“It’s cold!” she complained, tucking her hair under her earflaps and tying them under her chin. “We’ve done nothing but burn stove wood for months, and it’s supposed to be spring!”
“It’s just a little delayed, is all We still have plenty of our wood allotment left.”
“For another month, maybe,” she remarked in a dismal tone.
“That’ll be enough,” he said comfortingly. “Relax, Stavia.”
They strode along a street lined with house walls, broken only by high kitchen windows—whose evening candles served to light the street after dusk—and double doorways with wooden grills. There were no windows at all in the higher stories, no openings from which heat could be lost. Inside the houses, grilled openings in the upper floors let heat rise from stoves in the lower rooms. All the windows were of double glass. There were insulated shutters to close across them in the coldest weather. Each pair of houses shared a common wall between them to further reduce the heat loss, and the courtyards shared a common wall as well.
Some of the doors stood open and one could look along the sides of the houses to the courts where reflecting pools gleamed in summer, where vegetable gardens burgeoned and potted flowers glowed with fresh color. Now they looked desolate, littered with winter’s windblown trash.
“I thought we’d stop at the garden-craft shop,” Joshua told her. “We haven’t planned a thing for the courtyard yet this spring. We can start some things in the kitchen now. We need vegetable seeds, and flowers. Wella’s shop always has flower sets….”
“I’d like some lobelia,” Stavia said. “And nasturtiums, trailing out of those baskets along the back wall.”
“Morgot said she wanted a pot of pink geraniums. She said Jemina Birdsdaughter would give us some cuttings.”
“Put that on the other side, where it won’t clash,” Stavia sighed. The vegetable garden was always given over to what they could eat or preserve and it tended to be pretty much the same, year after year, but Morgot and Stavia usually planned the courtyard flowerpots to look interesting and gay. This year Morgot had been preoccupied with Myra’s baby and other things.
“Joshua, is Mother worried about something?”
“Not more than usual, why?”
“She’s seemed… different.”
He paused before answering. “She’s upset about Myra. Barten is the last person we would have wanted Myra to become infatuated with. However, I’ve told Morgot just what I’ve told you. Give the girl six months and see if she doesn’t settle down. Some of her age mates have had babies; they’ll all get together and share experiences, and before you know it, she’ll be a dignified matron.”
“Myra?”
“It could happen,” he shrugged, then turned very pale and clutched at his head as though it hurt him. “Damn.”
“Joshua! What’s the matter?”
He laughed unconvincingly. “I should never tell a lie. Tell a lie and it makes your head ache.”
“You mean Myra….”
“I think…,” he gasped. “I think that twenty years from now there’s very little chance that Myra will be any different from the way she is right now,” he said, straightening up and massaging the skin over his eyes.
“Then Mother’s right. Myra ought to live somewhere else.”
“Your mother is very impatient. She always wants everything to have happened yesterday.”
“Myra was too young to have a baby.”
“Women have been having babies at Myra’s age for most of human history,” he said, dropping his hand and wiggling his eyebrows as though to test for pain. “You’re right, though. Myra was too young, but Barten went after her like a coyote after a lamb…. I do have this feeling that someone put him up to it. He was very serious about Tally, and then suddenly…”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, Stavvy, I’m all right. Just a twinge I get sometimes when I think too much about something.”
The street curved and climbed as it followed the gentle upsweep of the city wall, made up of the back walls of houses and joined to the public thoroughfare by twisting flights of narrow stairs. Behind them, down the hill and through the western wall, the Processional Road ran out to the shore where the fishing boats bobbed in rocking clusters along zigzagging piers. On the first day of summer the entire populace, led by the Council, paraded down from the hill to the shore to beg the kindly regard of the Lady on the honest effort of the fisherwomen and farmers and herdswomen. Shepherds led rams with ribbons on their horns and the farmers had bells on their wagons.
From the top of the hill the straight, downhill street that ran to the plaza and the garrison went off to their left. Straight ahead were the market streets, a tangle of narrow ways crowning the height, crowded with booths and shops and with awning-covered stands in summer. Through the marketplace ran the Itinerants Road, which led down past the Spinners and Weavers streets and through the eastern gate to the huddled itinerants’ quarters outside the wall. There were only a few dozen people living in the intinerants’ town now: a score of oldsters existing on the charity of the Lady, part of an acrobats’ troupe, staying near Marthatown so the girls could attend Women’s Country schools, a wagoner or two making a lengthy stop at the wheelwright’s or the farrier’s, and a water-witcher hired to locate a well for the billy-goat keeper who lived in an isolated valley five miles east of town. It was said that the servitor who kept the billy goats smelled as bad as his charges. In any case, the distance from Marthatown had been carefully calculated to avoid smelling either, even when the wind was from the east. Itinerants’ town was always fascinating, though off limits to young girls who might, it was thought, be tempted by the romance of travel to leave the city and become mere wanderers.
To the right ran the Farm Road, winding down past grain and wood and wool warehouses to farmers’ housing and the
