Lois Bujold - Legacy

In the light of their candle stub atop Dag’s trunk, which did for their bedside table, Fawn sat cross-legged, and said, “Seven people can just vote you—us—to be banished? Just like that?”

“Not quite. They have to sit and hear arguments from both sides. And they’ll each speak with other folks around their islands, gather opinions, before delivering a ruling of this…this gravity.”

“Huh.” She frowned. “Somehow I thought your people not liking me being here would take the form of…I don’t know. Leaving dead rotten animals outside our door to step on in the morning, nasty tricks like that. Fellows in masks setting fire to our tent, or sneaking from the bushes and beating you up, or shaving my head, or something.”

Dag raised quizzical brows. “Is that the form it would take in farmer country?”

“Sometimes.” Sometimes worse, from tales she’d heard.

“A mask won’t hide who you are from groundsense. Anyone wants to do something that ugly around here, they sure can’t do it in secret.”

“That would slow ’em up some, I guess,” allowed Fawn.

“Yes, and…this isn’t a matter for boys’ tricks. Our marriage cords, if nothing else, draw it up to another level altogether. Serious dilemmas take serious thought from serious folks.”

“Shouldn’t we be making a push to talk to those serious folks, too? Dar shouldn’t have it all his own way, seems to me.”

“Yes—no…blight Dar,” he added, in a burst of aggravation. “This shoves me into exactly the worst actions to ease you in here smoothly. Drawing attention, forcing folks to choose sides. I wanted to lie low, and while everyone was waiting for someone else to do something, let the time for choosing just slip on by. I figured a year would do it.”

Fawn blinked in astonishment at his timetable. Perhaps a year didn’t seem like such a long time to him? “This isn’t exactly your favorite sort of arguin’, is it?”

He snorted. “Not hardly. It’s the wrong thing at the wrong time, and…and I’m not very smooth at it, anyway. Fairbolt is. Twenty minutes talking with him, and your head’s turned around. Good camp captain. But he’s made it clear this is my own bed to lie in.” He added in a lower voice, “And I hate begging for favors. Figured I used up a life’s supply long before this.” A slight thump of his left arm on the bedroll indicated what favors he was thinking of, which made Fawn huff in turn. Whatever special treatment had won him his arm harness and let him back on patrol must, it seemed to her, have been paid back in full a good long time ago.

Nevertheless, Dag began the next morning to show their presence more openly by taking Fawn out in the narrow boat for plunkin delivery duty. The first step was to paddle out to a gathering raft, which over the season had worked its way nearly to the end of their arm of the lake and would shortly start back up the other side. A dozen Lakewalkers of various ages, sexes, and states of undress manned the ten-foot-square lashing of tree trunks, which seemed to be munching its way down a long stretch of water lilies. This variety had big, almost leathery leaves that stuck up out of the water like curled fans, and small, simple, unappealing yellow flowers, which also stood up on stalks. The crew worked steadily to dig, then trim and separate the stems, roots, and ears, and then replant. Churned-up mud and plant bits left a messy trail in the raft’s inching wake.

Dag saluted an older woman who seemed to be in charge. A couple of naked boys rolled a load of plunkins into the narrow boat that made it ride alarmingly low in the water, and after polite farewells, Dag and Fawn paddled off again, a good bit more sluggishly. Fawn was intensely conscious of the stares following them.

Delivery consisted of coasting along the lakeshore, pulling up to each campsite in turn, and tossing plunkins into big baskets affixed to the ends of their docks, which at least showed Fawn where their daily plunkins had been coming from all this time. She hated the way the boat wobbled as she scrambled around at this task, and was terrified of dropping a plunkin overboard and having to go after it, especially in water over her head, but at length they’d emptied their boat out again. And then went back for another load and did it all over again, twice.

Dag waved or called a how de’ to folks in other boats or along the shore, seemingly the custom here, and exchanged short greetings with anyone working on the docks as their boat pulled up, introducing Fawn to enough new folks that she quickly lost track of the names. No one was spiteful, though some looked bemused; but few of the return stares or greetings seemed really warm to her. After a while she thought she would have preferred rude, or at least blunt, questions to this silent appraisal. But the little ordeal came to an end at noon, when they climbed wearily back up the bank to Tent Bluefield. Where lunch, Fawn reflected glumly, would be plunkin.

They repeated the exercise on the next four mornings, until the raft-folk and dock-folk stopped looking at them in surprise. In the afternoons, Fawn began to help Sarri with the task of spinning up her new plunkin flax, and, for more novelty, aid Cattagus with his rope-braiding, one of his several sitting-down camp chores that did not strain his laboring lungs. His breathing, he explained between wheezes, was permanent damage left from a bad bout of lung fever a few years back that had nearly led him to share, and had forced him finally to give up patrolling and grow, he claimed, fat.

Fawn found she liked working with Cattagus more than with any other of the campsite’s denizens. Sarri was stiff and wary, or distracted by her children, and Mari wryly dubious, but Cattagus seemed to regard Dag’s farmer girl with grim amusement. It was daunting to reflect that his detachment might stem from how close he stood to death—Mari, for one, was very worried about leaving him come bad weather—but Fawn finally decided that he’d likely always had a rude sense of humor. Further, though not as patient a teacher as Dag, he was nearly as willing, introducing her to the mysteries of arrow-making. He produced arrows not only for his patroller wife, but for Razi and Utau as well. It was very much a two-handed chore; Dar, it seemed, had used to make Dag’s for him, in his spare time. It didn’t need, nor did Cattagus make, any comment that Dag now needed a new source. Fawn found in herself a knack for balance and a sure and steady hand at fletching, and shortly grew conversant with the advantages and disadvantages of turkey, hawk, and crow quills.

Dag trudged off several times to, as he said, scout the territory, returning looking variously worried, pleased, or head-down furious. Fawn and Cattagus were sitting beneath a walnut tree having a fletching session when he stalked back from one of the latter sort, ducked into the tent without a word, returned with his bow and quiver, grabbed a plunkin from the basket by the tent flap, and set it up on a stump in the walnut grove. Within fifteen minutes he had reduced the plunkin to something resembling a porcupine smashed by a boulder and was breathing almost steadily again as he tried to unwedge his deeply buried near misses from the tree behind the stump. There were no wider misses to retrieve from the grove beyond.

“That one sure ain’t gettin’ away,” Cattagus observed, with a nod at the remains of the plunkin. “Anybody I know?”

Dag, treading over to them, smiled a bit sheepishly. “Doesn’t matter now.” He sat down with a sigh, unlatched and set aside his short bow, then picked up one of the new arrows and examined it with a judicious eye. “Better and better, Spark.”

She decided this was deliberate diversion. “You know, you keep saying I shouldn’t come with you so’s folks’ll talk frank and free, but it seems to me you might get further with some if they were to talk a little less frank and free.”