The Wild Girls Read Online Free Page B

Nata, and old Hehum, but she loved no one as she loved Mal. Mal was all she had left of her old life, and she loved in her all that she had lost for her. Perhaps Mal had always been the only thing she had: her sister, her child, her charge, her soul.
    She knew now that most of her people had not been killed, that her father and the rest of them were no doubt following their annual round across the plains and hills and waterlands; but she never seriously thought of trying to escape and find them. Mal had been taken, she had followed Mal. There was no going back. And as Bidh had said to them, it was a big, rich life here.
    She did not think of the grandmothers and grandfathers lying slaughtered, or Dua’s Daughter who had been beheaded. She had seen all that yet not seen it; it was her sister she had seen. Her father and the others would have buried all those people and sung the songs for them. They were here no longer. They were going on the bright roads and the dark roads of the sky, dancing in the bright hut-circles up there.
    She did not hate Bela ten Belen for leading the raid, killing Dua’s Daughter, stealing her and Mal and the others. Men did that, nomads as well as City men. They raided, killed people, took food, took slaves. That was the way men were. It would be as stupid to hate them for it as to love them for it.
    But there was one thing that should not have been, that should not be and yet continued endlessly to be, the small thing, the nothing that when she remembered it made the rest, all the bigness and richness of life, shrink up into the shriveled meat of a bad walnut, the yellow smear of a crushed fly.
    It was at night that she knew it, she and Mal, in their soft bed with cobweb sheets, in the safe darkness of the warm, high-walled house: Mal’s indrawn breath, the cold chill down her own arms, do you hear it?
    They clung together, listening, hearing.
    Then in the morning Mal would be heavy-eyed and listless, and if Modh tried to make her talk or play she would begin to cry, and Modh would sit down at last and hold her and cry with her, endless, useless, dry, silent weeping. There was nothing they could do. The baby followed them because she did not know whom else to follow.
    Neither of them spoke of this to anyone in the household. It had nothing to do with these women. It was theirs. Their ghost.
    Sometimes Modh would sit up in the dark and whisper aloud, “Hush, Groda! Hush, be still!” And there might be silence for a while. But the thin wailing would begin again.
    Modh had not seen Vui since they came to the City. Vui belonged to the Hans, but she had not been treated as Modh and Mal had. Dos ten Han bargained for a pretty girl from a Root wife-broker, and Vui was one of the slaves he bartered for that wife. If she was still alive, she did not live where Modh could reach her or hear of her. Seen from the hills, as she had seen it that one time, the City did not look very big in the great slant and distance of the fields and meadows and forests stretching on to the west; but if you lived in it, it was as endless as the plains. You could be lost in it. Vui was lost in it.
    Modh was late coming to womanhood, by City standards: fourteen. Hehum and Tudju held the ceremony for her in the worship-room of the house, a full day of rituals and singing. She was given new clothes. When it was over Bidh came to the yellow curtain of the hanan, called to her, and put into her hands a little deerskin pouch, crudely stitched.
    She looked at it puzzled. Bidh said, “You know, in the village, a girl’s uncle gives her a delu,” and turned away. She caught his hand and thanked him, touched, half-remembering the custom and fully knowing the risk he had run in making his gift. Dirt people were forbidden to do any sewing. Sewing was a Root prerogative. A slave found with a needle and thread could have a hand cut off. Like his sister Nata, Bidh was warm-hearted. Both Modh and Mal had called him Uncle for years