Child of Flame

Page 22

Urtan hurried up and spoke in an undertone to Beor, urging him to step aside. Beor hesitated. Adica could see the war waged within him: his jealousy, his sharp temper, his pride and self-satisfaction battling with the basic decency common to the White Deer people, who knew that in living together one had to cooperate to survive.
“No use causing trouble,” said Urtan in a louder voice.
“I’m not the one causing trouble,” said Beor with a bitter look for Adica. “Who is this stranger, dressed like a Cursed One? He’s brought trouble to the village already!”
“Go aside, Beor!” Mother Orla emerged from the birthing house. “Let there be no fighting on a day when living twins were given to this village out of the bounty of the Fat One.”
Not even Beor was pigheaded enough to go against Mother Orla’s command or to draw blood on a day favored by the Fat One. Still gripping the ax as if he wished to split Alain’s head open, Beor retreated with his brother and cousins while the villagers murmured together, staring at the foreign man who had come into their midst.
Alain swung a leg over the fence and in this way crossed out of forbidden ground so casually that it was obvious that he did not understand there was any distinction. He could not feel it down to his bones the way Adica could, the way she knew whether any hand’s span of earth was gods-touched, or hallowed, or forbidden, or merely common and ordinary, a place in which life bloomed and death ate. The crowd stepped aside nervously to make a pathway for him.
“You must wait here, Hallowed One,” said Mother Orla once they reached the village gates. “I ask this of you, do not enter the village until the elders have made their decision.” She called the elders to the council house, and the meeting pole, carved with the faces of the ancestors, was raised from the centerpost.
Adica had learned how to sit quietly as an apprentice to the Hallowed One who had come before her, the one who had been her teacher, but she was surprised to see how patiently Alain waited, sitting at her side. His dogs lay on the ground behind him, tongues lolling out, quiescent but alert, while he studied the village. The adults went back to their work and the children lingered to stare, the older children careful to keep the less cautious young ones from approaching too close.
In the end, it did not take long. The meeting pole wobbled and was drawn down through the smoke hole. Mother Orla emerged with the other elders walking deferentially behind her. Villagers hurried over to the gates to hear her pronouncement, all but Beor, who had stalked into the forest with his hunting spear. The dogs pricked up their ears.
“The elders have decided,” announced Mother Orla. “If Adica binds this man to her and lets him live in her house, she can reside again in the village until that comes which must come.”
“So be it,” murmured Adica, although her heart sang.
The villagers spoke the ritual words of acquiescence, and it was done, sealed, accepted. The Holy One had brought it to pass, as she had promised.
Adica had her own duties. She had to purify her old house, which had sat empty for two courses of the moon, and she had to purify the birthing house, since a male had set foot in it. Women who had borne living children passed in and out of the birthing house while she worked. They brought presents, food, and drink to Weiwara as they would every day until a full course of the moon had waned and waxed, at which time the new mother could resume her everyday life.
But afterward she was free to watch Alain, although she was careful to do so from a distance, pretending not to. She expected him to wait for her at the village gates, shy and aloof as strangers usually were upon first coming to a new place, but he allowed children to drag him from the well to the stockade, from the freshly dug outer ditch to the pit house where the village stored grain. He crouched beside the adults making pottery and the girls weaving baskets, and examined a copper dagger recently traded from Old Fort, where a conjuring man lived who knew the magic of metal-working. He coaxed in a limping dog so that he could pull a thorn from its paw, and scolded a child for throwing a stone at it although surely the child understood no word of what he said. He fingered loom weights stacked in a pile outside the house of Mother Orla and her daughters, and combed through the debris beside Pur the stoneworker’s platform. He spent a remarkably long time investigating the village’s two wooden ards. Adica remembered her grandfather speaking wonderingly of helping, as a young man, to plow fields for the first time with such magnificent tools; all his childhood the villagers had dug furrows with sharpened antlers.
Alain’s curiosity never flagged. It was almost as if he’d never seen such things before. Perhaps he was born into a tribe of savages, who still lived in skin shelters and carried sharpened sticks for weapons. Why then, though, would he have carried such skillfully made garments with him?