In the high cold sunlight of a spring morning the people from across the ridge came over, crossing two by two into the grey valley. Joha, eldest of her sisters, rose early and left the house even before she woke, and when at last the girl stepped out into the huge brightness of the morning she saw her walking out along the high path, keeping pace with the visitors and then rushing ahead, laughing. That path was old and narrow, nearly invisible, but she and all her sisters had walked it since they were children. They could have made their way up the ridge and down to the riverbank even in very deep night.Ā
The people from across the ridge were much like herself, much like her mother; in fact many of them were sisters to her mother. They spoke sweetly to her, told her how tall she had come since last they saw her, how soon the summer would be here ā at the riverbank the flowers were already near budding. Joha had come into her womanhood a few years before, though sheād kept to the house to help with the goats in the last winters.
The best of the visitors was Myrt, tall and heavy, who had been at her motherās side since before the girlās birth, through passions that warmed and cooled and sometimes grew icy. In recent years she had left the valley to live in the east as a wanderer. āOur river widens down the way,ā Myrt had said. āIād like to learn to sail. Perhaps Iāll pass the learning on to you when I return.ā That made her mother grimace strangely. Two years had passed now, and if Myrt learned anything from her kinfolk down the river, she said nothing of it to the girl ā but when she came back over the ridge she brought a set of beautifully carven dolls. The girl was by now too old for these things, but they might be passed down to Pjel, the youngest, and anyway they were fine to admire at least for a whileā¦
āIt might be a late summer,ā said the girl, speaking into the noontide air.Ā
Myrt sat behind her, braiding her hair so tight it tingled. āIt might, sweet thing. Why do you wish for that?āĀ
āIt makes no difference to me.āĀ
People often spoke about the springtime in terms of leaping, running, waking from sleep. Each year as the heat rose and the flies began to bite a scattered few children in the valley woke into womanhood or into manhood ā so her mother had told it to her.
Myrt only made a slight deep hum. In the darkness of the house she had heard that hum a thousand times, her mother and Myrt speaking quick and low to each other by the hearth, in the half light. Her mother who wanted to bare her whole spirit to someone, and Myrt who only wanted to hum.Ā
āItāll be a long walk,ā said the girl, after a while.
āYour father and all his fathers made it.ā
Now the girl hummed, slight and reedy, feeling the braid pull at her scalp.
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