By the time I move through the village, the air has changed. Word travels faster than fire on dry leaves. One Adropo canoe has been found, dragged half onto the mud at the far shore. Sprub’ex is gone.
Anger simmers. I detect some shame, too. I feel it brush against me as I walk, like static before a storm. No one speaks loudly. No one laughs.
The chief meets my gaze once across the platforms, and inclines his head. There will be a reckoning later. Not now.
Inside the hut, Callie is awake, blinking at the ceiling as if trying to remember where she is.
“What is wrong,” she says. “Your eyes. They…” She shows me by frowning hard.
“You were taken in the night,” I answer. “I am allowed to frown. Indeed, in my fury, I am allowed to go to the Adropo tribe, and use my spear on them all.”
She considers that. “But you will not. Yes?”
“Yes, I will not,” I concede. “I may not need to, either. If they’re banned from trading for our splix, their tribe may not last long. Anyway. Callie.”
She raises her little eyebrows. “Yes?”
“I am going to the shore again, to check on the Lifegivers. I know you like to be asked, so I will now ask: Would you like to come with me? There will probably not be a rekh this time. But there may be.”
She stretches luxuriously and gives me a smile. “I like when you ask. Yes, I will come.”
We don’t linger. I pack quickly and methodically, forcing my eyes not to drift too often toward the doorway. I do not want men to gather. I don’t want Callie studied.
“I think you want only me to be not stared at,” she says as she closes her strange garment at her neck.
I hide a smile at her interesting way of speaking. “I do want that,” I agree. “For you to be not stared at. Or rather, I want to be the only man who stares at you.”
“Can I stare atyou?” she asks, gathering her hair behind her head.
“No, that’s strictly forbidden,” I tell her with mock seriousness. “You may only stare at my spear.”
She glances at my loincloth, where there is again some hardening going on. “Which spear?”
I unwrap my real spear and put the blunt end on the floor. “Which one do you want to stare at?”
She taps her lips as if in deep thought. “Can I choose later?”
“Oh, all right. Wait here. I’ll get some food we can eat on the way.”
The paddle cuts through the water in steady strokes. Morning light turns the bay pale silver, the jungle steaming softly where the sun touches it. I scan the banks, the trees, the shallow places where raptors like to drink, and the sky, where an irox could come diving at any moment.
Nothing moves. No waves betray a krai lurking.
“It’s not coming,” Callie says, following my gaze to the surface.
“It may never return,” I reply. “It remembers my spear.”
“And I remember the other spear,” Callie says easily.
The memory of the Mating sets off the old pressure again.
We beach the canoe near the stream and move inland together, toward the pond. The Lifegivers grow on their small island, big leaves glossy and untouched.
I walk over to a cluster of bushes planted here for this purpose and lift the canoe from its hiding place among them. “We use this to get to them.” I put it on the surface of the pond. “It’s more suited for boys than for us, but it will carry us.”
Callie wrinkles her little nose at the canoe. “You are sure? It is very small.”
I step into the vessel. It’s so unsteady I almost fall right out again. I gingerly sit on the bottom while the canoe wiggles wildly this way and that. I get the feeling the thin-hulled vessel shakes in tune with my heartbeat. “It’s perfectly safe. Look, it’s completely steady. Come on.”
