Dag shifted, unfolding his legs to disguise his unease. “Actually, I was thinking of taking some of my unused camp time, till Fawn’s more settled in.”
“So when will that be? Leaving aside the matter of the council.”
Dag shrugged. “For her part alone, not long. I don’t think there’s a camp task she can’t do, if she’s properly taught. I have no doubt in her.” His hesitation this time stretched out uncomfortably. “I have doubt in us.”
“Oh?”
He said quietly, “Betrayal cuts two ways as well, Fairbolt. Sure, when you go out on patrol you worry for your family in camp—sickness, the accidents of daily life, maybe even a malice attack—there’s a residue of danger, but not, not…untrust. But once you start to wonder, it spreads like a stain. Who can I trust to stand by my wife in her need, and who will fold and leave her to take the brunt alone? My mother, my brother? Clearly not. Cattagus, Sarri? Cattagus is weak and ill, and Sarri has her own troubles. You?” He stared hard at Fairbolt.
To Fairbolt’s credit, he did not drop his gaze. “I suppose the only way you’ll find out is to test it.”
“Yeah, but it won’t exactly be a test of Fawn, now, will it.”
“You’ll have to sooner or later. Unless you mean to quit the patrol.” The look that went with this remark reminded Dag of Hoharie’s surgical knives.
Dag sighed. “There’s soon and there’s too soon. You can cripple a young horse, which would have done fine with another year to let its bones grow into themselves, by loading it too soon. Young patrollers, too.” And young wives?
Fairbolt, after a long pause, gave a nod at this. “So when is not-too-soon, Dag? I need to know where I can put your peg. And when.”
“You do,” Dag conceded. “Can you give me a bit more time to answer? Because I don’t think I can leave the council aside.”
Fairbolt nodded again.
“Mind, I can only answer for myself and Fawn. I don’t control the acts of anyone else.”
“You can persuade,” said Fairbolt. “You can shape. You can, dare I suggest, not be a stubborn fool.”
Too late for that. This man, Dag was reminded, had six hundred other patrollers to track. Enough for tonight. The frogs were starting their serenade, the mosquitoes were out in companies, and the fat double-winged dragonflies darting over the lake were giving way to the night patrol of flitting bats. He levered himself to his feet, bade Fairbolt a polite good evening, and walked into the gathering dark.
8
T hey were making ready to lie down in their bedroll before Dag reported his conversations with his brother and Fairbolt to Fawn. From the brevity of his descriptions, compared to the time he’d been gone, Fawn suspected he was leaving a good bit out; more than these clipped essentials had cast him into his dark mood. Brothers can do that. But his explanation of the camp council was frightening enough.
In the light of their candle stub atop Dag’s trunk, which did for their bedside table, Fawn sat cross-legged, and said, “Seven people can just vote you—us—to be banished? Just like that?”
“Not quite. They have to sit and hear arguments from both sides. And they’ll each speak with other folks around their islands, gather opinions, before delivering a ruling of this…this gravity.”
“Huh.” She frowned. “Somehow I thought your people not liking me being here would take the form of…I don’t know. Leaving dead rotten animals outside our door to step on in the morning, nasty tricks like that. Fellows in masks setting fire to our tent, or sneaking from the bushes and beating you up, or shaving my head, or something.”
Dag raised quizzical brows. “Is that the form it would take in farmer country?”
“Sometimes.” Sometimes worse, from tales she’d heard.
“A mask won’t hide who you are from groundsense. Anyone wants to do something that ugly around here, they sure can’t do it in secret.”
“That would slow ’em up some, I guess,” allowed Fawn.
“Yes, and…this isn’t a matter for boys’ tricks. Our marriage cords, if nothing else, draw it up to another level altogether. Serious dilemmas take serious thought from serious folks.”
“Shouldn’t we be making a push to talk to those serious folks, too? Dar shouldn’t have it all his own way, seems to me.”
“Yes—no…blight Dar,” he added, in a burst of aggravation. “This shoves me into exactly the worst actions to ease you in here smoothly. Drawing attention, forcing folks to choose sides. I wanted to lie low, and while everyone was waiting for someone else to do something, let the time for choosing just slip on by. I figured a year would do it.”
Fawn blinked in astonishment at his timetable. Perhaps a year didn’t seem like such a long time to him? “This isn’t exactly your favorite sort of arguin’, is it?”
He snorted. “Not hardly. It’s the wrong thing at the wrong time, and…and I’m not very smooth at it, anyway. Fairbolt is. Twenty minutes talking with him, and your head’s turned around. Good camp captain. But he’s made it clear this is my own bed to lie in.” He added in a lower voice, “And I hate begging for favors. Figured I used up a life’s supply long before this.” A slight thump of his left arm on the bedroll indicated what favors he was thinking of, which made Fawn huff in turn. Whatever special treatment had won him his arm harness and let him back on patrol must, it seemed to her, have been paid back in full a good long time ago.
Nevertheless, Dag began the next morning to show their presence more openly by taking Fawn out in the narrow boat for plunkin delivery duty. The first step was to paddle out to a gathering raft, which over the season had worked its way nearly to the end of their arm of the lake and would shortly start back up the other side. A dozen Lakewalkers of various ages, sexes, and states of undress manned the ten-foot-square lashing of tree trunks, which seemed to be munching its way down a long stretch of water lilies. This variety had big, almost leathery leaves that stuck up out of the water like curled fans, and small, simple, unappealing yellow flowers, which also stood up on stalks. The crew worked steadily to dig, then trim and separate the stems, roots, and ears, and then replant. Churned-up mud and plant bits left a messy trail in the raft’s inching wake.
Dag saluted an older woman who seemed to be in charge. A couple of naked boys rolled a load of plunkins into the narrow boat that made it ride alarmingly low in the water, and after polite farewells, Dag and Fawn paddled off again, a good bit more sluggishly. Fawn was intensely conscious of the stares following them.
Delivery consisted of coasting along the lakeshore, pulling up to each campsite in turn, and tossing plunkins into big baskets affixed to the ends of their docks, which at least showed Fawn where their daily plunkins had been coming from all this time. She hated the way the boat wobbled as she scrambled around at this task, and was terrified of dropping a plunkin overboard and having to go after it, especially in water over her head, but at length they’d emptied their boat out again. And then went back for another load and did it all over again, twice.
Dag waved or called a how de’ to folks in other boats or along the shore, seemingly the custom here, and exchanged short greetings with anyone working on the docks as their boat pulled up, introducing Fawn to enough new folks that she quickly lost track of the names. No one was spiteful, though some looked bemused; but few of the return stares or greetings seemed really warm to her. After a while she thought she would have preferred rude, or at least blunt, questions to this silent appraisal. But the little ordeal came to an end at noon, when they climbed wearily back up the bank to Tent Bluefield. Where lunch, Fawn reflected glumly, would be plunkin.
They repeated the exercise on the next four mornings, until the raft-folk and dock-folk stopped looking at them in surprise. In the afternoons, Fawn began to help Sarri with the task of spinning up her new plunkin flax, and, for more novelty, aid Cattagus with his rope-braiding, one of his several sitting-down camp chores that did not strain his laboring lungs. His breathing, he explained between wheezes, was permanent damage left from a bad bout of lung fever a few years back that had nearly led him to share, and had forced him finally to give up patrolling and grow, he claimed, fat.