III
Bela ten Belen and his companions did not return to the City in triumph, but neither did they have to creep in by back ways at night as unsuccessful forays did. They had not lost a man, and they brought back six slaves, all female. Only Ralo ten Bal brought nothing, and the others joked about how he fell asleep on watch. And Bela ten Belen joked about his own luck in catching two fish on one hook, telling how the girl had followed them of her own will to be with her sister.
As he thought about the foray, he realized that they had been lucky indeed, and that their success was due not at all to him, but to Bedh. If Bedh had told them to do so, the Allulu would have ambushed and killed the soldiers before they ever reached the other village. The slave had saved them. His loyalty seemed natural and expectable to Bela, but he honored it. He knew Bedh and his sister Nata, Bela's brother's wife, were fond of each other, but could rarely see each other, since Bedh belonged to the Hans. When the opportunity arose, he traded two of his own house-slaves for Bedh and made him overseer of the Belen House slave compound.
Bela had gone slave-catching because he wanted a girl to bring up in the house with his mother and sisters and his brother's wife: a young girl, to be trained and formed to his desire until he married her.
Some Crown men were content to take their Dirt wife from the dirt, from the slave quarters of their own compound or the barracks of the city, to get children on her, keep her in the hanan, and have nothing else to do with her. Others were more fastidious. Bela's mother had been brought up from birth in a Crown hanan, raised to be a Crown's wife. His brother's wife, caught on a foray when she was four, had lived at first in the slave barracks; but within a few years a Root slave-merchant, speculating on the child's beauty, had traded five male slaves for her and kept her in his hanan so that she would not be raped or lie with a man till she could be sold as a wife. Nata's beauty became famous, and many Crown men sought to marry her. When she was fifteen, the Belens traded the produce of their best field and the use of a whole building in Copper Street for her. Like her mother-in-law, she was treated with honor in the Belen household.
Finding no girl in the barracks or hanans that interested him, Bela had resolved to go catch a wild one; and had succeeded doubly.
At first he thought to keep Mal and send Modh to the barracks. But though Mal was charming, with a plump little body and big, long-lashed eyes, she was only five years old. He did not want sex with a baby, as some men did. Modh was eleven, still a child, but not for long. She was not beautiful, but vivid. Her courage in following her sister had impressed him. He brought both sisters to the hanan of the Belen house and asked his sister, his sister-in-law, and his mother to see that they were properly brought up.
It was strange to the girls to hear Nata Belenda speak words of their language, for to them she seemed a creature of another order-as did Hehum Belenda, the mother of Bela and Alo, and Tudju Belen, the sister. All three women were tall and clean and soft-skinned, with soft hands and long lustrous hair. They wore garments of cobweb colored like spring flowers, like sunset clouds. They were surely goddesses. But Nata Belenda smiled and was gentle and tried to talk to the children in their own tongue, though she remembered little of it. Hehum was grave and stern-looking, but quite soon she took Mal onto her lap to play with Nata's baby boy. Tudju was the one who most amazed them. She was not much older than Modh, but a head taller, and Modh thought she was wearing moonlight-her robes were cloth of silver, which only Crown women could wear. A heavy silver belt slanted from her waist to her hip, with a marvelously worked silver sheath hanging from it. The sheath was empty, but she pretended to draw a sword from it, and flourished the sword of air, and lunged with it, and laughed to see little Mal still looking for the sword. But she showed the girls that they must not touch her; she was sacred, that day. They understood that.
Living with these women in the great house of the Belens, they began to understand many more things. One was the language of the City. It was not so different from theirs as it seemed at first, and within a few weeks they were babbling along in it.
After three months they attended their first ceremony at the Great Temple, Tudju's coming of age. They all went in procession to the Great Temple. To Modh it was wonderful to be out in the open air again, for she was weary of walls and ceilings. Being Dirt women, they sat behind the yellow curtain, but they could see Tudju choose her sword from the row of swords hanging behind the altar. She would wear it the rest of her life, whenever she went out of the house. Only women born to the Crown wore swords. No one else in the City was allowed to carry any weapon, except Crown men when they served as soldiers. Modh and Mal knew that, now. They knew many things, and also knew there was much more to learn-everything one had to know to be a woman of the City.
It was easier for Mal. She was young enough that to her the City rules and ways soon became the way of the world. Modh had to unlearn the rules and ways of the Tullu people first. But as with the language, some things were more familiar than they first seemed. Modh knew that when a Tullu man was elected chief of the village, he had to marry a slave woman, even if he already had a wife. Here, the Crown men were all chiefs, and they all had to marry Dirt women-slaves. It was the same rule, only, like everything in the City, made greater and more complicated.
In the village, there had been only one kind of person. Here there were three kinds. You could not change your kind, and you could not marry your kind. There were the Crowns, who owned land and slaves, and were all chiefs, priests, gods on earth. And the Dirt people, who were slaves, less than human, even though a Dirt woman who married a Crown might be treated almost like a Crown herself-like the Belendas. And there were the other people, the Roots.
Modh knew little about the Roots. She asked Nata about them and observed what she could from the seclusion of the hanan. Crown men must marry Dirt women, but Crown women, if they married, had to marry Root men. When she got her sword, Tudju also acquired several suitors, Root men who came with packages of sweets and stood outside the hanan curtain and said polite things, and then went and talked to Alo and Bela, who were the lords of Belen since their father was dead. These Root men were rich. Root people oversaw planting and harvest, the storehouses and marketplaces. Root women were in charge of housebuilding, and all the marvelous clothes the Crowns wore were made by Root women.
Root women had to marry Dirt men. There was a Root woman who wanted to buy Bedh and marry him. Alo and Bela had told him they would sell him or keep him, as he chose. He had not decided yet.
Root people owned slaves, but they owned no land, no houses. All real property belonged to Crowns. “So,” said Modh, “Crowns let the Root people live in the City, let them have this house or that, in exchange for the work they do and what their slaves grow in the fields."
“As a reward for working,” Nata corrected her, always gentle, never scolding. “The Sky Father made the City for his sons, the Crowns. And they reward good workers by letting them live in it. As our owners, Crowns and Roots, reward us for work and obedience by letting us live, and eat, and have shelter."