Lois Bujold - The Sharing Knife - Beguilement

“Evening, patroller,” and carried on. Evidently the incident with Sunny was not to be discussed. On the whole, Dag was relieved.

He greeted Tril amiably and attempted to make himself useful hooking pots on and off the fire for her, while trying to think his way to other possibilities for a half-handed man to show his worth to the female who was, in Lakewalker terms, the head of Tent Bluefield. Tril watched him in such deep alarm, he began to fear he was looming, too tall for the room, and he finally just sat down and watched, which seemed to ease her. His comment about the weather fell flat, as did a leading question about her chickens; alas, Dag knew little about farm animals beyond horses. But a few questions about Fletch’s upcoming wedding led by a short route to West Blue marriage customs generally, which was exactly where Dag wanted her to go. The best way to keep her going, he quickly discovered, was to respond with comments on Lakewalker customs on the same head.

Tril paused in kneading biscuit dough to sigh. “I was afraid last spring Fawn was yearning after the Sawman boy, but that was never a hope. His papa and Jas Stonecrop had had it fixed between them for years that Sunny would marry Violet and the two farms would come together in the next generation. It’s going to be a rich spread, that one. If Violet has more than one boy, there may be enough to divide among them without the younger ones having to go off homesteading the way Reed and Rush keep talking of.”

The twins spoke of going to the edge of the cultivated zone, twenty miles or so west, and breaking new land between them, after Fletch married. It was a plan much discussed but so far little acted upon, Dag was given to understand.

“Fathers arrange marriages, among farmers?”

“Sometimes.” Tril smiled. “Sometimes they just think they do. Sometimes the fathers have to be arranged. The land, though, or the family due-share for children who aren’t getting land—that has to be understood and written out and kept by the village clerk, or you risk bad blood later.”

Land again; farmers were all about land. Other wealth was thought of as land’s equivalent, it seemed. He offered, “Lakewalker couples usually choose each other, but the man is expected to bring bride-gifts to her family, which he is considered to be joining. Horses and furs, traditionally, though it depends on what he has accumulated.” Dag added, as if casually, “I have eight horses at the moment. The other geldings are on loan to the camp pool, except for Copperhead, who is too evil-tempered to foist on anyone else. The three mares I keep in foal. My brother’s wife looks after them along with her mares.” “Camp pool?” Tril said, after a puzzled moment.

“If a man has more than he needs, he can’t just sit on it and let it rot. So it goes to the camp pool, usually to outfit a young patroller, and the camp scribe keeps a record of it. It’s very handy if you go to switch camps, because you can carry a letter of record and draw for your needs when you get there, instead of carrying all that burden along. At the hinterland meetings every two years, one of the jobs for the camp scribes is to meet and settle up any lingering differences. I have a long credit at Stores.” How to translate that into acreage temporarily defeated him, but he hoped she understood he was not by any measure destitute, despite his present road-worn appearance. He rubbed his nose reflectively with the side of his hook. “They tried me as a camp scribe for a while after I lost my hand, but I didn’t take to the fiddly work and all the writing. I wanted to be moving, out in the field.”

“You can read and write?” Tril looked as though this was a point in Dag’s favor—good.

“Pretty much all Lakewalkers can.”

“Hm. Are you the oldest in your family, or what?”

“Youngest by ten years, but I’ve only the one brother living. It was a great sorrow to my mother that she had no daughter to carry on her tent, but my brother married a younger sister of the Waterstriders—they had six—and she took our tent name so’s it wouldn’t be lost, and moved in so’s my mother wouldn’t be alone.” See, I’m a nice tame fellow, I have a family too. Of a sort. “My brother is a very gifted maker at our camp.” He decided not to say of what. The production of sharing knives was the most demanding of Lakewalker makings, and Dar was highly respected, but it seemed premature to introduce this to the Bluefields.

“Doesn’t he patrol?”

“He did when he was younger—nearly everyone does—but his making skills are too valuable to waste on patrolling.” Dag’s, needless to say, weren’t.

“So what of your father? Was he a maker or a patroller?”

“Patroller. He died on patrol, actually.”

“Killed by one of those bogles Fawn talks of?” It was not entirely clear to Dag if Tril had believed in bogles before, but on the whole he thought she’d come to now, and was rendered very uncomfortable thereby.

“No. He went in after a younger patroller who was swept away in a bad river crossing, late in the winter. I wasn’t there—I was patrolling in a different sector of the hinterland, and didn’t hear for some days.”

“Drowned? Seems an odd fate for a Lakewalker.”

“No. Or not just then. He took a fever of the lungs and died about four nights later. Drowned in a sense, I suppose.” Actually, he’d died of sharing; the two comrades who were trying to fetch him home in his dire illness had entered the tent to find him rolled over on his knife. Whether he’d chosen that end in shrewd judgment or delirium or despair or just plain exhaustion from the struggle, Dag would never know. The knife had come to him, anyway, and he’d used it three years later on a malice up near Cat Lick.

“Oh, aye, lung fever is nasty,” Tril said sympathetically. “One of Sorrel’s aunts was carried off by that just last winter. I’m so sorry.”

Dag shrugged. “It was eleven years ago.”

“Were you close?”

“Not really. He was away when I was smaller, and then I was away. I knew his father well, though; Grandfather had a bad knee by then, like Nattie”—Nattie, listening through the doorway as she spun, lifted up her head and smiled at her name—“and he stayed in camp and helped look after me, among other things. If I’d lost a foot instead of a hand, I might have ended like that, Uncle Dag to my brother’s pack.” Or I might have shared early. “So, um… are there any one-handed farmers?”

“Oh, yes, accidents happen on farms. Folks deal with it, I expect. I knew a man with a wooden leg, once. I’ve never heard tell of anything like that rig of yours, though.”

Fawn’s mother was relaxing nicely in his presence now and didn’t jump at all anymore when he moved. On the whole, Dag suspected that it was easier to coax wild animals to take food from his hand than to lull Bluefields. But he was clearly making progress. He wondered if his Lakewalker habits were betraying him, and if he ought to have started with Fawn’s papa instead of with the women.

Well, it hardly mattered where he started; he was eventually going to have to beguile the whole lot of them in order to get his way.

And in they clumped, sweaty and ravenous. Fawn followed, smelling of cows, with two covered buckets slung on a yoke, which she set aside to deal with later.

The crowd, minus Clover tonight, settled down happily to heaping portions of ham, beans, corn bread, summer squash, assorted pickled things, biscuits, butter, jams, fresh apple butter, cider, and milk. Conversation lagged for a little.

Dag ignored the covert glances as he dealt with biscuits by stabbing them whole with his fork-spoon; Tril, if he read her aright, was simply pleased that he seemed to like them. Happily, he did not need to feign this flattery although he would have if necessary.