The Wild Girls Read Online Free

were 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. The grandmother Hehum Belenda was grave and stern-looking, but quite soon she took Mal onto her lap to play with Nata’s baby boy. Tudju, the daughter of the house, 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 chose 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. 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, even if he already had a wife he had to marry a slave woman. 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 two kinds of person, Tullu and slaves. Here there were three kinds; and 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. Even though a Dirt woman who married a Crown might be treated almost like a Crown herself—like the Nata and Hehum—still, they were Dirt. And there were the other people, the Roots.
    Modh knew little about the Roots. There was nobody like them in her village. She asked Nata about them and observed what she could from the seclusion of the hanan. Root people were rich. They 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.
    Crown men had to 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 had died in a foray years ago.
    Root women had to marry Dirt men. There was a Root woman who wanted to buy Bidh and marry him. Alo and Bela told him they would sell him or keep him, as he chose. He had not decided yet.
    Root people owned slaves and crops, but they owned no land, no houses. All real property belonged