Page 92 of Circle of Days
“You said no. I was distraught.”
He laughed. “Well, you can be my girlfriend now, if you like.”
“Yes, please.”
She closed her eyes.
After a while he said musingly: “You’re so confident.”
“Mm.”
A few moments later she fell asleep.
I’m going to have a baby,” said Pia.
“A baby,” said Han.
It was daybreak, and she could see his face. He was happy: a child was what he wanted. She kissed him.
Her pregnancy was hardly surprising. They had made love here, in the thicket, almost every night for a quarter of a year. The grassy scent of yarrow would mean sex to Pia for the rest of her life.
The woodlanders, back from their summer migration, had looked at them suspiciously at first, but quickly realized they were harmless and left them alone.
Stam had become suspicious. Twice he had woken in the night and seen that Pia was not at home. The first time he had been ill with a fever, and by morning he was not sure what he had seen and what he had dreamed. But the second occasion had been different. Frantic barking from the dog had alerted him and Yana, and in the moonlight they had seen a family of wild boars in the field, a mother and three young, eating the crop. It was dangerous toget close to boars, so Stam had shot arrows at them and Yana had thrown stones, making them run away, the mother with two arrows sticking in her back. One of the young had been left behind, fatally wounded by an arrow, and when Pia got home Yana was cooking it.
And Stam wanted to know where Pia had been.
She had adopted Han’s suggestion and said she had a lover. Now he was desperate to know who it was. “Ask your friends,” Pia had said. “One of them knows.” That made him even more curious and steered him away from the truth.
All the same she was anxious. Stam was dumb but his father, Troon, was not. She feared that the secret might come out somehow. And the baby just underlined the precariousness of her position.
She said to Han: “It’s time for us to make some decisions.”
“I’ll become a farmer,” Han said immediately. “I’m big and strong, they’ll be glad to have me. I don’t know anything about farming, but I’ll be happy to learn.”
Pia was dead against this. “Three snags with that,” she said. She had foreseen this conversation and she knew what she wanted to say. “First, you would hate being a farmer. Men, women, and children work from sunrise to sunset every day of the year.”
“No rest days?”
“No. Herders who join the farmer community can’t get used to it and get a reputation for being lazy and unreliable.”
“I’m not lazy.”
“Not by herder standards, no. By farmer standards you do virtually no work.”
“Hmm.”
“Second, women are property here. They have to do what mentell them. If we had a daughter, that’s how she would be treated. You’re not used to that. It would offend you.”
“It does offend me.” Han was looking uneasy.
Pia went on: “But the most important reason is the third. I hate it here. I’m desperate to leave. I want a herder family, with everyone being kind and loving to one another.”
Han frowned, thinking. Pia listened to the morning chatter of the birds. Eventually Han said: “That settles it. We’ll have to go to Riverbend.”
Pia shook her head. “They would try to kidnap me, as they did Mo.”
Han looked angry. “They’d have to kill me first.”
