by Jean Johnson
“Wasn’t that the one who claimed to be all the way from Mendhi, and was traveling to see as much of the world as he could before he died?” Tedro asked.
“That’s the one,” Medred agreed. “Apparently he’s been telling tales every single night of the adventures he’d had in his youth with the caravan . . . and West Paw said he never once repeated any of his stories while they were giving escort. Anyway, Rahala went off with Family Malamute’s escort, and nobody knows when she’ll return. West Paw said her interest in the old man wasn’t like her interest in you, exactly . . . but that it was a strong interest.”
Kodan grunted. “She could hold out her hand to him from now until eternity, for all that I care . . . so long as she never holds out her hand to me.”
“Too late,” Tedro commiserated, giving Kodan a sympathetic pat on his shoulder. “For your sake, I hope Rahala stays away long enough for you to court Tava successfully . . . though I’ll warn you, you’re not the only one who’ll try courting her, too, once her initiation days are through.”
“If she does clean up pretty, you’ll have a lot of competition, multerai ,” Medred teased Kodan, clapping his hand on the older man’s other shoulder. “And if she’s an outlander, it just might be she’ll want a man with fewer shapes, rather than more, so she won’t feel quite as uncomfortable around her husband. Outlander women are said to be backward, that way.”
“In that case, you will have far more to fear from Torei than from Kodan,” Tedro teased his cousin.
“What of the other news?” Kodan asked, dragging the conversation back to that. “You said there were two pieces that deal with me.”
“The second piece of news,” Medred stated, his expression turning somber and serious, “is that your great-father has gone to Mother Earth. I’m sorry.”
Closing his eyes, Kodan absorbed the news for a long moment, then opened them again. Brushing the tears out of his eyes, he looked at Medred. “My mother? The rest of our kin? How are they faring?”
“She grieved a lot, as did your uncle and your aunts. But we all took comfort in that he passed peacefully in his sleep. There’s already been one formal Grieving Day, but your mother suggested to both Councils that there should be another one, for both South Paw and for Tailtip to express their own sense of loss. They’re the last warband besides yourselves to return to the Family,” Medred told him. “The Council of Shifters pointed out at the Family meeting after the Grieving Day that you are now the strongest shifter in the Family, now that Chodan is gone. They want you to take up the Lordship of Tiger.
“With no princesses in the Family, the Council of Sisters has agreed. I thought I should warn you so that you’ll be braced for it,” Medred added, “because the Sister Council pointed out that you are twenty-eight. They think that’s a bit old for a man to be unmated and added firmly that it’s not always best for the leader of a Family to be mateless—you’ll be happy to know they said those things after Rahala left,” the younger shifter added lightly, attempting to leaven his news. “But they did agree that you’re both mature and wise enough for the position, and both sides agreed that the intervening three weeks of trying to govern the Family strictly by the Councils hasn’t worked very well.
“Given all of that,” Medred continued wryly, “you being interested in any woman will be welcome news . . . but the fact that it’s an outlander woman will be looked at sideways. Plus it’s not just you that’ll have competition for the outlander’s hand, but how she’ll have competition for yours. Rahala wasn’t the only maiden interested in you, just the most persistent.”
“Lovely,” Kodan muttered. He had focused so much on preparing for taking on some position of responsibility, authority, and even leadership in his future that he hadn’t spared much attention or time for things like courtship. A little bit of courting—he was an adult, and he did like women—but nothing serious.
The problem is, I don’t want to pick a woman because it’s expected of me. Or because she’s simply there, convenient and available. And she needs to be my equal, he added silently, watching Tava coming out of the almost finished geome, the buckets dangling light and empty from her fingertips. She headed for the wagon she had fetched the buckets from, giving the trio of men a brief, curious look.
Not necessarily a shapeshifter, for all it’s highly encouraged for multerai to court princesses, but I definitely want to find someone strong-willed, intelligent, courteous, and understanding. Someone who knows when to stand strong, and when to give way. And she definitely has to be intelligent enough to lead the Sister Council, wise enough to take good advice from others, kind enough to listen to the needs of others, and practical enough to know when to stand firm on a subject.
A hand clapped him on the shoulder, startling him. Tedro grinned. “Father Sky to Kodan, you’d better wake up before you get wet!”
“What?” Kodan asked, blinking and looking away from the green-garbed woman headed for the pond.
“You were wool-gathering in the rain of your thoughts,” Medred told him. “While looking at the outlander woman, no less. You must be interested in her.” The younger man grinned cheekily. “I do say, it’s nice to finally see you losing your wits over a woman!”
Kodan narrowed his eyes, but let the teasing pass. “As there will be a maiden at supper, Medred, you’ll not dine in just your feathers. Tedro, go find your cousin a pair of breikas to borrow.”
Tava approached as Tedro moved off. She glanced at the newcomer, her expression curious, but when her gaze dipped down to the feathers forming a pair of shorts from his hips to his knees, she blushed and quickly looked away. Kodan gestured sharply, flicking his hand in a silent order to make Medred follow his kinsman. It took an additional whap of his hand on the younger man’s arm to get him to move, since Medred was busy smiling at the flustered maiden, but he finally moved.
“Um . . . Deian asked me to tell you one of the felts is getting a little thin at the crease-point where the roof staves meet the lattices. He wanted to know if it should be, um, patch-felted when the warband gets back to the Family, or re-felted,” Tava relayed. “What did he mean by that? Your father asked me to fetch water for the cookpot before I could ask.”
“The felt wears thin from use, rubbing against the frame, being put up and taken down each time we move pasture or travel in bad weather,” Kodan told her. “If the wear is just in a single, somewhat small spot, the thin spot can sometimes be thickened with additional wool. If it has several thin spots, it’s far easier to just apply a new layer of wool all over, because of the different processes.”
“What are the differences?” Tava asked, curious. “We never owned any sheep, and goat hair is meant only for spinning, so I never really paid much attention to how felt is made.”
“Well, first you shear the sheep, removing the wool. The fleece is then picked clean, since the sheep picks up debris by roaming around, rolling on the ground to scratch or rubbing up against bushes and trees,” he said. “Usually it’s soaked in different changes of water if it’s dirty, and the lanolin is skimmed off the wastewater to become part of softsoap and such. Some Families advocate cleaning it while it’s still on the sheep, but that takes a large body of water, and can foul the water for drinking purposes.
“Once the wool is dry, then it’s beaten with sticks until it fluffs up—if it’s meant for spinning, it’ll be carded and combed to straighten out the fibers, separating the long ones from the short. The short fibers get put into bags to either be turned into cushions, or to be used for felting, since they’re useless for spinning—you’ve probably done the same with short goat hairs,” he added.
Tava nodded, thinking of her own experience in such things. “When I comb those out, I put them into a bag to be turned into cushion stuffing. It works well when mixed with feathers, smoothing out the lumps of the quills. But three goats don’t produce much fiber, and I usually ended up buying pre-carded wool from the other women in the village to mix with it.”
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bsp; “We do that, too. Anyway, after the fibers have been fluffed up, they’re teased apart, to increase the fluff further. That helps make the felt work better,” Kodan explained. “Good, thick felt, not too compressed but not too loose, can keep a geome cool when the weather is hot and warm when it’s cold. If we’re doing a full re-felting, the wool is laid out on one of the oiled over-covers to make sure we have enough.”
“How much wool goes into the felt?” she asked, glancing at the nearly finished tent.
“That depends on the size of the geome. The warband geome is two to three times the size of the typical family one. A family-sized one needs anywhere from two hundred to three hundred fleeces.” Nodding his head at the tent in front of them, which was having the tiger-skin pulled up over the smoke-hole cone, he added, “So you can see how something the size of this one requires more like seven to nine hundred fleeces. That makes patch-felting much more practical than re-felting. Re-felting is also usually done in the spring when the sheep are freshly sheared, so we only have to carry a few extra fleeces for mid-season patching.
“Once the fleece wool is teased and laid out on an oiled canvas cover to gauge the amount, the original felt—we call it the ‘mother felt’—is dampened thoroughly, and the new wool laid out on top, paying attention to where the thinner spots are to make sure there will be extra wool to compensate. It takes several years of experience in both patching and re-felting to gauge such things,” he warned her. “You might be asked to help lay down the wool, as it can take up to a score of people to work on the task, but you won’t be placed in charge of where the wool goes for at least fifteen, maybe twenty years.”
“I’m not sure I’d still be here in fifteen or twenty years,” she muttered, thinking of his yearlong bargain, her presence on the Plains in exchange for getting to keep her household goods. He ignored it, choosing to continue his explanation.
“Once the new wool is laid on the mother felt, the new wool is also dampened with water. This will help it bind to the old felt. The oilcloth is then laid on top to tamp down the new wool and keep it from binding to the mother on that side, and we use a long, heavy pole to wrap it all up in a long bundle. The roll is then bound in hides and tied shut, the ends of the pole are fitted with a pivot-hitch, which is in turn tied to a pair of horses, and the whole thing is dragged off by the horses for several miles, until the wool is compressed into felt.
“Then we just take off the hides and peel it open, which the oilcloth helps with in separating the rolled-up layers. But that’s the way we re-felt. Patch-felting is a different process,” he said.
“So how does patch-felting differ from re-felting?” Tava asked, drawn back into his explanation by her curiosity, and by his willingness to sate it.
“Well, first you look carefully at the old felt to find the thin spots. This is sometimes done by tossing it up on a geome frame when the sun is shining brightly, to see where the light glows through the thinnest bits,” he admitted. “Of course, if the felt is that thin, it’s often that thin in several spots and needs re-felting. Sometimes it just wears down in one particular spot, and you can often feel it just by laying it out on the ground and crawling over it. Obviously we don’t do that when it’s been raining, but the ground is mostly dry, even this close to the pond.”
Tava nodded. A lot of the short-cropped grass farther out was the same late-summer yellow as the rest of the Plains, but the grass close to the oval pool was more green than golden. Cropped short by whatever herd animals had passed through here not that long ago, but close enough to the water in the pond to gradually regrow.
“Once you’ve found the thin spot, which is often worn in a curved line following the stake-ends where the roof meets the wall, you get a set of special brushes, some with wide teeth, some with narrow ones,” Kodan told her. “You use them to brush the felt, teasing up the fibers so that they’re very fuzzy and loose—not just over the weak, thin spot, but for at least two hand-spans all around the area in need of thickening, if not more. This is done so that the new felting binds firmly with the old.
“Once it’s been dry-brushed, the mother felt is carefully wetted, the new fleeces are laid down over the area, with the wool piled thickest in the weak spots and tapering out to the rest of the brushed-out area, and more water is sprinkled on top. An oiled cloth is laid over the top of the new fleece, and you get the children to twist-dance on top, which mashes the new wool into the old, matting the fibers together and thickening the felt until it’s no longer weak.”
“Twist-dance?”
“Look at my feet, and I’ll show you.” Kodan demonstrated on the short-cropped grass that surrounded their campsite. He balanced on the balls of his feet, but with his knees bent so that he could twist them one way, then the other. His arms swung, too, counteracting the twisting of his lower limbs, and he swayed his weight from one leg to the other. The effect, when he stepped back, was a tangled, circular smear of yellow and green grass stems with hints of matted dirt where each boot had rested. “We have the children do it, because for one, it’s fun, and for another, their weight is gentle enough that the fibers aren’t smashed completely flat before they’ve had a chance to truly bind together during the felting process.”
“I think I can see how that would matt everything together,” she agreed. “That’s kind of an odd way of dancing, though. In the Valley, we tend to dance in lines, holding on to each other by kerchiefs in our hands and stamping and skipping, or kicking our feet as we move, usually with the girls on one side, boys on the other. Do you hold hands when you twist?”
Kodan shook his head. “We have other dances where we do that.”
SEVEN
The thump of the geome door closing drew their attention back to the others, and the fact that the domed tent was just about finished. Kenyen approached them, a basket in his hands. He pushed it at his brother, smirking. “Here, oh fearless warleader. Our dear father spotted some dried apples downstream and wants you to collect some for the fire. I’m to show our lovely guest how to find rora flowers when they’re not in bloom, as well as teach her how to make grass-logs.”
Hands going to his hips, Kodan didn’t accept the basket. “You are going to gather the dried apples, and I will show Tava how to find rora flowers.”
Kenyen opened his mouth to protest but, at Kodan’s pointed stare, sighed and trudged toward the low sloping hill to the southeast.
“Dried apples?” Tava asked, confusion wrinkling her brow. “I didn’t‚ see any apple trees on the way here.”
He blushed. “It’s a discreet term for, um . . . grass-eater droppings. In specific, dried, straw-filled droppings.” At her horrified expression, Kodan spread his arms. “Do you see a lot of trees out here? Don’t count these little bushes around the pond,” he added as she glanced their way. “The Family is about eight hundred people strong. If eight people were to share a single cooking fire, that’s one hundred fires to fuel every single day. We make grass-logs and we burn dried apples so that we don’t strip away what few trees we do have on the Plains.”
“But . . . dung?” She wrinkled her nose again.
“That’s why we look for rora vines in the grass. Come, I’ll show you,” he urged, holding out his hand. As soon as she took it, he tugged her uphill. “Rora grows best on the south-facing slopes and along the tops of hills, where the sun shines the most. They also grow fast, but at this time of the year, we have to make sure to pick off and scatter the seed pods so more will grow next year.
“We throw them on the fire, vines, leaves, and especially the flowers if they can be found, because they contain an oil that changes the smell of the fire. Normally we’d make do with grass-logs—which I’ll show you how to twist—but there isn’t much in the way of long stalks around here, possibly because some of the herds have been pastured here recently. Which also explains the dried apples being available.”
“So what do these vines look like?” Tava asked.
“They have small, heart
-shaped leaves with serrated edges, and they grow in pairs from a common base at intervals, with the leaves often set at right angles to little branches of shorter vines that curl out among the grass-stalks. Sheep, goats, and horses won’t eat the runners, though cattle will. But since it grows down at the base of the hay, we feed the cattle first, since they eat the higher ends of the stalks, then the horses and goats and the sheep after that—ah, here’s some,” Kodan said, tugging her toward a patch of green peeking through the yellowed stalks. “The vines are reddish brown at this time of year, though they can be quite red in the springtime.”
“Should we go back for a basket?” Tava asked.
Kodan shook his head. “For a single fire, one that will be half grass, we only need about two body lengths. With the grass this short, it’ll be easy tugging it up. Here, you start tugging, while I pull up some grass from over there—keep yourself in sight of the geome.”
Turning, she looked around at the subtle, rolling hills. “. . . Why? I don’t think I could get lost out here, not with that line of greenery from the stream and the marsh to orient me.”
“I’m glad you realize you can get lost out here without familiar referents,” Kodan praised her. “But, no, it’s more a matter of custom. A young man and a young woman aren’t allowed to go out of public sight together.”
Tava gave him a thoughtful, sober look. “I don’t . . . I don’t think you’d ravish me, the moment we were alone.” Her sober expression softened a little, allowing a shy hint of a smile. “I think you might even be trustworthy, Kodan Sin Siin.”
He didn’t stop the smile that curved his lips. “Thank you . . . but actually, it’s you the custom is worried about. Since the customs you were raised under aren’t the same as ours, the others might think you want to drag me into the next gully and have your wicked outlander way with me.”