The gnarled tree was dying, split almost to the ground and rotting. Perhaps it had once borne fruit. But now its limbs were broken, dangling at odd angles, punctuated by occasional wisps of brown leaves.
The small cott behind the tree looked damaged and neglected too. But there were voices inside: a woman speaking roughly and a sharp-tongued child answering her in an angry, spiteful tone.
Thomas knocked. The voices became quiet and finally the door opened slightly.
"Who you be?" the woman asked abruptly.
"We’re friends of Mart’s," Thomas told her. "Is he inside? Is he all right?"
"Who be it, Mum?" the child’s voice called.
The woman peered at Thomas and Kira silently, not answering. Finally Thomas called to the child, "Is Matt at home?"
"What’s he done now? What you be wanting him for?" the woman asked, her eyes glinting with mistrust.
"He runned off! And tooken food too!" A tyke called to them; his head, thick with tousled, unkempt hair, appeared beside the woman. He pushed the door open wider.
Kira looked in dismay at the cott’s dark interior. A pitcher, overturned on a table, lay in a puddle of some thick liquid through which insects crawled. The tyke at the door picked his nose with one finger, scratched himself with the other hand, and stared at them. His mother coughed wetly and then spat something to the floor.
"Do you know where he went?" Kira asked, trying not to show how shocked she felt at the condition of these people.
The woman shook her head and coughed again. "Good rid to him," she said. She shoved the tyke to the side and pulled the heavy wooden door closed.
After a moment, Kira and Thomas turned away. Behind them, they heard the door open. "Miss? I know where Matt goed," the tyke’s voice said. He emerged from the cott despite his mother’s scolding voice and came to them. He was clearly Matt’s brother. He had the same bright, mischievous eyes.
They waited.
"What you gimme?" His finger went into his nose again.
Kira sighed. Life in the Fen was apparently a series of barters. No wonder Matt had become such a clever manipulator and entrepreneur. She looked helplessly at Thomas.
"We don’t have anything to give you," she explained to the tyke.
He eyed her appraisingly. "How about that there, miss?" he suggested, pointing to Kira’s neck. She touched the thong from which hung the polished stone.
"No," she told the tyke, and her fingers curled protectively around the stone. "This was my mother’s. I can’t give it to you."
To her surprise, he nodded as if that made sense to him. "That there, then?" He pointed to her hair. Kira remembered that she had tied it back that morning, as she often did, with a simple leather cord of no value. Quickly she pulled it loose and held it out.
The tyke grabbed it and thrust it into his pocket. It seemed to be a satisfactory payment. "Our mum, she thrashed Matt so hard he was horrid bloody, and so him and Branchie, they goed on a journey and they not be coming back, not to the Fen," the tyke announced. "Matt, he got friends who be taking good care of him, not thrashing him never! And they give him food, too."
Thomas laughed a little. "And they make him take baths," he added, though the tyke just stared, not understanding the word.
"But he meant us!" Kira pointed out. "We’re the friends he meant!" She was concerned. "If he tried to come to us, where is he? It was two days ago that he left here, and no one’s seen him since. He knew the way to —"
Matt’s brother interrupted her. "Him and Branchie, they goed someplace else first. He be getting a giftie for his friends. That be you, miss? And you?" He looked at Thomas.
They nodded.
"Matt, he say that a giftie makes a person like you best of all."
Kira sighed in exasperation. "No, that’s not the way it is. A gift —" She gave up. "Never mind. Tell us where he went."
"He be getting you some blue!"
"Blue? What do you mean?"
"Dunno, miss. But Matt, he said it. He be saying they got blue yonder, and he be getting you some."
The woman reappeared in the open doorway and called in a shrill and angry voice to the tyke, who retreated inside. Thomas and Kira turned away and began to retrace their steps on the muddy path back toward the village. Silent watchers still lurked in doorways. The fetid air still hung humid.
Kira whispered to Thomas. "When Matt disappeared, I thought perhaps we would find that he had been taken too. Like Jo."
"If he’d been taken," Thomas suggested, "we’d know his whereabouts. He’d be there with us in the Council Edifice."
Kira nodded. "And with Jo. Although maybe they’d have locked him up, like her. He’d hate that."
"Matt would find a way to get free," Thomas pointed out. "Anyway," he added, helping Kira find her way around a puddle with a dead rat in it, "they wouldn’t want Matt, I’m afraid. They only want us for our skills, and he hasn’t any."
Kira thought of the impish boy, of his generosity and his laughter, of his devotion to the little dog. She thought of him now, wherever he was, on his quest to bring a gift to friends. "Oh, Thomas," she said, "he does. He knows just how to make us smile and laugh."
There seemed no hint of laughter or any history of it in this terrible place. Making her way through the squalor, Kira remembered Matt’s infectious chortle. She thought, too, of the clear purity of the small singer’s voice, and how the two children must have been the only elements of joy here. Now Jo had been taken away. And Matt was gone as well.
She wondered where he could have journeyed, all alone but for the dog, to search for blue.
18
The day of the Gathering was approaching. Its nearness was palpable in the village. People began to finish projects and delayed the start of new ones. Kira noticed that in the weaving shed fabrics were folded and stacked, but the looms were not restrung.
The noise level subsided, as if people were distracted with preparations and didn’t want to waste time with the usual bickering.
Some people washed.
In his room, Thomas was meticulously polishing the Singer’s staff again and again. He used thick oils and rubbed them into the wood with a soft cloth. Smooth and golden, it began to take on a glow and fragrance.
Matt did not return. It had been many days now since he had disappeared. At night, before she slept, Kira held the scrap of cloth that had so often assuaged her fears and even answered her questions. She wrapped it around her fingers and concentrated on Matt; she pictured the laughing boy and sought some feeling of where he might be and whether he was safe. A feeling of reassurance, of solace, came from the scrap. But no answer.
They could occasionally hear the voice of the small singer, Jo, during the day. The crying had ceased. Most often they heard repetitive chanting, the same phrases over and over, though sometimes, as if she were allowed a moment of her own, the high lyrical voice soared into melodies that made Kira hold her breath in awe.
She crept down at night with the key in her hand and visited the tyke. Jo had stopped asking for her mother, but she clung to Kira in the darkness. Together they whispered little stories and jokes. Kira brushed Jo’s hair.
"I could thump with the hairbrush iffen I needed," Jo reminded her, looking up at the ceiling.
"Yes. And we would come." Kira stroked Jo’s soft cheek.
"Want I should make a song for you?" Jo asked.
"Someday," Kira told her. "But not now. We mustn’t make noise in the night. It must be our secret, that I come here."
"I be thinking up a song," Jo said. "And someday I sing it for you horrid loud."