Page 84 of The Summer Pass

“I did not expect to find you here,” he said.

“Did you not? Well, Padunu came upon us and said that you had arranged to meet here. But since you were not here, I sent him back to the great house with Otoni and waited myself. Where are Barda and his new friend?”

“On the wall, valiantly defending the fortress. Seems they were pressed into service when they showed their faces, and—well, I don’t know if they forgot their mission, exactly, but the fortress certainly does need defending, and they are doing their part.”

Gurti nodded. “Good. They sent you to tell me?”

“No, they’d completely forgotten about the meeting, and it was my idea to come back here with the message. I’m needed on the wall myself, as a matter of fact.”

He looked sheepish about it, as if he expected her to say he couldn’t possibly be needed. But it didn’t surprise her that he’d made himself useful. It was what she’d expect of him.

She couldn’t remember quite what she’d been thinking that first time she went to bed with Tirtu. Maybe she hadn’t been thinking anything. Maybe that was how it had been able to happen. She remembered the argument with Faru that had come before it.

They’d all eaten in the gathering place that evening, which was something they used to do more often in those days. It used to be a pleasant thing. Lord Vanu would seem at ease—she used to marvel at how little he seemed like a prisoner in those days, and how his good humour, quiet as it was, would warm the whole table. His daughters would be laughing and chatting with their hands, and Khatu and Barda, who were just boys then, would be on their best behaviour—which wasn’t very good, but you could tell they were trying. That night Tirtu had enough to drink, certainly, and told some funny stories. She liked the way he wasn’t ashamed to make himself the butt of the joke if it would get everyone to laugh. She could tell he wasn’t a fool, but he was a humble man. She liked that about him.

Faru was like a thundercloud all evening, and she didn’t know why. There was always something with him. Lately he had been saying he was the only one who felt the dishonour of being trapped in Umtúshta—and maybe that was true. Maybe that was the whole reason for his black mood that night. Maybe he’d looked around the table and realized not one of them was moping and pining for their freedom, and he thought that dishonoured them. But what really drove him to rage was when he saw Gurti enjoying herself.

They didn’t usually have music—none of them played instruments, and of course the deaf girls couldn’t enjoy it. But they did sometimes dance. That night it was Khatu who started the talk of dancing, and pretty soon all the young people were clamouring for it. Tirtu got out a barrel to serve as a drum, and beat time well enough to make up for his poor singing, and Khatu and Barda clowned around, trying to impress Lord Vanu, who was by far the best dancer among them.

The boys left the dance by and by, wrangling about something as they usually did, and without thinking much about it, Gurti got up.

She knew how she’d looked, dancing with Lord Vanu, because Faru described it to her in the great house after the others had left: “Smiling at him like a girl! Hopping about and making your breasts bounce like a foolish girl! Like a half-grown young girl with her hair unbound!”

Seemingly she’d looked like a girl. She’d felt a little like one. She’d enjoyed herself.

“It’s unseemly,” Faru went on. “You were throwing yourself at him. Have you no shame?”

She stared at him. It had never occurred to her that he would put such a meaning to it. That was why she had done it—there were none around to see but their own family and Lord Vanu’s, and none of them could think anything of it because …

“I’m old enough to be his mother!”

She wasn’t, really. Lord Vanu was thirty and had a daughter the same age as Gurti’s younger son. But she’d never, ever have thought of him in the way Faru was suggesting—she didn’t think of any man that way, because she was Faru’s wife. It had been a private pleasure for her to think of Lord Vanu in a motherly way, even if she wasn’t really old enough to be his mother. She liked how he always deferred to her as the mistress of Umtúshta and asked her advice about homely things like planting and caring for the animals.

“You know he’s … ” She hesitated. She knew various ways to say it, but none she thought Faru would want to hear her say. “A matchmaker’s ruin?”

She thought he would say yes, of course he knew that, but that it didn’t matter—she had still behaved wrongly, think about how it would look, and so on. As if it mattered when there was nobody at all here to see, nobody who could really think she had been flirting with Lord Vanu. She was surprised when instead Faru stared as if she’d said something shocking.

“What do you mean, woman?”

“He goes with men,” she said baldly. “Not with women.”

“Surely that is slander!”

“No, it isn’t. It’s very well known. In the Summer Pass, I daresay everyone knows.”

She remembered that Faru had been surprised to learn Lord Vanu signed, too, something else everyone in the Summer Pass knew.

“If you ever came to Manáshta with me to see my family, you’d know too.”

Faru huffed. “I would have heard this scurrilous gossip, you mean.”

“He makes no secret of it, Faru.”

“But—but our sons … ”

She laughed. She couldn’t help it. “They might count themselves lucky to catch his eye. It could be a fine thing for either of them. But I think they’re both too silly for it to last long.”

Faru looked like he didn’t know what to say. He’d already given up, with great reluctance, expecting that either of their sons would marry any of Vanu’s daughters. Now she could see him torn between the wish to sputter angrily at her for thinking they might whore Khatu and Barda out to Lord Vanu himself and the wish to pretend it had been his own idea.