With his first shot at the wheeled target, the odds offered against him dropped still further. The others held on, and Salvador staged a valiant rally that put him three points up on Clara, but eyes were on the trio of Dian, Laine, and Isaac. Wagers climbed—three cords of split wood, two Meijing silvers, half interest in a pony. The target seemed to pull Isaac’s arrows like a magnet, whereas Dian had to work for her bull’s-eyes; Laine began to fall behind, point by point, through inexperience and nerves and an unfortunate breath of wind. At the end of the round Isaac, cool, unblistered, and three points ahead, turned to Dian and half-shouted at her over the tumult of a hundred and more adult voices:
“Are you pleased with your competition, then?”
It was all very well and good to provide a thrill for the onlookers, but this was getting serious. To lose to a man, even Isaac, was unthinkable. Dian pushed her way to the trough to wash her face and have another drink, then went back across the green to see to her horse for the third round. There was a crowd gathered under a tree, at the center of which was Jeri, leg in plaster and a slate propped on her other knee.
“What’s up?” Dian asked, craning to see the slate.
“Bets,” she said succinctly, and wrote down the name of the woman in front of her, followed by the words 3x4 ft. window.
“Oh. What odds?”
“Three to one.”
“What? You really think Isaac—”
“Oh, no,” Jeri said quickly, and tugged on Dian’s arm in order to speak into her ear. “I’m betting on you. I’ve seen Isaac ride.” She shook her head and took the next wager, and Dian walked off grinning to herself.
Jeri, as it turned out, was one of the few who was totally pleased with the final result of the day. Isaac, indeed, was no horseman, and whereas Dian cantered past the target like a centaur, sinking her arrow cleanly into the bull’s-eye all six times, Isaac only made the center once out of three left-hand passes, and on the awkward right-hand tries failed miserably, once nearly missing the edge of the target entirely. Laine caught up with his score on the third pass and surpassed him by the end.
He seemed content with his third place, however, and the only ones who did not call out with full-voiced appreciation were those women—and, most especially, men—who were faced with the sudden improvident debt of pairs of boots, fur coats, bits of their houses, and long-hoarded silver. Isaac surrendered his horse and bow to their owners and walked up to shake hands with the victors.
“Well done, Laine,” he said. “You were absolutely right about the lessons. Next week?”
“As usual,” she said, then laughed and elbowed him in the ribs at the look on Dian’s face before turning aside to talk with Carla and Salvador. Silence fell as Isaac formally took Dian’s hand.
“And you, Dian. I hope you are well pleased?”
“You gave me a run for my money, I’ll give you that.” She hesitated, and then, in public view and with nothing held back, kissed him full on the mouth, to a surge of whistles and hoots.
Later, as they were making their way down the hill to a pre-siesta swim, Dian fell quiet, barely acknowledging the remarks of passersby. Eventually she said to Isaac, “That was very interesting, that was.”
“What? Beating me? Or almost losing?”
“Neither. Or both, I guess—more the reason you lost. You would have won if it hadn’t been for the ride-by. I’m going to have to talk to Judith about giving the boys more riding experience.”
“Oh, look, I only let you win because I knew you’d be such a witch if you lost.”
“What! Double bastard!” she cried, and whacked him smartly on the back of his head. “Let’s see how fast you are on your feet,” and she took off sprinting down the hill to the pond. He glanced around to make sure Teddy was with Susanna and set off after her, to the joy of the dogs giving chase. He hadn’t a hope of catching her, though, and by the time he lumbered up and flung himself into the millpond, she was halfway across, floating nonchalantly on her back.
Twenty minutes later, clean and refreshed, they walked together up to her quarters for a siesta, which, though not precisely restful, was certainly relaxing. When Isaac had fallen asleep, Dian slipped quietly out and went for a round of the sentries. They had drawn lots for the duty, and the losers this year were promised next year free, so there was not too much resentment. She told each of them about the competitions, assured them they’d be relieved by the night sentries in time for dinner, and went back. She was just tying her necktie, a gaudy strip of orange and pink silk from some distant fashion era, when the big bell rang, a thing it usually did only for emergencies. Isaac shot up in bed.
“What was that for?”
Dian reached into the closet and plucked out the frilly gown that was his lot for the night, and tossed it lightly into the air so that it came to rest in a cloud of pink across his head.
“Come along, Miss Isaacs, enough beauty sleep. Time to prettify yourself for the ball.”
The prettification took somewhat longer than Dian had reckoned. They were late for the beginning speeches and missed Judith’s invocation and half of Kirsten’s talk. The acoustics in the big wooden hall were surprisingly good, even without a finished roof, and from her place on the stage Kirsten’s thin voice carried to all corners. As Dian and Isaac came up on the porch, they could hear her clearly through the doors and the open windows.
“. . . a number of bad years, it is true. There were years without babies, years when we had to kill the milk cows for food and gather acorns for our bread. There were years when late frosts took the seeds and early frosts took the crops. One terrible year we had no wine whatsoever, except for medicinal use.” A light wave of laughter flickered through her listeners. “Come to think of it, even that was a blessing in disguise, because the wine tasted so bad nobody would admit to an illness that whole year.” Chuckles rippled through the hall, and the old woman smiled down at them. “We give thanks to God for the fine weather, for the blessings of healthy bodies and strong muscles and clever minds. We give thanks for another year of protection from enemies, from pestilence, from disease. We give thanks for this good land and its riches that give us life.” She held a moment of silence, broken only by baby noises from the back, and then her quavering voice began slowly to sing, to be joined quickly by over two hundred others:
Praise God from whom all blessings flow,
Praise God all creatures here below,
Praise God above, ye heavenly host,
Praise Father, Mother, Holy Ghost, Amen.
Old Kirsten’s face crinkled in a loving smile, touching each person with the love and approval of ages past. “You have worked hard, my children. Tonight you must play hard. You will excuse me if I don’t join in all the dances?”
She moved to leave the stage, and cheers erupted. It took several minutes before Ling, the master of ceremonies, could be heard.
“Just a couple of things,” she shouted, repeating the phrase until relative silence fell. “Thank you. Just a couple of things. Dinner’s nearly ready, and after everyone’s been served we’ll have music and the kids with their readings and this year’s play. After that, it’s dancing ‘til the cows come home, or go out, I suppose. Does the patient first want to work up an appetite? One dance before we eat?”
A roar of approval again smothered her voice but gradually submitted to her raised hand. “One more request, from your medical personnel. Please don’t take off your shoes to dance—we haven’t managed to finish the floors yet, and I for one don’t want to spend the night in the infirmary digging out splinters.” The laughter was lost in hoots of appreciation as the musicians and dance caller climbed up onto the stage and arranged their chairs. The caller would use a megaphone later in the evening, but for now she stood up and bellowed.
“Take your partners for the Virginia reel!”
The “men,” some with carefully painted mustaches and all wearing something resembling a necktie, lined up facing the “women,” who were i
n a variety of flounces and frills. Isaac’s furry, heavily muscled torso strained against a lacy pink maternity negligee, one of the few things Dian could find that he could breathe in without ripping the seams. Susanna had trapped him as he came in the door and attached several pink bows in his beard and hair, and as Dian looked down the line she saw that Judith’s brother, Peter, had a beard carefully plaited and tied in a dozen delicate crimson ribbons, to match the lace on his skirt. Two years before he had also been a “woman” and appeared in a stunning emerald number, but this outfit had obviously come under Susanna’s influence, because she was dressed as his twin. The loud voice from the stage called for the “ladies” to curtsy to their partners, and the lines of dresses bobbed down and up, led by husky Peter’s deep knee dip. Dian was not the only one to collapse onto the floor, holding her sides and risking splinters with the tears running down her face as the caller shouted for order.
The Virginia reel was a rout before it had begun, and in good-natured disgust the caller sent everyone out to the food.
The legs of the trestle tables pressed into the ground under their burden. Juicy roast pig, bloody beef, fried chicken, tamales, crepes, and cheese tarts, three kinds of egg, five vegetables (the ears of corn dripping with butter), eight kinds of salad, and more desserts than even eighteen-year-old Salvador could sample.
Afterward, those who had not cooked did the cleaning up, and Dian, up to her elbows in suds, listened to Ling’s string quartet, the village band, and the smaller school band. She slipped in next to Teddy in time for the last of the recitations, and then came the annual school play, written each year on some classical theme or current event in the life of the village. Two ten-year-olds carried out the title board, turned it around, and Dian sank down slowly into her chair. It read:
THE BONDING OF ISAAC
A COMEDY IN THREE ACTS
The giggles and glances had just begun to subside when Teddy, beginning reader that he was, piped up.
“That’s your name, Daddy!”
Dian glanced at Isaac and saw that he had gone bright red; they did not look at each other until it was over.
A wooden wagon pulled onto the stage, and from it appeared an immensely hairy figure at least eight feet tall (she had seen the children practicing hard with stilts over the last month, but had thought nothing of it) who pounded his chest (to the accompaniment of a drum offstage), flung his immense horse-tail beard over his shoulder, and shouted gruffly at the assembled womenfolk (one of whom appeared to be pregnant with quintuplets), “Take me to your she-der!” In act two he proceeded to eat everything in sight and carry entire (papier-mâché) trees in one hand, followed about by an equally hairy and rather bewildered toddler. (As the child was being led across the stage by his elder sister for the third time, Teddy finally got the joke and tugged at Isaac’s pink skirt with an excited, “Is that me, Daddy? Is that me?”) In the third act, a last-minute addition had the hairy giant splitting three arrows in a bull’s-eye before pounding his chest and carrying off a fainting female with a puzzled but amiable Culum on a rope. Dian and Isaac laughed politely and clapped, and wished fervently for the dancing to begin.
“ON ACCOUNT OF YOU,
THE ISLAND WILL CHANGE THE STYLE OF LIVING IT HAS OBSERVED FOR A VERY LONG TIME.”
NINE
MIDNIGHT CAME, AND WENT. MOUNDS OF BLANKET-DRAPED children lay like so many uneven boulders set down against the walls. The original beer kegs were long gone, the current one was running low, and about an hour ago jugs of a remarkably powerful spirit had begun to circulate. The band had got its second wind a short while before, no small thanks to the jug beneath the fiddler’s chair, and those men and women who were still upright and coordinating were being whipped into a positive frenzy of sweating activity.
It was a polka at the moment, and Dian was steering Isaac through the thinning crowd. The pink ribbons had long since fallen from his hair, the seams of his dress were giving way, and neither of them was entirely sober. It took Dian a moment to grasp that the second, beardless Isaac hanging on her arm was in fact Susanna, urgent and intense. Dian stopped, and the odd trio promptly became the stationary target for careering pairs. She hustled her two partners into a quieter corner.
“What’s the matter, Suze? Is your mother—”
“No, there’s a fight going on outside. I think you should stop it.”
Dian strode out of the Hall with Susanna and Isaac on her heels, in their wake a handful of others who had about reached their fill of the dance. It was immediately apparent what Susanna had meant: under half a dozen lamps hung from a tree, a fight circle had been set up. It held, almost inevitably, Sonja and Laine. Dian pushed her way through the excited onlookers. The fight had obviously been under way for a good few minutes, and although neither of the women was drunk enough to have it affect her coordination, both were sufficiently anesthetized that they had no inclination to pull their punches.
They were using the dowel “knives,” Dian saw, but the dark stain on the tips was not entirely paint, and both women, stripped to the waist, were bruised and bleeding and grinning ferociously at each other in the uneven light.
“All right, that’s enough for tonight,” Dian said firmly. Neither Sonja nor Laine seemed to hear her but continued circling each other until Laine feinted left and then rushed right. Sonja dodged and kicked out, and Laine’s roll was awkward. She staggered to her feet and turned toward Sonja, dowel held out.
“That’s all,” Dian ordered more loudly. Laine’s eyes flicked to her, then back to her opponent.
“Oh, back off, Dian. Harvest Day’s supposed to be fun, isn’t it?” She jabbed at Sonja playfully, a blow that would have ruptured something had it connected. “One day in the year you can enjoy yourself.” Another jab, easily avoided. “Old stick-in-the-mud Dian (jab), let’s-keep-things-tidy Dian (jab), never-take-a-risk Dian (jab).” Her tongue flicked out, savoring the taste of the blood on her split lip, her eyes locked on Sonja’s, and she bared her teeth again. “First time I find me a girl doesn’t mind playing rough, old Mama Dian comes along. ‘Time to put your toys away, children, before you get yourselves dirty (jab).’ Why don’t you just piss off, Dian? Go play with your doggies (jab). Your new pretty boy (jab). Just leave me for Christ sakes alone.”
Throughout this speech Sonja’s guard had dropped more and more, as none of the jabs were seriously meant, and when she glanced up on this last word to see how Dian was taking it, Laine hurled herself forward. It might have succeeded had not Sonja’s hand, stick firmly grasped, come around with the full force of her body behind it and met Laine’s forehead with a solid crack. Laine collapsed as instantly as a scissored marionette, tumbling into a limp and sprawling tangle on the grass.
The first thought that flashed through Dian’s mind was, That’s both of my right-hand women down, and the second was, I’m going to have to shoot her like a mad dog, before the necessities of action brought her to attention, made her stop the crowd’s (crowd? Where did all these people come from?) automatic surge forward and fill her lungs to bellow hugely for “LING!”
“I’m here,” said the voice practically at her elbow, and the healer bent over Laine, pulling back her eyelids, feeling at her wrist. “Will somebody get the stretcher and a blanket from the Hall? We seem to be making a habit of this,” she commented emotionlessly.
“Keep her here,” Dian ordered, to no one in particular but everyone in general, and helped carry the stretcher down the hill. No one needed to ask which “her” she meant.
In half an hour Dian was back, Culum locked securely away, Ling’s phrases “mild concussion” and “hell of a headache” ringing in her ears. Sonja had regained the sleek black suit she’d been wearing and stood leaning against the tree, ignoring the people around her as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do at half past one in the morning. She did look up at Dian’s reappearance on the scene.
“Is she . . . ?”
“No thanks to you. Why are
you doing this to us? It wasn’t enough to break Jeri’s leg? Won’t you be satisfied until you kill off all my best women? What do you want?” she demanded ferociously, and Sonja, whose face had grown more closed with every word, stood silently with her chin up and a half sneer on her lips, as superior and unreachable as a resentful teenager and every bit as infuriating.
At the sight of that incongruously adolescent expression, Dian’s hot anger suddenly shifted, becoming cold as the water under ice. Her blue eyes narrowed, but her shoulders and fists relaxed and her mouth slid into a grin of her own—but where Sonja’s expression was a shout of rebellion, Dian’s bore the lazy pleasure of a hungry shark.
Without taking her eyes off Sonja, Dian shrugged off her tweed jacket, tugged the absurd scrap of orange silk from her collar, and thrust both garments at the nearest bystander. “Come on, girl,” she coaxed in a voice that trickled fear down many of the nearby spines, “you’ve been picking fights for two weeks. Well, now you’ve got one. Why settle for second best when you can have me?” She took two steps forward, that ominous grin plastered on her face, then shot out one swift hand to slap a stinging and contemptuous blow onto Sonja’s cheek.
It was no fight; Sonja was no match for a roused Dian. She tried, but Dian was her better in skill and experience and had two inches’ reach on her. For every blow that Dian failed to dodge or block, three or four hit Sonja, all of them slaps, all to the face, and increasingly hard. Sonja’s nose was soon bleeding, her lips broken, her cheeks flaming even in the lamplight, her eyes watering from the blows and from tears of frustration and rage at the scornful precision of Dian’s blows and her refusal to fight properly, and every time Sonja tried to rush forward and seize hold, Dian either faded away or tripped her, and always there came the contemptuous slaps, the pleased shark’s grin.
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