strong. My hands were strong,” Kira added with satisfaction. She had heard the story so often; each time of hearing, she looked down at her strong hands with pride.
Her mother laughed. “So strong they gripped my own thumb fiercely and would not let go. Feeling that fierce tug on my thumb, I could not let them take you away. I simply told them no.”
“They were angry.”
“Yes. But I was firm. And, of course, my father was still alive. He was old then, four syllables, and he had been the leader of the people, the chief guardian, for a long time. They respected him. And your father would have been a greatly respected leader too had he not died on the long hunt. He had already been chosen to be a guardian.”
“Say my father’s name to me,” Kira begged.
Her mother smiled in the firelight. “Christopher,” she said. “You know that.”
“I like to hear it, though. I like to hear you say it.”
“Do you want me to go on?”
Kira nodded. “You were firm. You insisted,” she reminded her mother.
“Still, they made me promise that you would not become a burden.”
“I haven’t, have I?”
“Of course not. Your strong hands and wise head make up for the crippled leg. You are a sturdy and reliable helper in the weaving shed; all the women who work there say so. And one bent leg is of no importance when measured against your cleverness. The stories you tell to the tykes, the pictures you create with words—and with thread! The threading you do! It is unlike any threading the people have ever seen. Far beyond anything I could do!” Her mother stopped. She laughed. “Enough. You mustn’t tease me into flattery. Don’t forget that you are still a girl, and often willful, and just this morning, Kira, you forgot to tidy the cott even though you had promised.”
“I won’t forget tomorrow,” Kira said sleepily, snuggling against her mother on the raised sleeping mat. She pushed her twisted leg into a more comfortable position for the night. “I promise.”
* * *
But now there was no one to help her. She had no family left, and she was not a particularly useful person in the village. For everyday work, Kira helped in the weaving shed, picking up the scraps and leavings, but her twisted leg diminished her value as a laborer and even, in the future, as a mate.
Yes, the women liked the fanciful stories that she told to amuse restless tykes, and they admired the little threadings that she made. But those things were diversions; they were not work.
The sky, with the sun no longer overhead but sending shadows now into the Field of Leaving from the trees and thorn bushes at its edge, told her that it was long past midday. In her uncertainty she had lingered here too long. Carefully she gathered the skins on which she had slept these four nights guarding her mother’s spirit. Her fire was cold ashes, a blackened smudge. Her water container was empty and she had no more food.
Slowly, using her stick, she limped toward the path that led back to the village, holding on to a small hope that she might still be welcome there.
Tykes played at the edge of the clearing, scampering about on the moss-covered ground. Pine needles stuck to their naked bodies and in their hair. She smiled. She recognized each little one. There was the yellow-haired son of her mother’s friend; she remembered his birth two mid-summers ago. And the girl whose twin had died; she was younger than the yellow-haired one, just toddling, but she giggled and shrieked with the others, playing catch-me-while-I’m-running. Tussling, the toddlers slapped and kicked at each other, grabbing toy-sticks, flailing with their small fists. Kira remembered watching her childhood companions at such play, preparing for the real scramble of adult life. Unable to participate because of her flawed leg, she had watched from the sidelines with envy.
An older child, a dirty-faced boy of eight or nine years, still too young for puberty and the two-syllable name that he would receive, looked over at her from the place where he was clearing underbrush and sorting the twigs into bundles for firestarting. Kira smiled. It was Matt, who had always been her friend. She liked Matt. He lived in the swampy, disagreeable Fen, probably the child of a dragger or digger. But he ran freely through the village with his disorderly friends, his dog always at his heels. Often he stopped, as now, to do some chore or small job in return for a few coins or a sweet. Kira called a greeting to the boy. The dog’s bent tail, matted with twigs and leaves, thumped on the ground, and the boy grinned in reply.
“So you be back from the Field,” he said. “What’s it like there? Scared, was you? Did creatures come in the night?”
Kira shook her head and smiled at him. Younger, one-syllable tykes were not allowed in the Field, so it was natural that Matt would be curious and a little in awe. “No creatures,” she reassured him. “I had fire, and it kept them away.”
“So Katrina be gone now from her body?” he asked in his dialect. People from the Fen were oddly different. Always identifiable by their strange speech and crude manners, they were looked down upon by most people. But not by Kira. She was very fond of Matt.
She nodded. “My mother’s spirit has gone,” she acknowledged. “I watched it leave her body. It was like mist. It drifted away.”
Matt came over to her, still carrying an armful of twigs. He squinted at her ruefully and wrinkled his nose. “Your cott is horrid burnt,” he told her.
Kira nodded. She knew that her home had been destroyed, though secretly she had hoped she was mistaken. “Yes,” she sighed. “And everything in it? My frame? Did they burn my threading frame?”
Matt frowned. “I tried to save things but it’s mostly all burnt. Just your cott, Kira. Not like when there’s a big sickness. This time it just be your mum.”
“I know.” Kira sighed again. In the past there had been sicknesses that spread from one cott to the next, with many deaths. When that happened, a huge burning would take place, followed by a rebuilding that became almost festive with the noise of workers smearing wet mud over the fitted wooden sides of new structures, methodically slapping it into smoothness. The charred smell of the burning would remain in the air even as the new cotts rose.
But today there was no festivity. There were only the usual sounds. Katrina’s death had changed nothing in the lives of the people. She had been there. Now she was gone. Their lives continued.
With the boy still beside her, Kira paused at the well and filled her container with water. Everywhere she heard arguing. The cadence of bickering was a constant sound in the village: the harsh remarks of men vying for power; the shrill bragging and taunting of women envious of one another and irritable with the tykes who whined and whimpered at their feet and were frequently kicked out of the way.
She cupped her hand over her eyes and squinted against the afternoon sun to find the gap where her own cott had been. She took a deep breath. It would be a long walk to gather saplings and a hard chore to dig the mud by the riverbank. The corner timbers would be heavy to lift and hard to drag. “I have to start building,” she told Matt, who still held a bundle of twigs in his scratched, dirty arms. “Do you want to help? It could be fun if there were two of us.
“I can’t pay you, but I’ll tell you some new stories,” she added.
The boy shook his head. “I be whipped iffen I don’t finish the fire twiggies.” He turned away. After a hesitation, he turned back to Kira and said in a low voice, “I heared them talking. They don’t want you should stay. They be planning to turn you out, now your mum be dead. They be set on putting you in the Field for the beasts. They talk about having draggers take you.”
Kira felt her stomach tighten with fear. But she tried to keep her voice calm. She needed information from Matt and it would make him wary to know she was frightened. “Who’s ‘they’?” she asked in an annoyed, superior tone.
“Them women,” he replied. “I heared them talking at the well.