Page 52 of Circle of Days
That means I belong to him, she thought, and he belongs to me.
And he wants everyone to know it.
The drum sounded so slowly that Seft found himself waiting, almost anxiously, for the next beat. This was not how the Spring Rite normally began. He stood in the crowd as the dawn light filled the sky. The spectators were quiet. Neen and the two older children stood beside him. He was carrying the baby, who was asleep.
As he waited he had a chance to admire his work. He had rebuilt the Monument in wood using the peg-and-hole joints he had devised ten midsummers ago. With the crossbars firmly attached to the uprights, the big circle was neater and steadier. It would survive very severe weather, and if the farmers attacked it again—which he asked the gods to forbid—it would prove much more difficult to destroy. Though not impossible, he thought; that would require a stone Monument.
The song began when the priestesses were still outside, so that the music seemed eerily to come from nowhere. It was a sad tune that spoke of regret and loss. It made Seft look to make sure his children were all right.
When the priestesses appeared, they were led by Soo and Joia, who were side by side. The song followed the familiar pattern of a line sung by one person and answered by the whole choir.
After Soo and Joia came six priestesses carrying, at shoulder level, a wickerwork bier on which rested the body of Inka. She was naked except for some foliage, leafy branches interspersed with wildflowers. Her skin seemed white in the early light. She looked soft and vulnerable, as if still alive, except for the cruel gash across her throat.
Each of the priestesses following the bier had painted a white line across her own throat, probably with chalk. People in the crowd gasped to see the repeated vivid reminder of how Inka had died. Seft heard Neen mutter a shocked oath. He noticed that the two older children, standing on either side of Neen, were both holding hands with their mother. He began to wonder if he and Neen had been wrong to bring the children to this.
At the back of the procession, two novices held blazing torches.
The song was unbearably melancholy. Joia’s voice soared as Seft had never heard it before, seeming to fill the earth circle with sound, and the priestesses responded in unison like mournful thunder. As the pale cold body was slowly carried around, Seft heard people in the audience begin to cry.
The sun started to rise as they completed their circle. Now Seft saw that a funeral pyre had been built in the inner oval.People craned their necks to see between the posts. It was a low bed of dry leaves and twigs with logs on top: it would catch alight immediately and burn hot.
The priestesses laid the bier gently on top of the pyre.
Soo, the High Priestess, bent and picked up a jar previously hidden behind a post. Tipping it, she poured an oil that Seft guessed was birch tar over the body of Inka, holding the jar upside down until it was empty. Then she nodded at the novices with the torches.
The two girls came forward. One was weeping uncontrollably and barely able to stand. They went to the two ends of the pyre, knelt down, and held the torches to the dry tinder. The wood blazed up. The priestesses knelt and sang a song of the sun, a ball that itself seemed aflame as it rose on the eastern horizon.
Many watchers turned away as the body of Inka blackened in the heat and began to be consumed. Her soul rose in smoke, drifted and thinned in the air, and then was no more.
On the following night, under cover of darkness, Robbo and his family, carrying a few possessions, quietly crept out of Riverbend onto the Great Plain, and turned south.
The East River was still flowing, but it was shallow. Seft studied it with Tem. Seft had been head of the cleverhands since Dallo died, and Tem was his right-hand man.
When Tem had accompanied Seft to Riverbend, all those years ago, he had intended to go back to work for his uncle, Wun, in the flint mine. Then he had fallen in love with Joia’s friend Vee. Now they were a couple with a house in Riverbend and two children.
Seft and Tem were the first people to be consulted about any problem of carpentry or landscape. They knew little about living things, the ailments of cattle or trees or human beings; but they had a reputation for clever solutions to problems of inanimate objects such as houses and axes and rafts.
They worked together comfortably, and the two families often spent the evenings together. Seft sometimes thought that Tem was what a brother was supposed to be like.
The communal life of the herders suited them well. It was a collective effort, where everyone worked together and got fed and shared the rewards, if there were any—just like a flint mine.
Today they were south of Riverbend by a distance that could be walked in the time it took for a pot to boil. Here livestock often came to drink. But in the drought, as the beasts had encroached on the riverbed in reaching for a shrinking stream of water, they had trodden down the banks, and instead of a river there was a field of mud. The continuation of the river downstream was no more than a trickle.
Tem said: “We have to rebuild the banks.”
Seft nodded. “We need to drive stakes into the ground along the paths of the old banks, then secure the stakes with rocks on the inside and earth on the outside. If a few bushes grow in the earth, so much the better—their roots will strengthen the new banks.”
“The new waterway needs to be narrower than the old, so that the water runs high enough for the beasts to drink without stepping in,” said Tem.
“We can judge by the natural banks upstream.”
Seft had anticipated something like this, and had brought a dozen cleverhands with him. Now he set them to cutting stakes, hammering them into the mud, and piling stones and earth on either side.
With enough people the work went quickly, but still it would take a few days. Soon everyone was covered in mud, but no one minded. The spring sunshine kept them warm, and they would wash in the river at the end of the day.
Seft was marking the line of the new bank on the far side when a herder man passing by stopped to speak to him. “Someone was looking for you, Seft,” he said. “I didn’t know where you were.”
“Who was it?”
