Page 5 of Circle of Days
“Yes. She’s really good with disputes. She gets people calmed down and thinking logically.”
“My mother was like that. She could get my father to be reasonable, sometimes.”
“You told me she passed away when you were ten midsummers old.”
“Yes. She conceived a baby late in life, and she and the baby died.”
“You must miss her.”
“I can’t tell you how much. Before she died, my father had nothing to do with us three boys. Maybe he was scared to pick up a baby, or something. He never touched us, never even talked to us. Then when Mamma died, he suddenly had to look after us. I think he hated taking care of children, and hated us for making him do it.”
Neen said quietly: “That’s awful.”
“He still never touches us—except to punish us.”
“He hits you?”
“Yes. And my brothers.”
“Didn’t your mother have any kinfolk who could have protected you?”
That was a big part of the problem, Seft knew. A woman’s parents, siblings, and cousins were supposed to take care of her children if she died. But his mother had had no living relatives. “No,” he said, “my mother had no kin.”
“Why don’t you just leave your father?”
“I will, one day, soon. But I have to figure out how I can make a living alone. It takes a long time to dig a pit, and I’d starve to death before I came up with any flint to trade.”
“Why don’t you just collect flints from streams and fields?”
“That’s a different kind of flint. Those nodules have hidden flaws that cause them to break often, either while they’re being shaped or when they’re in use as tools. We mine the floorstone, which doesn’t break. It can be used to make the big axe-heads people need for chopping down trees.”
“How do you do that? Dig a pit?”
Seft sat down, and Neen did the same. He patted the grass beside him. “The earth here is not very deep. When we dig down we soon come to a white rock called chalk. We dig up the chalk with pickaxes made from the antlers of the red deer.”
“It sounds like hard work.”
“Everything to do with flints is hard. We smear clay on the palms of our hands so they don’t blister. Then we dig down through the chalk—it can take weeks—and sometimes, eventually, we come to a layer of floorstone.”
“But sometimes you don’t?”
“Yes.”
“So you’ve done all that for nothing.”
“And we have to start again somewhere else and dig a new pit.”
“I never even thought about how people dig for flint.”
Seft could have told her more, but he did not want to talk about mining. He said: “What was your father like?” She had told him before that her father was dead.
“He was lovely—handsome and kind and clever. But he wasn’t cautious, and he was trampled by a maddened cow.”
“Are cows dangerous?” Seft did not tell Neen that he was scared of them.
“They can be dangerous, especially when they have young. It’s best to be careful around them. But my Dadda just wasn’t the careful type.”
Seft did not know what to say.
