Page 20 of Circle of Days

Joia was not certain who would take whom. Han thought he was invincible, but Robbo was almost as big. Anyway, she had her mother’s aversion to violence as a solution. “We’re going to resolve this question peaceably,” she said, and she could hear the desperation in her own voice.

Inka stepped closer to Robbo and the cow. Han moved in too. Joia was losing control. She said: “Robbo, if you put down the knife she’ll drop her stick. Then we can talk sensibly.”

It was useless, she saw. Robbo’s expression hardened. He grabbed the cow’s horn and stretched its neck.

Inka screamed.

Robbo cut the cow’s throat with one strong stroke of the flint knife. The plaintive lowing was abruptly silenced. Blood splashed into the pot.

Inka, enraged, hit Robbo over the head with her stick. It was a stout tree branch, and Robbo staggered.

Joia yelled: “Stop it!”

Inka was maddened and she hit Robbo again, catching his left shoulder.

Thunder barked hysterically.

Inka raised her stick for the third time.

Han jumped into the fray, seizing Inka from behind to restrain her.

Robbo stepped closer to Inka, who could not dodge him because Han was holding her. He slashed with the knife in a wide left-to-right arc, cutting Inka’s throat as he had the cow’s. For a second time in a few short moments, blood spurted.

There was a horrified silence.

Inka slumped in Han’s arms, and he tightened his grip to hold her upright. The blood ran down the front of her leather priestess tunic.

Robbo was aghast and frightened at what he had done. “She tried to kill me!” he said, making his excuse although no one had accused him.

Han said: “There was no need! I had her pinned!”

Joia bent over and threw up on the ground.

Han gently laid Inka’s body down. The bleeding stopped. Her eyes stared lifelessly up at the cloudless blue sky.

Joia stood upright. She was shocked to her core. She had never known a murder among the herder folk. There had not been one in her lifetime. And the killing of a priestess was sacrilege. Horror paralyzed her thinking. She did not know what to do or say.

Thunder sniffed her vomit.

That brought her down to earth and she pulled herself together.

Inka’s body had to be taken to the Monument.

The herder community must be told what had happened.

And it must never happen again. This was a first, yes, but it arose from the crisis, the drought.

Unless the situation changed, there would be more rows and more killings.

Something had to be done.

Ani was tanning leather beside the river.

First she built a fire. While it was burning up, she pushed tree bark into her largest pot until it was half full, then filled it to the top with clean river water from upstream.

She set the pot into the embers at the edge of her fire.

She stirred the mixture with a stick as it was heating up.

While she waited, she thought about her family. She remembered how worried she used to get when Joia was a restless adolescent. Now Joia had found her destiny. She loved being a priestess, and was wholly absorbed by the work of keeping track of the days of the year.

Neen, too, was happy. She and Seft had three children, the joy of Ani’s life.

Han had not settled down yet, but he was a fine young man and one day he would give Ani more grandchildren.

She herself was healthy, and thanked the gods for it. She had seen more summers than she could count, and had given birth five times, including two babies who had not lived beyond a year, but she did not feel old, not yet.

Occasionally she missed having a man. She had loved the intimacy, and the sex, and the feeling of having a friend she could always rely on. But when she thought about men, she knew she could not love any of them. She did not want “a man,” she wanted Olin. No one else would do.

Her only worry was the drought. The plain had known droughts before, and Ani remembered a severe one from her childhood. She had survived, but some of her friends had died. And when it ended it had left people very cautious, averse to any change. The plain had taken years to recover its prosperity.

The pot was boiling merrily. Beside her was a second large pot with a basketwork sieve over its mouth.

Using two thick leather pads to protect her hands, she picked up the boiling pot and poured the liquid through the sieve into the second pot, pausing when she needed to clear fragments of bark from the sieve.

She now had a pot of tanning solution.

She picked up the hide of a cow that had been prepared for tanning—bits of flesh removed from the inside, the hair scraped off the outside—and stuffed it into the pot of tanning solution.

It would remain there for three twelve-day weeks, being stirred every day to make sure the solution reached every part.

The process of tanning could not be rushed: the solution had to penetrate right through the thickness of the hide.

The purpose of tanning was to arrest the natural process by which the hide, like most parts of animal cadavers, would break down and rot, whereupon someone’s tunic would become smelly and gradually fall apart.

She had several hides ready, and she was about to start on the next when Joia appeared.

Joia had not been a noticeably pretty girl, but she had grown into a beautiful woman.

Ani believed that beauty came from the inside.

When someone was doing work they hated or was partnered with someone they disliked, or was possessed by a deep resentment or a terrible failure or an ancient enmity, they looked ugly.

People whose lives were in harmony looked attractive, and Joia was like that.

It was not the color of her hazel eyes, it was the way they twinkled; her mouth was lovely because she smiled so much; her body was slim and supple because she danced every day and enjoyed it; her speech sounded musical because she spent so much time singing.

But then, Ani thought wryly, perhaps I’m biased.

As Joia came closer, Ani realized that she was in a serious mood; no, more than that, she had suffered a shock. Ani was immediately worried. “What’s happened?” she said.

“Robbo killed a priestess, Inka.”

Ani was horrified. “Killed? How did that happen?”

“Robbo was trying to slaughter a heifer. We all told him it was wrong, but he took no notice, so Inka hit him with a club.”

“Herders don’t kill each other!” Ani said.

“It just escalated.” Joia was close to tears. “I couldn’t stop them. Nor could Han.”

“He was there too?”

Joia nodded. “He tried to intervene, but it didn’t work. Robbo put his knife to the cow’s throat, so Inka tried to stop him, but she failed. He cut the cow’s throat, and—” Joia sobbed, then went on: “And he cut Inka’s throat.”

“Oh!” Ani put her hand over her mouth.

“What do we do? I mean, what does the community do when there is a murder?”

“I’ve only known one,” Ani said. “I was young, about fifteen midsummers. There was a man, a very bad-tempered man, who had a row with another man about which of them owned a certain flint axe. The bad-tempered man killed the other with the axe.”

“But what did the community do?”

“Well, when the story got around, no one would speak to the killer. Whenever they saw him they walked away. They wouldn’t let their children play with his children.

They didn’t share meat with him. One day he and his family walked away from Riverbend across the Great Plain and were never seen again. ”

“It doesn’t seem much of a punishment.”

“It’s the best we’ve got. In the farmer community, the murderer is killed, usually by the victim’s family. But sometimes they get the wrong person. And sometimes the killer’s family takes revenge, and so the killing goes on. In the long run our system is better.”

“What do the woodlanders do?”

“I don’t know.”

“So Robbo and Roni and their children will just have to move away, out of the Great Plain.”

“Probably, yes.”

“I wonder what Robbo is saying to people about what happened.”

“That’s a good question. Let’s find out.”

Ani quickly tidied her work materials and they left the riverside, heading for Robbo’s house. Robbo was outside, butchering the heifer, watched by Roni and their children and a small crowd. He was telling the story.

Joia was about to speak to him when Ani held her back, and with a finger to her lips told her to keep quiet and listen.

At first Robbo did not see Joia, and he went on with what he was saying.

“She hit me twice with her damned club,” he said indignantly.

“I thought that mad priestess was going to kill me.”

Joia spoke up. “It wasn’t quite like that, was it, Robbo?

” she said. She stepped forward so that everyone could see her.

“I was there,” she said. “My brother, Han, was actually holding Inka, restraining her, preventing her from hitting you, and then—when she was quite helpless—in your rage you cut her throat with your flint knife.”

There was a murmur of surprise from the crowd. Clearly Robbo had been telling people a different story.

“It was a fight,” he said. “I don’t recall the exact details, except that she started it.”

“I remember everything clearly,” Joia said firmly. “Inka was no danger to you once my brother had hold of her. She was helpless. The violence should have ended there, but you killed her in your rage.”

“That’s not how it was. You’re just saying that because Inka was a priestess.”

“I’m saying what I saw. You were killing a heifer, which was foolish and wrong. Inka wasn’t innocent—she should not have hit you with her club. But your life was never in danger.”

Keff, one of the elders, was in the crowd, and now he said: “This beast was a heifer?”

Robbo said: “No, it wasn’t.”