The others were looking at her. “Thenike, how long before the storm?”
“It’s upon us. Any moment.”
“Then we’ll have to hurry. Danner, Aoife, you will walk to the Echraidhe line and bring back both Captain White Moon and her mount, and a mount for each for yourselves–you can ride, can’t you?” she asked Danner.
“Yes.”
“And bring back one of the Briogannon, one of their leaders. Aoife, you will tell your people to follow us. Danner, you will tell your Mirrors to precede us, due south. While you are bringing White Moon and the mounts, Thenike and I will secure Uaithne to her horse.”
Danner and Aoife looked sideways at each other.
“Danner. You have a cling?”
Danner looked puzzled. “Yes.”
“Give it to me.” Danner peeled it loose from her belt and handed it over. “Hold out your arm.”
“What–”
“Hold out your arm. Your left. Aoife, you hold out your right.” She bound the arms together at the biceps. “Just in case. I’ll take it off when you both get back here in one piece. Now go.”
Danner took a hesitant step, which Aoife copied, then another. Marghe watched while they pulled each other warily, one step at a time, toward the mounted line.
When they were about halfway there, Thenike put a hand on Marghe’s shoulder, turned her around gently, and held her face between the palms of her hands. “You told a good story.”
I was ready. “I did, didn’t I?”
They smiled at one another, and Marghe wrapped her arms around Thenike and let her breath go in one long, deep rush.
Getting Uaithne’s body onto her mount was hard; the horse sidled and snorted and laid its ears back at the smell of blood and excretia. But they managed eventually.
It was Ojo who came back with Danner and Aoife, and who held the leading rein of White Moon’s horse. Marghe was tempted to cling all three of them together, but decided to trust them. She directed Thenike to take the lead rein from Ojo, and to walk in front of the three leaders; she herself walked behind them, leading Uaithne’s horse.
Ahead, the Mirrors turned and moved south at the march. Behind, the tribes stirred and started at a walk.
All the time, the wind rose, buffeting them in the saddle, and when Marghe had to give Danner directions to pass on to her Mirrors via comm, she had to shout against a gale that wanted to whip away her words like so much smoke.
Marghe kept them heading for the cave and the gully. Shelter first. Then they would talk.
In the end, the talking was done at Holme Valley.
When the five leaders had emerged from the cave, they found acres of grassland seared black, still smoking, turning dusk into evening. It was stifling.
Danner touched a stud at her collar. Her suit stopped humming, and she took off her helmet in a spill of cold air. “It’s too hot to leave those bodies unburied. We need to get them bagged and cooled immediately.”
After several strained hours in the cave, standing between two hundred women who would find it easier to fight than talk, Marghe was irritated by Danner’s attitude, but it was Thenike who spoke.
“They’re not ‘bodies’!” Marghe had never seen Thenike so angry. “They are what’s left of your captain and Aoife’s soestre. They were real. They had friends, mothers, people here who will pause in the middle of their next meal and miss that unique laugh or the sight of a familiar hand resting on a table. Their deaths helped to buy this.” She gestured at the gathered forces, still standing apart suspiciously, but not fighting. Not fighting. “They should be buried out there, where they died. Together. Their grave should be in the place where so many others came close to killing and being killed, on neutral territory so that women can come and visit it and remember why these two women died, and how. Then maybe this… this idiocy won’t ever happen again.”
Together with the massed tribes and a company of Mirrors as escort, Marghe and Thenike, and Aoife, Danner, and Ojo, leading Uaithne’s horse and White Moon’s and carrying shovels, went back to the place that had nearly become a battlefield.
The olla patch had escaped the fire, and Danner suggested that they bury them under the flowers. They looked at Thenike, but the viajera said nothing; she seemed to have withdrawn inside herself.
“No,” Marghe decided, “we’ll bury them where they died. We’ll put them under the charred grass and the seared soil, and their grave will green when the rest of the plain does.”
The funeral was short; there was no ritual that would have been acceptable to both sides. Instead, Aoife stepped forward and told a story about Uaithne, about how she had broken her first pony when she was ten years old, and Danner said a few gruff words about how White Moon had been a brilliant captain, with the respect and trust of her officers. Then Thenike shook herself and began to sing a soft song of harvest time. It seemed an odd choice to Marghe at first, but as the viajera started to clap along with her song, as she raised her voice to sing of harvesting, of threshing, of ground that would be plowed over and seeds that would be sown that the fields would bloom again, Marghe understood. She took up the clapping. As others heard the message of renewal, they clapped, too, and when Thenike stopped singing, the clapping went on and on.
After the burial, Aoife sent most of the tribeswomen back north. To gather the scattered herds, she said. Aoife herself and her daughter Marac, representing the Echraidhe, and Ojo for the Briogannon, followed Marghe, Thenike, and Danner to Holme Valley, where the talks were to be held under the great skelter tree that was the home of Cassil’s family.
Holle spoke for the women of Singing Pastures, and Cassil for Holme Valley. After much thought, Marghe decided she would act for Danner and the others. She owed them that, at least.
“You’re a tribe now,” she told Danner. “Try to think in those terms. I’ll get what I can for you. Your standing’s high right now.”
“You mean yours.”
Marghe ignored that. “I’m going to secure trata agreements from the tribes and from Holle, if I can, as well as strengthening the arrangement with Cassil.”
“Just as long as we get our seed crop, and some breeding animals.”
“I’ll do much better for you than that,” Marghe promised.
The final trata agreements were reached in the presence of the viajeras Thenike and T’orre Na:
The Echraidhe and Briogannon, temporarily merged under the madness of Uaithne, were enjoined to become one people in order to ensure peace for themselves and other settlements, and in order to survive; the herds of both tribes were decimated, their goods scattered, their children malnourished. They were granted joint use of grazing grounds to the north and west of Singing Pastures. From their herds, beginning the first year the animals reached reasonable numbers, they would grant a tithe of horses to Singing Pastures, in part reparation, and a tithe of breeding taars. These breeding taars would go straight from Holle’s people to Danner’s. Until that time, Danner’s people would receive a small number of breeding taars from Cassil, and help from both communities in capturing wild animals for domestication. Also from Cassil, Danner would get seed crop, first trading rights on the valley’s harvest, two hand looms, and–Marghe had had to fight hard for this–the fostering of six of the valley’s children, along with one or two adults.
“Think, Danner, they’ll be invaluable!” she told the Mirror. “What better way to learn the way a world works than to learn with their children?”
Cassil agreed, if volunteers could be found. In return, Danner had to promise the fostering of a third of any Mirror children in the next five years, again on a volunteer basis. Marghe was not worried about lack of volunteers. There were many on both sides who were curious, and some who would think to turn the arrangement to their personal gain. One way or another, both communities would benefit, in the end.