The Sterkarm Handshake Read Online Free PDF Page B

feelings.
    Andrea’s own eyes had filled as she’d listened, and she’d found it hard to swallow, but she was always embarrassed by tears and tried hard not to show them. “No use crying over spilt milk,” her father had always said. Besides, researchers were supposed to keep a distance between themselves and their work. She tried. It wasn’t easy.
    Sweet Milk said he held one of his small sisters in his arms and watched his mother crouch by his father’s body and howl like a dog. His mother, and six children, had been left with nothing but the clothes on their backs and what little grain they could rescue from the burning house.
    She read it over and over, shaking her head. It seemed extreme to her—the robbery, the burning, the murder, the destitution, all piling one on another—but it helped her understand the world she was in. No one among the Sterkarms thought Sweet Milk’s story strange. Such things happened commonly. That was why the towers were built, with their fifteen-foot walls; why the outbuildings had no entrances on the ground floor; why every man went armed and no one ever left the tower alone.
    Something banged on the table, surprising her and making her look up. It was Sweet Milk come back, and setting down a fresh jug of beer. He seated himself heavily on a stool and grinned at her through his beard.
    He was a big man, probably in his thirties, with long dark hair and a dark beard. His hands were big and thick fingered with scarred knuckles, his face usually grim, and he rarely spoke. He’d made Andrea nervous when she’d first met him. He’d seemed as threatening as any twenty-first-century biker. Then she’d got to know him, through Per, who treated him with familiar, affectionate contempt, and she’d found that Sweet Milk was good-natured, shrewd and funny. She valued his friendship a great deal. It had been Sweet Milk who’d told her about “the Sterkarm handshake,” and he was an influential man at the tower—Toorkild’s foreman when farming, and his second in command when fighting. Toorkild thought so highly of him that he’d given him the responsibility and great honor of being Per’s foster father. And yet Sweet Milk wasn’t a Sterkarm. He was a Beal.
    â€œI’ve written down all tha told me,” she said, “so I can remember it all.” She held the notebook up for him to see, and he peered at it. To him it must seem nothing but wriggling lines and scribble. He couldn’t read or write even his own name.
    â€œElf-Work,” he said, grinning. He had big, square teeth. When Andrea had first come among the Sterkarms, she’d expected to find a lot of stunted, puny creatures with rotten teeth, and had been surprised, even faintly disappointed, to find how wrong she was. The grit that got into the bread from the grindstones did wear down their back teeth, but since none of them had ever tasted sugar, and they drank a great deal of milk, the rest of their teeth were good and strong. Some even whitened them by chewing on hazel twigs.
    â€œCanst spell me with that?” He nodded at the writing.
    â€œNo. And I would not spell thee, Sweet Milk, even if I could.”
    â€œAh, tha needs no Elf-Work to spell me, Honey.”
    Andrea looked down at her notebook, pretending that she hadn’t heard and hoping that, in the red light, the flush on her cheeks wouldn’t be seen. She couldn’t get used to being admired and complimented. Back in the 21st she was “Big Fat Andy,” and had learned to expect that men would look straight past her. But what the 21st called “big and fat,” the Sterkarms called “bonny.” Tall as she was, full fleshed, broad beamed, bosomy, thunder thighed—the eyes of the Sterkarm men lit up. They noticed her all the time, and it was disconcerting. Would a looker like Per have given her even one glance if he’d been born and