It had been summer when I arrived, and I had slept on a pile of hay beneath the shelf where the water buckets were kept. When the nights grew colder, the overseer told me I was to sleep in the same place, though he knew it was exposed to every current of air from above and below, a place where it was impossible to stay warm.
“The better to keep her wakeful,” the overseer laughed to his cronies. Since the Frossian knew well I was always wakeful from first light until the night bell, expecting me to remain wakeful through the night was mere persecution.
Deen-agern said so. “Mere persecution, Mar.”
“What’s mere about persecution, Deen? If you live under it, it’s not mere, believe me.”
“Well,” the older woman huffed, “we all live under it. All us Ghoss.”
“They don’t treat you like this, and I’m not Ghoss.” By this time, I spoke in the language of the Ghoss, not fluently, but understandably.
“The overseers think you are.”
“Well, they’re wrong, and so are you.”
The Ghoss had been right, however, about the enmity of the Frossian herdsman. He remained implacably hostile. He began by stealing my clothes, piece by piece, until I had only one set of trousers and shirt to cover me. In the summer, it didn’t matter, but now that it was winter, the absence of cover was long torture through every night. The Frossians didn’t like the cold. According to the Ghoss, the Frossians preferred warm planets with high heat and humidity. In summertime, there were often only a few guards left on the place; their overlords were somewhere wet, basking in the sun.
The first wintry night below the bucket shelf, I stayed awake while cold breezes caressed my backside through the cracks and another ice-wind hand played its fingers over the rest of me. My second night, I dreamed of fire. Fire on hearths, fire in forges with hammers ringing, bonfire on the heath with people dancing, fire on eastern mountains glowing against the clouds in a false dawn more feverish than rosy. Fire anywhere, anytime, so long as it was warm.
During the day that followed, I decided to weave a thick blanket for myself from discarded rags, all wound about with tail wool from the umoxen themselves, tail wool I gathered from hedges and fences about the place. I would have to hide it somehow, so the overseer didn’t take it. If I had been Ghoss, the overlords would have been more cautious with me, but evidently they knew I was not, even though I looked just like them. No true Ghoss would have been ordered to sleep below the bucket shelf, so someone, or some set of someones, obviously regarded me as neither one thing nor the other. I myself had heard the least overlord, him of the twisty mouth, with nasty words dropping from it like spit, describing me:
“She’s an abomination, a Mar. The frumdalt want to get rid of Mar. We should get rid of it now.”
“Merely an aberration,” the middle overlord had replied on hearing this muck. “We haven’t enough bodies to do the work, surely not enough to go about killing this one and that one until nearer their time. We can get rid of it later, but not now. It still has work years in it.”
The word the least overlord had used, frumdalt, was unfamiliar to me. Fruma was the name of the carrion birds who frequented the river bottom. Dalt was one word used for a hilltop or tower. I asked the Ghoss.
“Frumdalt?” said Rei-agern. “I think it means ‘god,’ or perhaps something else to do with their religion, but we don’t pay attention to their religion.”
“A frumdalt might be something on high that eats dead things,” I suggested.
“Ah,” said Rei-agern with a puzzled look. “On Cantardene they have a god called Eater of the Dead.”
Next night I lay down on my bucket shelf, curled into a tight ball, waiting for the herdsman to make his last inspection, which he did, coming in to poke me in the process, to be sure I wasn’t asleep. Then, he went off to his warm bed in the snug quarters in the loft, leaving me to stand shivering by the shelf, pulling my scant wrappings around me. I dozed, fretfully, coming fully awake to find the little brown umox lying next to me, warm as a little furnace.
“Don’t,” I told it, looking into its eyes, deep and dark as those forest pools I had dreamed of as a child. “The herdsman will take it out on you. He wants me to suffer here. He mustn’t see you here, he might do something dreadful to you.”
The little one went back to the other umoxen where they lay tightly together in deep bedding, covered with their great, fluffy tails. It took a lot of cold to chill even one umox, much less a plether. I sat shivering as I heard the little one talking to the others, knowing its voice, slightly higher than the big ones, slightly sweeter.
“Mar-mar,” said a large umox, one or several of them. “Come here.”
“I’m dreaming,” I thought to myself. “I’ve been frozen under the damned shelf and now I’m dreaming.”
“Here,” said a deeper voice, joined by several others to make a low, harmonic sound in my head, as though great chimes were ringing there. “Here, young one.”
I rose like a puppet and staggered toward the plether bedded in the hay. As I came near, one shifted, then another, letting me fumble my way to the center of the plether, where a nest of hay was waiting, already warmed by the huge body that had lain there. “No need to go to the cold far,” whispered the voices. “Warm is here. Lay self down…”
Which I did, though it was more a stumble-flop than a graceful recline. The warm tails of half a dozen umoxen moved slightly to cover me from head to toe, leaving only
