“Or that we already have,” Naä said. “In fact that’s one reason, I guess, I have trouble with it. But when I see you tomorrow, I’ll tell you what Ienbar says. That’s next best to going to see him, isn’t it?”
“And some time soon thou must come and eat with us. And sing this new song for Abrid and my father — Father likes thy singing almost as much as I do.”
And, laughing, the two women parted to go their different ways through the town.
When he reached the first field, Rahm paused to fill his chest with the scent of grain under hot sun and to listen to the roar of crickets, to grass spears brushing one another, and to sparrows and crows and jays, which all, with another breath, would again become what at any other time he would think of as silence.
Halfway across the field, Tenuk the plowman looked up, halted his animal, and waved. Ahead of the plow, the mule was the hue of cut slate. A distant ear twitched — and waving back, Rahm imagined the rasping bluebottle worrying at the eyelashes of that diligent, tractable beast.
With more humor than reproach, Rahm thought: Tenuk’s only three days farther along than when I left. They’ve missed me here.
Beets grew to Rahm’s right. Kale stretched to his left. He walked along one field’s edge. The earth was soft. Yellowing grasses brushed and scratched his sweating calves. Moist soil gave and sprang back to his bare soles. Even as he tried to take in all that was familiar about his fields, his country, his home, one new bit of the familiar was wiped away with the next.
He turned onto the path toward town. Moments later, trotting out under lowering oak branches, he saw the woman at the stone well halt, clay jug at her hip; she recognized him — and smiled. Rahm grinned back as four children careened from behind the door hanging off the hut across the way, a dog yapping among them. (Three years ago and a head and a half shorter, in her dirty hands the eldest of those children had held that dog up to him as a puppy, and Rahm had said, “Why not call him ‘Mouse’? A big mouse — that’s what he looks like,” and the girl and the others had laughed, because it was such a silly idea — calling a dog a mouse!) They ran toward him, not seeing him. As they broke around him, he caught up the youngest and swung her to his shoulder as she squealed. And suddenly he was among them, the others jumping around him and clapping. The little one grappled his long hair, and her squeal became laughter that, somewhere in it, had his name. And he said all theirs, and their mothers’, then theirs again (“Hello, Jallet. Hey there, Wraga…How is thy mother, Kenisa? Jallet, dost thy fat old man Mantice still waste his time with the water cart? I did not see thy uncle Gargula in the fields today. Perhaps he’s still doing some work for thy mother? But you must not let Veema work him too hard! Tell her I told you so too! Let Gargula get back to the beet fields, where he’s needed! Wraga, so long…”), and called them all out again in farewell, because it pleased him — almost surprised him — that after a week in the field, those names that he had not thought of over all the adventurous days, names that he might as well have forgotten, came back so quickly to his tongue. A step more, and he set the little girl down. She grabbed hold of his forefinger now, tugging and calling for another ride. But Rahm laughed and freed himself. And they were running on.
Where she’d carried her loom out into her yard, to sit cross-legged on the ground, Hara looked up from her strings and shuttles and separator plank and tamping paddle. A breeze lifted the ends of the leaf-green rag tied around hair through which white flowed like currents in a stream; it moved the hem of her brown skirt back from browner ankles. Her breasts were flat and long, the aureoles wide around dark dugs. Her eyes were black and glittering within their clutch of wrinkles, which deepened when she saw him. “Hello to thee, young Rahm!”
Rahm came over to stand behind her and look down. Crouching now, he frowned at her pattern: blue, orange, green, cut away sharply by the unwoven strings. “What makest thou there?”
“Who knows,” Hara said, her smile more full of spaces than teeth. “Perhaps it’s something thou mayest wear thyself one day, when they decide in the council house that a bit of youth’s foolishness has gone out of thee and more of the world’s wisdom has settled between thy ears.”
That made Rahm laugh. He patted the weaver’s shoulder — and stood, still able to feel where the girl, gone now, had sat on his.
Hara slammed down the treadle. The shuttle ran through quivering threads, drawing gray yarn.
Rahm loped off between stone and thatch buildings. Toward him from an alley end, an ox tugged a creaking cart. The side slats were woven with wide leather strips, the bed piled with rocks.
Its two drivers, man and boy, were gray from cracked, callused toes to bushy beard (on the elder) and hair. The man raised an arm to Rahm even as he frowned — as though the rock dust powdering his face and beard made a fog hard to see through. But the boy, who held a sack on his lap, suddenly pushed it to the bench, stood in his seat, and called out: “Rahm!”
Stopping, Rahm grinned. “Hey, Abrid!”
Washed free of quarry powder, Kern’s hair and beard would be the same powder gray. But after a splash from the bucket, Abrid’s braids would be as red as his sister’s. And because I know that, thought Rahm, that’s how I know I’m home!
Kern halted the cart with a grunt. His frown deepened. He nodded to Rahm. But Kern’s frown was as welcoming, Rahm knew, as any smile.
Abrid jumped down from the bench and seized Rahm’s wrist the way a much younger child might, though the grit on his palms made the boy’s hand feel like an old man’s. “You will work again with us at the stone pits, Rahm?”
“No, Abrid.” Rahm shook his head. “I will stay in the fields.”
Inside the house Rimgia had put the dough cakes on the hot stones down at the fire and was tossing handfuls of cut turnips and sliced squash and chopped radishes into the bowl of lettuces she had torn up, when something in the voices outside caught her. She turned from the counter and stepped across the floor mat; she needed more water. As she went, she hooked two fingers in the handle of the jar sitting there, but it was already half full. Holding the jar, she pulled in the door with the other hand and stepped out onto the porch over the high sill (which kept the heavy winter rains from coming up to the door — Abrid had better fix that loose plank soon). She looked out, to calclass="underline" “Father, Abrid, come in and get your —!”
Her father, Kern, still sitting on the cart seat, and her brother, Abrid, already standing, looked around.
She saw Rahm.
Reaching up to run her hand, still moist from the water in which she’d washed the vegetables, across her forehead and into her hair, Rimgia set the water pitcher on the porch planks and, with a surge of delight, rushed barefoot down the steps. “Rahm! Thou wilt stay to eat with us?” Again a hand to her hair to brush back some from her forehead (yes, Rahm thought, the same red as her brother’s beneath his work dust); but her face was full of a smile that wanted to get even bigger, wanted to swallow all the sunlight and breeze around them. She wiped her other hand on her shift’s hip. “Come, stay — there’s more than enough! And thou canst tell us of all thy adventures in thy wander. Did you get back this morning? Or last night?”
“I only tramped in by the southern fields ten minutes past, and glimpsed Tenuk stalking his mule. I’ll come and see thee soon, Rimgia. But I haven’t even told Ienbar I’m here.”