"All right. But I still think—" He said no more; their hands were busy with thongs and lacings. "I wonder how old this custom is—"
Mali, when she came out, bit her lip to keep from laughing. At least, he hoped that was suppressed laughter on her face. He felt a fool enough, strutting around like a young bull first meeting heifers, and nearly as big. She wore the maiden's vest of soft doeskin embroidered with flowers, laced tightly behind, where she could not reach it, a tradition as old as his apron. The men began to stamp the beat, their deep voices echoing off the barton walls as they chanted. Gird stamped as hard, feeling his face redden, hating it—but the old rhythm began to move him.
The steps were only partly traditional: part was each new-married man's invention. The jiggling thing on the apron was ridiculous, yes—but it was not
merely
ridiculous. Gird strutted the length of the barton, whirled, skipped a step, backed—and closed on Mali. Her eyes were bright, twinkling with laughter; she glanced down, pretended shock, looked skyward and reeled backwards, to catch herself with a clutch at Gird's shoulder. The watchers howled. She snatched her hand back, a maiden caught in indiscretion, and turned away. Gird circled her, faced her again, put his hands behind his back and waggled his hips. For an instant she grinned delightedly, then covered her face with her hands, brushed past him close enough for her skirts to catch on the apron, and then leaped like a startled deer.
Clearly, the dance was not embarrassing Mali—she played into the jokes as heartily as most men. Gird took heart, then. They could make their families laugh—their private joke, if their red faces came from exertion, and not from the shouts and laughter of others. They spun it out, circling and dodging between others and the tables, playing parts they only half understood. When they were both dripping sweat, Gird gave her a little nod, and his next rush carried them both into the cowbyre, where a stall had been laid with fresh straw for this occasion.
Here she had to unlace his apron, and he to unlace the maiden's vest she wore, to replace it with the matron's looser vest, his wedding present to her. Her fingers on his legs, his waist, brushed tantalizingly; the apron would be hardly more obvious than his response if she didn't hurry. He fumbled with the vest lacings.
"Did they have to lace it so tightly?"
"That was my sister," said Mali, breathless. "She wanted to see me faint, I think. Don't break the laces, remember." If he broke the laces, they'd have to give her family a sheep. He grunted and worked carefully. Finally the last knot came loose, and Mali drew a deep breath. "Ahh. Better." She worked her arms out of the vest carefully, and turned to him.
Gird handed her the matron's vest his mother and sisters had made. "You'd best get this on, if you don't want to spend the rest of the feast in here."
Mali chuckled as she looked him up and down. "Eager, are you?" She twitched her shoulders, putting the vest on, and Gird felt his pulse quicken. "But we'd better hang these out, or they'll come in to help."
"I'll do it," said Gird, The apron and vest had to be returned to each family, and the first step was to hang them on the appropriate pegs outside the cowbyre. A roar greeted him as he came out and put them up. Two of his friends were ready to grab him and keep him out, but he was quicker and managed to dart back into the stall with Mali.
Someone outside began another song, in which the women joined as well. Mali hummed the melody, and sat swaying a little back and forth. Gird stared at her. He wanted her—wanted her even more than on a hillside in the dark—but on the other side of the wall the whole village was waiting for this. It was one thing to be roused by someone else's marriage rites, he was discovering, and quite another to fulfill all the rituals with everyone watching him. Or not exactly watching, but not indifferent, either.
Then Mali turned away, and burrowed into the straw. Gird watched, bemused. There was nothing in this stall; he'd cleaned it himself, that morning, and laid the clean straw carefully. Mali grunted, and came up with a stoppered jug and something wrapped in a cloth.
"You are a witch." Gird pulled the stopper out when Mali passed him the jug. He sniffed. "What's this?"
"My aunt's favorite. And I'm not a witch, but you don't know all the rituals. Groom prepares the stall, but the bride bribes her new mother-in-law to supply it."
Gird sipped cautiously; a fiery liquid ran down his throat and made him blink. "Lady's blessing—that would bring—"
"Trouble if the lords knew of it." Mali took a swig, and opened her eyes. "My. No wonder she wouldn't let me taste it before." She unwrapped the cloth, and Gird saw a half-loaf of bread and some cheese. They ate quietly for the rest of that song, and the beginning of the next. Then either Mali's aunt's potion or Mali herself—warm and spicesmelling beside him—drove out his lingering embarrassment. He rolled toward her on the clean straw, and she embraced him. It was as satisfying as the first time, even when he roused to the ring of faces peering down at them.
"You went to sleep," Amis said, grinning. "We could hear you snore all through the singing."
Gird looked past them at the opening; it was nearly dark. Mali, her skirts back down around her knees, started rebraiding her hair. When he looked at her, she winked, and wrinkled her nose. "Well," he said, "did you eat all the food, or can we have some?"
They had to lead more dancing, that night, in the final Weaving that took them in and out of every cottage in the village, and around all three wells. Then at last it was over: all the food eaten, all the songs sung, all the dances danced, and a few hours to sleep (this time only sleep) until dawn brought work and their first day as a married pair.
Despite his mother's approval, Gird had worried about Mali's quick tongue in the house, when she had to share that cramped kitchen with two other women and the children. His mother's health had begun to fail; she was querulous sometimes, and Arin's wife could never weave to suit her. But Mali left the loom alone, and took over all the kitchen work. The other two had no more scouring and scrubbing to do, no more washing of pots or kneading of dough. Gird had never known how much difference a parrion for cooking could make. All women cooked, and many men; food was food. Now he realized that food differed as much as weaving. Mali's bread was lighter, her stews more savory, her porridge smooth, neither lumpy nor thin. She gathered herbs in the wood, and hung them to dry; they gave the cottage a different, sharper smell. She even knew how to make cheese.
With no kitchen work to do, Gird's mother could concentrate on weaving, and let Arin's wife do all the carding and spinning. They traded Mali's cheese for extra wool; his mother sent three furls to the trading fair in the next village, which brought them precious coppers, almost as much as the marriage fee even that first year. Gird's mother had always liked weaving better than anything else. Now she produced furl after furl, trading to the dyer for skeins of colored yarn, rich golds and reds and dark green. With those, she could weave patterned cloth that brought a higher price, combining the barley pattern Mali's mother had taught her with color.
The other cheesemaker in the village was getting old, and people began to bring Mali milk. She traded herbs to the older cheese-maker for one of her tubs, and made more cheese. For every five, a hand, she could keep one. Her cheese was not as good as some, she admitted—she would not try to sell it at a tradefair—but in the village it brought them what they needed to feed the extra mouths.
Gird's first child was born just after Midwinter. Mali had gathered the herbs she said she needed back in the summer, and as usual the village grannies came to help with the birthing. Gird had not realized how much his status would improve, first as a married man, and then as a father. Now all the grown men spoke to him by his own name. In the rest breaks they would wait for him before starting a conversation. Teris, who had been married more than a year, now treated him as an equal, an old friend. For a few days he resisted this, remembering Teris's accusations. One bleak day when they were both in the cowbyre, Mali wormed the old quarrel out of him, and counseled forgiveness.
"You can't change the past, love. If he's a good friend now, why not?"
Gird found that his old grudge looked very different when he got it out and tried to explain it to Mali. "You make everything so simple," he complained.
"It's not simple, but it's over. He erred, back then—did you never err?"
"You know I did, but—"
"Well, then, let be. He blamed you unfairly; if you refuse his friendship now, you'll be blaming unfairly."
"Are you ever angry?" He looked down at her; she had the baby at her breast, and he could smell her milk and the baby's scent overlaying her own.
Mali knotted her brows, thinking. "Angry . . . yes. When things happen, not later. If I'd been here, and seen someone hurting you, then I'd have been angry. Otherwise—'tis like a bit of old milk in the pan that sours the new. All life would sour if we held anger. So I yell, and throw things, and scour it all away, right then, so the next day won't sour."
"But when things aren't
right
—"
Mali shifted the baby to the other breast; he noticed how the baby's sucking had changed the shape of her nipple before she pulled her vest across to cover it. "Is this about Teris, or something else?"
Gird chuckled; he wasn't sure why. "Something you said that first night. And talking with the men in the village council. Things have changed since my father was a young man, and more since his father's day. And not for the better."
"Taxes?" Taxes were up again, the field-fee higher for the third year in a row.
"Not only that." Gird rolled on his back and tried to think. "The law itself has changed. Old Keris was telling us yesterday about the way it was back then. No guards here, for one thing, and fewer everywhere. No lockups. No stocks, no whippings."
"Old men always think their youth was golden," said Mali, stroking the baby's back.
"He saw the lords' magic himself, he said." Gird looked for a reaction to that and got it; Mali stared at him, shocked that he would speak of it openly. "He said they used to show it all the time, use it for aid in drought and storm."
"What was it like?" Her voice was barely above a whisper.
"He saw them call rain, he said. Bring clouds out of a clear sky, gather them up as a shearer gathers the tags of fleece, and then call rain down." Gird cleared his throat and looked around. No one else was in hearing. "He said, too, that the old lords would warm the heart to see, not like our count. That everyone wanted to please them."
"Old men's tales," said Mali, but without conviction.
That year the spring rains came timely, and a rich harvest rewarded their labors. Arin's wife had another baby in the fall; by Midwinter, Mali told him she was pregnant again. The cottage seemed to bulge at the seams already . . .
The dun cow lowed, her hoarse voice as loud as if she'd been in the cottage. No, she seemed to cry. No, no, no . . . o . . . o. Gird palmed his burning eyes and wanted to groan a refrain to it. No. He was not ready to get up and help that cow; he wanted to lie where he was and sleep. But the cow was not giving up; with the stubborn insistence of a deprived bovine, she let out another long plaint. Most cows tried to edge furtively into the woods when about to calve, but this one wanted someone there . . . yet refused to do it where it was convenient. Gird rolled on his back, grunting at the ache in his shoulders from plowing, and slowly sat up. He heard his father's harsh breathing, the catch in every inhalation. One of the children snored: probably Rahel. The cow called again, this time answered by the two in the cowbyre. Gird stifled an oath, and sat up, feeling around on the floor for his boots.
Outside, the predawn light in the sky only made the barton itself darker. Gird carried a splinter of oak from the fire, its tip bright orange, almost flaming in the breeze of his movement. Tucked in his tunic was the scrap of candle he'd light if he needed it when the time came: no use to waste candle if daylight came before the crisis. The dun cow had stayed out of the byre last night, as she did every time she calved. She would be in the thicket near the creek, if he was lucky. Outside the barton, the lower meadow looked silver-gray under a sky sheened with dawn. Heavy spring dew wet his boots through before he came to the thicket, guided more by the cow's voice than his sight, though it grew lighter moment by moment.
In among the gnarled and twisted scrub, though, he could barely see, and staggered more than once over root or stone. Stupid cow, he thought, as he had thought for three years now. Staying out in the cold and dark, hiding yourself in the thicket, when you know you'll want my help. There she was, a large hump of shadow among lighter, flickering shadows. Down already, grunting and panting, her tail thrown back out of her way. He pulled out the candle, found a smooth stone to set it on, and with a wisp of dry grass and breath, blew the splinter into a flame. The cow's big eyes reflected it, making three flames where there had been one. For a moment his mind wandered: did the cow see a reflection of flame in his eyes? Was that why she looked afraid? He lit the candle, picked it up, and walked closer, crooning to the nervous cow.
Have a heifer
, he begged silently.
Have a heifer this time.
A contraction moved across her girth; a bulge extruded below her tail. A pearly blot inside . . . a hoof. That was good, unless the other leg was back. He couldn't quite see. Another contraction, and he could: two hoofs and a nose. A normal delivery, so far, with the shiny black nose already free of the sack. Now it was light enough to see the shapes he needed to see. He tipped the candle, quenching it against the damp grass with a hiss, and tucked it back into his tunic. His feet were cold. The cow groaned again, a softer sound but eloquent of struggle. Gird stroked her flank, and began the calving chant.
"So, cow, gentle cow, quiet cow, so . . . Birth calf, milk calf, little calf grow . . . so cow, kind cow, good cow, so . . . Life come, growth come . . ."