fingers tightened, painful around his. “Marry me now, Psallo. Please! Your father will forgive it in time.”
“He will not,” Psal said, and the girl left weeping. Left alone, Psal spoke to the old man.
“Great Chief,” he said, “have no fear. I will prove my worth to Father and—give me six months! One hundred and fifty days!—you will have this alliance with our clan. But, Great Chief, forgive me for adding sorrow to sorrow, but there is a thing I must tell you.”
The old man’s mind seemed elsewhere. “Nothing you say could bring me sorrow, my boy.”
“Chief Tsbosso, today, as we returned from the abandoned tower, I met a chief of the Voca clan.”
“The Voca?” Worry and surprise mixed on Tsbosso’s face. “Here? But our towers didn’t hear them this morning. Nor have I seen—”
“They came at midday. They left at midday.”
“Left? What do you mean ‘left?’”
“Have you heard anomalies when tracking towers? Towers seeming to be there, then…not being there at all.”
“Yes. In the past few months several…but—”
“The Voca have discovered how to keen by day.”
Amazement now. “In the daytime? The daykeen?”
“I saw it with my own eyes. I wonder. Do you think the daymoon figures in their—”
“How clever those bitter women are! They have attacked us forty or more times since the Great Eclipse. Legions of Voca warriors attacking our exploratory longhouses! Our men killed. Our women given the choice of living with them or losing their girl children. Few of our people have escaped. And now this!”
“Indeed, Chief. I have often thought you should form an alliance with them.”
The chief waved a dismissive hand. “We make no truces with women.”
Psal sighed. He looked past the old man’s left shoulder into the darkness. Was Cassia still about? All he saw were mats and tables being gathered up and carried into longhouses, women from different clans calling small children indoors, Wheel Clan warriors from different longhouses speaking to the Wheel Clan king. “I’ve forgotten to congratulate you on the future birth of your grand-child. May it be a boy.”
“It shall be.”
“In the meantime, I will ask my mother to beg Nahas to let me marry Moonlight. Moonlight is wise. She will know how to befriend Mother as they feast together. No doubt, this time next year, I shall be your son and peace will rule between our peoples.” Nevertheless, he offered the traditional farewell common to all clans. “Who knows if we shall see each other again?”
Tsbosso turned his gaze away, toward the longhouse the Peacock women would be using to meet the Wheel Clan women. “Perhaps our children will meet.”
“Or, perhaps my children will be your grandchildren,” Psal answered, laughing.
Psal hurried to the Hinis tower, dodging the scurrying Wheel clan women. His mother stood among an assortment of blankets, carts, and foods prepared for the traditional two-day Feasts of Women. Psal limped toward her.
“I’m busy, Psal,” she said, before he could speak.
“I know, Mother. Hinis. Queen Hinis. I will not keep you long. I only wanted to.…”
Her dark brown eyes dared him to continue. A pile of blankets teetered. She gestured to a young girl, a foundling, who looked shyly up at Psal until Hinis pushed both of them aside.
“Psal,” his mother snapped, “why are you always underfoot? And where are those sisters of yours? Why are they alw—”
“My sisters are well, Mother.” He had seen them earlier. He clung to her as she hastened to the door. “It’s only…Mother…if I were Tsbosso’s son-in-law, Mother, Queen Hinis…Mother.”
Hinis stood in the entrance, twining the end of her braids absent-mindedly and craning her neck as she peered into the darkness. “Psal, the girl you wanted is married. Pregnant too. And this Moonlight which Tsbosso so wanted to give you…I find her too subtle for you. Is your heart so weak that you love Cassia at one moment then tumble to Moonlight the next?”
Psal looked down at her feet. “Moonlight and I don’t love each other yet. But…but…love will come. But, but, but, now, we wish to comfort each other.”
“No doubt there is much in your life you need to be comforted about.” She called to his brothers playing outside with their father. “Go and find your sisters.” Then turned to Psal. “How gullible you are to trust that deceitful old man!”
“Nevertheless, Mother, consider helping me. With a woman of my own, I wouldn’t be entirely underfoot. To shame you, I mean. And the skirmishes with the Peacock Clan would stop, Mother. Truly, Mother, they would.”
The queen stared at him, said nothing.
His sisters soon appeared with his brothers. They dragged a heavily-laden wheeled cart, the girls pushing it from behind, the boys pulling it in front. Queen Hinis gestured them toward the open door. “That the daughters of King Nahas should go about the longhouses begging for sweets! Have you no sense of decorum?”
The girls kissed Psal and dragged their sweet-loaded carts past him. He stepped down from the longhouse and Hinis closed the door behind her.
CHAPTER 5
THE HOPE
The Voca daytime keen was a wonder, not something that a curious studier—even one with a broken heart—could put in the back of his mind for too long. Psal noted the discovery in his tower charts and in his annals. When Chief Studier Dannal awoke from his Tomah stupor, he would have to be told. The disappearing tower anomaly had been explained. Now the old man could focus on his other obsession: failing towers.
Psal heard footsteps near his door and looked up from his wheeled cot to see Nahas standing in the doorway.
“Father! I’ve been waiting for you.” He pushed aside the pain in his hip, back, and thigh and rose to his feet. “What news I have! What news I have!”
Nahas eyed the engraved staff Tsbosso had given his son. “What were you speaking of today, you and Tsbosso?”
“Father, the Voca have—”
“Why is he so insistent about your marrying one of his daughters?”
Psal pushed his father’s restraining arm aside and walked toward a woven basket filled with parchments. “Could we speak of Tsbosso another time, Father? There is—”
The king squeezed his forehead. “Is it true? You told him your own people mock you? Firstborn, are you such a child that you complain to your Father’s enemies about a little teasing?”
“It is not a little teasing, Nahas! It is endless cruelty and mean-spiritedness toward those you consider weak. And I do not wish to speak of it now!”
Psal
