Dangerous People

Chapter One

NOBODY KNOWS WHY the house named Hardcinder stands by itself on a rise of slaggy basalt, inside the curve of the other houses of that arm of the town.[1] Maybe at some time they enlarged the common place of Telina[2] but left the old house standing the way it does, sticking out into the common; or maybe some hard-headed people built the house there on the common because they wanted a foundation of rock. Nobody knows now. What happened a long time ago, or even not long ago at all, even what happens now, is a matter of memories and inventions and mostly has to be taken on somebody’s word.

So I give you my word:[3] a good many years ago[4] a family[5] was living upstairs in Hardcinder House, in the five southeast rooms with the deep balcony that goes around the corner of the house. The railing of the balcony is carved with grape stakes and grape vines and goats kneeling and standing up to eat the grapes. The children who grew up there knew each wooden goat, the grinning billy, the staring kid, the dancing nanny with her tongue sticking out, the lopsided goat missing one horn, cracked off maybe by some other child playing there some other time. A little girl[6] who lived in that household thought the grinning goat kept his mouth open because he was hungry for the wooden grapes that hung just out of his reach, so she put wild oats and parsley in his wooden mouth. Later on, her little son found the fat flank of the dancing nanny a place of comfort to lean on when he needed comforting, and soon after that, her little daughter tried hard to break the one horn off the one-horned goat so it would come out even, but she couldn’t do it. A few years later there was a second daughter waving her legs and reaching her arms out to the goats and the grapes. And a few more years later the children of those two daughters were hauling themselves up to stand by holding on to the wooden leaves, learning how to walk, running about the balcony, feeding the he-goat wild oats and parsley. So Shamsha saw green stuff drooping out of his mouth as she came back from the Oak Society workshop, and said, “Still hungry, are you, goat?” The goat grinned. Shamsha stood a moment at the railing looking down at the common where her grandchildren and other children were playing, and then went indoors, eager for shade and cool water. It was a hot afternoon in a hot summer.

Nobody was in the house but Shamsha’s elder daughter’s husband Vavetaiveda, asleep on the front-room windowseat. As she walked across town, Shamsha had imagined lying down on that windowseat where the south wind would flow sweetly over her. She had a long drink of water from the cooler[7] and went on to her own room to lie down, but it was so close and stuffy there that she soon got up, bathed and changed, and went into the kitchen. She was restless, wanting work to do. She was chopping mint and chervil for salad when her younger daughter came into the room. Hwette did not speak. On the oaken counter, beside the board on which her mother was chopping herbs, she laid down a plant of chicory: the root, the tough stalk and leaves, the flower stalk at the top, all the flowers but one closed and that one closing, for it was late in the day and chicory is a morning flower.[8]

“That’s too old for salad, soubí!”[9] said Shamsha. She looked around, but Hwette had already gone through to another room.

Shamsha went on chopping herbs, and put on a pot of cracked wheat to boil so it would be cool by dinner time, continuing to think about what concerned her. She had been for some years archivist of the Madrone Lodge,[10] and last winter in the course of going through old gifts and holdings of the archives had become interested in a manuscript, unsigned, probably written a couple of lifetimes ago, called Controlling. It dealt with aspects of human behavior that interested her, and people of the Madrone and Oak[11] had agreed with her that it was a work of originality and insight, worth saving for a while.[12] She had been copying and editing it since before the Moon Dancing,[13] spending several weeks all told at the Exchange[14] to use the writers there,[15] and today she had been at the Oak workshops talking with people there about using one of the presses and arranging for the paper, for she wanted to hand-set the piece as a book. By the time the Water was danced[16] she would be setting type, but that pleasure would come in its own time. First she must have the text right. That was her concern now. She was thinking about an obscure passage, where the author had missed or miscopied several words through absent-mindedness, or had failed to express the thought in words appropriate to it. She knew how the text might be emended, but not whether she should emend it. Perhaps the obscurity just at this crucial point of the treatise, on which much of the argument hinged,[17] was deliberate. To offer clarity and withdraw it without warning did not seem characteristic of the author, but it was a complex mind that had thought these thoughts, and the subject, after all, was control. So the obscurity might be intentional; or accidental; or non-existent except to Shamsha failing to understand. She was certain only that she must be careful about changing a text which perhaps understood her better than she understood it. So she thought while she carefully rinsed the chopper and the counter, gathered up the bits of stem and wilted leaf, and put them into the compost pail.

All the same, even if the author was deliberately indulging in a compressed allusive mode, the sentence that most troubled her still troubled her. Was it a clear strand across a gap, or a break in the skein, or a knot, a tangle? “Shattering pressure may induce scattering to find what is traduced.” The chime of shatter and scatter, induce and traduce, were much gaudier than this author’s usual plain style. Perhaps they signified a sleepy moment, copying out late at night, the mind not in control of the hand, picking up rhymes not reasons. The cracked wheat was done; she stirred it up and left the pot half-open on the stove to cool. Turning back to the counter, thinking of that word traduce, she saw the plant of chicory, today’s flower now withered shut and tomorrow’s buds on the stem mere knots, their promise lost. She felt a little annoyance at Hwette’s childishness in forcing her to decide what to do with this small, ungainly, and inappropriate gift. Was she to put it in water root and all? or to dry the one gangling root to roast for chicory tea? To chop the whole thing up for a bitter note in the salad was the only thing that made any sense at all. But the color of the closed flower, the blue-violet color it would be if it were open, was clear in her mind, and in that color the daughter’s gift of that flower to the mother spoke itself, and she understood.

Shamsha stood looking at the chicory plant, her arms apart and still, and then went hurrying down the hall to Hwette’s room, saying her daughter’s name. But nobody was in the room, or any of the rooms, except in the front room where her son-in-law was still stretched out in the windowseat, looking soft and moist and breathing in through his nose and out through his lips so that he made a little noise, like a distant engine with a bad valve, puh… puh… puh…. Often at night, too, Tai snored in reverse that way. Shamsha’s room was next to his and Fefinum’s, and once she heard the sound when seeking sleep there was no use trying to think of anything else.

She hurried noisily through the room now, hoping to disturb him, and out onto the balcony. The air that had come hot all day from the east was beginning to come cooler from the south, though still not very cool. Shamsha sat down in a legless wicker chair behind the wooden goats and vines and looked through them over the common place and across the Valley to the hills south of Odoun.[18] She stretched out her legs and stared at the blue-violet hills. Several times she spoke aloud, saying “How—” or “No,” or made a small, wordless sound, in the busy distress of her thinking.

Her son-in-law, Hwette’s husband[19] Kamedan, came up the outside stairs onto the balcony. He said in his low, gentle voice, “So you’re here, amabí.”[20] She looked at him from clear across the Valley. At last she started a little and said, “Kamedan! Have you seen Hwette?”

“Not since this morning. I’ve been at the looms,” he said. He stood there, hesitant. Kamedan was a tall, well-made man with dark skin, long hair, and clear eyes. He was strong and beautiful in limb and feature. His mother-in-law looked at him now admiringly and with rancor. She thought: He doesn’t know. He won’t know till she tells him. She told me first, as she ought. Hwette always does right, always does as she ought to do.—The thought was complacent and yet heavy, as if it held other thoughts folded inside it. She put it away from her. She said, “She was here, and then I lost her.”

Kamedan said, “I think she was going to the heyimas[21] this afternoon with Fefinum, to Clown practice.”[22]

“Oh yes, that’s right,” Shamsha said, getting up. She found it hard to get up gracefully from a legless chair, but Kamedan’s beauty made her wish to be graceful in his eyes. “All the same, she was here for a minute,” she said, and so saying thought about the chicory plant. She did not want anybody else seeing it lying wilting on the counter. She went in to the kitchen. Tai was there, still moist and creased, but awake, standing up, and breathing through his nose. She did not see the chicory plant. He had spread out a litter of vegetables and implements all over the counter, being as unable to work in an orderly place as Shamsha was unable to work in a disorderly one.

Kamedan had followed her, and now the children came running in, Fefinum’s eight-year-old daughter Bolekash and Hwette’s little boy Torip. Torip fastened his arms around his grandmother as high up as he could reach, which was just below the hips, and said earnestly, “Ama! Ama, I’m very hungry, I need to eat!” Kamedan poured them and himself cups of lemonade from the jug in the coolroom, and Shamsha fetched down a great bowl of apricots, the last picking of their five trees[23] in Dry Creek orchard, and the children filled their hands and mouths. Pottering at the counter, Tai asked, “Shall I get dinner early?”

“It’s still too hot. After sunset, maybe,” Shamsha said.

Bolekash said, “Come on! We’re going to the garden!” and whirled out again. Torip obediently followed her, clutching apricots. Shamsha called after them, “Keep out of the irrigation system, you two!”

“We will,” Torip called back, sweet as a towhee chirping.

Shamsha said, “They dammed up the ditches this morning and flooded the salad beds. A pair of wild pigs! The wheat’s on the stove, cooked, Tai, and I left the herbs in oil, there in the brown bowl. Do you want a hand with anything else?”

After thinking about it for a while, Tai said, “No.” Shamsha was relieved. When he cooked he moved so slowly among such a confusion of implements and unfinished work that it tried her patience, and she often ended up finishing the unfinished for him, which he never seemed to notice. She had already started out of the room when he said, “I guess the peas need to be shelled,” with the air of a person coming slowly upon a concept entirely new to him. Shamsha turned around, picked up the big basket of peas and an empty basket, and went back out on the balcony to shell them.

Kamedan had brought his lemonade out and was sitting there looking out through the goats to the hills. When she sat down with her baskets he moved closer, took up a handful of peapods, and began shelling, dropping the pods into the empty basket and the peas into his shirt pocket, except for those that went into his mouth.

“Will any of those come back?” Shamsha asked, and he answered, “Only the ones I don’t eat.”

“The book I’m working on describes people like Tai,” she said, “who by apparently doing nothing cause other people to do things. The author calls it controlling by receding, an important principle, especially useful for controlling people like me. People like me will always come forward as people like Tai recede.”

Kamedan smiled, diffident; he seldom analysed ideas or people. They both shelled steadily. The peas were small, crisp, and neat, willingly coming out of their pods under the push of a thumb. They fell musically into the basket in arpeggios as Shamsha shelled, and in a pattering rush when Kamedan leaned forward to empty his pocket. His movements were steady and quiet, reflecting his art as a weaver, and his nature, Shamsha thought as she watched him. Yet she did not trust his quietness, his gentleness. It was real but it was blind. Though his eyes were clear, inwardly the man was blind, eyes clinched shut, forehead wrinkled like a bull’s, helplessly dangerous.

Shamsha believed that men knew their helplessness, since the rules that bound desire were largely of their making and responded to their needs; but she would like to know a man who did not love his helplessness. She wondered if it had been Hwette’s choice to have a second child, or if it was Kamedan’s non-choice, his blind doing, the helpless, driven reassertion of potency as paternity, not wanting the child but the fatherhood of the child that bound him to the mother, his emptiness to her fullness.

And why had the child chosen to come to them? Had they yet considered that? Shamsha thought that Hwette might not have considered it and yet, when she did, would be able to answer the question. Hwette had that gift, though she seldom used it. Kamedan, if he considered the question, would not care if he could not answer it. He thought it was enough to welcome the child, to love the child, as he loved Torip. The child was a thread in the fabric of his relationship with Hwette, his marriage the warp on the high, broad loom and he the blind shuttle weaving her life into a pattern, a figure—but really, Shamsha thought, what gaudy metaphors! That book is controlling my mind. Here sits the handsomest man in Telina, shelling peas to help me, thoughtful, careful, kind, the perfect husband for my daughter. Why shouldn’t they be having another baby? Kamedan leaned forward to empty a load of peas from his shirt pocket, and the fineness of the corners of his mouth, the innocence of the smile that changed his face from its habitual calm, irresistibly invited her trust and pleasure. Men need marriage, she thought, and it’s foolish to begrudge it to them.

Looking down through the goats’ legs she saw the two wives, her daughters, coming together across the common from the Naward Bridge. Perhaps because her mind was agitated and she had been thinking about marriage, she saw ghosts: her father walked in his granddaughter Fefinum’s short, assertive stride, on small feet that turned out a little, planting themselves firmly at each step. And it was the grandmother, Shamsha’s mother Wenomal, who turned Hwette’s head, lifting the chin, looking up into the evening sky with a bodily gesture so submissive, so remote, that it frightened Shamsha and made her look away, thinking that it is never an altogether happy thing to see the dead, even in the living.

Her two daughters came up the stairs to the balcony, Fefinum talking steadily. Shamsha found herself nervous, feeling ashamed that she had not responded at once to Hwette’s message, wanting to make up for that silence now, though she must do so in silence. But Hwette greeted her without the least trace of question or confirmation, so that Shamsha felt foolish trying to catch her eye, and thought she must speak to her later, alone. After Hwette had gone indoors and Kamedan had followed her, Shamsha thought that the best thing would have been to get up and touch Hwette, hold her for a moment; that was all that was needed. But she had not done it. Since her marriage Hwette had become not easy to touch. Even as a little child, trusting and affectionate, she had been elusive, like the swallow she had been named for then;[24] and now, like the scrub oak she had named herself for, she was unobtrusive, unwelcoming to the hand.

But, Shamsha thought, whose reluctance am I really talking about? It was so easy to blame the passive person for one’s own active choice, and Shamsha had chosen for a long time, for years now, since Geseta left, not to touch people or be touched unless custom demanded it.

“‘The child coming to be born demands that the house be set in order,’” Shamsha thought, and was afraid.

“Why bother cooking them?” Fefinum said boisterously, scooping a handful of shelled peas from the basket and tossing half the handful in her mouth. She chewed noisily. She was still being a Clown, still enjoying the license to be crude, loud, and greedy, which she thought had been granted her when she joined the Society. That the license was granted only to the Clown, and that so long as she was Fefinum she was not the Clown, was the kind of distinction she did not make. Nor did she observe the distinction between her mother the center of a household, the Archivist of the Madrone Lodge, and her mother the changing, uncertain woman Shamsha. Fefinum saw the role not the person. Her obtuseness was often very restful to her mother. To be treated like a great rock made Shamsha feel like a great rock. To know her control over people and events was taken as a fact made her feel that she was in fact in control. Fefinum loved control, thrived on it; she couldn’t have wanted so badly to be a Clown if she wasn’t controlled by control, as the manuscript Controlling put it.

Kamedan came back out on the balcony and took up his place by Shamsha. Fefinum leaned against the carved railing facing the two of them, and stretched out her round, strong legs. She said, “I want to talk to you two about Hwette.” That was Fefinum practicing at being the great rock, the center of the household. Because the role was more important to her than the person, everything she did seemed like play-acting; and the more important it was, the more dishonest she seemed in doing it. Shamsha felt Kamedan shift a little, uncomfortable. In herself she felt the ironic and resistant spirit rise, holding its iron flail, ready to strike. I will not speak, I will not speak, I will not destroy her, she vowed to herself.

“I don’t think Hwette is ever going to be a Blood Clown,” Fefinum said, low-voiced, tragically important.

Shamsha held her tongue and nodded once.

“She’s been coming to Society meetings and learning the dances all summer, ever since the Moon. And of course she does everything right, but I just don’t think she has the vocation, the true run of it. And Shaio agrees with me. We talked about it today. Just Shaio and I—not with Hwette, of course. And she agrees with me.”

In Telina the Blood Lodge people call their singer of most authority “The Eye of the Ewe,” and that was what Shaio was called. The idea of that powerful, stern old woman meekly agreeing with Fefinum, bleating “oh yes!” like a baa-lamb, made Shamsha say, “Ah—!” But no more. She controlled herself and kept still.

“But—” Fefinum leaned forward, pointing the fingers of her right hand at Shamsha, all her toes spread out intensely—“what Hwette has is a much greater calling. I felt that all along. Even before she wanted to join the Blood Clowns.”

This was too much for Shamsha. “She only joined because you nagged her to.”

“I encouraged her. Of course I did. You have to start somewhere, and she was doing nothing, nothing at all.”

“Aside from the house and the gardens and bringing up Torip and helping bring up Bolekash and working at the heyimas, nothing at all,” Shamsha said, letting the ironic spirit flail away. But her daughter’s pompous earnestness only increased: “That’s nothing, mother. Nothing to what she could do, what she ought to be. You know that!”

Kamedan said, “Yes.”

Shamsha drew back into herself, wary as a snail. She set the big basket of shelled peas down off her lap onto the decking. “What do you mean, ought to be?”

“Shaio says she ought to be learning the great songs. That she has the gift, but isn’t giving it.”[25]

“Then it’s hers to give, not yours,” Shamsha said. This time the flail hit. Fefinum winced. Shamsha looked down and shut her eyes in disgust with herself and her daughter. She stood up, picking up the baskets one in each hand, the heavy peas and the empty pods, so that she stood like a scales. “I don’t know,” she said.

Fefinum started to speak again, but Shamsha went on: “I don’t understand spiritual business. I don’t go to the deep springs. I’m only an intellectual. But I will say, I think Hwette has enough responsibilities as it is. She hasn’t ever been herself entirely since the baby was born—” She stopped short.

Fefinum, no longer play-acting, whether her ambition was for her sister or for herself, said quickly but gently, “That’s just it. She’s never found who she needs to be. Isn’t it so, Kamedan?”

He said nothing, but nodded once, slightly.

“She’s twenty-five years old. With luck she has a considerable length of life in which to find herself,” Shamsha said. “Don’t hurry her. Let it happen.” She went indoors with the baskets, aware that she was running away, evading further confrontation. But how could she talk sensibly about Hwette until she had talked to Hwette about this second pregnancy? And it seemed to her that her last words were not merely conventional wisdom used in self-defense. In saying them she knew that Hwette did need to be let alone, and that her need was urgent.

She set the baskets down on the counter. Tai was at the stove and didn’t turn around. She went to Hwette and Kamedan’s room. The curtains were drawn making a warm golden darkness in the room. “Soubí, soubí,” Shamsha said at the door, “are you in here?” Hwette was sitting on the chest, her hands at her sides. She looked up. In the dusk Shamsha could not see if she was smiling or weeping or neither. Shamsha sat down on the chest beside her and put her arm around Hwette’s round, warm, delicate, vigorous body. They sat still for a while. “Oh, you, oh, you,” Shamsha whispered, as she had whispered to the new baby daughter. Hwette leaned comfortably against her, fitting into her arm. They were going back to being part of each other. Shamsha drew a deep, long breath. “Well!” she said, and then nothing more. Nothing needed saying or thinking for a while.

They heard Kamedan’s voice outside the window, talking to a neighbor on the northeast balcony.

Shamsha felt tension come into Hwette’s body or her own arm. They no longer sat in perfect ease. Words began to press at Shamsha’s tongue. She said at last, “I finally saw the flower, soubí.”

Hwette made a drowsy little uncomprehending sound.

“The chicory flower.”

Hwette stayed wordless and heavy against her. Shamsha wanted to ask a great many questions but said only, “Thank you for telling me.”

“What chicory flower?” Hwette whispered sleepily.

“This afternoon, soubí,” Shamsha said. The strangeness of Hwette’s question came to her slowly, bringing coldness.

“I was thinking about the book, you know, and I was so hot and stupid. The flower lay there in front of me for I don’t know how long before I saw it. It’s a wonder I didn’t just chop it into the salad without noticing.” Every word she spoke took her farther from trust and ease. Every word was true, but when she spoke it it became false.

“Somebody brought you a chicory flower?”

“You did, soubí.”

“I was at the heyimas. With the Blood Clowns. All afternoon.” Hwette sighed and straightened up, leaving the curve of the mother’s arm and body. She stretched out her arms into the growing dusk and sighed.

“Hwette, you were here.”

“How could I have been?” She asked the question as if she expected an answer.

Shamsha felt coldness in the center of her body. She asked, “Are you pregnant, Hwette?”

Hwette stood up quickly and lightly. “I don’t know, mamoubí, how can I tell? My bleedings are so irregular I can’t worry about them. So if I am I don’t know it. Have you been dreaming grandbabies, mamou?” Light as air she moved across the room, gathering up her loose hair and bringing it across her shoulder to braid it.

Shamsha sat cold and confused. “I don’t think I was dreaming,” she said.

Bolekash came running down the hall, calling, “Dinner is ready, Taibí says!”

Shamsha hurried back to the kitchen and looked over the littered counters and workblocks. There was no chicory plant lying there. But Tai had been working at the counters. She did not want to ask him if he had seen it. His slow mind would seize on the strange question and worry at it and he would talk about it. She’d look in the compost basket after dinner. It might be there. Why hadn’t she put it in water or taken it to her own room, done something appropriate with it, the message, the grandmother-word? Had she really left it lying there along with the parsley stems and trash? But she had cleaned the counter before she left the kitchen—she was sure she had. Had the chicory plant been there at all? Had Hwette been there? Was she asleep on her feet then? Now? She took her place at the dinner table. “Thank the food, Bolekash,” she said to her granddaughter, hearing her own stern voice.

Looking around at what was on the table, the child said, “Heya! Our praise to you, eggplants, onions, we already thanked the chicken. Our praise to you, tomatoes, nice green peas. What’s that? Chiles, herbs, rice, lemons, salad, heya hey heya! Shut up, Torip.”

“You didn’t thank the pies, you didn’t thank the pies!”

“I did too, they’re leftovers, I did yesterday.”

“But you ought to—”

“Hush,” the grandmother said, and they hushed, and ate.

In the late, still darkness as the cricket chorus rang like beaten bells, Shamsha lay awake, thinking that there was a person she wanted to talk to: Duhe, that Serpentine doctor,[26] who had been the first to say that Controlling was a useful book and might not only be kept in the Archives but copied for use in lodges in the other towns. Duhe was a person who saw and heard. Shamsha was certain of it, though they had talked only about the book.

Shamsha had said she intended to take the fragile manuscript up to the Exchange to reproduce, to make a sturdy copy to keep in the Archives; and Duhe—they had been alone in the Archives reading room—had said, “Then you don’t want to perform it?”[27]

Shamsha had admitted that she had thought desirously about hand-copying the text, so as to clarify both the handwriting and some errors or obscure passages, but thought this might be mere self-indulgence. “A doctor wrote this book,” she said, “and I’m no doctor, not well read or practiced in this kind of thinking, this healing thinking. Where I’m in control,” with a glance at the darkened, foxed, spotted manuscript, “is here in the Archives alone with the books. That’s my learning, my experience.” Duhe nodded; Shamsha went on, “Usually I’m a very good judge of whether an old work is better kept or let go. But this time, I distrusted myself. This book resonates with my temperament, my way of thinking so closely that to me it was a great discovery, but I don’t know if it would mean so much to other people.”

She had seen in Duhe’s face that this confession was surprising and interesting to the doctor. Indeed, she was surprised by her own candor and fluency. Duhe listened in a way that gave one words.

Without exploiting that power, Duhe simply replied that her opinion was that the book was not only worth reproducing, but worth performing by hand or even printing, if Shamsha had considered that option.

“Ah! Don’t tempt me!” Shamsha replied, laughing, for there was no work she liked better than setting a text in type, delighting in the type itself, the ink, the press, the paper, the first proof, the trimming, the sewing, the binding, in the high redwood workshop of the Oak Lodge, where the rigorous and demanding mind met the rigorous demands of a material art, and where from that meeting a book came to be, the most mental of material things. In that place, at that work, Shamsha had known the most intense satisfactions of her life. Not the most enduring, but the purest. Too pure: so that she had avoided the easy obsession, and gone to the Madrone, and become not a maker but an unmaker of books, judging what should be saved and what unmade, the knot of words untied, the letters scattered like seed, the paper gone back to pulp or to earth and ash, to the green shoots and reeds and trees and books of years to come.

“I fed a wooden goat,” she said, and heard her voice thin and weak as a child’s, and sat up in bed in the darkness startled and lost.

What had she been thinking about? About the book, about Duhe, why? Because she wanted to talk to the doctor about Hwette, but that was nonsense, why should she do that? She had been falling asleep. Something had happened which she did not understand, or had not happened. But she was certainly not going to ask a stranger’s advice about it. She could run her own household.

Thirty-five years ago Shamsha had joyously married Mehoia. They were living in Wenomal’s household in Hardcinder House when their son and daughter were born. Between a night and a morning the young husband had died of heart failure, leaving Shamsha forever distrustful of anything given her.

Some years later at a dance in Wakwaha she met a man named Geseta, who followed her to Telina and wooed her relentlessly. He was handsome and charming and seemed to Shamsha a great piece of luck, except that he was singleminded. He knew only one story, the love story. To Geseta, life was a means of achieving orgasm. Of course biology was on his side; his sperm and her eggs would agree with him, if they could speak, as would many people of eighteen or nineteen. But there was more to a story than the climax. Shamsha wondered what she was doing in Geseta’s love story. But he was so handsome and so accomplished a storyteller that she entered into the plot; she resisted, she wavered, she flirted, she fled, and she succumbed deliciously to his ardor. Their orgasms were many and rewarding.

As his passion waned, he forced it to revive, for if living is only one thing the lack of that thing is death. He demanded marriage; he importuned her to the point of harassment. She saw that their story was over, but he insisted on prolonging it past the end. Her resistance became real. Resentful, he called it teasing, provocation. He became jealous, possessive, following her everywhere, but would not talk with her. The anger between them burned high. She set his things out on the balcony.[28] When he found them, she was alone in the house. He raped her.

To that rape her third child chose to come to be conceived. That was the hinge of the door of Hwette’s life.

People would talk, seeing Shamsha pregnant and Geseta gone off to Madidinou; they might well speculate that she had not consented to this pregnancy. Shamsha was chivalrous. Knowing Geseta was unable to endure real shame, she did not tell even her mother that she had been raped. She longed to, but felt that even so much solidarity would give her unfair advantage over Geseta, who knowing her strength would founder in his weakness. But it may have been that her strength and his weakness grew in that silence.

To her the rape was one thing and the conception another thing; they were facts of so different a nature that she could connect them only artificially, not in feeling. Justification was irrelevant. What she felt was that this child had chosen to come into her in pain.

The birth was a deliverance, setting free Shamsha’s own soul. At Hwette’s birth and all through her babyhood, Shamsha knew she had given this child more than she had given the others. They were themselves, but this one was herself given away, set free, not known. She called the baby Sehoy, a common name, but to her holding in it the flight of the swallows at dusk over the River, quick, many, scarcely to be seen, voices veering and disappearing, all but disembodied by swiftness and twilight.

Geseta came back to Telina and fell in love with various women. These days, now that he and Shamsha were getting old, he liked to come around Hardcinder House and indulge in nostalgia, always telling that same old love story though it had become a lie. She did not care if he came or not. Where his passion had touched her was a burn scar, thick and nerveless, an ugly thing but not crippling. Her only feeling towards Geseta was an intense distrust of him with their daughter. Once when Sehoy was four or five Shamsha had found him in the Narrow Gardens with her, picking her honeysuckle flowers to suck. Shamsha had come between him and the child and said to him, “Never touch her.” Something terrible in her face or voice made him obey. He sometimes made feeble efforts to disobey, to charm and win over the child or to win sympathy for himself in the family, complaining how his heart ached for his daughter and how she was deprived of the simple warmth of his fatherhood by the mother’s possessive jealousy. Shamsha ignored all that. But if he made any bodily move towards the child, Shamsha was between them, like a heavy, silent dog with its head and tail down, watching him sidelong.

When Sehoy was grown and had given herself the name Hwette, her begetter laid claim to a superior understanding of her heart and mind, an intuitive link with her. He argued with her against her choice of a name; to call oneself Scrub Oak was self-denigrating, too humble, too scrubby, he said. She should call herself Isitut, Wild Iris: something delicate, beautiful, like herself. When Kamedan began to come to the house, courting Hwette, Geseta talked against him all the time. His jealousy and envy of the young man was so apparent that Shamsha felt a queasy pity for him. He insisted that he was thinking only of Hwette’s wellbeing. “Kamedan will destroy her,” he said.

“You should know,” Shamsha said.

“I do know. I know his type. He’ll love only one woman all his life. He’ll demand everything of her—that she be the world to him, and he the world to her. He’ll smother her with love, he’ll tie her down with giving. He’ll be jealous of anyone or anything that touches her, so he’ll keep touching her all over, all the time. She’s a wildflower, she can’t thrive indoors. She’s a hummingbird, like me—she needs to move, move. She’ll die if she can’t go from flower to flower. I used to resent your not letting me touch her, but I see now that you were right; you knew we had to keep hands off her. She’s very fragile. She can’t take pressures on her, claims on her. Her strength is in her freedom.”

Disgust with his assertion of complicity and distaste for his sentimentality did not quite keep Shamsha from agreeing with him; but she shrugged and said nothing. Hwette and Kamedan were going to marry. And in her beauty of sexual delight, fulfilled desire, pregnancy, motherhood, Hwette was radiant, like a hummingbird indeed, not for fragility but for intensity of life.

Yet that vitality flashed out less and less often. Scarcely at all for how long now, a year? or more? Kamedan was as all-loving of her as Geseta had foretold. He adored her and seemed to depend on her for his being. Neither Mehoia nor Geseta himself had ever drawn from Shamsha, drained her, demanded her as Kamedan did Hwette. It’s all very well for a lover to say he’d die without you, but unfair to make it your unremitting responsibility to keep him alive, Shamsha thought. Then she thought, What about Hwette’s own life?

The answer was a jolt, a blank. What was Hwette’s life?

To Fefinum just now she had said, “housework, garden work, bringing up her son and niece, working at the heyimas”—Well, wasn’t that a life, anybody’s life? The household, the heyimas; one’s family, other people; the obligations and responsibilities, the network of reciprocal and mutual work, observance, care, and celebration: what more was there?

A swallow in a net. Kamedan claiming her attention, desire, constant companionship; little Torip and Bolekash needing her attention, care, companionship, teaching; Fefinum demanding that she perfect herself spiritually to fulfil her sister’s ambition; and she, Shamsha, the mother, what did she ask of Hwette? To be good, not to bother, be competent, let me get on with my work, my head stuck into the empty spaces between written words all the time. She’s the hinge of the household, not I. It all depends on her being here, and she’s being pulled to pieces by us all pulling her different ways. She should leave. Take little Torip and go. Where? To her brother’s house in Kastoha, there wouldn’t be pressure on her there. Or up to Wakwaha, by herself, leave the child with us, go by herself, go alone, that’s what she should do. I’ll tell her that, Shamsha thought. First thing tomorrow.

Chapter Two[1]

THE DRY SEASON was well along into the heat, and the tarweed was blooming, about a month from ripe. When the moon was near full one night the little boy in Shamsha’s household began talking in the dark. He said, “Take the light away, mamou! Please, mamou, take away the light!” The child’s father went across the room on hands and knees and held him against his body, saying, “Mamou will be home soon, Torippi. Please go to sleep now.” He sang a rocking song, but the child could not sleep; he stared at the moon through the window and then cried and hid his face. Kamedan held him and felt fever coming into him. Whe the day began, Torip was hot and weak and dull-witted.

Kamedan said to Shamsha, “I think I should go with him to the Doctors Lodge.” She said, “No need of that. Don’t fuss. My grandson will sleep this fever off.” Never able to argue with her, he left the child asleep and went to the weaving lofts. They were warping the ten-foot power loom for canvas that morning, and he worked hard, not having the child in his mind for some while; but as soon as the warping was completed he started back to Hardcinder House, walking fast.

Near the Hinge of town he saw Modona going towards the hunting side with his deer bow. He said, “So you’re here, Hunter.” Modona said, “So you’re here, Miller,” and was going on, when Kamedan said, “Listen, my wife Hwette is in the hills somewhere on the hunting side, it seems. I keep thinking maybe she got lost. Please be careful when you shoot.” He knew they said Modona would shoot at a falling leaf. He went on, “You might call aloud, in places where you’re not looking for the deer. I keep thinking she’s hurt and not able to make her way back.”

The hunter said, “I heard people saying that a person who’d been in Ounmalin said they’d seen Hwette there. No doubt they were mistaken.”

“I don’t think they could be altogether correct,”[2] Kamedan said. “Maybe they saw a woman who looked like Hwette.”

The hunter said with a smile, “Are there women who look like Hwette?”

Kamedan was at a loss. He did not like Modona. He said, “I have to go home, the child is sick.” He went on, and the hunter went on his way, still grinning.

Torip lay hot and miserable in the bed when Kamedan came to him. Shamsha said it was a summer cold, there was nothing to worry about, and the other people in the household said the same, but Kamedan stayed around the house. Towards nightfall the fever cooled and the little boy began to talk and smile, and ate some food, and then slept. But in the night, when the moon one day from full shone in the northwest window, he cried out, “Mamou, mamou! come here! come!” Kamedan, sleeping next to him, woke up and reached out to him. He felt the child hot as a coal of fire. He soaked cloths in water and wrapped them around the child’s head and chest and wrists, and gave him sips of cold water in which willowbark extract was infused. The burning lessened a little and the child could sleep. In the morning he lay sleeping soundly, and Shamsha said, “Last night was the worst of it, he’s over the fever. Now all he needs is rest. You go on, you’re not needed here.”

Kamedan went to the lofts, but his mind would not turn fully to his work.

Sahelm was helping him that day. Usually he observed and followed Kamedan attentively, learning the art; this day he saw Kamedan making mistakes, and once he had to say, “I think that may not be altogether correct,” to prevent Kamedan from jamming the machine on a miswound bobbin. Kamedan threw the switch to stop the power, and then sat down on the floor with his head between his hands.

Sahelm sat down not far away from him, crosslegged.

The sun was at noon. The moon was opposite it, directly opposed, pulling down.[3]

Kamedan said, “Five days ago my wife Hwette left the Obsidian heyimas, where she’d been at Blood Clown practice. In the heyimas they say she said she was going to walk on Spring Mountain. But it was late to go there and get back before dark. In the Blood Lodge some women say she was going to meet some dancers in a clearing on Spring Mountain, but didn’t come. Her mother says she went to Kastoha-na to stay in her brother’s wife’s household for a few days. Her sister says probably she went down the Valley, the way she used to do before she married, walking alone to the seacoast and back. Modona says that people have seen her in Ounmalin.”

Sahelm listened.

Kamedan said, “The child wakes in fever under the moon and calls to her. The grandmother says nothing is the matter. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to look for Hwette. I don’t want to leave the child. I must do something and there’s nothing I can do. Thank you for listening to me, Sahelm.”

He got up and turned the power of the loom back on. Sahelm got up, and they worked together. The thread broke and broke again, a bobbin caught and caught again. Sahelm said, “This isn’t a good day for weavers.”

Kamedan went on working until the loom jammed and he had to stop. He said then, “Leave me to untangle this mess. Maybe I can do that.”

Sahelm said, “Let me do it. That kid[4] might be glad to see you.”

Kamedan would not go, and Sahelm thought it better to leave him. He went from the lofts to the herb gardens down by Moon Creek. He had seen Duhe there in the morning, and she was still there. She was sitting under the oak Nehaga[5] eating fresh lettuce. Sahelm came under the shade of the oak and said, “So you’re here, Doctor.” She said, “So you’re here, man of the Fourth House, sit down.” He sat down near her.

She squeezed lemon juice on lettuce leaves and gave them to him. They finished the lettuce she had washed, and she cut the sweet lemon in quarters and they ate it. They went down to Moon Creek to wash their hands, and returned to the large shade of Nehaga. Duhe had been watering, weeding, pruning, and harvesting herbs. The air was fragrant where she was, and where the baskets she had filled with cutting were in the shade covered with netting, and where she had laid rosemary and catnip and lemon balm and rue on linen cloth in the sunlight to dry. Some cats were hanging around, wanting to get at the catnip as the sun released its scent. She gave a sprig to each cat once, and if the cat came back she threw pebbles at it to keep it off. An old grey woman-cat kept coming back; she was so fat the pebbles did not sting her and so greedy nothing frightened her.

Duhe asked, “Where has the day taken you on the way here?”

Sahelm replied, “Into the broadloom lofts, where I’m learning the craft with Kamedan.”

“Hwette’s husband,” said Duhe. “Has she come back yet?”

“Where would she come back from?”

“Some people were saying that she went to the Springs of the River.”

“I wonder, did she tell them she was going there?”

“They didn’t say.”

“Did any of them see her going there, I wonder?”

“Nobody said so,” Duhe said, and laughed as if puzzled.

Sahelm said, “Here’s how it is: she went five different ways at the same time. People have told Kamedan that she went to walk alone on Spring Mountain, to meet to dance on Spring Mountain, to Kastoha, to Ounmalin, and to the Ocean. His mind keeps trying to follow her. It seems she said nothing to him about going anywhere before she went.”

Duhe threw an oakgall at the fat cat, who was coming at the catnip from the southeast. The cat went half a stone’s-throw away, sat down with her back turned to them, and began to wash her hind legs. Duhe watched the cat and said, “That’s strange, that story you tell. Everybody knows where Hwette is and nobody knows.”

“Kamedan says the child wakes and cries in the night, and the grandmother says nothing is the matter.”

“Shamsha has brought up three children. Very likely she’s right,” said Duhe, whose mind was not very much on Hwette, but mostly on the catnip and the cat, the hot sunlight and the shade, Sahelm and herself.

Duhe had lived about forty years in the Third House at that time.[6] She was a short woman with large breasts, heavy hips, sleek, fine arms and legs, a slow, calm manner, a secretive nature, an intelligent and well-disciplined mind. The Lodge name[7] she had given herself was Sleepwalker. A girl, now thirteen, had made her a mother,[8] but she had not married the father, an Obsidian man, nor any other man. She and her daughter lived in her sister’s household in After the Earthquake House, but she was mostly outdoors or in the Doctors Lodge.

She said, “You have a gift, Sahelm.”

He said, “I have a burden.”

“Bring it to the Doctors, not the Millers.”

Sahelm pointed: the old fat cat was approaching the catnip slowly from the southwest. Duhe threw a piece of bark at her, but she made a rush at the catnip nonetheless. Duhe got up and chased her down to the creek, and came back hot and sat down by Sahelm in the shaded grass again.

He said, “How could a person go five ways at once?”

“A person could go one way and four people could be mistaken.”

“Or lying.”

“What would they be lying for?”

“Some people are malicious.”

“Has Kamedan done something to bring malice against him?”

“No,” Sahelm said. “Kamedan is without malice. But ­Modona…”

They sat in silence for a while.

“Besides malice,” the doctor said, “there’s laziness. It’s easier to explain than to wonder…. And there’s vanity. People don’t like to know they don’t know where she went. So they make up knowledge: She went to Spring Mountain—She went to Wakwaha—She went to the moon! I don’t know where she went, but I know some of the reasons why people who don’t know would say they know.”

“Why didn’t she herself tell anybody before she went?”

“That I don’t know! Do you know Hwette well?”

“No.”

“When they married, people called them Awar and Bulekwe.[9] When they danced on the Wedding Night, they were like those who dance on the rainbow. People watched in wonder.”

Again they sat in silence. Duhe pointed: the old fat cat was sneaking along in the wild oats above the creekbed, coming back towards the catnip. Sahelm threw an oakgall at her. It rolled between the cat’s front and hind legs, and she leaped in the air and rushed away down the creekbed. Sahelm laughed, and Duhe laughed with him. Up in Nehaga a bluejay screeched and a squirrel yelled back. Bees in the lavender bushes nearby made a noise like always boiling.

Sahelm said, “I wish you hadn’t said she went to the moon.”

“I’m sorry I said that. It was spoken without sense. A bubble word.”

“The child too is Obsidian,”[10] he said.

Not knowing that Hwette’s child was ill, she did not know why he said that. She was tired of talking about Hwette, and sleepy after eating lettuce in the long, hot, late afternoon. She said, “Will you keep the cats off for the next while, if you have nothing else you’d rather do? I want to go to sleep.”

She did not sleep altogether. Sometimes she watched Sahelm from within her eyelashes and under her hair. He sat still, without motion, his legs crossed, his wrists on his knees, his back straight as a fir. Although he was much younger than Duhe, he did not look young, sitting still. When he spoke he seemed a boy; when he was still he seemed an old man, an old stone.

After she had dozed she sat up, rested, and said, “You sit well.”

He said, “I was well trained to sit. The teacher of my sprouting years in the Yellow Adobe heyimas of Kastoha told me to sit still long enough to see and hear every sight and sound in all the six directions, so I myself would become the seventh.”

“What did you see?” she asked. “What did you hear?”

“Just now here? Everything, nothing. My mind wasn’t still. It wouldn’t sit. It was running here and there all the time like the squirrel up there in the branches.”

Duhe laughed. She picked up a duck’s feather from the grasses, a down feather, lighter than breath. She said, “Your mind the squirrel. Hwette the lost acorn.”

Sahelm said, “You’re right. I was trying to see her.”

Duhe blew the feather into the air with a puff of breath and it floated back down to the grasses. She said, “The air’s beginning to cool.” She got up and went to see to the drying herbs, heaping them onto basket trays or tying them into bunches to hang. She stacked the trays, which were triple-footed so they stood one on the other without crushing what was in them. They were light but awkward to carry, stacked up, and Sahelm helped her carry them to the storehouse the Doctors Lodge was using.[11] It stood southwest of the northwest common place, a half-dugout with stone walling and redwood roof. All the back room of it was stored with herbs drying and dried. Duhe sang[12] as she entered this room. As she stored and hung the herbs she continued to whisper the song.

Standing in the doorway, Sahelm said, “The smells in here are strong. Too strong.”

Duhe said, “Before mind saw, it smelled, and tasted, and touched. Even hearing is a most delicate touching. Often, in this Lodge, a person must close their eyes in order to learn.”

The young man said, “Sight is the sun’s gift.”

The doctor said, “And the moon’s gift as well.”

She gave him a sprig of sweet rosemary to wear in his hair, and as she gave it to him, said, “What you fear is what you need, I think. I begrudge you to the Millers,[13] man of Kastoha-na!”

He took the sprig of rosemary and smelled it, saying nothing.

Duhe left the storehouse, going to After the Earthquake House.

Sahelm went along to Between the Orchards House, the last house of the middle arm of town, where he was staying since Kailikusha had sent him away from her household.[14] A Yellow Adobe family in Between the Orchards, having a spare room and balcony, had given them to Sahelm to use; one of the women of that house was his cousin and had grown up with him in Kastoha. He cooked dinner for the family that evening, and after they had cleared away he walked back inward and across towards Hardcinder House. The sun had set behind his back, the full moon was rising before his eyes above the northeast range. He stopped in the gardens where he saw the moon between two houses. He stood still with his gaze fixed on the moon[15] as it heightened and whitened in the dark blue sky, shining.

People from another place[16] were coming in along the southeast arm there, three donkeys, three women, four men. They all carried backpacks and wore hats over their ears. One of the men played a four-note finger-drum slung on a cord round his neck as they walked along. One of the women piped a few notes of a tune now and then on a fife. A person up on a first-floor balcony greeted these strangers, saying, “Hey, people of the Valley, so you are here!” Other people came out on other porches and balconies to see so many strangers going by, and some children ran out to follow them. The strangers stopped, and the man with the finger-drum tapped it with his nails to make a hard clear sound, playing a rain piece, and called out aloud, “Hey, people of this Telina-na town, so you are fortunately and beautifully here! We’re coming in among you thus on four feet and two feet, twenty-six feet in all, dragging our heels with weariness, dancing on our toes for joy, speaking and braying and singing and piping and drumming and thumping as we go, until we get to the right place and the right time, and there and then we stop, we stay, we paint, we dress, and we change the world for you!”

A person called from a balcony, “What play?”

The drummer called back, “As you like it!”

People began to call out plays they wanted to hear. The drummer called back to each one, “Yes, we’ll play that one, yes, yes, we’ll play that one,” promising to play them all, the next day, on the middle common place.

A woman called from a window, “This is the right place, players, this is the right time!” The drummer laughed and gestured to one of the women, who came out of the group and stood in the moonlight where it ran bright through the air and along the ground across the gardens between the houses. The drummer brought up his dance-drum and drummed five and five, and the players all sang the Continuing Tone,[17] and the woman lifted her arms up high. The beat changed to four and four, and she danced a scene from the play Tobbe, dancing the ghost of the lost wife. As she danced she cried out again and again in a high faint voice. She sank down into a bar of darkness, the shadow of a house, and seemed so to vanish. The drummer changed the beat; the piper lifted her fife and began to play a stamp-dance; and so calling and playing the players went on towards the common place, but only nine of them went.

The woman who had danced[18] went along alone in the shadow of the unlighted house until she came beside Hardcinder House, among the big oleanders, white-flowered. There in the white light a man stood still with eyes fixed on the moon. So she had seen him standing with his back to the players while they played and sang and she danced the ghost’s dance.

She stood and watched him watch the moon for a long time from the shadow of the oleanders. She went then, following shadows all along, to the edge of Cheptash Vineyard, and sat down in the mixed dark and moonlight near the trunk of a long-armed vine. From there she watched the still man. When the moon was shining higher in the sky, she went along the side of the vineyard to the corner of the apricot orchard behind Generously Dwelling House, and stood in the shadow of the porches of that house, watching him. He had not moved yet when she slipped away, still following shadow, towards the galleries on the common place where the others of her troupe had camped.

Sahelm stood still, head now held back, face lifted, eyes looking at the moon steadily. To him the blink of his eyes was a slow drumbeat. Of nothing else was he aware but the light of the moon and the drumbeat of the dark.

Kamedan came to him saying his name, late, when all lights in houses were out and the moon was above the southwestern range. “Sahelm! Sahelm! Sahelm!” he said. The fourth time he said his name, “Sahelm!” the visionary moved, cried out, staggered, and fell to hands and knees. Kamedan helped him stand up, saying to him, “Go to the Doctors Lodge, Sahelm, please, go there for me.”

“I have seen her,” Sahelm said.

Kamedan said, “Please, go to the Doctors for me. I’m afraid to move the child, I’m afraid to leave him. The others are crazy, they won’t do anything!”

Looking at Kamedan, Sahelm said, “I saw Hwette. I saw your wife. She stood near your house. By the northeast windows.”

Kamedan said, “The child is dying.” He let go his hold of Sahelm’s arms. Sahelm could not stand up, but fell again to his knees. Kamedan turned away and ran back to Hardcinder House.

He hurried into his household rooms, wrapped up Torip in the bedding, and carried him to the outer door. Shamsha followed him, a blanket pulled round her and her grey hair over her eyes, saying, “Are you crazy? The child is perfectly all right, what are you doing, where are you going with him?” She called to Fefinum and Tai, shouting, “Your sister’s husband is crazy, make him stop!” But Kamedan was already out of the house, running to the Doctors Lodge.

No one was in the house of the Lodge but Duhe, who could not sleep under the full moon. She was reading in lamplight.

Kamedan spoke at the doorway and came in, carrying the child. He said, “This child of the First House is very ill, I think.”

Duhe got up, saying as doctors say, “Well, well, well, well, let’s see about this,” slowly. She showed Kamedan a cane cot to set the child down on. “A choking? A burn? Fever, is it?” she asked, and while Kamedan answered, she watched Torip, who was half-awake, bewildered and whimpering. Kamedan said in haste, “Last night and the night before he was in high fever. In the daylight the fever goes away, but when the moon rises he calls to his mother over and over. In the household they pay no attention, they say nothing is wrong with him.”

Duhe said, “Come away into the light.” She tried to make Kamedan leave the child, but he would not go out of reach of him. She told him, “Please talk quietly if you can. That person is sleepy, and frightened a little. How long has he lived in the Moon’s House now?”[19]

“Three winters,” Kamedan said. “His name is Torip, but he has a nickname, his mother calls him Monkeyflower.”

“Well, well, well, well,” said Duhe. “Yes, a little person with gold skin and a pretty little mouth—I see the monkeyflower. There isn’t any fever just now in this little flower, or not much. Bad dreams, is it, and crying and waking in the night, is that how it’s been?” She talked slowly and softly, and Kamedan did the same when he answered, saying, “Yes, he cries, and he burns in my arms.”

The doctor said, “You see, it’s quiet here, and the light is quiet, and a person goes to sleep very easily…. Let him sleep now. Come over here.” Kamedan followed her this time. When they were on the other side of the room, near the lamp, Duhe said, “Now, I didn’t understand well, please tell me again what’s been wrong.”

Kamedan began to weep, standing there. Tears ran down his face. He said, “She doesn’t come. He calls, she doesn’t hear, she doesn’t come. She’s gone.”

Duhe’s mind had been in the book she had been reading, and then her attention had gone all to the child, so only as he wept and spoke did she bring into her mind now the things Sahelm had spoken of in the afternoon under Nehaga.

Kamedan went on, speaking louder. “The grandmother says that nothing’s wrong, nothing’s the matter—the mother gone and the child sick and nothing is the matter!”

“Hush,” Duhe said. “Let him sleep, please. Listen now. It’s not good carrying him about here and there, is it. Let him sleep the night here, and you stay with him, of course. If medicine will help, we have medicine. If a bringing-in would be good for him,[20] we’ll hold a bringing-in, maybe for both of you. We’ll do whatever seems the right thing to do. We’ll decide that in daylight, after talking and thinking and watching. Just now here, the best thing to do is sleep, I think. Since I can’t do that when the moon’s full in the sky, I’ll be sitting on the porch by the door there. If the little one cries out in dream or waking I’ll be here, I’ll be awake, listening and hearing.” While she spoke she was setting a mattress down on the floor beside the cane cot, and she said, “Now, my brother of the Serpentine, please lie down. You’re as tired as your child is. If you want to go on talking, you see, I’m sitting here in the doorway; you can lie down and talk, I can sit here and talk. The night’s cooling off at last, it’ll be better for sleeping. Are you comfortable?”

Kamedan thanked her, and lay in silence for some while.

Duhe sang in undertone on a matrix word,[21] making an interval and place for his silence. Her voice control was excellent; she sang always more faintly until the song became inaudible breath, and then stillness. After a while she stretched and yawned as she sat by the door, so that Kamedan would know the song was done if he wanted to talk.

He said, “I don’t understand the people in that house, this child’s mother’s house.”

Duhe said something so that he knew she was listening.

He went on, “When a Miller marries into a family whose work is all in the Five Houses,[22] if they’re conservative people, respectable, superstitious, you know, that can be difficult. Hard on everybody. I understood that, I understood how they felt. That’s why I joined the Cloth Art, took up weaving, when I married. My gift is mechanical, that’s how it is. You can’t deny your gift, can you? All you can do is accept it and use it, fit it into your life with the others, the people you live with, your people. When I saw how people from Telina were going to Kastoha for canvas because nobody here was using the canvas loom or doing much broadcloth weaving here, I thought, there’s the place for me, that’s work they’ll understand and approve of, using my own gift and my training as a Miller. Four years now I’ve been a member of the Cloth Art. Who else in Telina is making sheeting, canvas, broadloom linens? Since Houne left the lofts, I do all that work. Now Sahelm and Asole-Verou are learning the art with me, doing good work. I’m their teacher. But none of that does me any good in my wife’s house. They don’t care about my work, it’s Miller’s work. I’m not respectable, it’s dangerous, they don’t trust me. They wish she’d married any other man. The child, he’s a Miller’s child. And only a boy, anyway. They don’t care for him. Five days, five days she’s been gone without a word, and they don’t worry about it, they say don’t worry, what are you upset about, they say, oh, she always used to walk down to the coast alone! They make me a fool—the fool they want me to be. The moon rises and he cries out for her and they say, nothing’s wrong! Go back to sleep, fool!”

His voice had grown louder, and the child stirred a little. He fell silent.

After a while Duhe said in a quiet voice, “Please tell me how it was that Hwette left.”

Kamedan said, “I came into the house from working at the East Fields generator. They called me over there, there was a consultation, you know some work needs to be done there, and people in the Milling Art had to talk and decide about it. It took all day. I came home and Tai was cooking dinner. Nobody else was home yet. I said, ‘Where are Hwette and Monkeyflower?’ He said, ‘He’s with my wife and daughter. She went up onto Spring Mountain.’ Pretty soon Fefinum came in with both the children, from the gardens. The grandmother came in from somewhere. The grandfather showed up too, though he doesn’t live with us. We ate together. I went over up the Spring Mountain way to meet Hwette coming home. She never came. She never came that night, or since.”

The doctor said, “Tell me what you think about this, Kamedan.”

“I think she went off with someone. Some person that walked with her. I don’t think she meant to stay away, stay with them. Nobody’s missing, that I’ve heard about. I haven’t heard that any man is staying away somewhere or hasn’t come home from somewhere. But it might not be far. She could be in the woods, on the hunting side, in the hills. Maybe at some summer place, up high. So many people are up in the hills this time of year, nobody really knows where anybody is. She might be staying with some people at a summerhouse. Or maybe she went on from where they were dancing, went on a ways to be alone, and got hurt. People can trip and fall, break an ankle, in those canyons. It’s wild there on the south side and southeast side of Spring Mountain. All those paths are bad, nothing but hunters’ paths, it’s hard not to get lost there. Once you get round on the wrong side of Spring Mountain it’s very confusing. I ended up once coming into Chukulmas when I thought I’d been going southwest all day. I couldn’t believe it was Chukulmas—I thought I’d blundered into some town over in Osho Valley, a foreign town, and I saw Chukulmas Tower but I kept thinking what’s that doing here, I couldn’t make sense of it. I had got turned around. It could have happened that Hwette did the opposite thing, she meant to turn back here and kept going the wrong way, she might be over there outside the Valley, with the Osho people, not sure how to get home. Or what worries me the most, you know—if she has hurt herself—if she broke an ankle, and is where nobody can hear her—The rattlesnake. I can’t think when I think of the rattlesnake.”[23]

Kamedan stopped talking. Duhe said nothing more for some time. She said at last, “Maybe some people should be going up on Spring Mountain calling out. Maybe there’s a dog that knows Hwette and would help find her if she’s there.”

“Her mother and sister and the others say that would be foolish, they all say she went down the Valley to the Mouths of the Na, or up to the Springs. Fefinum is certain that she went downriver. She used to do that. Probably she’s on the way home now. I’m a fool to worry this way, I know. But the child kept waking and crying to her.”

Duhe did not answer. Presently she began to sing under her voice, a Serpentine blessing song:

Kamedan knew the song. He did not sing with her, but listened to the song. She sang it very quietly and let her voice become fainter until the song became inaudible breath. After that they spoke no more, and Kamedan slept.

In the morning the little boy woke early and stared all around himself for a while, wondering. The only thing he saw that he knew was his father, sleeping beside the cot. Monkeyflower had never slept up on a cot with legs, and felt as if he might fall out of bed, but he liked the feeling. He lay still for a while, and then climbed down off the cot, stepped over his father’s legs, and went to the door of the room to look out. There was a woman he did not know curled up asleep in the porch there, so he went the other direction, to the inner door, into the second room. There he saw a lot of beautiful glass jars and bottles and containers of various colors and shapes, many ceramic bowls and holders, and several grinders with handles to turn. He turned all the handles he could reach, and then took down off the low shelves first one colored glass jar and then another, until he had a great many of them on the floor. There he began to arrange them. Some of them had something inside that made a noise when the jar was shaken. He shook all the jars. He opened one to see what was inside, and saw a grey, coarse powder, which he thought was sand. Another one had fine white sand in it. A blue glass jar had black water in it. A red glass jar had brown honey in it; that got onto his fingers, and he licked them. The honey tasted as bitter as oakgalls, but he was hungry, and finished licking his fingers. He was opening another bottle when he saw the woman stand in the doorway looking at him. He stopped doing anything and sat there amidst all the jars and bottles arranged around him. The black water had run out of the jar and soaked into the floor. Seeing that, he wanted to piss, and did not dare to.

Duhe said, “Well, well, well, well. Monkeyflower, you get to work early!” She came into the pharmacy. Monkeyflower sat very small.

“What’s this one?” Duhe said. She picked up the red jar. She looked at the child, took his hand, and sniffed it. “Sticky Monkeyflower, you are going to be constipated,” she said to him. “When you become a doctor you can use all these things. Until you become a doctor you’d better not. So let’s go outside.”

Monkeyflower let out a wail. He had pissed on the floor.

Duhe said, “O Spring of the Yellow River! Come on outside now!” He would not get up, so she picked him up and carried him out to the porch.

Kamedan woke and came out on the porch. Monkeyflower was standing there, and Duhe was washing his buttocks and legs. Kamedan said, “Is he all right?”

“He is interested in becoming a doctor,” Duhe said. Monkeyflower put up his arms and whimpered to Kamedan. Duhe picked him up and gave him to Kamedan to hold. The child was between them in the first light of the day’s sun, hinging them.[24] Monkeyflower held his father tight and would not speak or look at Duhe, being ashamed.

Duhe said, “Listen, brother, instead of going to the lofts this morning, maybe you could go with Monkeyflower somewhere, do some work with him. Stay out of the sun in the middle of the day, make sure there’ll be plenty of water to drink where you go. This way you’ll be able to judge for yourself whether he’s well or ill. I think he’s been wishing to be with you, since his mother is away. You might come back by here with him towards the end of the day, and we can talk then about whether we might want to hold a singing, or a bringing-in, and about other things. We’ll talk, we’ll see. All right?”

Kamedan thanked her and left, carrying the child on his shoulders.

After Duhe had straightened up the pharmacy, she went to bathe and eat breakfast in her household. Later in the morning she started across the arms to Hardcinder House. She wanted to talk to Hwette’s people. On the way, in the narrow gardens, Sahelm came to meet her. He said, “I’ve seen Hwette.”[25]

“You saw her? Where?”

“Outside the house.”

“Is she home, then?”

“I do not know.”

“Who else saw her?”

“I don’t know that.”

“Hwettez—Hwette?”

“I could not tell.”

“Whom have you told?”

“No one but you.”

“You’re crazy, Sahelm,” the doctor said. “What have you been doing? Moongazing?”

Sahelm said again, “I saw Hwette,” but the doctor was angry at him. She said, “Everybody’s seen her, and each in a different place! If she’s here, she’ll be in her house, not outside it. This is all crazy. I’m going to Hardcinder House and talk to the women there. Come if you want to.”

Sahelm said nothing, and Duhe went on through the narrow gardens. He watched her go around the oleander bushes towards Hardcinder House. Somebody up on a balcony of that house was shaking out blankets and hanging them over the railing to air. The day was already getting hot. Squash blossoms and tomato blossoms were yellow all around in the narrow gardens, and the eggplant flowers were beautiful. Sahelm had eaten nothing but lettuce and lemon the day before. He felt dizzy, and began to separate and be in two times at one time. In one time he was standing among squash blossoms alone, in one time he was on a hillside talking to a woman wearing white clothes. She said, “I am Hwette.”

“You’re not Hwette.”

“Who am I, then?”

“I do not know.”

The woman laughed and whirled around. His head whirled around inside itself. He came back together on his hands and knees on the path between tomato vines. A woman was standing there saying something to him. He said, “You are Hwette!”

She said, “What’s the matter? Can you stand up? Come on out of the sun. Maybe you’ve been fasting?” She pulled his arm and helped him up, and held his arm till they came into the shade of the drying-racks at the end of the narrow gardens by the first row of Pedoduks vines. She pushed him a little till he sat down on the ground in the shade. “Are you feeling better at all?” she asked him. “I came to pick tomatoes and saw you there, talking, and then you fell down. Who was it you were talking to?”

He asked, “Did you see someone?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t see well through the tomato vines. Maybe some woman was there.”

“Was she wearing white, or undyed?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know the people here,” she said. She was a slender, strong, young woman with very long hair braided nine times, wearing a white shift belted with a many-colored woven sash, carrying a gathering basket.

Sahelm said, “I’ve been fasting and going into trance. I think I should go home and rest a while.”

“Eat something before you walk,” the young woman said. She went and took some plums off the racks and picked some yellow pear-tomatoes from a vine. She brought these to Sahelm, gave them to him, and watched him eat them. He ate very slowly. “The flavors are strong,” he said.

“You’re weak,” she said. “Go on. Eat it all, the food of your gardens given you by the stranger.” When he was done, she asked, “Which house do you live in?”

“Between the Orchards,” he answered. “But you live in Hardcinder House. With Kamedan.”

“Not any more,” she said. “Come on now, stand up. Show me where your house is between the orchards, and I’ll go with you.” She went with him to his house and up the stairs to the first floor; she went with him into the room he used, laid out his mattress, and said to him, “Now lie down.” While he turned away to lie down, she turned away and left.

Coming away from that house she saw a man coming down into Telina between the Telory Hills, following the creek path from the hunting side, carrying a dead deer. She greeted them: “Heya, guest from the Right Hand coming, my word and thanks to you! And you, Hunter of Telina, so you’re here.”

He said, “So you’re here, Dancer of Wakwaha!”

She walked along beside them. “Very beautiful, that Blue Clay person who gave himself to you. You must be a strong singer.”

“And a strong crossbowman.”

“Tell me all about your hunt.”

Modona laughed. “I see you know that the best of the hunting is the telling. Well, I went up on Spring Mountain in the middle of the day, and spent the night at a camp I know up there, a well-hidden place. The next day I watched the deer. I saw which doe went with two fawns and which with one and which with a fawn and a yearling. I saw where they met and gathered, and what bucks were about alone. I chose this spike-horned buck to sing to, and began singing in my mind. In the twilight of evening he came, and died on my arrow. I slept by the death, and in the twilight of morning the coyote came by singing too. Now I’m bringing the death to the heyimas; they need deer hooves for the Water Dance, and the hide will go to the Tanners, and the meat to the old women in my household, to jerk; and the horns—maybe you’d like the horns to dance with?”

“I don’t need the horns. Give them to your wife.”

“Such a being there is not,” said Modona.

The smell of the blood and meat and hair of the death was pungent and sweet. The deer’s head was near the dancer’s shoulder, moving up and down as Modona walked. Grass seeds and chaff lay on the open eye of the deer. Seeing this, the dancer blinked and rubbed her eyes. She said, “How do you know I’m from Wakwaha?”

“I’ve seen you dance.”

“Not here in Telina.”

“Maybe not.”

“In Chukulmas?”

“Maybe so.”

She laughed. She said, “And maybe in Kastoha-na, and maybe in Wakwaha-na, and maybe in Ababa-badaba-na! You can see me dance in Telina this evening, anyhow. What strange men there are in this town!”

“What have they done that you think so?”

“One of them sees me dancing where I’m not, another doesn’t see me dancing where I am.”

“What man is that—Kamedan?”

“No,” she answered. “Kamedan lives there,” pointing to Hardcinder House, “though the man says I do. He lives there,” pointing along the arm to Between the Orchards House, “and has visions in the tomato patch.”

Modona said nothing. He kept looking at her across the death, turning his eyes but not his head. They came to the narrow gardens, and Isitut stopped there, saying, “I was sent to pick tomatoes for our troupe to eat.”

“If your players would like venison as well, here it is. Will you be here several days? It has to be hung.”

“The old women in your household need the meat for jerky.”

“What they need, I’ll give them.”

“A true hunter! Always giving himself!” said the dancer, laughing and showing her teeth. “We’ll be here four days or five days at least.”

“If you want enough to go around, I’ll kill a kid to roast with this meat. How many are you?”

“Nine and myself,” said Isitut, “but only seven of us eat meat. The deer is enough; we will be filled full with meat and gratitude. Tell me what to play for the feast you bring us.”

“Play Tobbe, if you will,” Modona said.

“We’ll play Tobbe, on the fourth evening.”

She was picking tomatoes now, filling her basket with yellow pear and small red tomatoes. The day was hot and bright, all smells very powerful, the cicadas shrilling loud near and far continuously. Flies swarmed to the blood on the hair of the deer’s death.

Modona said, “That man you met here, the visionary, he came here from Kastoha. He’s always acting crazy. He doesn’t go across into the Four Houses, he just walks around here staring and jabbering, making accusations, making up the world.”

“A moongazer,” said Isitut.

“In what House do you live, woman of Wakwaha?”

“In the moon’s House, man of Telina.”

“I live in this person’s House,” Modona said, lifting the deer’s head with his hand so that the death seemed to look forward. The tongue had swollen and stuck out a little from the black lips. The dancer moved away, picking from the tall, strong-smelling vines.

The hunter asked, “What will you be playing this evening?”

From behind the vines Isitut replied, “I’ll know that when I go back with the tomatoes.” She moved farther away, picking.

Modona went on to the dancing place. Outside his heyimas he stopped, set the death down on the earth, and cut off the four hooves with his hunter’s knife. He cleaned and strung them, tied the string to a bamboo rod, and stuck this in the earth near the southwest corner of the heyimas roof so that the hooves would dry in the sun. He went down into the heyimas to wash, and talked to some people there. He came back up the ladder and walked down the west steps of the roof, looking for the dead deer. It was not where he had set it down.

He walked clear round the heyimas roof, and then around the dancing place, hurrying and staring. Some people greeted him, and he said, “There’s a death walking around on four legs here. Where’s it gone?”

They laughed.

“There’s a two-legged coyote around here,” Modona said. “If you see a spike-horn buck walking without hooves, let me know!” He went off at a run, across the Hinge, to the middle common place. The troupe of players from Wakwaha were all sitting around in the shade of the gallery and the booths, eating flat bread, sheep’s-milk cheese, and red and yellow tomatoes, and drinking dry Betebbes. Isitut was with them, eating and drinking. She said, “So you’re here, man of the Blue Clay. Where’s your brother?”

“That’s what I’d like to know,” he said. He looked around the booths and gallery. A cloud of flies was in one place behind the gallery, and he went to look there, but it was dog turds they were clustering on. The deer was nowhere there. He came back by the players, speaking to them: “So you’re here, people of the Valley. Has any of you seen a deer’s death go by this place?” He made his voice sound easy, but there was an angry look in his body and face. The strangers did not laugh. A man answered politely, “No, we have not seen such a thing.”

“It was to be a gift to you. If you see it, take it, it’s yours,” the hunter said. He looked at Isitut. She was eating, and did not look at him. He went back to the dancing place.

This time he noticed some marks in the dirt at the foot of the southwest side of the roof of the Blue Clay heyimas. He looked with care and saw that farther on there were dry grass stems broken, pointing away from the heyimas. He went on in that direction. Clear over at the bank of the River, down under the bank, he saw something white. He walked towards it, staring. The white being moved. It rose up and faced the hunter. It stood over the deer’s death, which it had been eating. It showed its teeth and cried out.

Modona saw a woman in white clothes. His mind whirled round in his skull and he saw a white dog.

He stooped and picked up rocks and threw them hard, shouting, “Get away! Get off that!”

When a rock hit the dog in the head she shrieked and ran away from the death, downstream, towards the dwelling-houses.

This dog’s mother was hechi, her father dui, and she was unusually tall and strong; her coat of hair was white, with no other color, and her eyes were bluish. When a puppy she had been befriended by Hwette, and they had played together and gone together whenever Hwette went outside the town. Hwette had called her Moondog. After marrying Kamedan Hwette had seldom called the dog to walk or guard, and nobody else knew her well; she would not have anything to do with any human being but Hwette, and kept alone even in dogtown. She was getting old now and had lost keenness of hearing; lately she had been getting thin. Hunger had given her the strength to drag the death from the heyimas down to the River, and she had eaten most of one haunch. Bewildered by the pain where the rock had struck her between eye and ear, she ran up into Telina, between the houses, to Hardcinder House.

Inside Shamsha’s household the people heard a clawing and a crying at the outer door, which was closed to keep out the day’s heat. Fefinum heard the voice crying and said, “She’s back! She has come back!” Speaking, she cowered down in the corner of the room farthest from the door.

Shamsha jumped up and said, talking loudly, “Children playing on the porches, it’s a shame, it’s never quiet here!” She stood in front of her daughter, concealing her from Duhe.

Duhe looked at them, went over to the door, and opened it enough to look out. She said, “It’s a white dog, crying here. Hwette used to walk with this dog, I think.”

Shamsha came to look. “Yes, but not for years now,” she said. “Let me drive her away. She’s crazy, coming here, trying to get inside the house like that. Old and crazy. Get away, get off, you!” She took up a broom and poked it out the door at Moondog, but Duhe kept the broom from striking the dog, and said, “Please wait a minute. It seems to me the dog’s been hurt and wants help.” She went out to look more closely at Moondog’s head, having seen blood on the white hair about the eye. Moondog cringed and snarled at first but feeling that the doctor was not at all afraid, she held still. When the doctor’s hands touched her she felt great authority in them, and she made no objection while Duhe examined the wound the rock had made between her left ear and eye.

Duhe spoke to her: “What a beautiful old woman-dog you are, though a queer color for a dog, better for a sheep; and you haven’t been overeating recently, to judge by your ribs. Now what happened, did you run into a branch? No, this looks more like a rock was thrown at you and you didn’t dodge it; that’s not so smart, old woman-dog. Shamsha, may I please have some water and a clean cloth to wash this injury with?”

The old woman brought a bowl of water and some rags, grumbling, “That dog is worthless, of no account.”

Duhe cleaned the wound. Moondog made no protest and stood still and patient, trembling a little in the hindquarters. When Duhe was done the dog wagged her tail several times.

“Please lie down now,” the doctor said.

Moondog looked into the doctor’s eyes, and lay down with her head on her outstretched front legs.

Duhe stroked her head behind the ears. Shamsha was inside the room, Fefinum had come near the door to watch. Duhe said to them, “She may have some concussion of the brain. That was a hard blow.”

Shamsha asked, “Will she go into fits?”

The doctor said, “She might. More likely she’ll sleep it off, if she’s allowed to stay in a quiet place where she isn’t disturbed. Sleep is a wonderful healer. I didn’t have much of it myself last night, between the moon and your grandson the Monkeyflower.” She came back indoors, bringing the bowl and rags. Fefinum kept her back turned, and started cutting up cucumbers for pickling. Duhe said, “That is the dog who used to go along with Hwette, isn’t she? What did Hwette call her?”

Shamsha said, “I don’t remember.”

Fefinum said without turning round, “My sister called her Moondog.”

“It seems she came here to find Hwette, or to help us find Hwette,” said Duhe.

“She’s deaf, blind, and crazy,” Shamsha said. “She couldn’t find a dead deer if she fell over it. In any case, I don’t understand what you say about finding my daughter. Anybody who wants to talk with her can go up to Wakwaha, they don’t need a dog to show them the way upriver.”

While the women were talking, Monkeyflower and Kamedan came up the stairs onto the porch, hearing the women’s voices behind the open door. Kamedan looked at the dog and went in without speaking. Monkeyflower stopped and looked at the dog for some time. Her tail thumped on the porch floor quietly. Monkeyflower said in a low voice, “Moondog, do you know where she is?”

Moondog yawned with anxiety, showing all her yellow teeth, and shut her mouth with a snap, looking at Monkeyflower.

“Come on, dog,” Monkeyflower said. He thought about telling his father that he was going to find his mother, but all the adults were talking inside the house, and he did not want to be in there among them. He liked the doctor and wanted to see her again, but was ashamed of having pissed on her floor. He did not go in, but went back down the stairs, looking over his shoulder at Moondog.

Moondog got up, whining a little, trying to do both what Duhe had told her to do and what Monkeyflower wanted her to do. She yawned again and then with her tail down and wagging a little, her head down, she followed him. At the foot of the stairs he stopped and stood waiting for her to show him the way to go. She waited a while too, to see what he wanted, and then set off towards the River. Monkeyflower came along walking beside her. When she stopped he patted her back and said, “Go on, dog.” So they went on out of town, northwestward, into the willow flats along the River, and along beside the water, going upstream.

Chapter Three

IF SHE WENT UP on Spring Mountain dressed in white, the dancers’ white, then it could be that she stayed behind when the others left, stayed up on Spring Mountain because she could not bear to go home that night. Her sister Fefinum talked and talked as the dancers went down the path to Telina and she did not want to hear the talk and the talk, so she dropped back, and farther back, and stayed to look up at some small birds that were flying quickly overhead in the sunset light, and then the group of dancers was out of sight down the path, and she stopped walking. After a while maybe she turned around and went back up to the dancing place.

If it was all quiet there and the twilight was coming into the hills and the shadows rising from the low places, from the creek-courses and the canyons, then it could be that she sat down in the quietness and let it come into her.

It could be that she went down with the other dancers, hearing their talking, but when they went to the heyimas she went to Hardcinder House, and there she left for her mother a plant of chicory, the root and stem, the leaf and flower. As soon as you pick it the chicory flower begins to draw its blue petals together. Before you have it home it has wilted. If she spoke with her mother in the evening of that day, before the household ate dinner, it could be that she left the house again and went back up the path to the place where the Blood Clowns had practiced the dances, having it in her mind to dance alone.

If a hunter came through that clearing that evening he would have seen her there.

Each would have been startled by the sight of the other, in that place, at that time. They might have greeted each other, saying so you are here, and then he went on towards the place he liked to spend the night when he was hunting deer. Or he stopped in the clearing and sat down and talked with her, even if she did not want to talk. If it was late dusk when he came to the clearing and he saw only the glimmer of her white clothing, who knows what he thought it was. Maybe it looked to him like the ghost of the woman in the play Tobbe, the ghost of Tobbe’s wife who was raped and murdered. Frightened by the ghost, he would be angry at having been frightened. He was a hunter, a man who would not allow himself to be afraid, who would be shamed by fear and angered by shame. He was a dangerous man.

If he frightened her by something he said or did, some movement he made, she might have run from him in panic. He was standing on the way between her and Telina, but there was another path out of the clearing, which met a branch path from Hot Creek and wound on down the foothills to come into Telina from the southwest. It was steep and seldom used, it would be hard to follow in the twilight. On that path she could lose her way and be bewildered. She could fall. If a hunter followed her she could not outrun him and he would certainly catch her on that path.

There would be no use crying out. Those foothills of Spring Mountain are thick-grown with scrub oak and wild lilac and thickets of manzanita, the digger pines stand and fall across the deer-trails, the paths where people may go are few and hard to follow, nobody lives there but trees and thickets, deer and rattlesnake, jay and owl, and all the people of the wilderness.

In Hardcinder House the next morning when they were washing the breakfast dishes Shamsha may have said to her daughter Hwette, “I think you’re tired and anxious, I think you’ve been dancing too much. Why don’t you go and visit your brother in Kastoha for a few days? Leave Torip here, it’s time you left him now and then. He needs to learn that he’s not the hinge of the universe.”

Hwette would make objections: “But they want me for the Clown dancing. And Kamedan won’t want to go, and he doesn’t like me to go away.”

“What difference does it make to him if you’re away four or five days? Or a month for that matter? He’s well looked after! And he’s got his Monkeyflower to dote on.”

“Maybe he’d go with me.”

“The reason to go is to be by yourself. With nobody to look after, and nobody asking you to do anything. Dubukouma and Kodsua are undemanding people, and very fond of you. You can dance with the Clowns in Kastoha if you like. They’d be glad to have you. Just go! You used to go rambling every summer, every fall. Half the year I didn’t know where my Swallow had flown to.”

“I was a child.”

“You’re that child grown.”

“Woman, not child.”

“Swallow-woman.”

“Scrub oak has roots.”

“Scrub oak is prickly tough-stemmed stuff that lives on the hard dirt in the wilderness. Nobody puts scrub oak in the garden and tends it and says Oh look, how lovely! Oh look, it has an acorn!—You need to go over on your wild side, daughter. You need to get out of this house, out of this town. Your roots don’t have room enough here!”

Hwette was silent for a while, drying the plates and putting them in the cupboard. Shamsha was about to speak again when her daughter said, “Maybe I should do as you say.”

If Shamsha was dissatisfied with herself because of the subdued, obedient tone in which Hwette spoke, she could show it only by saying, as she wiped the sink clean, “Oh, I don’t know! you should do as you like, only what is it you want, soubí?” and Hwette would not have been able to answer that question. So it may be that she left Telina walking upstream and came to Kastoha-na in the evening of that same day, to the household of her older brother’s wife.

The copy of Dangerous People Pandora sent from the Valley was damaged in transit, and the rest of the third chapter, the last ten or twenty pages of the novel, are lost to us, though not to readers in the Valley of the Na. We can only speculate which of the five places in which she was seen Hwette was actually in that night; and whether Modona killed her and her subsequent appearances were all ghosts, or her “divided spirit” separated into five, all partly but none fully real. The last possibility seems the likeliest, but we don’t know if her part-selves survived this dissolution and rejoined, and if so, whether her marriage with Kamedan was lost or saved. We don’t know whether Monkeyflower drowned in the river when he wandered off, or was guided and kept safe by Moondog. If the story has an end, we can only guess what it might be. Kesh stories tend to end with a homecoming, a rejoining; but it is not always a happy one.