“No doubt, only half-full,” Sullen said.
“We’ll fare better with the rest of the tradesmen clans,” Reddish said.
True to her words, at the Carpenter roundhouse, Old Carpenter’s mate held out not one but two rounds of hard cheese, proving her clan’s generosity and wealth, underscoring the success they had trading the wheels they crafted. The maidens went next to the Shepherd roundhouse and were given two flagons of wheaten beer when one was sufficient; surely Old Shepherd’s mate had witnessed the generosity of the Carpenters. Brimming now with expectation, the maidens moved on to the Hunters, an even more prosperous clan headed by Reddish’s father, Old Hunter, and grown in number in recent years to twenty-two. What might Old Hunter’s mate provide to outdo the Shepherds’ two flagons? The maidens departed the Hunter roundhouse, weighted with two more flagons of beer. This, when Young Hunter had already speared the boar the maidens would eat. As they approached their final stop, Reddish settled a flagon in the crook of her arm and said, “Wait and see. We’ll get at least the same from the Smiths.”
As far back as Devout could remember, when stores outlasted Fallow, they sat on the Smiths’ burdened shelves. The maidens called out, and Young Smith’s mother opened the door, her eyes roving from one scrubbed face to the next. It would not matter that the girls were lit only by the moon and the blazing fire within. Devout’s foulness, her dishevelment, would be apparent to Young Smith’s mother, that is if she so much as bothered glancing at the hand maidens.
Young Smith appeared behind his mother in the doorway. Devout gripped the neck of her cape, though it was not possible to hold it more snugly closed than it was. It pleased him, that infinitesimal shift of her hand, the whitening knuckles, and his face broke into a wide smile. His mother turned to him, turned back to the maidens, and said, “A boy besotted with a shabby lot of maidens begging at the door.”
Her eyes were on Reddish as she spoke, and it was plain that his mother was not wise to her son’s gift, that so far as she was concerned, Young Smith would have Reddish as his mate. His mother had concocted the insult so that Reddish would know to come into the household with her head bowed.
The maiden smiled slyly, as though certain that her life would unfold much as she had planned.
Devout swallowed hard at the thought of the woman’s eyes on the glinting Mother Earth’s cross. Even if Devout were washed, even if her hair gleamed with chamomile, to Young Smith’s mother she would always be a hand. The woman’s blindness caused something to harden in Devout’s chest, and any ambivalence about wanting the lost amulet at her throat collapsed. She imagined herself alongside Young Smith, cape pushed back from her shoulders, amulet exposed as he told his mother that he had made his choice. Devout’s hair shone in the scene. Her cheeks gleamed. Her dress was not creased or stained with sweat.
When finally Young Smith’s mother said, “Welcome, Mother Earth. Abide with us,” the words were flat, and it sent a chill along Devout’s spine that anyone should call so indifferently to Mother Earth. The woman handed over two flagons of wheaten beer, also a round of hard cheese, a sack of hazelnuts, and a vessel of honey, then drew back from the doorway, and the maidens entered, Devout with her head bowed under the weight of Young Smith’s gaze.
Young Hunter’s boar hung over the firepit, sizzling and crackling and dripping grease into the flames. Smoke curled upward and disappeared through the roof’s thatch, a sweet, smoldering reminder of the feast to come.
Though they were meant to parade solemnly, Devout looked up from the hands clasped together at her waist. She took in the great rectangles of woven wool partitioning the alcoves where Young Smith and his kin slept from the bulk of the space. Each alcove contained a sleeping pallet thick with rushes and heaped furs, and neatly enclosed by four planks. She counted ten alcoves, observed that not a single partition was the yellow gray of undyed wool but rather the blue of woad, the green of nettle, the purple of elderberry, the yellow of goldenrod. It made her think of her own home as wearisome even though the wattle-and-daub wall was well patched and the floor spread with a thick covering of new rushes. In the dim light, she noticed the hoard of swords, one for each clansman, leaning against the wall; the trio of low wooden tables; the dozen low benches ringing the firepit, each draped in furs; the shelves laden with bowls and plates and every kind of serving vessel and more flagons than even so large a clan could use.
She looked at her clasped hands, tried to focus on Mother Earth, who would come freely that very night to rid the clearing of fleas and rats and wheat-felling moths and those dark fairies—imps too small and too fast to be seen—who stole milk from ewes’ teats, who snatched sprouting seed from blessed women’s wombs. But she could not shut her mind to the infrequency with which Young Smith’s mother trudged beyond the clearing to collect wood, certainly not to the base of Edge to draw water at the spring. Nor did she hunch for long hours over the quern stones milling wheat. She spent her days with the matriarchs of the other tradesmen clans, women with sons apprenticed to their fathers from whom they would inherit their trades. She spun wool to yarn and idly chatted about the superiority of rowan over meadowsweet in creating black dye, the usefulness of urine in making a color fast.
Was Young Smith eyeing Devout in the procession just now, seeking a wink of silver at the front opening of her cape? She would not be found out, not just yet. All the girls wore their skin capes as they paraded sunwise, their arms heavy with bread and cheese and wheaten beer. Still the moment would come when maidens slid capes from shoulders. She picked at the dirt beneath her fingernails, wondered if she might abandon the procession, slip away, and then later quietly rejoin the maidens. Might she return to her roundhouse, rub a handful of crushed sweet violet into her skin, masking her ripeness? She could tidy her hair. She did not want Young Smith to find her repellent as they stood face-to-face, could not bear his disapproval, though it would surely come. It was a slight like no other, her carelessness with his gift. Yet still she wanted his good opinion. She wanted the unassuming boy, who had made her an amulet and who had flagons to spare and rafters hung with every color, to favor her still. She wanted Reddish to know.
Such thoughts! And at the very moment when Mother Earth should be uppermost in Devout’s mind. Her sack, at home on her pallet, brimmed with sweet violet, the full haul, even the third that belonged to Mother Earth. This, on the Feast of Purification, the very night she would come, the very day Devout had been so heedless as to lose the cross that paid homage to her. And yet she paraded sunwise, mind ablaze rather than steadfast on Mother Earth.
Her eyes lit on Mother Earth’s cross hanging from the rafters, same as it did in each roundhouse at Black Lake. Twelve rushes woven together formed the central square and four extending arms of the cross, a configuration meant to remind the bog dwellers of the goddess’s limbs reaching outward to all the world. Devout went to her knees beneath it, touched her lips, the covering of new rushes spread over the earthen floor. She closed her eyes to pottery vessels and woven partitions, opened her mind to Mother Earth, to ewes lambing well, to the blush of green soon to unfurl. Devout’s chest expanded, became a waiting cave. She breathed deeply, filling that hollow place with a spreading warmth, not unlike hot soup during the coldest, hungriest days of Fallow. Mother Earth had come. They called, and she had come to Devout.