Page 18 of Circle of Days
“No, he was nice about it. But it was a waste of time.”
“And then you came home?”
“No.” Joia hesitated, then decided to tell the truth. “Then I kissed Vee’s mother.”
Neen said: “A woman! That’s a surprise. What was it like?”
“Really nice. But then she said I should kiss someone my own age.”
Ani said firmly: “Quite right.”
“But now I don’t know what I want—if anything.”
Ani said: “Well, you’ve learned that you’re attracted to women, not men.”
“I don’t know. I can’t imagine kissing Vee or Roni or any of the girls.”
“Don’t worry. If you’re not driven to have sex, just accept that. It’s not compulsory. And you may change.”
“Really?”
“Some people do. When I was your age, I knew a boy who always went with boys, never looked twice at a pretty girl. Then, when he was older, he fell in love with a woman. They’re still together and they have children. Though I think he still goes with men at the revel.”
“I don’t like being different from everyone else,” Joia said unhappily. “I felt a failure tonight.”
“You are different. I’ve always known it. But you’re not a failure—just the opposite. You’re special. Believe me, you will live an interesting life.”
“Will I?”
“Oh, yes,” Ani said confidently. “You’ll see.”
Seft woke up in the house near the pit. His body hurt all over. He had a pain in his belly, his head ached, and when he touched his face he found a swollen, tender patch near his left eye.
But the shame of it was worse than the pain.
All those people had seen him beaten like a bad dog. He had crawled away on his hands and knees. Once upright he had kept his head down and slunk through the crowd, trying to avoid attention, but he had been unlucky and had met Joia. Now Neen would know how he had been degraded. How could she possibly respect him after that?
He had gone so quickly from happiness to misery.
He got up and went to the nearby spring, where he drank and dipped his head in the cool water. Back at the house, he found cold pork in a leather bag and ate some for breakfast. It made him feel better.
Then he looked down into the pit. It was a mess. The ground was littered with lumps of chalk and flakes of flint, meat bones, discarded antler picks, broken shovels, and worn-out shoes. Hisfather had told him to clean it up. We should just clean up every day, he thought, then we wouldn’t spend our lives wallowing in filth.
He decided he had better get on with it. It was a necessary chore, he had nothing else to do, and he would be in trouble if he disobeyed orders.
He went back to the house to get a basket, but when he looked at the building he saw that it was in danger of collapse. The doorway consisted of two posts and a lintel lashed to the posts with leather straps. While the family had been away, the straps had broken and the lintel had shifted. It was still on top of one doorpost but its other end hung loose. He had not noticed this last night, because he had been in such distress.
The rafters above the lintel now had no support, and would fall sooner or later, bringing down part of the roof, if not all. It needed to be repaired right away.
The easy way to do it would be to get some new leather straps and retie the lintel to the doorposts. However, he did not have any leather straps. And anyway, that approach seemed unsatisfactory to him. The straps would eventually rot again.
He wanted to take a closer look at the lintel, but it was too high. He gathered some pieces of chalk rubble from the rubbish pile and made a little platform in the doorway. Standing on that, he could look down on the lintel.
It was a tree trunk about as thick as his thigh and as long as his arm. He saw that it was rotten with damp, and it would have collapsed soon if the straps had not gone first. So he needed another lintel.
There was a hidden place in the house, a hole in the ground with a wooden lid, covered with a layer of earth, underneath the hide that served as a floor covering. He lifted all the layers and took out a flint axe. Then he hid the hole again.
He searched the territory around the pit and eventually found a young tree of about the right size. Chopping it down and cutting the trunk to length with his flint axe took him the rest of the morning, and he had to sharpen the edge of his axe several times.
