'Good Lord,' she murmured, utterly bewildered. 'How could that be called merciful? How was he supposed to die? No, don't tell me that.' She lapsed into silence.
'Tess, he had to die. He had broken the gods' law. Otherwise his-crime, is that the word? — would have made the whole tribe suffer.''
'What did he do?'
Yuri looked shamed, and he hesitated, as if he was afraid to confess the magnitude of the man's wrongdoing. 'He shot a whistler.''
'A whistler?'
'It's a bird.' Wrung from him, the admission seemed both anguished and, to Tess, utterly incongruous.
'A bird.' What kind of people had she fallen in with?
'He shouldn't have been out hunting with women's weapons anyway, and he was three times a fool to shoot into a thicket. He should have flushed out the game.' Yuri shrugged. 'But it's done now. The gods must have guided his hand. It was a just execution.'
He spoke so matter-of-factly that Tess was appalled, and not a little frightened. 'Yuri. You'll tell me, won't you, if I'm about to do something that would offend, that would break your gods' law?'
Now he looked shocked. 'You don't think we punish children? Or those who act in ignorance? We're not savages!'
'No, no, of course not. I'm sorry. I didn't mean-' But Yuri could not maintain outrage for longer than a moment. He grinned at her consternation. 'Well,' said Tess, 'I appreciate you coming to find me. Did Bakhtiian send you?'
'Ilya? Why would he send me? No, Sonia did.' Abruptly he blushed. 'She thought, if you were upset, that you might want-a man's comfort.' The constrained tone of his voice left no question as to what Sonia meant by a man's comfort.
For an instant, unable to look at Yuri, Tess was too embarrassed to speak. But then, glancing up at him, she realized that Yuri was far more embarrassed than she was. Their gazes met. Yuri covered his mouth with his hand, and they both laughed.
When Tess tentatively laid a hand on his arm, they sobered. 'I don't-I don't need a lover, Yuri. Not right now. But a brother…' Had Charles received her computer slate already? Only to send a message to Jeds and find that she had never arrived? 'I could use a brother, right now.'
He smiled, looking both relieved and honestly pleased, and grasped her hand with his. 'Then I will be your brother, Tess. I would far rather be your brother, because a woman's lovers come and go, but her brother she keeps always.' He studied her a moment, serious. 'But you'd better wash your face. I'll take you to the stream.'
They walked back through camp. Yuri led them wide around his family's cluster of tents, where Tess could see a little gathering: Bakhtiian, standing as if he was on trial in front of a half circle of older women and men. On the far side of camp, they followed a stream past a low rise. The stream slipped down a smooth ladder of rocks and broadened into a pool. Yuri left her at the top of the rise, and Tess picked her way down the slope alone. Sonia, standing with a group of young women, saw her and waved.
'Tess.' She came to greet her. 'Perhaps my brother does not interest you.' About twenty young women gathered around. They were not shy at all; they pointed to Tess's clothing and even touched her brown hair, exclaiming over its color-theirs was either blonde or black, with no shade in between.
Under their scrutiny, Tess was amazed she could keep her composure. 'No. No, I like him very much. But I am not looking for a lover.'
'Ah.' Sonia shooed the other women away and immediately began to undress. 'Your heart has been broken. I can see it in your face.'' She stripped down to a thin white shift. Around them, the other young women, naked now, plunged gasping and laughing into the pool. 'A man has treated you badly. Here, let me help you take those off.'
Tess was not entirely sure she wanted to strip naked in what was after all no more than an early spring day, however fine, and swim in a stream that looked bitterly cold, but after the execution, she did not want to refuse. 'Yes,' she agreed, to both statements.
'What fine undergarments you wear.' Sonia examined Tess's underclothes without the least sign of selfconsciousness. 'Perhaps you can show us how to fashion some. Here, Elena, Marya-' Several of them splashed right out of the pool to exclaim over this new discovery, and when they had tired of that, they bullied Tess into stripping completely and coming back into the water with them.
It was like ice. But the company, and the energy with which they all splashed about, soon made her forget her goose bumps. Only Sonia spoke Rhuian; the others addressed her cheerfully in their own language and she quickly learned names and a few words. About half the women had scars on their left cheeks.
'So you are not married?' Sonia asked. 'No? How old are you? Twenty-three? A widow, perhaps?'
'No. I… I was to be married, but…'
'Ah. This is the man who has broken your heart. Well.' Sonia dismissed the betrayer with a blithe wave of one hand, and a retaliatory splash in the direction of the gray-eyed, blonde girl she called Elena. 'In Jeds the customs are different. I did not like them. We have many young men here who are polite as well as handsome.'
Tess could not help but laugh. 'When I'm ready for a lover, I'll ask your help in picking one out.'
'I sent you my brother. But perhaps-' She laughed. Her laugh gave color to the air and sparked her eyes and wrinkled up her nose. 'When I know you better, Tess, then I can help you choose. But I think it is time you got a husband, for I see that you have no-what is it to say in Rhuian? — none of the Mother's threads on your belly. As old as you are. I am twenty-four, and I have three children. You must not wait too long. Everyone knows the story of Agrafena's aunt.'
The story of Agrafena's aunt was not, it transpired, about anyone living in the tribe, but an old tale. Giggling and shivering, everyone hurried out of the pool, dried off, and dressed. They sat farther up on the slope, the pool dappled by shadows below, an untidy collection of bodies sprawled in the sun with Sonia and Tess at their center. By turns two or three of the young women took clothing to a stretch of flat stones below the pool and beat them clean in the water. As Sonia told the story, it took a fair while to tell, alternately in Rhuian and in khush. It was about a woman who waited so long to have children that when at last she married and wanted them, she was barren-having offended the spirits of earth and water by her stubbornness-and so had to send her niece on a long journey in order to find the holy woman who could restore her to favor.
Poor Agrafena had not yet found the holy woman when a little girl raced down from the direction of the camp and delivered a message to the group. Sonia rose and reached down to help Tess up. 'The men are coming.'
Slinging the damp clothes over their shoulders, the women walked in a straggling group back to camp. A path had been beaten down through the coarse grass, winding around the base of the hills, and they followed this. Elena, at the head of the line, whistled suddenly. The whole group quieted. A young man, then another, and another, came around a rise-the men going to the pool. All the girls straightened their shoulders, swaying their hips as the men did when they were wearing their sabers, and when the first of them passed the first young man, the entire group broke into song. The men, all young, stared silently at the ground; many were grinning. One had flushed a desperate, flaming red; another hid his eyes with his hands. Toward the end of the line, a young man with reddish- blond hair looked up as he passed Sonia and Tess, and winked. He had piercingly blue eyes. Sonia gasped, laughing, and looked back at Tess.
'Did you see that? Did you? Trust Kirill!' The last of the men passed them. All the women were laughing now, breaking off their song. 'Did you see?' Sonia addressed the whole group. 'I want you all to know-' first in khush, then in Rhuian '-I want you all to know. He winked.'
'Who?' called Elena from the front.
'Who do you think?'
A chorus, up and down the line, answered her. 'Kirill!'
'You see.' Sonia turned back to Tess again. 'He's terribly forward. He has no shame at all.'
'I'm not sure I understand what happened.'
Sonia swung her wet burden out in front of her and, with a quick turn of the wrist, made it snap in the air. Faint drops of water sprayed. 'We sang a man's song at them, which reminds them of the order of things. If a woman sings a man's song, it makes fun of men, you see.'
Tess did not see, but she was saved from having to answer by their arrival in camp. Whatever other
