About the time Kikirri is hauling herself upright and shouting “Da!” at her father and “Ma!” at her mother and grandmother and “No!” when told to stop what she is doing, Shuku has another baby. Like many second conceptions, it is a singleton. A fine boy, small, but greedy. He grows fast.
He will be the last of Shuku’s children. She and her husband will make love still, whenever they please, in all the delight and ease of the time of flowering and the time of fruit, in the warm days and the mild nights, in the cool under the trees and out in the buzzing heat of the meadow in summer noontime, but it will be, as they say, luxury love; nothing will come of it but love itself.
Children are born to the Ansarac only in the early northern spring, soon after they have returned to their birthplace. Some couples bring up four children, and many three; but often, if the first two thrive, there is no second conception.
“You are spared our curse of overbreeding,” I said to Kergemmeg when he had told me all this. And he agreed, when I told him a little about my plane.
But he did not want me to think that an Ansar has no sexual or reproductive choice at all. Pair bonding is the rule, but human will and contrariness change and bend and break it, and he talked about those exceptions. Many pair bonds are between two men or two women. Such couples and others who are childless are often given a baby by a couple who have three or four, or take on an orphaned child and bring it up. There are people who take no mate and people who take several mates at one time or in sequence. There is of course adultery. And there is rape. It is bad to be a girl among the last migrants coming up from the south, for the sexual drive is already strong in such stragglers, and young women are all too often gang-raped and arrive at their birthplace brutalised, mateless, and pregnant. A man who finds no mate or is dissatisfied with his wife may leave home and go off as a peddler of needles and thread or as a tool sharpener and tinker; such wanderers are welcomed for their goods but mistrusted as to their motives.
When we had talked together through several of those glimmering purple evenings on the veranda in the soft sea breeze, I asked Kergemmeg about his own life. He had followed Madan, the rule, the Way, in all respects but one, he said. He mated after his first migration north. His wife bore two children, both from the first conception, a girl and a boy, who of course went south with them in due time. The whole family rejoined for his second migration north, and both children had married close by, so that he knew his five grandchildren well. He and his wife had spent most of their third season in the south in different cities; she, a teacher of astronomy, had gone farther south to the Observatory, while he stayed in Terke Keter to study with a group of philosophers. She died very suddenly of a heart attack. He attended her funeral. Soon after that he made the trek back north with his son and grandchildren. “I didn’t miss her till I came back home,” he said, factually. “But to come there to our house, to live there without her—that wasn’t something I could do. I happened to hear that someone was needed to greet the strangers on this island. I had been thinking about the best way to die, and this seemed a sort of halfway point. An island in the middle of the ocean, with not another soul of my people on it… not quite life, not quite death. The idea amused me. So I am here.” He was well over three Ansar years old; getting on for eighty in our years, though only the slight stoop of his shoulders and the pure silver of his crest showed his age.
The next night he told me about the southern migration, describing how a man of the Ansarac feels as the warm days of the northern summer begin to wane and shorten. All the work of harvest is done, the grain stored in airtight bins for next year, the slow-growing edible roots planted to winter through and be ready in the spring; the children are shooting up tall, active, increasingly restless and bored by life on the homeplace, more and more inclined to wander off and make friends with the neighbors’ children. Life is sweet here but the same, always the same, and luxury love has lost its urgency. One night, a cloudy night with a chill in the air, your wife in bed next to you sighs and murmurs, “You know? I miss the city.” And it comes back to you in a great wave of light and warmth—the crowds, the deep streets and high houses packed with people, the Year Tower high above it all—the sports arenas blazing with sunlight, the squares at night full of lantern lights and music where you sit at the café tables and drink ii and talk and talk halfway to morning—the old friends, friends you haven’t thought of all this time—and strangers—how long has it been since you saw a new face? How long since you heard a new idea, had a new thought? Time for the city, time to follow the sun!
“Dear,” the mother says, “we can’t take all your rock collection south, just pick out the most special ones,” and the child protests, “But I’ll carry them! I promise!” Forced at last to yield, she finds a special, secret place for her rocks till she comes back, never imagining that by next year, when she comes back home, she won’t care about her childish rock collection, and scarcely aware that she has begun to think constantly of the great journey and the unknown lands ahead. The city! What do you do in the city? Are there rock collections?
“Yes,” Father says. “In the museum. Very fine collections. They’ll take you to see all the museums when you’re in school.”
School?
“You’ll love it,” Mother says with absolute certainty.
“School is the best good time in the world,” says Aunt Kekki. “I loved school so much, I think I’m going to teach school, this year.”
The migration south is quite a different matter from the migration north. It is not a scattering but a grouping, a gathering. It is not haphazard but orderly, planned by all the families of a region for many days beforehand. They set off together, five or ten or fifteen families, and camp together at night. They bring plenty of food with them in handcarts and barrows, cooking utensils, fuel for fires in the treeless plains, warm clothing for the mountain passes, and medicines for illness along the way.
There are no old people on the southward migration—nobody over seventy or so in our years. Those who have made three migrations stay behind. They group together in farmsteads or the small towns that have grown around the farmsteads, or they live out the end of their life with their mates or alone, in the house where they lived the springs and summers of their lives. (I think what Kergemmeg meant, when he said he had followed his people’s Way in all ways but one, was that he had not stayed home but had come to the island.) The “winter parting,” as it is called, between the young going south and the old staying home is painful. It is stoical. It is as it must be.
Only those who stay behind will ever see the glory of autumn in the northern lands, the blue length of dusk, the first faint patterns of ice on the lake. Some have made paintings or left letters describing these things for the children and grandchildren they will not see again. Most die before the long, long darkness and cold of winter. None survive it.
Each migrating group, as it comes down towards the Middle Lands, is joined by others coming from east and west, till at night the twinkle of campfires covers the great prairie from horizon to horizon. The people sing at the campfires, and the quiet singing hovers in the darkness between the little fires and the stars.
They don’t hurry on the southward journey. They drift along easily, not far each day, though they keep moving. As they reach the foothills of the mountains, the great masses split again onto many different paths, thinning out, for it’s pleasanter to be few on a trail than to come after great numbers of people and trudge in the dust and litter they leave. Up in the heights and passes where there are only a few ways to go, they have to come together again. They make the best of it, with cheerful greetings and offers to share food, fire, shelter. Everyone is kind to the children, the half-year-olds, who find the steep mountain paths hard going and often frightening; they slow their pace for the children.