There was grain growing along the Road. There were rocks about. Children of all ages found Tim Hann strange and interesting, and some would do what he suggested.
He showed the younger children how to gather grain. The older helped him carry rocks. Upthrusting banyan knees had flaked a great flat shelf of lava from the Road. Four were able to move that. It became the base of Tim Hann's oven.
His first experiments came out scorched, but two days after his sibs left him, Tim Hann served bread at dinner.
The morning of the third day- The first of the board riders took their boards from where they were propped against the long wall of the House of Healing. Tim Hann trailed the others, watching them, trying to balance the board on his shoulder as they did.
The board was a few inches shorter than Tim himself, carved from wood that grew in the swamp. It was heavy and awkward. Playful gusts of wind kept swinging it about.
Far up the Road toward Spiral Town, there was dust.
Jemmy stopped and squinted. A plume of dust, far off. He thought he knew what it meant.
Wend Bednacourt carried her board like a wand. She wasn't stronger
than he was, but she had the balance. The other riders were running, but Wend trailed back a little. She said, 'My daughters have taken an interest in you, Tim.'
'I know. But all the others-' It had taken Jemmy two days to notice that the Bednacourt women were the only women who would talk to him. In Spiral Town that was normal, but here? 'Is it something I'm doing?'
'Tim, do they say marry in Spiral Town?'
'Yes. Of course.'
Wend shied back a bit to avoid the wild swinging of his board. 'How's it done?'
'There's a ceremony. You invite-'
'Tim, how do you decide?'
This was no casual conversation. Jemmy set his board down and sat on it, thinking it through.
'We kids all pretty much know each other, time the girls stop talking to us. If I'm interested in a girl-' He decided not to mention Tunia Judda. '-why, maybe I've got a friend who dated her, or knows her, or a friend of a friend.' He'd learned quite a lot about Tunia and the Judda family. 'Or my sister or maybe a cousin probably knows her, can tell me-'
'You don't talk to her?'
'Her. No, not until we're dating. That's-' He'd never thought of it this way. '-like a contract, like you're buying seed corn or a rooster. Like we buy each other on spec.'
The older woman also sat on her board. 'So, two nights ago, Loria spoke to you-'
He could feel himself blushing. 'She did.'
'What did she say?'
'She told you?'
'We talked,' said Wend.
He couldn't lie. He wouldn't know what to hide. He said, 'Loria came with me back to the House of Healing. She brought a blanket. I rolled up in mine. I was tired. There wasn't any light, of course, so I couldn't see her face and she couldn't see mine. Talking's easier that way somehow. I just thought we'd talk until I fell asleep.
'She said, 'Do you want to make babies with me?''
'What did you take that to mean?'
He looked at Loria's mother. 'It means rub up against. F-fuck. How could it mean anything else?'
'Yes. Tim, we say that when we want to talk about marrying. Raising children. How to take care of them, how many you can afford-'
'No, look, she touched me. I would have, but I was a little slow, maybe. She was a little distance away and I couldn't see her face. I didn't see it coming. 'Do you want to make babies with me?' and then a hand came out of the dark and had my knee. I pulled, and she came to me, and we did it.'
The other board riders were all out on the water. Leaving them alone. Pointedly?
Wend Bednacourt was smiling, but not at him. 'And last night?'
'I couldn't find Loria. All day.'
'She went with some others, spice hunting.'
'Avoiding me? I told her it was my first time. Wend, there are things we're not born knowing. It's dark in the House of Healing. I hit her jaw with my elbow before I got the knack.'-of moving slowly, touching everywhere. Darkness had its good points.
'She wanted to let you talk to the rest of us. What happened last night?'
'Tarzana. She came back to the House of Healing with me after dinner. I didn't know what she had in mind, so I didn't push. I was hoping she'd tell me why Loria, if she didn't want to see me. Why. But I didn't know how to ask.
'She said, 'Tim, do you want children?'
'I reached out and got her hand and she said, 'No, Tim,' and I stopped.' His memory raced on ahead. Tarzana's voice in the dark: You do want children, don't you?
He'd laughed and said, What, from way over here?
Aren't you interested?
I was, he said lightly, hiding disappointment. It was as if Tarzana blew hot and then cold, offered and then pulled back. Loria had done that too, then relented. He'd have been angry if a Spiral girl did that. Here, he might be missing some signal, some custom.
Loria says she asked you, but you didn't answer, Tarzana said.
She asked, he told Tarzana smugly. I think I answered- He snapped back to the present. 'We weren't talking about the same thing at all, were we?'
'No,' said Wend.
'Uh-huh.' How could he not be flattered? And horrified! These waters were deeper than he'd expected. 'Loria knows I didn't know anything. She just. .
'Went ahead with it,' Wend said.
'Why didn't she just leave? When she knew I had the wrong idea.'
Her mother's lips twitched upward. 'Maybe she liked the wrong idea. A girl might. She's seen every Twerdahi boy and man every day of her life. She could wait for a caravan, but that's so...' Wend smiled. 'Everyone does that. You're different. You can do things we can't. Not just the bicycle, Tim, that only came with you. But the oven.'
Are all Twerdahl women like this? He chose to ask instead, 'So why didn't Loria tell Tarzana?'
'Why don't I ask her that?'
He couldn't stop grinning. 'Big joke. On her sister. So why didn't Tarzana leave?'
'Big joke?'
On Loria? On Tim Hann? 'Wend, where does that put me? I can't be dating both of your daughters.' A weird impulse made him add, 'Can I?'
'No, but you don't have to make up your mind right away.'
'Good,' he said. 'Wonderful,' meaning it. Then he said, 'Wait. Yes, I do. Is that what I think it is?'
The dust plume had settled some while they talked, but it was still there.
Wend said, 'They'll he here late tomorrow. Speckles are cheap after they leave Spiral Town, if they've got any left. We usually wait. Unless we're out.'
'I never told you why I left Spiral Town.'
'Not just following Cavorite?'
Jemmy told her.
Caravan. Merchants' guns. Fedrick blowing a watermelon to bits. Eight years later: caravan. Fedrick again, Fedrick's gun, Fedrick dying on the floor.
Tim Hann was the mask that hid a merchant-killer. Nobody in Twerdahl Town knew that, but they all knew he was a stranger come straight down the Road ahead of the caravan. Anyone in Twerdahl Town might blurt that out to any merchant.
He didn't tell her his name.
She listened and nodded. He was expecting her to shrink from him, but she didn't.
