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Alder of Sinshan told me, “Human persons come into the Five Houses when they are born; when they wake from a dream or return from wilderness or 'the steps of the lion'; when they are revived from drowning, electrocution, heart attack, or another reversible death; and when a person born elsewhere undertakes instruction in a heyimas to become a person of the Valley.
"Animals come from the Four Houses into the Blue Clay when they cross over to the hunting side and consent to become a death. People who are dead and mourned do not return as five-house people except by being born again. Some mothers have a vision of their child in the four houses, before they conceive, but apart from that, people in visions or stories stay in the four houses. Except for you,” he added, wryly.
Thorn of Sinshan concurred with this list, and added, “Each of the Five Houses has some way for no-House people to join. They’re all different. Obsidian is the hardest—I don’t think anyone from outside the Valley has become an Obsidian person in my grandmother’s lifetime. Perhaps it’s because all women are concerned with the First House in a way, joining the Blood Lodge—since it’s so easy to cross the threshold, they make it harder to get all the way in. [This may be a paraphrase of a ribald Blood Clown song—ed.] The First House has a wide front door and a narrow back door. [This is definitely a paraphrase of an even more ribald Blood Clown song—ed.]
“Joining the Adobes is easiest—as long as you’re willing to join the Planting Lodge, but almost everyone does that anyway. There’s a Serpentine man in Ounmalin who came from the Amaranth Coast, and in Telína and Wakwaha there are a few more Serpentine people who came from outside. To join the Serpentine, the wakwa is simple but the learning can be long for someone from far away, where the plants are different—so many new brothers and sisters to meet! But that’s the best way of things—if you’re going to make a home in the Valley, you should know who you are sharing your House with.”
Concerning birth rates in the Valley
The human population of the Valley has been, broadly speaking, stable for time out of mind—at the very least, since the founding of Tachas Touchas, the second youngest of the towns on the Na. The towns themselves meander somewhat around their Hinges, the arcs of the two sides moving like flagella as a building is put up here, taken down there, but the scale of the infrastructure remains, likewise, largely static. The youngest of the nine towns, Chumo, was built not by surplus population of the other towns, but by displaced inhabitants of a town destroyed by wildfire: one house goes down; another comes up. The houses, it is true, tend to become larger and more rambling over time, and the households fission and recombine; but the number of human people (and of domestic animals) settles back to equilibrium with, on a demographic timescale, remarkable rapidity.
This stability is entirely in keeping, philosophically, with the decided Kesh prejudice against large families—and, practically, entirely incompatible with it.
In our day, a birth rate of two children per birthing parent is below replacement level, though very slightly. In the Valley, where infant and child deaths are so much more common, the replacement birth rate is proportionally higher, averaged across the population.
But of course this populational average must account for the large number of only children—for the quite large number of completely infertile persons and couples—for forest-dwelling women, and the few but respected celibate adults—for married couples childless by choice, who exist and did not, from what I observed, seem to draw any especial social censure for this choice, apart from the disappointment of their own parents and grandparents.
The Kesh animus against bearing or siring more than two children is not balanced by any similar opposition to having fewer. And yet, the archaeological evidence—the oral histories—the records of the Exchange—all agree: The human population of the Valley has been stable, time out of mind.
So where were the missing babies—the families of three, four, or more children that must, somewhere, balance out those of one or none?
One must start, I suppose, not with the missing living children but the dead ones. Most people in the Valley have a dead sibling, or several, even those with one or more living siblings. I found no evidence of dead children counting against the limit of two, except in two specific circumstances. One was a piece of gossip, in the process of transforming into cautionary folklore, about a young Obsidian woman who died, leaving an infant to be raised by her parents and younger sister; the parents had conceived again, despite already living with their child and grandchild, and had undergone a spate of assorted calamities until the mother came to the Doctors' Lodge and requested an abortion.
The occasion for such a choice cannot arise frequently, given the late average age of first motherhood in the Valley; few women will be made grandmothers while still fertile. The other circumstance is rather more common: I spoke to several parents of children born dusevai or with other congenital illness, who had conceived a third child while their first or second was still dying. All had terminated their pregnancies as soon as they were discovered; all, even those who had since had another child, expressed disgust and offense at the suggestion that they might have carried to term. It would be, they agreed, to wish death on their living children. No one told me they knew of anyone who had done, or would do, such a thing; there were not even cautionary tales.
But even so—not every woman whose child dies without issue bears another; and there are still many women who bear only one or none. I had reduced the scope of the problem, but not solved it.
I went down something of a rabbit hole of library and Exchange records researching immigration, which may leave very little footprint in genealogies and oral history, if the immigrant takes a Kesh second and third name. But, though a net gain, it is not a significant enough one to make up more than a small part of the birthrate deficit. While more people do move permanently into the Valley than out of it, the rates of both in- and out-migration are quite small—and, at times when the Valley has had more commerce with the outside world than was common during my stay, the rates of both have increased, but the proportions remained largely the same.
I was thinking like a person outside the world, looking first to the currents of History and not those of people. When I turned back, I began to see what should have been obvious: That the missing third children—and even fourth and fifth, a few of them—were right here all along: hidden in the shuffle of people into and out of new households and marriages, and in the human propensity—no less common in the Valley than anywhere else—to justify the behavior of those we admire.
So. The Kesh, almost without exception, agree that to allow more than two children to make one a parent is highly irresponsible. Some people, then, simply behave irresponsibly, and accept whatever social censure they draw, with good grace or without it. In the larger towns, there are enough such families to form cliques and even neighborhoods; in the smaller ones, a too-prolific parent or couple might live with childless relations, making up among them a fairly typical multifamily household.
And on closer look, in a not insignificant number of such households—three to six adults of the one generation, three to six children of the next, some number of grandparents—a disproportionate number of the children, sometimes all of them, turned out to have been born to just one mother. Where the people concerned were considered respectable; and—this was crucial—where one woman or couple in the household had been childless prior to the birth of a third child to another, the matter was considered excusable, a reasonable adaptation to circumstances. These arrangements were not adoptions—the Kesh do not practice formal adoption except of orphans, and of children old enough to choose goestun-parents of their own accord—but the names of the parents were often elided, when speaking of the children, into the names of the houses: “Here are Night Rain and Frost and Noon of After the Fire House.” It was a common locution, and easily employed to dispel questions.
Another way the missing children were hidden in plain sight was through the dissolution of marriages and partnerships. The Kesh are, broadly speaking, matrilocal—women own their houses, and a divorced man typically returns to his mother’s house—but he might return with his children, if their mother (and his mother; and the children, if old enough to be consulted) are agreeable; and women can and do leave houses, husbands, and children behind and move elsewhere. A person, of either sex, with two children living with their other parent might have two more with a current partner without incurring more than token disapproval. A custodial parent who remarried would face sterner censure for starting a new family—but comparatively little for sending the children back to the other parent and then doing so, if the other parent had not yet had other children, unless the children or the former spouse complained loudly. Children often went to live with other relatives, temporarily or permanently, for any number of reasons; for a person in good social standing, an amicable change of custody was all the plausible deniability required.
Any of these arrangements, of course, might be taken as evidence of disordered living in a person or family already considered of no account; but among people who showed up for planting and roof-raising, who were clean, quiet, and got along with their neighbors, it could be understood that, while to have three or four children was certainly irresponsible, in the general way of things, one must take account of the circumstances.
A life history by Pinion of Wakwaha
There are people here in Wakwaha who came to the Valley from Stoy and Yanyan, and from the Amaranth Coast, and even from the lands around Crater Lake—but me, I say I came to the Valley from both closer and farther than any of them, because I came by way of the City of Mind.
My people were Goose clan of the Aho and we spoke Aho at home, but we sent delegates to the Farms at Rekwit every year and learned both Rekwit and TOK. Goose people are sailors, but my lineage was a remnant, and shipless since before I was born. To discharge old debts to us, however, my father’s mothers had arranged to give us the keeping of the Schehets of Pass River. Schehets is an Aho word—in Kesh there is only the TOK word, fjord—and ours was The Schehets, the place where the Range of Light comes right down to wade in the sea, and the sea comes up between the ridges of the mountains and fills a deep valley. At the head of that valley is the trailhead to Líídou on the Omorn Sea, so it is an important waypoint, the only deep harbor where a ship can lay anchor close to the pass, and the caravan traders meet the ship traders and exchange wares.
But for most of my childhood, there were no caravans, because of the raids of the Condor people into the Antelope lands around Líídou. They had stayed in that country a long time before they built their City, and after they built it they raided into those lands for cattle and slaves because they knew the country and how rich it was. They made a good deal of trouble for travelers over the pass, and the caravans did not come—for one summer, then for two, and then there was an avalanche that did a good deal of damage to the road, so that even in lighter raiding seasons the caravans did not come.
On the Rekwit side the pass was in Goose keeping, and for most of the clan the closing of the passes made more opportunities than it closed off—for those willing to make the more dangerous journey outside the Gates, to Omorn Island and so to Líídou by sea, there was still plenty of glory and plenty of trade. And so the pass stayed blocked; and for most of my childhood, the hostelry we kept was full only when the logging crews from the Aho Island shipyards came up to cut timber in the forests above the Schehets.
The rest of the year, it was only my mother, my aunts, my great-grandmother, and myself, keeping that huge house. Despite that, we had an Exchange, for the City doesn’t seem to care if the inhabitants of a place are there year-round, or even if it’s the same people, so long as it meets the population requirements at the time of asking. I learned TOK, and I learned how to query the City skillfully and at an early age, for we often had to consult it for advice on matters of craft or medicine, with no village but ourselves.
When I was twelve, that year’s Farms reached consensus that the rest of the watersheds around the Inland Sea should be told everything we knew about the Condor People, who were raiding Rekwit lands north of the Schehets, though they were never able to move their armies into the southern coastal plain, having no ships and not enough woodcraft to cross the mountains overland. The messages that were sent caused a great deal of activity in the Exchange, all up and down the coasts of the Sea. My aunts were becoming quite political and wanted to keep up with everything about the pass and the caravan trade, and I was the best of the household at finding such things.
At this point I ought to explain, if you haven’t used the Exchange, how speaking on it works. It’s not like sending a letter, where your words are placed into the hand of the person you want to write to; and it’s not like when they call the sheep down from Ama Kulkun, where the dogs hear all the shepherds’ cries but only heed their partners’ voices. It’s more like how, on some of the houses here in town, people write poems on the walls, and sometimes long chains of poems and replies. It’s there in the open for anyone to see—but you only see it if you happen to walk that way, and when you don’t go that way for a while you might come back and find the wall has been whitewashed.
So, while the Exchange will show you anything you ask for, it will never show you anything without being asked. And you have to know very precisely what to ask for—you have to give it directions past the houses, as it were. I was better than my elders at formulating requests that brought in new information, so I was often at the Exchange, and I got to know some of the people who were also following the conversation. I didn’t have anything to add to the conversation about the Condor people, but there are codes under which you can file information about using the Exchange itself—requests for assistance, and documenting query structures and what happens when you use them—and these were where I made my first friends.
The first messages I filed were answers to simple requests from people who hadn’t used the Exchange much, or hadn’t had to follow such a large and branching conversation before; but in answering them I learned a great deal myself about the structure of the discussion itself, and soon I was able to point people to exactly the code or query they needed to find what people were saying on a particular topic, or in response to a particular person; and in this way I found myself often speaking with people much older and more learned than I was.
Some of those I spoke with the most were from the library here at Wakwaha—the librarians Oak Gall and Comes Running, and several other people of the Valley who took an interest in the situation. Among them was one called Mulberry, who was often posting and replying late into the night as I was. She had just been initiated into the Finders Lodge; they were concerned with the effects of the Condor people’s raids on the northern trade routes, as my family was with the eastern ones, and that is how we began talking in the public codes, but soon we had formed our own heading. It was visible if one knew how to ask, but essentially private—like writing on the back of a shed no one uses much; it’s there to see, but why would you look? We used it to talk just to each other, about anything and everything.
She was sixteen. She lived in a town; she had friends and teachers and a boy who wanted her to come inland with him; she was training a filly; she sang in her heyimas and in the dancing place; she seemed to me everything worldly, grown-up, and sophisticated. We spoke TOK with each other, of course, but for some words—the heyimas; the dancing place—TOK has no words of its own, only transliterations of the words in human languages. I don’t know if she learned any Aho words besides schehets—I wanted much more to hear her stories than to tell my own, and see set down in words the smallness of my life—but every night I learned a few more words of Kesh. When I would go to bed, near dawn, I would hold them in my mouth, thinking these words I had never heard a voice say, not quite daring to say them myself, but savoring them.
I didn’t know what was happening to me. I was falling in love, that was all, but I’d never done it before and it seemed like I was discovering something new and true that no one else had ever known. And looking back, I’m still not sure whether I fell in love first with Mulberry, or with her life—with her town and her Valley, that I had never seen.
I tried to see it—that was one of the first queries I made about the Valley. But all the Exchange had were aerial maps, from orbit or very high flyovers; the people of the Valley don’t allow the City to send drones except by arrangement, and they don’t use cameras much at all. I’m not sure why—the Glass Art here in Wakwaha makes excellent lenses for spectacles and laboratory equipment, and the Millers makes light sensors, but people here don’t use cameras for art and portraiture the way they do in Rekwit; they’re another piece of laboratory equipment, that’s all. So I had to imagine all the places and people Mulberry told me about.
While all of the human people were arguing about what to do about the Condor, the Condor people were destroying themselves; the ones who had hoarded all the power killed each other for it, and the other Condor people began to return to their old way of life, or to learn from the peoples around them how human people should behave. Many of the Condor people crossed back to the eastern slopes of the Range of Light; some of them traveling in the same kin groups they had first come West in, but others of them alone or by twos or threes. These last were mostly people held in low regard among the Condor—men who had been soldiers, and men and women who had been farmers or laborers. A number of these came into the Antelope country, where the Condor had once raided. There was a great deal of tension and bad blood on both sides, and some villages drove out all the Condor people who tried to come, or even killed them if they came too near.
But those that were able to come a little further south, into the lands around Líídou, mostly did well enough. Many went to work for Líídou houses as herdsmen, which is a job the Líídou hold in less esteem than farming, but the Condor esteem more; so both sides felt they had done better out of the deal.
When word of this situation came to the Schehets, my great-grandmother deigned to sit at the Exchange terminal herself to draft a message to her old contacts on the eastern slope, proposing that if the Condor people wanted to show they could learn to behave like human people, they should come south and clear the pass and rebuild the road, since it was because of them that it had been blocked in the first place. This suggestion was taken up with considerable interest—not least by the former Condor people themselves, who were eager to find some way to live comfortably among their new neighbors, and were still civilized enough to prefer a single great deed to the slow work of living.
I sympathized. I was still on the Exchange every night, reading much, commenting little, conversing hardly at all. Mulberry had left Wakwaha, and I was disconsolate. When trade to the north became possible again, she left with the Finders, to make an expedition to some of the peoples north of the Mountain. While there were occasional notes from or about the Finders party, reporting on where they were and what goods the people there wanted to trade, Mulberry posted nothing in our private channel. I went back and forth between thinking that she must miss me as much as I missed her and that one day when she was able she would message me again with grand stories of her adventures, and believing that we would never speak again, that I was far too young and provincial and stupid to hold the interest of a worldly woman who even now might be looking on Crater Lake! If I could have cleared a road or built a causeway to get her attention, I would have done it immediately, with my hands and teeth if I had to.
All I had was the work before me, of keeping the hostelry for my clanspeople who came to clear the pass from the Rekwit side, while the Condor men—they sent no women—started restoring the road from the Líídou side. There was finally consensus at the Farms to task the Goose with that work—and to allocate tools and provisions not just for the work itself, but equal to the missed profit from that season’s shipping, which had been the sticking point.
As neither the Condor men nor the Goose people were willing to be outdone by the other, the pass was cleared by the end of summer—just in time, my great-grandmother said, for it to be snowed up again, and indeed it was within a moon, but before that, the Condor men feasted at our house, and then all of us, even Great-Grandmother riding on a donkey, trekked back with them as far as the first way-house and had another feast outdoors, antelope and deer roasted on great spits set up across the roadway over fires lit on the roadbed itself. (The repair of the way-houses had not been part of the agreement, and the Farms would almost certainly not have given permission for all of the improvements the Condor had made on their side; but the Condor men had not waited for approval; and in the end the way-houses stayed, with the understanding that the Condor would maintain them.)
That way-house is in a high gap, where the side of the mountain falls away into forest. It looks like our Schehets, if the whole arm of the sea were the tops of trees. Standing there, looking down into that waving green expanse, I had the thought that I was seeing something Mulberry had not seen, might not ever see. I was small-minded enough to be glad of that fact first—that I had something she had not, that I had hoarded this place, this view, this moment.
But the place, the greenness of the place, the heya of it all, was so much bigger than I was, that after a little while it did not matter that I was being small-minded. The sea of treetops had more than enough right-feeling to share with me, and was generous with it. My feelings began to change, then; not all at once, but by the time I came down the mountain I was no longer thinking like a hoarder. I wanted Mulberry there to share it with me; but it was enough that I had seen what I had seen; and though for the time I held it quite close, it was not to keep that experience for myself, but because I did not know how to describe it, or who I should tell it to. I feel that I am still not describing it well.
The pass snowed in and we were alone again that winter. It was different being alone, now that it was a temporary thing; what had been just the way of things had become something to wait out. Even the adults were testy; and while the tree-gap had cured me of my jealousy of Mulberry, it could do nothing for my longing, for that was not an illness or a fault to be mended. I spent hours on the Exchange, having arguments that did not satisfy, learning facts that left me no wiser. Oak Gall, the librarian, took pity on me when she learned how isolated we were and sent messages every few days, taking an interest in my life and recommending things to read—mostly written in TOK, for the Exchange, but by Valley writers, who were the ones she knew best, and so by searching for more I would sometimes come across texts in Kesh, and out of restlessness translate them, first with the help of the Exchange, but by the end of the winter I was reading more or less on my own, in that I understood how the verbs worked, though there were still many words for things that I did not have any reference for.
When summer came, I was still restless; the pain of heartbreak had ebbed, but nothing had come to take its place. Late in the summer a ship belonging to my father’s lineage came into the Schehets. When it was all unloaded and standing ready to take on copper and tin from Líídou, my mother took me aside to tell me she had arranged for me to have a place on board, if I would take it.
The ship had carried wine and olive oil from the Valley. I took it as a sign that I should go with it, and took the place.
We did not call anywhere near the Valley—not that season, or that year, or the next. We spent the winter making short runs in the south, to the Rice and Cotton people, and then when the winds were favorable we stopped over in the Falares and sailed through the Gates. What we did and saw in the Western Ocean and the Omorn Sea is another story, or many other stories—I have written some of them up in a book for the library here—but this story, the one I am telling, picks up again after two years, when we came again through the Gates and put in at Sed.
My heart was breaking in a different way, for after two years at sea I was realizing I would never be the sailor a Goose person ought to be. I could haul on a rope and pull an oar and tend an electric motor, and anyone who will do those things uncomplainingly will find a ship to carry them, but I was years from knowing how to read the weather and the water as well as a ship-raised child of seven or eight.
I was seventeen, desperate to be good at something, and I did not think I could abide the years of ineptitude still before me if I devoted myself to learning the craft; but I had already come to know that, having lived in the wider world now, I could not bear the silence and emptiness of another winter between caravans in the Schehets.
At the inn in Sed there were five or six people of the Valley. They were an acting troupe, come to stay for the winter, trading entertainment for lodging and learning all the new songs, dances, and stories that came through the port. Except for here in Wakwaha, theater in the Valley is mostly played outdoors, and so it’s a summer thing; in the rainy season the lesser troupes, those too new to be invited to play the big towns, they go to Sed or Tatselets or up to Stoy and work there on new material before taking it back to the Valley.
By now I had seen theater; I had even seen the feather-dancers of Líídou, which I felt made me quite worldly. These players from the Valley played largely in dance and mime there in Sed, with no words except the hinge-lines, said in Kesh and then again in TOK. I was in raptures over the grace, the high leaps, the beautiful masks, and at the end of the first night’s entertainment I tried clumsily to express my appreciation in the little Kesh I still remembered, which made me a general favorite, and I ended every night of our stopover drinking wine and smoking cannabis with the actors.
We were in port ten or twelve days, making arrangements for various middlemen to take charge of our cargo, and then the captain announced we were bound the next day for Aho Island. “Home, eh?” said the captain, forgetting that I had never seen it; but when he saw the face I made, he looked at me for a while and said, “Or pay out now, if that’s what you want.”
And that was what we did. I took some of what was owed me in money, and some in turquoise and silver. The bulk of it was in drafts on the Farms storehouses, which I transferred to my family to manage in my name, but to have the use of until I returned.
I had to sign onto the Exchange to arrange this, which I had not done in many months. There are always many people waiting for access to a portside Exchange terminal, and no time to sit and chat as I had used to do. I sent my usual message to my family that I was well. I did not tell them where I was going, for I did not know myself—or rather, I knew, but I did not want to tell them until it was done.
And then I checked my private channel with Mulberry; and, when I found no new posts—nor anything elsewhere from Mulberry, or even mentioning her, in the last year—I got the Exchange to tell me how often the channel had been viewed in that time. It was more times than my own brief sessions on the Exchange would account for.
It might have been someone else, finding it by accident, or even by deliberate search for some reason. Or it might have been Mulberry—perhaps living under a new name now—remembering the friend of her youth, but scared as I was to reach out again.
I had already made my decision; in that moment between leaving my old life and starting a new, I wished very much that there were a message, my old friend sharing the responsibility for what I was doing; but I knew even then it was better there was not; that this was something I needed to do by myself.
So I went to the innkeeper and paid most of my coin for lodging for the rest of the winter; and then I went and told my new friends the actors that I was going to stay in Sed for a while, and then, perhaps, travel up through the Valley. It was important to me that I say it rather than wait to be invited, for they were kind people and would have invited me to join them if I had said outright I did not know where to go. As it was, they told me immediately I must travel with them when they went back north—“We’ll ride the Train! Have you ever seen it? Oh, you have such a wonder in store!”
I spend the rest of the season becoming a sort of accessory to the troupe. It turned out that being willing to haul on a rope and tend a motor will make a person as welcome among actors as among sailors—there was always a light to hold, a lace to tie, a rattle to shake, a smoke pot to wave. My Kesh became nearly passable, and I learned to beat five and four on the skin drum.
The night before they were to return to the Valley, and me with them, I sent a message on the Exchange—not to Mulberry, but to my old friend Oak Gall, the librarian. I told her was coming into the Valley with an acting troupe up from Sed. I wasn’t sure what else to say—I had no claim on her, on anyone in the Valley; I had some trade goods, a desire to leave my old life, and no new one to step into.
When we left before dawn the next morning, there was still no answer; and the Valley has only one Exchange, so once we arrived in Tachas Touchas, I could not check to see what she might have said; if she remembered me.
In Tachas Touchas, the actors introduced me as their new apprentice; and so that was what I became. I began to learn the steps of the chorus in the simpler dances, the line-gyres; I had learned to sing sailors’ work songs, but White Ear, who had a beautiful deep voice, would not let me learn any songs until I had satisfied her by singing the Beginning and Ending Tones properly. When I complained I was bored, holding the same note for ages, she told me to come back to her when I ceased to be. I thought this meant I would never be allowed to sing a melody, but sure enough as she continued to correct my posture and my breathing, those two notes became more and more interesting.
It was good for me, I think, to have a new craft to learn while I was learning to be a person here in the Valley. It made it easier to look on everything as a student, to have patience, both with myself, when I felt stupid over my halting Kesh, and with my hosts, when their ways of doing things seemed inexplicable or backward to me.
My given name, Oëghë, is very hard to say, for people who do not speak Aho, so my hosts tended to call me Woman of the Goose People, or just Goose.
In Sed, I had felt less of a Goose than ever; now I was constantly stumbling over the parts of my upbringing I had never paid attention to at the time, and that none of the messages and books I had read on the Exchange had bothered to mention. I did not know how to eat rice with my fingers, or to greet sheep without spooking them; I had no words to say when swatting a fly, which to my hosts seemed deeply immoral, and they had none to say for a sneeze or a yawn, which seemed immensely risky. Though in the Schehets I had quite neglected my devotions and only made ancestor-braids on Great-Grandmother’s nameday, I began to make one or two every morning, and to wear a goose feather in them if I could get one, which made me feel somewhat less unworthy about being called by my clan-name.
About a moon after we arrived, Tachas Touchas danced the World. The first day of the World, the mourning, frightened me, and I spent most of it fearing I had transgressed for wearing my usual goose pinion in my hair; but the second day was joyous, and on the third, the day of children, I think I began to be born into the Valley properly.
We spent the spring and summer working our way up the Valley, playing in every town—four or five days in the smaller towns, a whole moon in Telína. We danced the Grass in Kastóha and came to Wakwaha at the end of the fall.
After we settled in, I went up to the library and asked for Oak Gall. She was not in, but a young woman using the Exchange terminal to annotate a map of Crater Lake looked up from her work. “Oëghë?” she said, as though she had practiced the sounds. “So you are here? Oak Gall told me you might be here, soon!”
“Mulberry?” I said. “I am Breath now,” she said, and she reached out and touched my hair, my face, the goose quill I wore beside my cheek.
“And I am Pinion,” I said, my second name coming to me as she held it, my name, in her fingers.
Breath is one of the names of the Ninth House, and I understand now that it is an audacious name. To take one’s own House name as a second name—to take it at all, instead of being given it—is presumptuous; to take the name of one of the Four Houses is not, but it is perhaps unwise. And yet it was fitting to me, though I could not then have explained why, that a person I had known only as text—only as the stories she told of herself, as a Four-House person—should have the name of one of the houses of Sky.
But now she was Breath of the Blue Clay, a human person, speaking and spoken of in the Five-House mode. And here in the Valley, we began the work of becoming friends over again—as any two friends might, who had not spoken for so long. It was not hard work, or at least not unpleasant work, but it consumed us, consumed the whole of our days, while we tried to learn what we were to each other; how we should best love each other.
We tried being lovers—indeed, that was very nearly the first thing we tried, for Breath could not stop touching me and I did not know many ways to be touched. She was not my mother, or a workmate hauling beside me, or White Ear correcting my posture with her hands against my diaphragm, so what else could she be? And she was wearing colors with her white; and I had done more than just watch the feather-dances in Líídou.
But we were still too unreal to each other to be good together that way—creatures of letters and light, not skin and hands. We passed a long night chasing climaxes that fled from us, and several days after avoiding each other and blushing when we could not.
In the end, we could not avoid each other for long. The troupe had done well enough over the summer to be invited to perform through the winter in Wakwaha—in a hay barn, not in the Theater, but it was still Wakwaha. White Ear was elated, and gave ninety copper coins to the Obsidian heyimas as an offering in celebration. And though Wakwaha was a large town, the Exchange room of the library was small and Oak Gall’s office smaller, and we were neither of us willing to cede that ground to the other.
So Breath and I tried again—as lovers once or twice more, until we had to accept that we were simply not suited. We could not remember what we had told each other, long ago, and what was so important we merely assumed the other must have known, and so we talked past each other often, or repeated stories the other still remembered by heart. We did not know each other’s patterns of talking, and so interrupted each other constantly, and yet we knew each other’s favorite turns of phrase.
Since the troupe was now resident in Wakwaha, we had had to find other lodging than the hostelry. Breath invited me to live with her, in the household where she lived with a cousin and his children, but after our attempts at lovemaking I was embarrassed to share a room with her, and took a room White Ear offered me in her sister’s house.
All of my actor friends now had responsibilities outside of the troupe—the Yellow Adobe people turned around and went south again to help with the pruning, and the Serpentine went up into the hunting side to gather nuts, and those whose heyimas were not forming work parties took on shifts at an Art or a Lodge.
I did not know the local gathering plants or how to prune grapes, or how to make paper or blow glass; and while at first I tried to use my time practicing diligently at my singing and drumming and dancing, this did not make me appear responsible, and I got lectures from White Ear and her sister about giving the craft too much of myself, too quickly.
I offered myself to the Millers’ Art, for I did know about maintaining engines and by now I had learned quite a bit about rigging electric lights, too; but they were wary of giving responsibility to a transient who, for all they knew, might be on the Train up to Stoy the next moon. And more than that: they would not give the work to a no-House person. It was dangerous enough that Milling was under the Houses of Sky; to allow a person with no place in any of the Five Houses to do the work was to invite disaster.
And so I ended up in my old work, at the Exchange, monitoring the passive searches for misfiled trade information and printing out letters for people and Arts in the other towns.
“If I wanted to become a Five-House person,” I said to Oak Gall—
“You are here, aren’t you?” she said, using the Earth mode; and then, in Sky mode, “Or aren’t you?”
“I have no heyimas,” I said.
“Ah. Yes, that’s true,” she said.
“Would any have me? If I wanted to truly become a person of the Valley?”
“Oh, that—yes, of course. You will have to ask.” I took this at the time to mean that they might say no to me, but her meaning was simpler: I would have to ask, because no House would invite me. That would be a presumption on their part. “There would be instruction,” she went on. “It might be difficult—in some Houses, it’s quite difficult.”
“But how do I know which House to ask? You, in the Valley, you’re born to your House; you did not choose to be Serpentine—”
“That I remember,” she qualified.
Certainly I could not remember ever asking to be born a Goose person. If I had had such a choice, why had I not asked to be born in the Valley? But as what?
I must have looked quite dismayed, for Oak Gall said, kindly, “Listen. You are too young to be that sure of who you are. So ask instead, with whom do you want to find out?
We were then in the Twenty-One Days. Breath went up with her cousin and two other Blue Clay people onto the slopes of Ama Kulkan. I was sitting on the porch outside my room, just after dawn, bundled up in blankets but not yet dressed, when they came down from the hunting side, and Breath said several heyas and other things I could not make out and then ran up the porch stairs to embrace me. “Oh, you’re warm! We left the last camp hours ago—walking in frost; the grass shattered under my boots, but it was worth it to have a clear sky—we saw five meteors! And the City passed overhead twice, or a City; Last Blossom can tell which one is which but I can’t yet.”
She had made the trek in silence, and now four days’ of words were bubbling out of her. We sat there, she speaking, I listening, nestling closer and closer under the blanket. A goose passed overhead, not the black-headed kind that stays year-round, but the white kind that are visitors. “Sister! So you are here,” she greeted it; then she blew out another puff of air, which was white with the cold, and said “See! Here are your namesake and mine, both in the Seventh House this morning.”
Her hand came around my hip, which I found quite comfortable; I leaned into the touch.
Breath pulled her hand away, suddenly, letting the cold air in between the blankets. “It’s the Twenty-One Days,” she said. I didn’t know why, until she said, “Well. I’m not fasting—are you?” and I realized that she had been talking of celibacy; that she had thought of that touch as sexual.
I didn’t say anything, but I drew the blankets close up around me.
“I should go,” she said, which was not what I had meant, but I could not explain, and she left.
I did not know the country here well enough to walk in the steps of the lion; but I gazed up at Ama Kulkan for most of that day, keeping silent, going far away in my mind and thinking.
Even I knew that the Twenty-One Days was no time to begin such an undertaking; but when all the fires had been lighted again, I asked Oak Gall to come with me to the librarian of the Blue Clay heyimas. She found the right wakwas—in her memory, and written down, and some I think she invented on the spot—and told me what I must learn and what I must dance, to become a person of the Second House.
We were still there when Breath came into the heyimas for the Salt Journey committee meeting. She was surprised to see us. “So you are here!” she said, and then did not know what else to add.
Oak Gall finished the greeting, proudly: “Woman of the Valley. Or she is to be, soon.”
“Yes,” I said to Breath. “We are to be sisters, you and I.”
Breath went very white at the nostrils, but she said nothing in front of the librarians.
I was not going to say anything, either, but, though Oak Gall was a kindly woman who did not look for gossip, Springs, the heyimas librarian, was a shrewd woman, and when we met for my instruction the first thing she said was, “You went to bed with that Finder girl, didn’t you?” And I had to admit that I had, unsatisfying as it had been.
It did not keep me from becoming a Blue Clay person. Even adult Valley-born people, who commit incest knowing what they are doing, are not cast out of their Houses, and Springs scoffed at the very idea. As well cast Coyote out of the wilderness! And I had not been a Blue Clay person at the time, nor ever been instructed in the responsibilities of goestun-sisters, or the right behavior of human beings.
I bristled somewhat at this, but clearly, a better-instructed person would not have made her best friend a party to incest. So I was permitted to take instruction, and to learn the Water dances and the Blue Clay songs, and at the Water dance that summer I was immersed in the springs of the Na and emerged, shivering and as blue as my new House, a woman of the Valley.
Breath was very angry with me for a long time, as she had every right to be. “You might have said,” she said to me, over and over, never saying exactly what I might have said. So perhaps neither of us could say the things we should have, that might have kept us from hurting each other.
But sisters, it turns out, can hurt each other quite a bit and still forgive each other in time, and still be sisters; and now that we are both a little wiser, we are friends again, and sisters as well, and we have carried a yoke between us on the Salt Journey three times. Heya!
A Deer Poem of the Blue Clay
Brother, come into
our House; the door
is narrow, narrow;
you cannot enter
in your thousands.
Brother, come into
our House; the stairs
are narrow, narrow;
you cannot enter
uncountable.
Only alone, fearless
can you enter.
Only one head, one skin,
two eyes, one breath--
Brother, come inside!