The conversation ranged widely; the great room was filled with a hum of talk. Very little of it involved Great Grandma, though. Now and again one or two of the clansfolk would come up to her with a disagreement and ask her for fact or opinion. She always told them the straight of it without hesitation; they always went away, satisfied.
“Strange how it’s so often the great grandmother who leads the clan,” Gar said to Isaac, who sat across the table from him at Great Grandma’s right hand. Gar even kept a straight face through Alea’s mental jibe: So often? As though we’d visited a hundred clans?
“That’s because the women live longer than the men.” Isaac nodded sagely.
“Can we help it if our constitutions are stronger?” asked Martha. “We take our share of risks when the Belinkuns attack, you know!”
“Oh, I know it well,” Isaac assured her. “Still, I’ve heard of clans where it was the great grandfather who was clan chief—until he died, of course.”
“Well, you can’t be surprised if the younger folk turn to his wife for comfort and guidance then, Isaac,” Grandma Em said. “After all, we’ve lived so much longer than you that we’re bound to know better what to do.” She sighed, shaking her head. “I’m growing weary, though—weary and weak. I’ll be taking to my rocker soon, and letting one of you younger folk take the lead.”
“As long as you’re there to lead the leader, Gran,” Martha said.
“Only when you truly have need of me,” Grandma Em said. “Old folks grow tired, you know, Martha—tired and weak.”
“But never dull,” Isaac said. “You’re still sharp as a razor, Gran.”
Alea looked at his beard, glanced at the full bushes on the other men, and was surprised they even knew what a razor was.
When the meal was over and the children set to clearing away the dishes, several teenagers pulled the corks from jugs and went from place to place, pouring two fingers’ worth into each mug. Alea tasted hers and felt fire burn all the way down into her stomach. She glanced at Gar and from the roundness of his eyes knew he was feeling the same. He exhaled loudly and said, “What a delightful aftertaste!”
Great Grandma nodded in pleasure. “That’s my own recipe, that is—peaches in with the mash. The flavor grows as it goes through the still.”
At one of the tables, a man began to sing. Others joined in, higher voices harmonizing with lower, some even high enough to send a descant floating over the music during the choruses. Gar and Alea listened in pleased amazement as the voices sang,
The clansfolk told, with tongue in cheek, how the handsome youth had been bitten by a snake and how his true love had tried to save him by sucking out the poison but had finished by dying with him. When it was done, Gar and Alea sat amazed, partly by the beauty of the singing, but also by the spirit in which the story had been told—and by the spirits in their mugs, but they sipped sparingly at those.
“What of yourselves, travelers?” Isaac asked. “Can you offer song in return?”
“Time to sing for our suppers,” Gar muttered to Alea.
Alea bit her lip, trying furiously to remember the song of the Lorelei, but Gar turned to his hosts and said, “I’ll be glad to sing, Goodman Isaac, if you’ll suffer the cawing of a crow.” Then he began to sing in a surprisingly rich baritone,
Alea listened, amazed, to the tale of a horse thief and the young man who chased him, ending with the young man riding the stolen horse home with the thief’s son beside him. She hadn’t known Gar could sing so well and wondered why he never had before.
She wasn’t so caught up in his song, though, as to miss its effect on the clansfolk. They followed the tale of the chase with excitement, cheered the young man’s defiance when the thief had him at his mercy, then turned thoughtful as the two declared their respect for one another and the young man pledged friendship with the thief’s son. She decided Gar had chosen an interesting selection for a clan dedicated to a feud.
They learned quickly, though. As he began to sing the first verse again, to end the song, several of the clansfolk joined in. When he finished, they applauded, and Great Grandma Em nodded. “A good song, young man, and one so long merits another in return. Tull, sing the ‘Lay of the Founders’ for us.” A young man rose, reddening, and said, “If you please, Gran, but I’ll ask everyone else to join in when they should.”
“Of course, lad,” said Isaac. “On with the song, then.” Tull cleared his throat and began.
“Aye!” all the clansfolk responded with a massed shout that shook the walls.
Tull went on without missing a beat.
The lay went on for half an hour. Alea was staggered not only by its length and the amount of detail, but also by the verve with which the clansfolk shouted their responses, by their total devotion to the goals of their ancestors—even when those goals became murderous.
For the Farlands weren’t the only people who had decided to give their unborn children a clean start. So had many other families, though the song implied that the Farlands had led the way in their own spaceship and the others had simply followed along to steal the clan’s real estate. Alea had read enough about terraforming and genetics to know that couldn’t be true, that it would have taken hundreds of thousands of people to tame an alien world and seed it with Terran plants and animals, even with the help of robots and automated farming equipment. Moreover, she knew that those hundreds of thousands of people would have had to raise millions in cash to be able to buy those machines, not to mention the seeds and the animal embryos to stock their farms.