“We saw you on the equinox,” said Prid. “You did look silly wearing that yackcarn mask.”
“I’m sure I did. It’s one of my talents. But I didn’t see either of you in the audience.”
“Oh,” said Hatch, “we were up on the keep’s wall. We aren’t supposed to attend openly until we come of age, except that Father keeps pitching me in.”
“He would have again if you hadn’t run away.”
“This time, I’m glad you did,” said Jame, remembering Sonny Boy’s fate with a shudder. “Come to think of it, I’ve never seen any Merikit women there at all.”
“That’s because those are men’s mysteries.”
Prid snorted. “Men playing fools, more like. Gran Cyd says they have to find some way to make themselves feel important between wars, hunts, and bedtime. We women have more sense.”
“Huh. You won’t be a woman for years yet, if ever. How many housebonds do you plan to take?”
Prid tossed her tawny mane. “None. I’m going to be a battle maid and fight and hunt and take whatever lover I choose, not keep house as some dull, old lodge-wyf.”
“Otherwise,” Jame asked, “how many husbands . . . I mean housebonds . . . are you allowed?”
“Oh, as many as Gran Cyd permits and I can keep happy. How many wyves for you, Hatch?”
“Maybe one, if she ever grows up. Otherwise none. If I become a bard or shaman, I can sit by any fire I choose. Only women own property, you know,” he added to Jame. “Prid, you could be one of them. Just become a war-wyf like Gran Cyd.
“ ‘Just’! I may be of her blood, but there’s only one Gran at a time.”
“I’m confused,” said Jame. “Isn’t Chingetai the chief of the Merikit?”
Prid laughed. “He’s Gran’s first housebond, but there’s talk that she’s thinking of divorcing him after the mess he’s made of things.”
“So you do admit that the men’s mysteries have some effect!” Hatch exclaimed, and elbowed her in the ribs for emphasis.
“D’you want me to jab this bow into your eye? What good are any rites if they don’t bring the yackcarn to us? You know we’re like to starve this winter without them. Just the same, there are rules.” She turned to Jame, trying to sound very adult and knowledgeable, obviously repeating what she had heard. “Chingetai messed up in the first place by making you the Earth Wife’s Favorite and then, worse, by denying it. I mean, if Mother Ragga doesn’t object, why should he?”
“D’you mean Chingetai is only chief on his wife’s say-so? Oh, priceless!”
Hatch grinned. “He doesn’t think so.”
“As if he had anything to say about it. If we go to war, Gran Cyd leads us, the way it’s always been, or one of her daughters after her. Or granddaughters.”
“Only women own property,” Jame repeated thoughtfully. “So, with all these housebonds running in and out, who owns the children?”
They both looked at her pityingly. “Why, the wyf who bore them, of course. And she names the father as it pleases her. Why? How do you do things down south?”
“Much differently,” Jame admitted wryly. “Possibly not as well.”
They rounded a bend in the path and Jame got her first look at the Merikit village, not that she immediately recognized it as such. On a hill between the Silver and a lesser stream rushing to join it stood a wide, roughly circular earthen bulwark topped by a wooden palisade. Within were a multitude of hillocks, each surrounded by a wattle fence containing a variety of livestock. Plank roads wandered through this patchwork of miniature fields. One large building stood out on the hill’s top, round and thatched. Smoke rose out of its central hole, murky below, white where it climbed into the dwindling sunlight. Already, the valley floor lay in shadows.
Jame now saw that a multitude of lesser smoke columns drifted upward with it in the still air, each from its own hillock, as the evening chill settled.
Outside the palisade rose other plumes of smoke.
As they passed close to one, she saw the sunken lintel and uprights of a doorway at the foot of a short flight of sod steps. Prid called down into the darkness, and was answered with a swarm of girls roughly her own age. Meanwhile, Hatch had roused a similar seething of boys from the next lodge.
All clambered into the light, saw the rathorn, and descended on him with whoops of delight.
Death’s-head snorted and backed away, stepping delicately, as if besieged by an army of clamorous mice.
Go, Jame told him silently.
With that, he turned tail and fled, pursued by cries of disappointment.
Jame only hoped that he wouldn’t run afoul of his tack. Since he had first accepted the saddle and hackamore, he had chosen to treat them as if they didn’t exist, which was fine as long as he didn’t tangle his legs in the reins or roll on the saddle, which would surely break its wooden tree.
“What are these?” One of the children was fingering the sheathed blades that crossed her back.
“My scythe-arms, good for chopping up noisy little brats.”
They whooped with glee at this. Surrounded by a shouting mob, a nervous Jorin pressed against her thigh, Jame entered the village. People emerged to stare at her—many women, some men, all wearing brightly colored woolens. Many were also ornately tattooed on the face and hands, which was all the bare flesh she could see until they passed what was clearly a bath lodge. Yes, the older Merikit males were tattooed everywhere a needle could reach, and not shy about showing off their body art.
The planks of the road rang hollow under her boots.
“There are tunnels underneath,” Prid told her, raising her own voice to a shriek in order to be heard.
“So that we can get from lodge to lodge in the winter,” added Hatch, almost as piercingly.
Both were clearly proud of their village, with good reason. Yards and streets were scrupulously clean, lintels inlaid with gold and silver. They passed an open forge with a brawny female smith and heard the click of looms under the earth. Everyone seemed well scrubbed and well dressed. Even the dogs looked happy.
As they passed the central lodge, there came the one discordant note: while below something large and succulent was being roasted, mixed with its scent was something else, mock-sweet and choking.
Bad meat, thought Jame, but quickly forgot it as they approached a larger, more ornate lodge than most, its sunken walls decorated with serpentine forms and round-faced imus. It might almost have been the Earth Wife’s house. In its low-cast shadow, the children at last fell silent. Prid took her by the hand and led her down the steps with Jorin close on her heels.
Inside was a long chamber with earthen benches along the sides heaped with furs. A fire burned on a similarly raised hearth, venting its smoke out a hole in the roof. Flickering light fell on walls lined with bright-woven tapestries, their images picked out with scarlet, copper, and white bronze. At the far end of the room, Gran Cyd of the Merikit sat in judgment.
Firelight stirred embers in her long red hair, two braids of which twined around her head, right to left, while a third intricate plait of many strands descended from the left-hand side to coil at her feet. Her sandals were gilded, her tunic and mantle purple with a filigree of silver. Strong, white arms lay on the rests of a chair as golden as the chains clasping her neck and wrists.
“No one else can beat Chingetai at arm wrestling,” Prid whispered.
Regarding that broad, white forehead and those smoky green eyes, Jame suspected that here was a woman who bested her man in more ways than he knew.
The argument before her lay between two housebonds and their wyf. The older was claiming the night with her, the younger protesting that he never got a chance, although he was the best trapper in the village. Let Gran regard her own hall. Half the pelts here were his gifts.