The Wild Girls Read Online Free PDF Page A

now.
    Alo ten Belen had three sons from Nata by now to be priests and soldiers of the House of Belen. Alo came most nights to play with the little boys and take Nata off to his rooms, but they saw little of Bela in the hanan. His friend Dos ten Han had given him a concubine, a pretty, teasing, experienced woman who kept him satisfied for a long time. He had forgotten about the nomad sisters, lost interest in his plans of educating them. Their days passed peacefully and cheerfully. As the years went by, their nights too grew more peaceful. The crying now came seldom to Modh, and only in a dream, from which she could waken.
    But always, when she wakened so, she saw Mal’s eyes wide open in the darkness. They said nothing, but held each other till they slept again.
    In the morning, Mal would seem quite herself; and Modh would say nothing, fearing to upset her sister, or fearing to make the dream no dream.
    Then things changed.
    Tudju’s brothers Bela and Alo called for her. She was gone all day, and came back to the hanan looking fierce and aloof, fingering the hilt of her silver sword. When her mother went to embrace her, Tudju made the gesture that put her aside. All these years with Tudju in the hanan, it had been easy to forget that she was a Crown woman, the only Crown among them; that the yellow curtain was to separate them, not her, from the sacred parts of the house; that she was herself a sacred being. But now she had to take up her birthright.
    “They want me to marry that fat Root man, so we can get his shop and looms in Silk Street,” she said. “I will not. I am going to live at the Great Temple.” She looked around at them all, her mother, her sister-in-law, Mal, Modh, the other slave women. “Everything I’m given there, I’ll send here,” she said. “But I told Bela that if he gives one finger’s width of land for that woman he wants now, I’ll send nothing home from the Temple. He can go slave-catching again to feed her. And you.” She looked again at Mal and Modh. “Keep an eye on him,” she said. “It is time he married.”
    Bela had recently traded his concubine and the Dirt son she had borne him, making a good bargain in cropland, and then promptly offered almost the whole amount for another woman he had taken a fancy to. It was not a question of marriage, for a Dirt woman, to marry, must be a virgin, and the woman he wanted had been owned by several men. Alo and Tudju had prevented the bargain, which he could not make without their consent. It was, as Tudju said, time for Bela to consider his sacred obligation to marry and beget children of the sky on a woman of the dirt.
    So Tudju left the hanan and the house to serve in the Great Temple, only returning sometimes on formal visits. She was replaced, evenings, by her brother Bela. Dour and restless, like a dog on a chain, he would stalk in after Alo, and watch the little boys running about and the slaves’ games and dances.
    He was a tall man, handsome, lithe and well muscled. From the day she first saw him in the horror and carnage of the foray, to Modh he had been the golden man. She had seen many other golden men in the City since then, but he was the first, the model.
    She had no fear of him, other than the guardedness a slave must feel towards the master; he was spoilt, of course, but not capricious or cruel; even when he was sulky he did not take out his temper on his slaves. Mal, however, shrank from him in uncontrollable dread. Modh told her she was foolish. Bela was nearly as good-natured as Alo, and Mal trusted Alo completely. Mal just shook her head. She never argued, and grieved bitterly when she disagreed with her sister on anything, but she could not even try not to fear Bela.
    Mal was thirteen. She had her ceremony (and to her too Bidh secretly gave a crude little “soulbag”). In the evening of that day she wore her new clothing. Dirt people even when they lived with Crowns could not wear sewn garments, only lengths of