"Without nothing, and it's never tired at that!" she added, and they shared a bawdy laugh.
Marian would be so embarrassed, she thought, smiling fondly.
"I see you are happy; Moon Woman has set stars at your birth that called you to a strange way, but not a bad one," Dhinwarn said. She shook her head. "It's strange and frightening, this love-between-only-two people the Eagle People have. Yet not a starless thing or a turned-back path."
"No, wonderful and terrifying," Swindapa agreed. It had scared her at first, that her whole life should be so wrapped up in only one other. "There's nothing so warm; it's like being inside the fire, without being burned."
Heather and Lucy raced by on their ponies, waving and shouting to their mother; an uncle pursued them, swearing and laughing at the same time.
"Those two are fine girls," Dhinwarn said. "You should bring them here more often."
"As often as the stars set a path for it," Swindapa said.
She looked around at the countryside. Not everything was as she remembered, even from her last visit. There were new crops amid the familiar wheat and barley and scrubby grass of fallow fields. Machines were at work, cultivators and disc-plows pulled by oxen-or sometimes by shaggy ponies that had once drawn only chariots. The whir of a hay-mower's cutting bar made a new thing in the long quiet of the White Isle.
More stock, she thought. More fodder to overwinter it. New byres and sheepfolds, too. Bigger beasts, some of them. Something teased at her eye, until she realized it; she'd seen scarcely a single woman spinning a distaff as she walked or sat. Thread comes from the machines now.
Some of the small square fields had been thrown together for the convenience of the animal-drawn reapers the Eagle People had brought, too, changing the very look of the land. If you looked closely, there were other changes; iron tools in the hands of the cultivators, more and more colorful clothes and cobbled shoes on the dwellers, brick-walled wells, the little outhouses that the Islander medical missionaries had advised and the Grandmothers agreed to make part of the purity rituals, here and there a chimney, or a wagon with a load of small cast-iron stoves, or a wind pump.
"More changes than you would think, and more every year-like a rock rolling downhill," Dhinwarn told her, sensing her thought. "Some are discontented, thinking they break old harmonies. Others say no, best of all so many more of our children live and grow healthy."
Her smile grew slightly savage. "And because we listened first, we grow faster than the Sun People in all ways, wealth and knowledge and numbers. Many of them come west now-not to raid, but asking for work or learning."
Swindapa nodded. "We had to become other than we were, or cease to be at all," she agreed.
They spoke more, but her voice was choked off when the Great Wisdom itself rose above the horizon on the east, looming over the bare pasture as it had been made to do so many centuries before. She had seen the pictures on Nantucket, of the great stones shattered and abandoned, their true purpose lost. There were times when that image seemed to overwhelm her memories, but here the Wisdom stood whole and complete, the great triathlons and the bluestone semicircle…
She began to sing under her breath, the Naming Chant that called each stone by its title, and listed the Star-Moon-Sun conjunctions that could be sighted from it-not only the great ones, the Midwinter Moon that chased the flighty Sun back to Its work of warming the Earth dwellers, but the small friendly stars that governed the hearth or the best time to take a rabbit skin.
Marian never could sink her mind into this, she thought. Odd, for she knows the Eagle People's counting so well. Perhaps it's that she can't see that a word can be a number too.
Beside her Heather and Lucy grew quiet until she finished, their lips silently following along on some of the simpler bits. When she was done and waved them ahead they clapped heels to the ponies and rode off to the north, toward the Kurlelo greathouse, shouting greetings to cousins they hadn't seen for a quarter of their short lives. Swindapa stood in the stirrups and shaded her eyes with a hand.
The huge round, half-timbered shape of the greathouse, with its conical roof of thatched wheat-straw, looked subtly different. A metal tube at the apex…
"You put in a copper smoke-hood!" she said, delighted.
Her mother nodded and took off her conical straw hat. "It's much easier on the eyes now," she said. "And warmer in winter. Better for the girls doing the Chants, too." She smiled. "We've so much more time for that! More time for songs and stories, for making bright-please-eye-warm-heart-joy-in-hands things."
Swindapa's smile died as she remembered that this was not only a visit. It was a meeting, and the news was of war. The Grandmothers didn't decide such matters; that wasn't their business, save where the Sacred Truce was concerned. But those who did decide such matters would listen carefully to their opinions.
"Uhot-na. InHOja, Inyete, abal'na," the elder of the Grandmothers in the circle began, as the last of those who felt they should be here drifted into the smaller round hut and ranged themselves about its hearth. Her owl-headed staff nodded in her hand.
There were a score and one in all, a lucky number, although nobody had arranged it thus. Swindapa breathed in the scent of woodsmoke and thatch and cloth and sweat… yet even this wasn't as it always had been. The smells included soap, the bitter scent of hops, and one of those sitting around the whitewashed wall was wearing glasses.
"A good star shine on this meeting. Moon Woman gather it to her breast. We're here to talk, let's talk," the Eldest said.
She picked up the sticks in her hands, tapping lightly along their colored, notched lengths. Each notch and inset in the yard-long wands marked some happening, or feeling, or shade of meaning. They squatted on their hams around the fire, shadows flickering on their faces- wrinkled crone, stout matron whose drooping breasts were proud sign of the children she had borne, Swindapa the youngest of them but the one whose path had wandered beyond Time along the Moon-trail. Others, star-students, Rememberers, Seekers.
The Grandmothers of the Great Wisdom.
The Eldest spoke, with her voice and with the flashing sticks: "Would that the Eldest-Before was with us, who first greeted the Eagle People, was here."
She saw so far, so much. I'm lost without her.
Another set of sticks took up the tapping rhythm. "You sat by her feet a long time. We'll listen to you; there are many here, we'll find out what Moon Woman wants. Everybody rides the Swan sometime."
Love, trust.
Greatly daring, Swindapa took up her rods. She'd made them herself, on the voyage over. They looked different; more angular, in parts, with strange colors. That showed her spirit…
"I've seen the changes here. Most of them are happy."
Doubt, uncertainty, a tremulous joy, children laughing, cattle lowing, peace.
More tick-tapping, weaving in and out. An older woman spoke: "Happy for now. In the many-cycles to come, who knows."
Doubt, nagging worry-concern.
The eldest: "Eldest-Before saw only a darkness without stars before the feet of the Earth Folk, before the Eagle People came from out of time."
Relief, joy, an aching not noticed until it went away.
Another: "We thought we'd have peace, but now the Eagle People are talking of a war, far away, with people who never harmed us. Is that the path Moon Woman's stars reflect, now?"
Distaste, wariness, doubt, doubt.
"Moon Woman shines in all the lands-who aren't Her children? The Eagle People came from very far to help us, shouldn't we do the same for others?"
Resolution, resignation.
"Earth Folk have never carried spears so far. Bad enough to fight for our own hearths."