Tarashana by Rachel Neumeier (best novels to read for students .TXT) 📗

such things. If this were to work at all, then Elaro and I would have to make it work. If he were more quarrelsome or harder-tempered, probably this arrangement would be impossible. I was not ordinarily quarrelsome, but this was different. I knew already—I could hardly mistake it—that my temper was much harder than his.

I let out my breath, trying to let anger and bad feeling go with that breath as well. This did not really work. I had been walking back toward the inGara camp and had already come to the edge of the camp without really noticing the land across which I walked. I saw two warriors, older men, sitting cross-legged in places where they could see those who came and went. I nodded to them, but I did not go farther into the camp. Instead, I stopped a child who was running past and said to him, “Go to my mother’s tent and tell the Lau woman I am going to walk down to the lake, and I wish her to come to me there. Will you take that message for me?”

The child, a boy of perhaps seven winters, bowed and said he would carry my message and ran away toward center of our camp, fast, as only a boy that age can run. I turned aside and walked north and east, past the men watching, toward the lake—toward the place where the waterfalls come down into the lake. When I passed one of the warriors, I asked, “There has been no trouble?”

The man shook his head. “Everything is quiet. I have not heard of any trouble yet. I think the inTasiyo are cowardly as well as dishonorable. You wish to go down to the lake? That should be well enough. We have been taking it in turns to walk that path and along the lakeshore, to the place the rocks become broken, there. Perhaps it might be better to go no farther than that, Ryo.”

I nodded, marking the place the man had indicated. Beyond that place, the ground became too rough and steep and broken for any path. I did not really care about the inTasiyo now because I had many other thoughts that concerned me more, but I said, “I will not go farther than that.” Then I walked north, slowly, waiting for Lalani to come.

For all the trouble that had come into my heart, the morning was fair. Long streamers of clouds crossed the sky high above, where the winds were fierce, but here, close to the earth, the air was quiet. The Sun was high, the sky bright and clean and very far away. The air was crisp, carrying the scents of smoke from cooking fires and of cooking food and many people. It would be cold for a Lau, especially when the clouds crossed the Sun’s face. I thought of that only now. Perhaps I should have gone to speak to Lalani in my mother’s tent, or asked her to put up her own tent, or thought of another place. But I preferred to remain beneath the sky if she did not mind the cold too much.

I had come to the lake now, and turned to walk along the shore. The ice was not thinning yet, but soon that would begin. The sound of the waterfalls came clearly, though the cascades were still a bowshot or so to the north. Even if there had been no concern regarding the inTasiyo, no one would set their tents here, where the ground was rocky and uneven, and where mist from the waterfalls drifted when the wind came from the mountains. On an ordinary day, women would come and go from the lake all the time, but no one was nearby now. The closest person was the warrior I had passed.

“Ryo,” Lalani called, and I turned. She walked toward me, wrapped in a fur cloak, tucking even her hands out of sight, with the hood pulled up over her head. But she looked at me with concern and did say I should not have asked her to come out into the cold. She came to me, holding out a hand. “You’re upset,” she said in darau. “What happened?”

I sighed. Then I told her. We walked a little farther along the shore of the lake as I spoke, north, toward the waterfalls. I liked the privacy of this part of the lakeshore, but I stopped before we came to the place where the rocks were broken and the path ended. That was far enough. Warriors might patrol farther than this, but I did not want to go too far from the camp. The wind had come up more strongly as well, and clouds came and went across the face of the Sun. I asked, “Are you too cold?”

“No,” she said firmly. “I’m perfectly all right, Ryo. You actually think this was a reasonable thing for Darra to suggest?”

“Plainly it is a sensible suggestion. Only I cannot like it and I do not know whether I can accept it. Even if I am able to set aside ordinary jealousy, what if my children, our children, come to know him and not me?”

“Oh. Yes, for a man like you, that would be difficult. Would that be different if you alone married a woman, but then came only seldom to the tent of your wife?”

At once I saw that this would be the same. Or the same in every way except that if I accepted Darra's suggestion, all her children would have one father near at hand. A poet would not even be much at risk from the ordinary dangers that warriors face. I drew a slow breath, trying to consider this a good thing.

“Among us, I mean, when a talon wife has a child, no one asks who the father is,” Lalani said thoughtfully. “Every man in her file generally takes an interest, but that's