My uncle had several wives. Some Rassiu women had several husbands. The marriage ceremony consisted of the two people announcing, “We are married,” at the daily food exchange. Scattered along between the two half villages were some little reedcloth huts, just big enough for a cot or mat, which were used by men and women who wanted to sleep together. They made their assignation at the food exchange or at a private meeting in the paths or fields. If a couple decided to marry, the man built a marriage hut, and his wife or wives came to it whenever they agreed or arranged to. I once asked my uncle as he left in the evening which wife he was going to, and he smiled shyly and said, “Oh, they decide that.”
As I watched the young people flirting and courting, I saw that marriage had a good deal to do with skill in fishing and skill in cooking, for a husband gives the fish to the wife, who cooks it for him. That daily food exchange of raw for cooked was called “the fish-mat.” The women, with their poultry and dairying and gardening, actually produced a good deal more of our food than the men did by fishing, but their butter and cheese and eggs and vegetables were all taken for granted, while everybody made a fuss over what the men provided.
I understood now why Ammeda had seemed ashamed when he cooked the fish I’d caught. Village men never cooked. Boys and unmarried men had to bargain or wheedle for their dinners, or take whatever was left on the fish-mat. My uncle’s taste in wives and cooks was excellent. I ate well while I lived with him.
I spent the year after my initiation as an Aytan Sidoy of the Rassiu learning how to do what the men of my people did: fish, plant and harvest ricegrass, and cut and store reeds. I was unhandy with a bow and arrow, so I wasn’t asked to go out in the boat to shoot wild fowl, as boys often were. I became my uncle’s net thrower. While we dragged the net, I fished with the rod and line. My knack for this was recognised at once and won me approval. Often we took a boy along to shoot, and it was the joy of old Minki’s life to leap into the water after the duck or goose when he brought one down, fetch it back to the boat, and carry it proudly ashore, wagging her tail. She always gave her birds to my uncle’s oldest wife Pumo, and Pumo thanked her gravely.
Planting and harvesting ricegrass is the easiest job on earth, I think. You go out in autumn in a boat on the silky blue water over at the north end of the lake where the rice islets are close together, and pole slowly down the tiny channels, tossing handfuls of small, dark, sweet-smelling grain in showers to right and left as you go. Then in late spring you go back, bend the tall grasses down into the boat from right and left, and knock the new seeds off the stems into the boat with a little wooden rake till the boat’s half full of it. I know the women sniggered at the fuss the men made about planting and harvesting ricegrass, as if there were any skill to it; but they always received our bags of rice with praise and honor at the fish-mat exchange, “I’ll stuff you a goose with it!” they said. And it tasted almost as good as Etran grain porridge.
As for reed cutting, that was hard work. We did a great deal of it, in late autumn and early winter, when the weather was often grey and cold or raining. Once I got used to standing all day in water two or three feet deep, and to the angle of the curved scythe and the triple rhythm of cutting and gathering and handing—for you must gather the reeds together before they separate and drift off on the water, and hand the long, heavy bundle up into the boat—I liked it well enough. The young fellows I went out with were good companions, rivalrous about their own prowess as cutters, but kind to me as a novice, and full of jokes and gossip and songs that they shouted across the great reed beds in the rainy wind. Not many of the older men went reed cutting; the rheumatism they had got from doing it as young men kept them from it now.
It was a dull life, I suppose, but it was what I needed. It gave me time to mend. It gave me time to think, and to grow up at my own pace.
Late winter was a pleasant, lazy time. The reeds had been cut and handed over to the women to make into reedcloth, and there wasn’t much for the men to do unless they were boat makers. Nothing bothered me but the damp, foggy cold: our only heat was from a tiny charcoal fire in a ceramic pot. It made a very small sphere of warmth in the hut. If the sun was shining, I went to the shore and watched the boat makers at their work, a refined and exacting skill. Their boats are the finest art of the Rassiu. A war canoe is like a true line of poetry, there is nothing to it that is not necessary, it is purely beautiful. So when I wasn’t huddled over the fire pot dreaming, I watched the boat grow. And I made myself a good set of rods and lines and hooks, and fished if it wasn’t raining hard, and talked to my friends among the young people.
Though women didn’t set foot in the men’s village or men in the women’s village, we had, after all, the rest of the world to meet in. Men and women got to talking at the fish-mat, and out on the lake from boat to boat—for the women fished too, especially for eels—and in the grasslands inland from the villages. My luck in fishing helped me make friends among the girls, eager to trade their cooked food for my catch. They teased me and flirted mildly and were happy to walk along the lakeshore or an inland path, a few of them with a few of us young men. Real pairing off was forbidden until the second initiation. Boys who broke that law were exiled from their village for life. So we young people stayed together as a group. My favorite among the girls was Tisso Betu, called Cricket for her pinched little face and skinny body; she was bright and kind and loved to laugh, and she tried to answer my questions instead of staring at me and saying, “But Gavir, everybody knows that!”
One of the questions I asked Tisso was whether anybody ever told stories. Rainy days and winter evenings were long and dull, and I kept an ear out for any tales or songs, but subjects of talk among the boys and men were limited and repetitive: the day’s events, plans for the next day, food, women, rarely a little news from a man from another village met out on the lake or in the grasslands. I would have liked to entertain them and myself with a tale, as I had Brigin’s band and Bar-na’s people. But no one here did anything like that at all. I knew that foreign ways, attempts to change how things were done, weren’t welcomed by the Marsh people, so I didn’t ask. But with Tisso I wasn’t so afraid of putting a foot wrong, and I asked her if nobody told stories or sang story-songs. She laughed. “We do,” she said.
“Women?”
“Ao.”
“Men don’t?” “Eng.” She giggled.
“Why not?”
She didn’t know. And when I asked her to tell me one of the stories I might have heard if I’d been a little boy growing up in the women’s village, it shocked her. “Oh, Gavir, I can’t,” she said.
“And I can’t tell you any of the stories I learned?”
“Eng, eng, eng,” she murmured. No, no, no.
I wanted to talk to my aunt Gegemer, who could tell me about my mother. But she still held aloof from me. I didn’t know why. I asked the girls about her. They shied away from my questions. Gegemer Aytano was, I gathered, a powerful and not entirely beloved woman in the village. At last, on a winter day when Tisso Betu and I were walking in the pastures behind the rest of the group, I asked her why my aunt didn’t want anything to do with me.
“Well, she’s an ambamer,” Tisso said. The word means marsh-lion’s daughter, but I had to ask what that meant.