22

Kontas was a good boy but absent-minded for all his eleven years. When Kirya had done the morning milking, she had to call for him. He was playing dice with his cousins Stanyo and Danya.

“You should be helping with the chores, not playing. You two boys take the herd off away from the tents to graze.” He grinned at her, never one to take a scolding to heart; she gave him an affectionate clout on the head. “Pest! Go on! Danya, go help Feder with the turning. I’ll send Asya over to help you.”

Danya ran off. The boys chivvied the bleating sheep and goats farther into the grass. Four of the six dray beasts followed with placid amiability, while Nimwit and None-in-the-Skull kept ripping up the grass where they stood, oblivious of the movement around them.

She hooked the stool under her arm. With the leather sack sloshing with warm milk over a shoulder, she trudged through the scatter of tents that marked their tribe. Her cousin Estifio sat cross-legged on a threadbare rug outside his wife’s tent, embroidering the sleeve of a man’s shirt. He grinned as she paused to admire the intricate line of vines wound around dainty flowers.

“A wedding shirt,” she said. “For Mari?”

“I was thinking for trade. But I’m down to my last needle.”

They looked at each other. Thread they could spin, and plants collect for dye, but they had no blacksmith nor any tribe obliged to offer them the services of a blacksmith.

“Uncle Olig can make you a bone needle,” she said.

He shrugged, his way of passing off disappointment. “His bone needles are very fine, but not fine enough for this delicate work.”

“If you finish it before the confluence ends, you can trade for needles and the best dyestuffs.”

“Yes, I suppose.”

Estifio’s wife Yara, together with Uliya Tomanyi, knelt on a mat, pressing felt into the distinctive linked-circles pattern passed down through their tribe for generations. They were talking intently, heads bent together. Yara’s son slept in a sling on her back. Uliya’s two little girls tied knots beside Asya, Uncle Olig’s granddaughter, who was concentrating so hard that she was biting her tongue. Kirya sighed. They were good girls, very serious, but she could not imagine how Uliya would ever get husbands for her girls, or what Asya could expect as the last descendant of her tent, with no aunts or mother to bargain for her.

Yara and Uliya glanced up to see her, and started as if they’d been caught whispering secrets. What were they plotting?

With a grimace, she hitched the heavy sack a little higher, walking on. Uncle Olig sat on a rug under the awning of what had been his sister’s tent, she who had been cousin once removed to Kirya’s aunt and mother. Wood shavings littered the rug as he planed the inside length of a shaft of wood.

“Kiri, that gelding kicked Manig again.”

“I don’t know why Manig keeps going near him. Is he hurt?”