Gird rotated all the men through all the tally groups, but noticed which had special abilities. The whittlers, sure of an appreciative audience, worked even when not on actual tool duty, fashioning spoons and bowls, dippers and pothooks. Some of the men took to the old stone tools, and one liked to spend his spare time chipping new blades from flint cobbles. No one sneered, now, at those who could make useful baskets, or sew neat patches.
On Midsummer Eve, lacking ale, they drank the fresh juice of wild grapes and sat out under the stars, singing the old traditional songs. Like Midwinter, Midsummer was a fireless night, but this one was not dark and cold. In the freshness before Midsummer dawn, when every sweet scent of the earth redoubled its strength, Gird lay in the long grass and wished they could have women with them. The other men, too, were restless, remembering the traditional end to all those traditional songs, when the brief hours of darkness were spent first hunting the elusive flowers said to bloom only that night, and then celebrating them. Gird thought of his first night with Mali, of all the Midsummers he’d spent with her. A breath of air moved, wafting still more scent past him, and he rolled up on one elbow. She had been dead, and he had not gone back out, but now he was out, and he could not stop thinking about it.
Of course it would not do. He made himself get up and walk around the others, who pretended to be asleep. The two or three who were really asleep risked dangerous dreams, on Midsummer night. They snored, or muttered, and tossed uneasily. He did not wake them, walking farther away into the stillness. Dew lay heavy on the grass, gray-silver in the starlight, in the slow light of dawn that rose from the east in faintly colored waves.
Two days later, he had just come from the eastern camp, and was nearing the other, when Diamod met him on the trail.
“I have to tell you something,” he said. Gird stopped. He had made a rule that they not talk on the trail, even when chance-met like this. But Diamod’s expression declared this an emergency.
“What, then?”
“Your daughter Raheli—”
Gird’s heart contracted; his vision hazed. “She’s dead.” Despite the two reports he had had, he had continued to worry, sure that she might yet die of her injuries or her sorrow. He had worked harder, to keep himself from thinking about it, but her face haunted him.
“No—she’s come.”
Relief and shock contended; he felt that the ground beneath him swayed “Come? You mean—come here? They wouldn’t keep her?”
“They would have been glad to keep her; she would not stay. She has come here, and she insists she is joining us.”
“No!” That was loud enough to send birds squawking away in the forest canopy overhead, and loud enough for any forester to hear. Gird bit back another bellow and lowered his voice. “It’s impossible. She can’t—”
“You come tell her that. She followed me here from Fireoak—I didn’t even know she was following until I reached the wood, and then I couldn’t—I didn’t think I should—send her back. Or that she’d go.”
Rahi alive, and well enough to walk so far—that was as much as he’d hoped. More. He wanted to see her, hold her, know she was whole and strong again. He remembered the blood on her face, on her body. When he looked at Diamod, the man seemed to have understood his very thought, because he nodded slowly.
“Yes, she has a terrible scar, and no, she seems not to mind. She wore no headscarf. Something else, she’s dressed like a man.”
Gird shook his head, shrugged, could not think of anything to say. Most headstrong of his children—how was he going to convince her to leave? If she had come this far, it would not be easy, and if she refused to obey him, it would cause him trouble with the men.
“What has she said to the men?” he asked Diamod.
“She said she was your daughter, and must see you. She had told me she meant to stay, but when I left she had said nothing else to the others.”
“Thank Alyanya’s grace for that,” said Gird. He shivered, flicked his fingers to avert the trouble, whatever it had been (and he could guess well enough) and started on toward the camp.
The other men were all busy, carefully busy and carefully avoiding the tall, strongly built person in trousers and man’s shirt who sat motionless on a log, back toward him. Gird paused to look at her. From that distance, in that garb, she looked like a boy, her short dark hair (she had cut her hair!) rumpled, her big hands busy with a knife on a stick of wood. What was she whittling? When had she learned to whittle—or had she known, and he not known it?
He came toward her; the other men’s glances at him alerted her, and she turned, then stood. She stood very straight, as she had when expecting punishment in childhood—she had been the one of his children most likely to defy him. Now he could see the ruin that blow had made of her beauty, a scar worse than her mother’s, puckering the corner of her mouth. Her jaw had been broken, by the unevenness of it now. Her eyes held nothing he had seen before, in her years as child and maid and young wife. They might have been stones, for all the softness in them.
He could not bear it. He could not bear it that his daughter, his (he could admit it to himself) favorite, could look at him so. “Rahi—” he began. Then he found himself reaching for her, sweeping her into his hug despite her tension when she felt his hands. She stiffened, pushed him back, then stood passively. That was worse. He held her off, searching her face for some part of the girl who had been. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t think—”
“I came to stay,” she said, as if it were a ritual she had memorized. “I came to fight. I am strong. I have no—no family ties.”
“Rahi—!” He was appalled. But she went on.
“No child, no husband, nothing—but the strength of my body, the skill of my hands. I can be useful, and I can fight.”
The other men had vanished, into the trees. Gird did not blame them; he was grateful for their tact. He was also sure they were listening avidly from behind every clump of leaves.
“I can’t marry again,” Rahi went on. “I’m—too noticeable. Imagine going before a steward or bailiff. And the healers say that fever may have made me barren, as well as killing my—the—child. And I don’t want to marry again. I want to do something—” She snapped the stick she’d been whittling, and flung the pieces away. “Something to end this, so no other young wife will see her husband die as I did, and then have it be his wrongdoing—” She looked up at Gird, eyes suddenly full of tears. “I have to do this, Gird, here or somewhere else.”
She had not called him Da, or the more formal father: she had called him Gird, like any of his men. That was another pain, even closer to the deep center of his heart where father and child were bound in ancient ties. He blinked back his own tears, and brushed away those that had run down his cheeks. His beard was wetter than he expected.
He tried to stay calm. “Rahi, love, we can’t have women here, in the camps. Not to fight—and it’s not fair otherwise. It’s not safe.”
“Was I safe tending my own hearth at home?” she asked bitterly. “Is any woman safe? Are we safer when the strongest men are off in the woods playing soldier?” Gird grasped at the weak end of that.
“That’s going to change; I thought of a way for men to learn soldiering in the villages.” He explained quickly, before she could argue, and when he finished she was nodding. “So you see—” he said, easing into it.
“I see,” she interrupted. “I see that the men will get some training, and then you’ll take them away to a battle, leaving the women unprotected.”