I also had another impression, subtle but strong: when I came to Humping, as I had come to so many other places in the past year, I immediately felt comfortable there. Or if not comfortable, at least willing to bear the discomforts because they fit the awkward places in my heart.
The people viewed me with suspicion, of course, for I came over the hills from the west, where more civilized folk in easier farms had nothing but contempt for the Humpers, using the name as a mockery for slow-witted children. But I lived in these hills for a week, speaking to no one, until at last my loneliness struck a sympathetic chord. I was standing on the crest of a steep hill, watching as a shepherd far below tried to get his sheep to climb a slope to a saddle that led over to an uncropped valley. The man had no dogs, which was unusual, and the sheep kept breaking to left or right rather than climbing. When the man finally stopped and sat on a rock to watch his victorious sheep hunt for forage in an already overgrazed valley, I came down the hill and stood a few meters off from him, watching the sheep. I didn't speak because I had nothing to say; my offer was intrinsic in my presence.
The shepherd accepted. He stood and began prodding the sheep and uttering, the low, guttural cried that the sheep could hear clearly but that were inaudible from a good distance off. The sheep began to move, but this time when they broke left I was crying them onward; when they broke right, there was the shepherd, grunting. Finally the sheep gave in and shambled up the slope and over the saddle, rushing downhill to graze in the thick grass.
I stayed in the valley with the shepherd all the rest of the afternoon, staying pretty much on the other side of the valley from him, but watching his sheep, and sending back the few that strayed in my direction. He seemed not to notice me and said nothing, so that I wondered if by ill-fortune I had stumbled on a Humper who couldn't talk, but when the sun came close to the horizon he stood and began herding the sheep along a fairly easy route home. I did not follow, but when the shepherd crested a rise, after making it plain he didn't need my help on this journey, he turned and watched me for a moment, then beckoned. I was to come home with him.
I followed him for several kilometers before we came to a cluster of three low, thatched houses. They looked like small hills, the roofs the color of the summer-yellowed grass, but inside they were warm against the cold night. The sea wind came heavily from the north, even during the summer nights, and the deep current that flowed through the Humping Sea was icy-- though Britton was as far south as Wong, which sweltered in the summer, no night in Humping was ever warm, and the winters, while usually snowless, killed any fool who was caught out of doors after sunset. Except, of course, someone like me, who could sink into the earth if I desired; or just as easily draw heat from the air around me, no matter how cold it was. They could not have known this about me, however; to them I was a man alone, inviting death each night I spent in the open.
That may have been part of the reason the shepherd invited me home. It was well-known to the Humpings (for news of any kind travels quickly in lonely places like this) that no one had taken me in; I spent night after night in the hills, yet was still alive. That made me somehow holy and powerful, and they were in awe of me; yet when I proved my intentions were kind by helping the shepherd with his sheep, I was accepted, not as one of them, but as one they would willingly share their small homes and tiny larders with.
Dinner was a stew, and since the wife had not known I was coming, the pot was meager. Since I needed no food at all, I took the smallest portion I dared-- large enough to accept hospitality, but no more. And when the pot had been passed around and scraped clean by the shepherd's wife on her own dish, the shepherd looked at me.
For what? Did these people pray? Or was there some custom a man had to follow when offered food? I didn't know, so I smiled and said, "My name is Lake-drinker, and what good I can do you, I will always do you."
The shepherd nodded gravely, and turned to his wife. She laid her hands on the table, closed her eyes, and intoned:
Sun on wheat, Baking bread, Making meat From the dead. Good we give That we live.
Then, reverently, the three children, none older than five, watched as their mother took a spoonful of stew from her own plate and gave it to her husband, who solemnly chewed the bit of meat and swallowed. Then the husband took stew from his own dish and gave it to me, and I also ate. I was unsure what to do next, but the ritual made a kind of sense, and so I took from my dish and gave to each of the children, who looked wide-eyed and surprised, but ate.
The shepherd looked at me with tears in his eyes, and said, "You are welcome here forever."
Then we fell to and the stew was gone in a few minutes.
They made a place for me in the largest bed, a frame filled with straw and covered with blankets. I knew it was the parents' bed, and indeed they were preparing to sleep on the floor of packed dirt. I had slept on the earth during many a field maneuver in Mueller, long before the earth taught me another kind of welcome in Schwartz; I had no need of comfort when I slept. So I ignored the offered bed and curled up on the floor by the door. A cold draught slipped under the door, but my Schwartz-trained body coped easily, and the parents, wonderingly, went to bed in the straw.
In the morning, I was one of the family, and the children chattered freely in my presence.
"Glain," said the shepherd, and then, glancing at his wife, "Vrran." From then on, though conversation was never lush, what needed to be said could be said.
His dogs had died in the same week nearly a month ago, and since then he had lost nearly a dozen sheep from random strays that he could not pursue. At first, I herded with him while he trained a pup from a neighbor's litter; later I stayed at home and tended his vegetable garden while his wife was sick because the fourth child was coming.
It disturbed me at first to pull so many living stones out of the soil and put them in dead piles; I had gone so long now without killing anything that it even bothered me to know that the plants I planted there would grow only to be killed. In the night I asked the earth, and received only indifference. The billion deaths of plants together made a powerful sound, but that sort of death was necessary for life. For the first time I realized that for all their genius, the Schwartz obsession with avoiding killing was as unproductive, in the long run, as the selfish way the Ku Kuei used their power over time. The Schwartz kept themselves even purer than the earth required, and in doing so, kept all other human beings from becoming pure at all.
What agonized the rock was the cry of unnecessary or unmerciful death, the howls of the murdered. I heard all the sounds, and all hurt, but I decided that in the world outside Schwartz, death was the way of things; even killing, as long as it was done for need, was a part of nature. I had eaten dead plants animals all my life, and yet the sand had accepted me when I plunged from the pinnacle. So no matter what the Schwartzes said, I knew there must be no murder in farming, and I worked hard and did well for Glain and Vran.
Over time the other shepherd families came to visit, and eventually got over their shyness in my presence. I knew that the story of my nights on the hill and my habit of sleeping on the coldest part of the floor were known to everyone, and while they called me Lake-drinker to my face, I overheard references to Man-of-the-Wind, a legendary creature who comes either to kill or cure, brought by the cold wind and taken, eventually, by the sea.
Yet because they were unused to people of prestige or power among them, they did not know how to show me honor, except to treat me as they treated each other. In a place where all men lack equally, the only reward is trust, and I received that. I learned to handle sheep, to shear wool with glass blades without cutting the skin, to help with the foaling, to know when the sheep were nervous and when they were sick. I learned the soil, too, not in the personal way I had known in Schwartz and Ku Kuei, but as a reluctant ally in the war against starvation. Though I never felt hunger myself, I knew the faces of the children when they were hungry, and so I worked hard.