“Those were better times,” said Wylf. “These valleys used to feed so many. As we have dwindled, the land has dwindled; it's hard to say which came first. Sometimes I think the land has given up because so many of us gave up.”
“How many were you?” I said. “I've seen no empty houses in Folcsted. Were others torn down as the Folc dwindled?”
“St. Arin's Lake was not the only place of the Folc in olden times,” said Wylf. “In my great-grandfather's day, the four clans were four villages, each ruled by its own elder. As our numbers dwindled, we drew together, for too few hands cannot keep the fields, the flocks, the orchards, all that is needed to survive.”
“Mother Halred's right in that,” said Girnhild. “We need each other too much to fly apart.”
“But her talk of the old ways of the Folc—” I began, then hesitated.
Wylf smiled. “True enough, in the old days, sheep were marked for the valley, not the clan; but today's clans were of four valleys, and each had its own mark. Halred's ‘old ways’ are not very old. But what of that? A straight path is only as straight as the hills allow it to be, but it is straight enough for everyday use; nor is the truth any straighter than the ground it has to run on. Living as one Folc is our way now; if our ancestors lived apart, they left those ways for good reason. Calling common flocks ‘the old way of the Folc’ is true enough for everyday use.”
“You reason like a Tarvon priest,” I said, gambling that the order's reputation for too-clever argument had penetrated even this remote country. By the women's smiles, I saw that it had. “Nonetheless, your words seem wise to me. But others must remember this, too; I wonder why Edwach did not call Mother Halred a liar in Assembly when she spoke of the old ways.”
“Well, the guest-code really is ancient—for all I know,” said Wylf.
“And if he spoke of the four valleys, his real wishes would be too naked,” said Girnhild. “St. Arin's Lake was the place of the Linden Clan—did you notice how many lindens grow in the valley? It was the best of the four settlements, so naturally, it was the one to be kept alive. But Edwach thinks his forbear foolish to let the other clans share it so easily. He thinks that Linden should rule the other clans, and he should be Headman always, not just one year in four.”
Godrun put in, “Well, let him keep the land himself, then. His sons have all left but Ethwin. He would be crying for our help before long.”
“We all may be crying for help soon if the land is not kinder,” reminded Girnhild, silencing the conversation.
At night when we gathered in the great hall for a meal, these worries surfaced again. “Here it is, twelve days past the Longest Day, and the lambs as small as they should have been in spring,” complained a shepherd.
“The milk's down to a trickle,” Paddon said.
“The grain's barely sprouted,” said his wife, Sigrun of the Linden.
Ethwin, who was visiting to stare at Trenara and avoid his father, said, “Maybe it's time we should all leave this land together.”
“Would you really?” Hwyn asked. “The whole Folc, leave St. Arin's Lake?”
“Or the Hills of Penmorrin entirely,” Ethwin said. “They say the lowlands are easier.” He himself had never seen any flat ground larger than the lakeshore.
“It's been talked of,” Guthlac admitted. “The last Assembly but yours, we spoke of leaving. If this harvest isn't better than the ones before it, we may be forced to go.”
“Our people were not always here,” said Girnhild. “We came east from the Ferend River Valley. Our ancestors, oppressed by the Kettran conquerors, fled to the mountains for freedom.”
“That must have been ages ago,” I said. “The Kettran Empire hasn't stretched so far east in over three hundred years.”
“Maybe it's time to return, then,” said Ethwin. “Maybe that's what the land is telling us.”
“Maybe,” Guthlac said doubtfully. “But there would be war and strife, with or without the Kettrans. We would be aliens there, just as these travelers were among us. Why should the lowlanders welcome four whole clans of vagabonds when we could scarcely welcome three souls?”
“You might go north,” Hwyn said. “Enough people have fled from there to leave plenty of farms untended, plenty of villages needing fresh hands.”
“What—go from the frying pan to the fire?” said Guthlac. “Who goes to the very place all the world flees?”
“Those that are different from all the world. Those that fled to a harsh land for freedom and learned to live there,” Hwyn said. “Don't tell me you fear ghosts more than hunger!”
“Ghosts! Those are nothing,” said Guthlac. “It's the stranger stories I'm thinking of: summer not following spring, harvest not following summer. We're far enough along that path ourselves. Last year's harvest was so small that Edwach of the Linden tried to tell me that autumn had not come and his year as Headman had not ended.”
“Edwach would say that,” put in Girnhild.
“Of course, I told him that if the harvest was poor in his year, he should not profit from it by keeping the headship.” Guthlac sighed. “Now I wish I'd chosen other words. The way this year's begun, I don't want to be judged by the harvest of my own year as Headman. Better to think it had not really begun! And I have better cause to say so than Edwach, for the Longest Day passed before we even dared shear the sheep.”
“Perhaps the Rite of Increase will wake the gods to our plight,” said Girnhild.
Paddon shook his head. “The gods are far away at the rim of the world, with the dead and the unborn. What do they even see of these little gestures we call rites of the gods?”
“Why did you volunteer to bleed, then?” I asked.
“For the reason I gave,” Paddon said. “In solidarity with a newcomer willing to be generous with the Folc. I don't really believe the gods require it, or that they will notice what we do here.”
“You may be right,” said Guthlac slowly. “But then again, there are moments.” His eyes strayed toward my face. “In the Assembly, when we drew lots for the Upside-Down God, I brought the choosing straws to the travelers on a whim—”
“To gall Edwach,” Girnhild cut in.
“All right, woman, all right,” he said with mock-exasperation. “That may have entered my head. But even as I did so, I remember thinking, If any of the strangers draws the one short straw in a hundred, then the god's hand really is in it.” He looked levelly at me.
“Strange coincidence,” I said uneasily.
“You hated being chosen, didn't you?” Guthlac said. “To my mind, it only makes the god's hand clearer.”
I rolled my eyes toward Paddon, who returned a sardonic smile.
Meeting Guthlac's steely eyes again, I said evenly, “And if the gods did have a hand in it—the better to annoy Edwach!”
Girnhild laughed heartily, and that was the end of the topic. But I could see from Hwyn's face that she at least took the sign seriously.
The eve of the Rite of Increase came swiftly. Despite Halred's pessimism and Hwyn's fears, I felt by then quite recovered, the wound sealing neatly over unswollen flesh, my eye unaffected and my face no worse than it ever was.
This was fortunate, for the night before the rite we were required to sleep with the flocks—not only the four men who were to bleed, but the four women who would perform the ritual. Although each clan had its own paddock, all the flocks had been herded together in the common paddock near the Assembly grounds for the night. All four elders were to stand guard over them, save that Edwach, who like me was one of the “beasts” for the night, had to leave that task to Ethwin. And so it was a strange gathering, our chief friends among the Folc and our chief enemy together with all three travelers—for though Trenara had not been asked, she went where Hwyn did.
At the paddock, I also met Halred's two acolytes, graceful, quick-witted, sharp-tongued maids of some twenty summers who laughed when they told me the names Halred had given them, Day and Night, but declined to give any othe
r. Day was tall and broad-shouldered, with a thick red braid and round aster-blue eyes; she would take vows to the Bright Goddess the next summer. Night was small and black-haired, with long silver-gray eyes and a low-bridged nose like a Magyan; she would soon be consecrated to the Hidden Goddess. These girls had been rehearsing the rite with Hwyn while I had been cooped up in Red Oak house, and so they knew her a little by then, but their close camaraderie with each other left Hwyn on the outside. As much as ritual propriety allowed, she stayed by me.
We stood a while watching Trenara playing with the sheep, stroking their patient heads, feeling the fleece just starting to grow back from the shearing, gazing into their quiet brown eyes. Hwyn watched her a bit wistfully. “Thank the gods we're not here at slaughtering time. It would distress her too much to see—and me to take part in it again, if the truth be told.”
“You've done it before?”
“Too many times. I remember when I was a little girl, very young, I had been feeding the lambs since spring, and I'd given them all names. And someone thought it instructive, or maybe just amusing, to make me hold a bowl for blood while he slaughtered my favorites, the ones I'd begged him to spare. I never gave a name to an animal again.”
“Who would do that to a child?”
She looked away. “It doesn't matter. I don't know why I remembered it just now.”
“Maybe,” I said softly, “because you're worried about tomorrow.”
She said nothing, but I saw her shoulders tremble as though a chill had gone through them.
I put a hand on her shoulder, very carefully. “Hwyn, it's all right. No one is going to die. This isn't a human sacrifice.”
“But it was once,” she said. “I can feel the ghosts gathering near the place of slaughter, waiting, waiting for something to happen.”
As she spoke it seemed that I too could feel something like names whispered at the edges of my consciousness, where I could not quite discern one from the other. “Yes, they are here,” I said. “What are they waiting for?”
She shook her head. “I only feel a sense of expectancy, nothing more.”
“If they rage, I can call them by name and reason with them. It seemed of some use with Conor of Kelgarran.”
Hwyn squinted up at me. “You are not the least bit uneasy, are you?”
“For once in my life, no,” I said. “When I first volunteered for the Rite of Increase, it was a desperate stratagem, but almost as soon as the words were out of my mouth it all seemed strangely right. I can't tell you why, but I feel perfectly sure of what I'm doing.”
“Then I have to trust you,” she said.
“It will all be well,” I said. “No one will die. It's like Halred's argument against marking what's mine and what's yours: if all four share the sacrifice, none need die.”
Hwyn smiled. “That's a fine thought. Have you told it to Halred?”
I shook my head. “When I see her, she's prodding me and making me drink reeking brews. You tell her. But listen, will you be all right bearing your part in the ceremony as temple-singer as I—as I bear my part?”
“Jereth,” said Hwyn, smiling shamefacedly, “you are my great friend, and I hate to think of you hurt, but I may as well confess that when I sing, I think of nothing but singing.”
Halred called her then to stand guard with Night, and I lay down to take what little sleep I could on the close-cropped turf, among the warm bodies of the beasts.
I dreamed of a heart beating deep under the hill, where no men heard it. But all the beasts that fed on the hillside grasses, tame and wild, stood still to listen, and the dull passivity of the sheep, which I had taken for stupidity, was really the silence of waiting.
I woke to a cool, misty dawn, the trilling of birds, and the barking of sheepdogs. The other three men marked for the ritual were already on their feet. Rubbing my eyes, I too rose and waited for the rites to begin. I could not see Hwyn, but I knew the priestess and acolytes stood around the flocks, for Halred was plainly visible a short distance away, her face impassive as the mountains, and Day's red hair stood out like a beacon-fire at some distance across the sea of animal bodies. The elders, too, stood silent around us; Ethwin, in his father's place, looked nervous and very young.
As the red light blossomed in the east, the lonely song of the reed pipes rose slowly toward us. The three elders and Ethwin moved to meet the sound, their pace dreamlike. The piper led a procession of shepherds, whom the Elders met at the paddock gate. I heard Guthlac's voice ring out, “Who seeks entry?”
“Shepherds of the Folc,” said the second in line behind the piper.
“Whose sheep are these?”
“They are the gods' but we tend them,” said the shepherd.
“Enter, then, and tend them.”
They entered, and I expected the ceremony to begin, or rather continue from there. But for a long while, nothing followed but the routine morning tasks, the milking of ewes, the tarring of sores. The other three men marked for the ritual stood passive as sheep themselves, so I followed their example.
At last the shepherds drove the flocks out, and us with them. To my surprise, they took us to the ground around the Assembly Stone and let the sheep graze there, on what had seemed sanctified ground. On the Assembly Stone, a bowl, a candle, and a large jug stood amid coiled vines.
For a long time, again, we waited in silence. I looked around, feeling foolish, but Paddon, Drict, and Edwach seemed unperturbed, so the delay must have been normal.
I could see Halred, Day, and Night by the Assembly Stone, but Hwyn was still out of my sight, and Trenara also. I began to doubt that they had been with us when I woke in the sheep-fold. Where could they have gone? Cut off from my companions, the only people in the whole Hills of Penmorrin I'd known more than a few days, I felt a sudden surge of panic. Then reason returned: Halred had been counting on Hwyn's participation in the rite, and she would not survey the scene so calmly if any of the pieces in her pageant were out of order. Hwyn was wherever Halred had sent her, and Trenara with her as always.
A hollow pattering sound announced a second procession, led by a young woman deftly worrying a goat-hide drum with a polished bone held loosely between her fingers.
“Who comes to this place of Assembly?” Guthlac called out to her.
“We are the farmers and other hands of the Folc,” she said.
“And whose beasts, and whose fields, and whose crafts have you just left?”
“They belong to the Four Great Ones; we are honored to keep them.”
“Come, then, and let your labors be blessed.”
They came and dispersed among the sheep and shepherds already on the green, and now all the Folc were together. I realized then what we had been waiting for: just as the shepherds had to work their morning tasks into the morning rite, so too the others had tasks that could not be left undone, rite or no rite. No one had spoken of it because everyone but me—even Hwyn, maybe even Trenara—had known the rhythms of farming life too well to remark on it. Only I was as out of place here as a seal among goats.
Halred climbed up onto the Assembly Stone and called out, “Sunlight ripens the grain, but dark earth bore it. May the Bright Goddess and the Hidden Goddess extend their hands over this land and give life to it. May our hands, too, always be open to give what we can for the life of all. Who comes to give of himself for the life of this land?”
“I, Edwach of the Linden.”
“I, Drict of the Holly.”
“I, Paddon Outlaw, adopted by the Red Oak.”
I took my cue from the others, and called out my name.
“Come, then, to the gate of the mountain and prepare yourselves.”
I followed the others to the cave behind the Assembly Stone. Halred led us in, and her acolytes followed us till we stood muffled in dark and silent stone. I could see nothing. I felt the warmth of Paddon's body recede before me, and put out a hand to orient myself. On either side were cool walls of hewn stone. I hesitated, then fel
t a hand reach out and draw me forward: Hwyn's hand, I knew instinctively, though I could not have said how I knew. I dared not speak; even Halred was silent. But if I had dared, I would have asked Hwyn whether she felt what I sensed: the dead gathered around us, waiting.
At last Halred broke the silence: “Hidden Goddess, hear us, your children! We neither understand what makes the earth barren nor what makes it bear, why we die nor why we are born. All we know is our yearning. Accept our longing; accept the blood-offering of our men in atonement for the life we have taken from the land. Lead us in the dark passage before us. Bear us to life again or give us hope even in death.”
Someone began sobbing, then—a familiar voice. I heard Hwyn hushing her softly and knew it must be Trenara. I tensed, afraid the Folc might take it as a profanation of their holy place, but either it seemed well enough in keeping with the mournful prayer or they deemed it greater offense to reprimand her in the holy cave than to let her be, for none disturbed her, and at length even Hwyn stopped trying.
After some time, Halred spoke again: “We thank you, Goddess, for your presence in the dark, even as we move into the light. In darkness, the seed wakens and grows toward light.” We crept out again through the walls of stone. I had lost Hwyn's hand in Trenara's disruption, so I stumbled out alone into the light of day, where the Folc awaited us. When we stood before the Assembly Stone and faced the mountain again, I saw that Hwyn had not followed.
Halred took her place atop the stone and called out, “Bright Goddess, ripener of fruit and grain, lifter of hearts, we rejoice in your warmth, in the splendor of the sun, in the richness of the earth. We have sung your praise in your summer festival. Now we beg your aid in our time of travail. Join hands across the Wheel with the Hidden Goddess, and come among us with your power to heal, with your warmth to swell the fruits, with your gentleness to make the land gentle to us.
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