“It doesn’t take big beams,” Jep commented. “Haven’t you ever been in the Bondru Dharm temple? Didn’t you ever notice the ceiling?”
Saturday had been there and had not noticed the ceiling. With an extended finger, Jeopardy drew in the dust two concentric circles, one about a fourth the diameter of the other. He pointed at the center circle and invited consideration.
“That’s the middle, where the grills are, where the God goes, right?”
The other children, who gathered at any excuse for a break, agreed that the God went in the middle.
Jeopardy drew a series of radiating lines from the small circle to the larger one encompassing it. “Those are the stone arches,” he said. “There’s twenty-seven of them in this temple. So, all we need is stuff long enough to go crosswise from one arch to the next. That’s about six feet at the outside, and it’s hardly anything in the middle where they get skinny. In the Bondru Dharm temple, the roof’s made of wolf-cedar trunks laid up tight to each other.”
“How come you noticed that?” Saturday was moved to ask.
Jeopardy started to answer, then stopped, aware of some vacancy inside himself where the answer should have been. He should have had a reason, more than mere curiosity, for what he had actually done several days before, which had included climbing a set of footholes along an arch at the Bondru temple and cutting a sample of the ceiling, which he had then taken to his mother for identification. He really couldn’t say why he had done that. “I just did,” he replied lamely. “I just did.”
“I guess we could cut wolf-cedar with a lase-knife,” one of the Tillans remarked in his usual imperturbable manner. All the Tillans looked and sounded alike. “I’ve got one.”
Several others of the children also had access to tools suitable for the cutting of wolf-cedar, including the other Tillan boy and the two Quillow boys, Deal and Willum R., as well as their girl cousins, Sabby and Gotoit. While the main body of their colleagues continued repairing the mosaics, these larger and stronger young people began exploring the wolf-cedar forest and marking slender trees from which to build a roof. They returned from the forest at dusk, singing, Saturday’s voice darting and hovering above the youthful chorus like a prophet bird.
• Maire Girat was drawn to the porch of her sisterhouse by the sound of Saturday’s singing. The child’s voice was unmistakable, unselfconscious as rain. Maire’s earliest memories were of similar music. Not herself singing, but voices singing, marvelous voices in her head, solo and chorus, making wondrous melodies inside herself. Saturday’s voice was like one of those she had heard within her when she had been a child.
When Maire was only four or five, she had wakened early one morning, before the rest of the family were up, and had seen the curtain moving in a light breeze with a sunbeam shining through it, had felt a song welling up in her throat, and had let it spin out, into the room, into the moving light.
Mam had come running, and Dad, and the four older brothers and sisters, all to stand with puzzled faces around the cot where she’d lain, still a little drowsy, letting her mouth make music. After that, there had been songs for everything. Gradually, the inner music had moved into the background, returning in its full glory only at that borderland between sleep and wakening or when she dreamed at night of great choruses crying ecstatically in the spaces between worlds.
They had lived just outside Scaery in the county of Bight, where the eastern shore and the northern shore of the peninsula of Voorstod came together to make a knobby heel thrust against the gray seas of Ahabar. Here the fields were pillowy and green, and the fogs gathered thick, like the wings of angels, soft and protective. Her brothers and sisters were all much older, so her playmates were the Gharm children. They were smaller than she, and darker, and they had quick, clever hands. They had a private language from some former time, too, which they spoke among themselves, but only when they forgot, for they were forbidden to speak that language. When they were caught speaking that language, the Voorstod pastors came with their whips and punished them, so Maire was told.
Morning times, Maire went out into the mists, around the corner of the house to the quarters out back where the Gharm lived. Fess and Bel were there, the daughters of the Manone house-Gharm, and also Bitty, a son of a Manone field-Gharm.
“What’ll we play?” asked Maire.
“Adventures,” suggested Bitty. “We’ll adventure to a far place and slay a monster.”
“I get to be the monster,” said Fess. Fess was the biggest of the Gharm children, almost as big as Maire. Fess liked to be the monster, or the great ally-gaggle in the swamp, or the giant who had caught them all in her teapot.
So Fess was the monster, and the monster caught Maire and held her fast until Bitty came, just in time, and rescued her.
Fess’s mam, Lilla, had been Maire’s nurse-Gharm. When Maire was a baby, in nappies, Fess’s mam had taken care of her. Sometimes when Maire was unhappy, she still went to Lilla to hold on to her until things were right again.
Sometimes the children went out in the fields to play hide-and-seek. The Gharm were very clever at hiding, because they were so small. It was hard to find them, and when they were found, they collapsed in giggles, scarcely able to walk.
“I love you, Fess,” said Maire Manone. “I love you, Bel.”
Fess hugged her, and then Bel, but neither of them said anything.
“I love Fess and Bel,” Maire told her mam.
Mam became suddenly very quiet.
“What’s their last names, Mam?” Maire asked, only to
