“Songfather, this woman brings you evening food,” whined son’s daughter, my half sister, Hazini.
“Songfather, this woman brings you water for your mouth,” hummed daughter’s daughter, Shalumn. My friend Shalumn.
She remained my friend. Even afterward, she talked to me sometimes. Or, she talked to the wall, knowing I was where I could hear her. So I learned how things were, how things happened, how she read Hallach’s face and his movements, seeing what he really felt written upon him.
So, she said, Hallach turned and held out his hands. Shalumn poured the water into them, murmuring rapidly as she did so. “Blessings upon the pattern of water, water that fecundates, that cleanses, that cools, that blesses, that heals, that becometh a tool in the dedicated hands of the Dinadhi.”
He sipped from his hands, rinsing away the words of song so they would not be contaminated by mere food, then dried his hands upon the folds of his cotton inner robe. He approved of Shalumn’s abbreviated litany. If Hazini had poured the water, she would have chattered out the entire water-blessing catalog rather than ending expeditiously with the all-purpose phrase becometh a tool in the hands…. And while Hazini had gone on and on, Hallach songfather would have had to stand hungry, which would not have bothered Hazini, who was bony as a lightning-killed tree and ate only so much as a small picky bird. Hazini did not understand hunger.
Hallach took the bowl Hazini offered, casting his eyes upward. There was light upon the height, still time to eat outside before real darkness came. He sat down, his back politely turned so the girls would not offend custom by catching sight of his food, an important courtesy in times of famine, though one not rigorously observed during the present days. There was no current shortage of food in Cochim-Mahn.
The women had raided the last of their winter stores to provide stew for tonight, stew full of the flavors of smoked meat and dried roots. A bright stripe of flavor among all those dark stripes of fungus! He scooped a mouthful onto a round of hearth-bread and let the softened meat pleasure his tongue.
“Songfather?” Hazini said in a self-important voice. “This woman has learned the rest of the rain names and would recite them for songfather.”
“Umpn,” Hallach said around a mouthful. “Not tonight, Hazini. It is not a proper time.”
She made a disrespectful sound behind him, almost a rudeness.
He put down his food and turned to look at her. Her lips were compressed into that pinched line Hallach found so annoying. Just like Chahdzi’s second wife, Zinisi. Pinch-pinch, whine-whine, never satisfied with anything. Pretty, though. The way she turned her head and looked at men under her lashes, with that half smile, letting that whiny little voice come out like a seeking tendril to wind around their loins. Songfather remembered how Zinisi had wooed poor Chadzhi, the poor widower. “Chaa-dzi. Can liddle Zinisi have the pretty feathers, Chaa-dzi?” Poor Chahdzi hadn’t been able to resist her. Now look at him! With only Saluez to listen to him, only Saluez to…
Hallach felt sudden fury. He fixed Hazini with a song-father glare. “Girl, do not make that tightness with your mouth. You cannot recite sacred names from a mouth like that.” Rage filled him. He dared not stop to question why. “Also, your voice is too whiny. It must be full and generous if you are to pray to Daylight Woman and Weaving Woman and Great Lightning Wielder.”
Shalumn’s mouth puckered as though she might laugh, but as Hallach turned toward her she bowed hastily, hiding her face. Hazini, shocked into movement, turned and ran back toward the great dark slab of the hive.
Hallach, ignoring Shalumn for the moment, turned back to his food. He did not ask himself where this rage had come from. He knew. Saluez. Feelings he was supposed to have put behind him. Affections a songfather might not indulge in. His anger was unworthy of him, but nonetheless, he felt no remorse at chiding Hazini. The Gracious One had decreed this conflict from the time they had come to Dinadh. Age must discipline youth. Men must teach women the proper way of things. Some must lose that others may gain. Cold against heat, dry against wet, life against death, every quality must strain to contain its opposite, the whole requiring songfathers to sing the pattern into balance.
Though sometimes it was hard to accept…what happened.
Hallach shifted uncomfortably. It wasn’t wise to think about that either. Such thinking smacked of doubt, and of course he didn’t doubt. She’d be fine. She was his… his son’s daughter. Of course she’d be fine.
No longer at all hungry, he set the half-emptied bowl aside.
Shalumn saw all this and drew her own conclusions. She moved slightly toward him, her hesitancy reminding him she had not been dismissed. Hallach held one finger upright, stopping her where she stood.
“Saluez,” he said, a mere whisper. It would not have been proper for a songfather to ask about a mere girl, but he had not asked. He had merely said a name.
Shalumn had seen Masanees return. Shalumn had seen her leave again, with two of the sisterhood. Then, in the dusk, they had returned again, a cluster of women who had carried someone, someone alive, perhaps, or dead, perhaps, but who had in either case gone into a side entrance to the hive and down into a shadowy place below, a place Shalumn could not go, where even songfathers could not go.
No one had mentioned this to songfather, and he could not ask. He had not asked,
