villages had been more cautious and still had the grain on hand. A few in each settlement took her side. These were unmarried men, widows and families who had been too stubborn or too poor to buy wool, so they paid their tax in grain. All winter they had envied their well-fed neighbors and now when they understood that the new tax would be collected from each according to the amount of cloth paid, they pulled their ragged coats around them and solemnly praised Hath's justice.

Sometimes a few of these moralists walked a little way with her, or an herb woman came and they talked about medicine, but this time she was alone, puzzling over what she had seen. How would Pahid do it? For the first time she began to doubt him. Spring was short, the province big and he could not afford to divide his forces. How would he do it?

The answer came as she watched slow-falling snow join in a lattice over the surface of a mountain lake. The flakes would melt unless the water had been nearly frozen. Now as they touched the water, rays of ice struck out across it. So must the people be nearly subdued when the first demand reached them. She understood now why Pahid called her his ally. He will need an army, she thought, and it must be an army of us. That was the significance of the red cord; it would denote his minions.

When she understood tht, Berthe took even greater care to seek out those who took her side, and to win over the herbalists. She told them how much Pahid had taught her and related a little of the history of the world. She refrained from making any alphabets, though. They were too powerful, somehow, and like strong medicine sometimes worsened what they were meant to cure. Even her friends at the provincial city had given up studying to read. They forgot the letters as soon as they learned them. If they did succeed in keeping a few in mind, they still could not understand how some lines on bark could signify real objects. Ma Zauber had spent hours staring at a scroll, awaiting the promised moment when she would hear it speak. It remained silent, until finally she rolled up the bark and took it with her to the Middle Plains in case someone there might be able to use it.

The field where Berthe and Meta first met was blanketed by snow when she reached it. Stubble poked through in her footsteps. The new shrine, covered with leaves and rattles like the one that was burnt, rustled and pattered in the wind. Ice ringed little puddles of juice and water on the altarstone. A new Fey danced over the frozen gifts.

Berthe prayed there for a little while, shivering and trying to pretend her nervousness was cold, until the west turned yellow and the shadows on the snow were blue. A green tinge crept up from the horizon to meet a band of orange running behind a cluster of bright clouds. Sunlight glinted like fire in the ice-tipped trees and snow caught in the trunks held the glow of the fading afternoon, but lower down the bark faded into the ground cover, now turning from the very softest grey to black. She leaned against an uko at the wood's edge to look at the brilliant sky, the deepening ground and the trees that touched them both, and at her husband's house, a round lump at the edge of the empty corn field.

It was dark when she came to the door. One of the straw mats had been pulled into place to keep out the night air. She heard someone moving inside. Before she could push aside the mat and enter, a woman's arm thrust out. Berthe stepped away from the light. A bare foot showed behind the inner curtain.

He had remarried. Berthe leaned against the house, then she went around to look in the window, where they had always left a gap in the shutter to draw air for the fire. There were the fifteen black feathers he had used to ward her off, tied in a bundle on the shelf. Had he kept them in her memory, or forgotten them?

Gelukish, much the same, was eating supper, while she, pale, raven-haired and farther pregnant than even the hastiest remarriage could account for, nibbled from his bowl and called him a little duckling. He called her fat hen. She pulled his hair. He bit her shoulder. She turned her back, telling him to leave her alone. He pulled her into his arms, kissing her ears and squeezing her breasts while she undid his laces. Her giggles turned to sighs and his low endearments died away altogether long before the pair rolled out of the firelight.

Her knees gave way and Berthe staggered, leaning against the house with her cheek pressed to her fist while the blood surged tingling through the backs of her legs. The fire still burned, under the ice and despite the empty stretch of years alone. Under its layers of stone and dirt, under the skin that lied and called its senses dead, under the deep blanket of new language, new learning and new terrors, the fire was burning still. Ever again Shis calls us, she thought. Fate calls us to meet not the future but the past.

She stood looking at the cold stars among the branches of the windbreak. The trees had promised spring when, big and full, she watched them from the doorway of this house. Now, she was outside with them. Leafless branches creaked in the frozen wind, pointing to emptiness.

Meta's house had also been destroyed in the fighting between the villages and the brothers erected a big southern-type one with part of the rafters covered to make a second floor where, until they had more children, the couple stored vegetables, strings of dried fruit, baskets of grain, beer and cloth. Downstairs was not as it had been, and Berthe stumbled over something as she tried to come in quietly.

The three-year-old daughter called out, "Mama, here's Auntie!" and caught at what she thought was Schwalbe's hand. Seeing how big it was, she let go.

"Hush," Berthe said. "Don't you remember me?"

"You're dead. Go lie in the ground," the girl told her.

Berthe shook her head.

"Ma!" the girl called.

Meta came unwillingly, saying, "Now what? You're going to wake your father--" She saw and embraced her friend in silence. Her forehead rested on Berthe's shoulder. In a minute she began to snore.

Not sure what to do, Berthe sat rocking Meta like a baby. She was very light and no longer pregnant. "Was it stillborn?" she asked the daughter.

"Don't know. Mama was sick."

"When?"

"Don't know! Before." Then, in a more friendly tone, she asked, "Want fire?"

"Yes. Make a fire."

The child pattered to the door, dragged in an armful of sticks and threw them on the fire. Light flared. It revealed Meta's husband, who shrank back without waking. Meta heard the flames. "We thought you were dead," she murmured. Squinting, she felt Berthe's cheeks and chin with her hands. "Are you crying because you went to your house?"

"He thinks I died," Berthe sobbed. "Now I want to come back. I want to come back and I can't. I want it to be like before. Do you remember when we were pregnant?"

"We were hungry."

Berthe wiped her cheeks and moved closer to the fire. She began to shiver as though she had never felt cold before. She told about Pahid, his sons, her lessons, how she had learned to ride a horse, the history of the world and how Pahid forbade them to use the spinning wheel. Once during the night Meta pressed a bowl of mush into Berthe's lap. Later, she laid her head there.

Had she been sick? Her hair was much fuller than Berthe remembered and, she thought, a little darker. Her parted lips were dry. "Do you love him?" Meta asked.

Berthe was supporting Meta's head with one hand, sharp chin in her palm, her fingers bent under the jaw and the smooth cold curls--fuller, they must be--covering her wrist. "Love him. He knows how to move the hearts of gods. But I--he has spared my life a day at a time." She laughed. "The more he teaches me, the less I care about him. Do you know, every morning he goes down to the stream and stands in cold water up to his armpits? And he sings. I have seen him do it. He understands something about the gods and the world that we...We bribe the sprites and spirits, but he moves Fea's heart. To a human being, though, he looks like an ugly old man."

"Are you afraid?"

"Yes, but--no. What am I risking? My life is already like morning mist, isn't it? I was an empty woman. Now I have the history of the world. When I see people working and hear their voices, I see the whole humanity moving with them and hear the voices of the silent and the dead crying out. I am about to learn my name. As for dying, I would die anyway. He may yet kill me. He is not as cruel as we thought, though." And she told about the disasters they would avert and the spring collection.

Meta did not say anything to that, but she drew Berthe's hem out smooth and began creasing a handful of the cloth into tiny pleats.

"I'm sure he will do it," Berthe told her.

Meta pressed another crease.

"They'll come with this year's record and last year's. Whoever paid less will have to make up the difference. Everything is written down."

Another crease.

"You see, the gods are closer than we thought, and they were angry when we tried to cheat them. We must be much more honest. Pahid says it's better to collect now, before spring planting. Otherwise people will think they can pay in cloth, and plant less."

Meta sighed.

"Save grain, Meta. I warn you. He will demand every bit, even what the rats have eaten. They will take no less. Save it."

"We did," Meta said. "He thought something would happen."

"It seemed as though--who could have thought Lir priests would ever come to this town? When I came here, I thought I had gone so far from the world that even my ghost would be scattered in the wind instead of going to Ayekar with other people's. Instead, I have met more ghosts and people than I knew there were."

The long winter twilight had begun. Slowly Meta's face appeared, shining pale and grey beneath the skin. She smiled dreamily. "I want to sleep forever."

"Don't say that! You have no idea how close they are."

Meta laughed. Her husband, now visible on the pallet under the second storey, stirred, rolled over and went back to sleep. "For ever and ever. I want to go to the sleeping paradise, where no one works. Everyone just floats and dreams."

"You might dream you were working."

"Maybe...must we pay?"

"Yes. Every bit and right away."

"Will we get our cloth back?" Meta teased.

"Little miser, what would you do with it?" She pointed to a folded white rag stuck between the ash jar and the water jar. "You've got more than you can use already."

"That was for the baby." There were birthing mats, too, under the blanket in which the little girl lay propped on her elbows, gazing at her mother and the ghost. She looked well, even fat.

"Why doesn't she sleep with the two of you?" Berthe asked.

Meta jerked her head toward the husband. She sat up and signed her daughter to bring more wood.

Berthe watched the man. His broken leg had healed only a hair shorter than the other. It was Hex's best work ever. "What do you mean?"

Meta shrugged. "We sleep alone. Is it hard to read?" she asked suddenly.

"At first. Once you learn to hear the letters speak, it isn't hard, but you need a good teacher."

"Can you teach it?"

"No. I tried, but none of them learned."

Meta took a handful of sticks from her daughter and arranged them to burn slowly, nudging the icy wood into place rather than grasping it. She rubbed her fingers over the flames. "You taught us, remember? You taught us to spin. And I'm teaching this one. It's not so hard." She smoothed the girl's hair with both hands. "Look how dark she is. Just like her grandfather." She winked at Berthe.

"Are you a good learner, Telinge?" Berthe asked. The little girl ran to her. "She's so young that if you took her now and put her in a bird's nest she would grow feathers and learn to fly." She flapped the girl's arm like a wing.

"Can I? Can I learn to fly?" Telinge jumped up and down.

"Teach her," Meta said.

Her husband opened his eyes. "You women start talking before the sun's up and you don't shut your mouths till midnight," he said without looking at them.

Berthe went to the door. "I don't want Gelukish to know I came back," she whispered.

"Wait." Meta came and took her hands. She looked around. "Wait," she said again. The man groaned. They stepped out onto the bright snow.

"I have to go now," Berthe said.

"Teach her."

Berthe yanked the clay bracelet from her wrist. "Here, take it. You see the seeds; you know them. And here are the writing signs inside. The first sound in the seed's name is the same as the mark on the other side. See: aghata. The first sound is a. Then beril, and the mark is b. Do you understand?"

Meta shielded her eyes to look at it. "No. But I'll show her the seeds--"

"And the marks."

"Every day."

Telinge was straining over her mother's shoulder toward the bright ground. "Day!" she cried.

Inside, the husband finally woke and began shouting, "Meta! Meta! Come here!"

A voice in another house said, "Shut up, you brat!" So that child was still alive. Berthe had delivered him.

"I'm coming," Meta called.

Her husband shouted again, calling her a sow that had littered too often. He threatened to beat her.

"I'm getting wood!" she told him crossly.

"I'm going," Berthe said.

"Tell her the names. Just once." Meta put the child in Berthe's arms and embraced them both, then pulled back with a sweeping motion that brought the cold air in a rush up Berthe's chest, and grabbed up an armful of wood. She went into the dark hut.

The child clung to Berthe's shoulder. "Alep," Berthe said.

"Alep."

"That's right." They turned their backs on the house and faced the bright snow. Berthe carried the girl chanting back and forth until the sun rose high. Then she hurried into the forest and set off among whispering trees toward the city and temple.

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

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