and in the house consecrated to the ceremony;
in the evening they ate a ritual meal in silence; then they were led off in pairs by masked and silent ritualists. Many of them kept their masks on, hiding their fear and modesty in that sacred anonymity.
Because Other Sky people have sex only with Original and Buried Cable people and they were the only ones of those lineages in the group, lyan lyan and Havzhiva had known they must be paired. They had recognised each other as soon as the dancing began- When they were left alone in the consecrated room, they took off their masks at once. Their eyes met. They looked away.
They had been kept apart most of the time for the past couple of years, and completely apart for the last months. Havzhiva had begun to get his growth, and was nearly as tall as she was now.
Each saw a stranger. Decorous and serious, they
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approached each other, each thinking, 'Let's get it over with.' So they touched, and that god entered them, becoming them; the god for whom they were the doorway; the meaning for which they were the word. It was an awkward god at first, clumsy, but became an increasingly happy one.
When they left the consecrated house the next day, they both went to lyan lyan's house. 'Havzhiva will live here,' lyan lyan said, as a woman has a right to say. Everybody in her family made him welcome and none of them seemed surprised.
When he went to get his clothes from his grandmother's house, nobody there seemed surprised, everybody congratulated him, an old woman cousin from Etsahin made some embarrassing jokes, and his father said, 'You are a man of this house now;
come back for dinner.'
So he slept with lyan lyan at her house, ate breakfast there, ate dinner at his house, kept his daily clothes at her house, kept his dance clothes at his house, and went on with his education, which now had mostly to do with rug-weaving on the power broadlooms and with the nature of the cosmos. He and lyan lyan both played on the adult soccer team.
He began to see more of his mother, because when he was seventeen she asked him if he wanted to learn Sun-stuff with her, the rites and protocols of trade, arranging fair exchange with farmers of Stse and bargaining with other pueblos of the lineages and with foreigners. The rituals were learned by rote, the protocols were learned by practice-Havzhiva went with his mother to the market, to outlying farms, and across the bay to the mainland
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pueblos. He had been getting restless with weaving, which filled his mind with patterns that left no room outside themselves. The travel was welcome, the work was interesting, and he admired Tovo's authority, wit, and tact. Listening to her and a group of old merchants and Sun people maneuvering around a deal was an education in itself. She did not push him; he played a very minor role in these negotiations. Training in complicated business such as Sun-stuff took years, and there were other, older people in training before him. But she was satisfied with him. 'You have a knack for persuading,' she told him one afternoon as they were sailing home across the golden water, watching the roofs of Stse solidify out of mist and sunset light. 'You could inherit the Sun, if you wanted to.'
Do I want to? he thought. There was no response in him but a sense of darkening or softening, which he could not interpret. He knew he liked the work. Its patterns were not closed. It took him out of Stse, among strangers, and he liked that. It gave him something to do which he didn't know how to do, and he liked that.
'The woman who used to live with your father is coming for a visit,' Tovo said.
Havzhiva pondered. Granite had never married.
The women who had borne the children Granite
sired both lived in Stse and always had. He asked nothing, a polite silence being the adult way of signifying that one doesn't understand.
'They were young. No child came,' his mother said. 'She went away after that. She became a historian.'
'Ah,' Havzhiva said in pure, blank surprise.
A Man of the People
He had never heard of anybody who became a historian. It had never occurred to him that a person could become one, any more than a person could become a Stse- You were born what you were. You were what you were born.
The quality of his polite silence was desperately intense, and Tovo certainly was not unaware of it. Part of her tact as a teacher was knowing when a question needed an answer. She said nothing.
As their sail slackened and the boat slid in toward the pier built on the ancient bridge foundations, he asked, 'Is the historian Buried Cable or
Original?'
'Buried Cable,' his mother said. 'Oh, how stiff I am! Boats are such stiff creatures!' The woman who had sailed them across, a fenywoman of the Grass lineage, rolled her eyes, but said nothing in defense of her sweet, supple little boat.
'A relative of yours is coming?' Havzhiva said to lyan lyan that night.
'Oh, yes, she templed in.' lyan lyan meant a message had been received in the information center of Stse and transmitted to the recorder in her household. 'She used to live in your house, my mother said. Who did you see in Etsahin today?'
'Just some Sun people. Your relative is a historian?'
'Crazy people,' lyan lyan said with indifference, and came to sit naked on naked Havzhiva and massage his back.
The historian arrived, a little short thin woman
of fifty or so called Mezha. By the time Havzhiva met her she was wearing Stse clothing and eating breakfast with everybody else. She had bright eyes
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and was cheerful but not talkative. Nothing about her showed that she had broken the social contract, done things no woman does, ignored her lineage, become another kind of being. For all he knew she was married to the father of her children, and wove at a loom, and castrated animals. But nobody shunned her, and after breakfast the old people of the household took her off for a returning-traveler ceremony, just as if she were still one of them.
He kept wondering about her, wondering what she had done. He asked lyan lyan questions about her till lyan lyan snapped at him, 'I don't know what she does, I don't know what she thinks. Historians are crazy. Ask her yourself!'
When Havzhiva realised that he was afraid to do so, for no reason, he understood that he was in the presence of a god who was requiring something of him. He went up to one of the sitting holes, rock cairns on the heights above the town. Below him the black tile roofs and white walls of Stse nestled under the bluffs, and the irrigation tanks shone silver among fields and orchards. Beyond the tilled land stretched the long sea marshes. He spent a day sitting in silence, looking out to sea and into his soul. He came back down to his own house and slept there. When he turned up for breakfast at lyan lyan's house she looked at him and said nothing.
'I was fasting,' he said.
She shrugged a Mttle. 'So eat,' she said, sitting down by him. After breakfast she left for work. He did not, though he was expected at the looms.
'Mother of All Children,' he said to the historian, giving her the most respectful title a man of one
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lineage can give a woman of another, 'there are things I do not know, which you know.'
'What I know I will teach you with pleasure,' she said, as ready with the formula as if she had lived here all her life. She then smiled and forestalled his next oblique question. 'What was given me I give,' she said, meaning there was no question of payment or obligation. 'Come on, let's go to the plaza.'
Everybody goes to the plaza in Stse to talk, and sits on the steps or around the fountain or on hot days under the arcades, and watches other people come and go and sit and talk. It was perhaps a little more public than
