what I done or why I done it. There was the tech lying right by to accuse me.
Once I was out, I had to go down on my knees and pick up all the tech, one piece at a time. The moon was down, which was a help in one way as I wasn’t in full view, and a hindrance in another as I couldn’t see. I swear to Dandrake, I almost forgot to breathe when I was groping around for those precious things, waiting all the time for a light to go on inside the house or for the lookout to shout a challenge.
None of them things happened. I picked up all the tech and I creeped away on my toes’ tips across the gather-ground.
And home, where the door was still unlocked as I had left it, I hanged up the workshop key on its hook.
I stowed the tech under my bed, where no one was like to look.
I undressed and climbed back under the covers.
I guess I don’t need to tell you how much sleep I got.
21
The next day I worked in the shed and in the mill yard, and said not a word to anyone. My ma was approving of the work I done but a mite troubled by my silence.
“What bit you on the tongue, Koli?” she asked me.
“Nothing bit me,” I mumbled. “I’m just tired, is all it is.”
“He sneaked out in the night,” Athen said. “I think he got a sweetheart.”
She only meant it as a joke, but it give me great dismay that she heard me go out. And the dismay come out as anger, like it will for anyone from time to time. “A man can’t even take a walk but women watches him,” I shouted, and throwed down the long-soled plane with a great clatter.
“You just wish women watched you,” Mull said. “Act your age now, and go back to work.”
“And pray that plane isn’t broke,” Jemiu put in. “For if it is, I’ll take a broom to you and turn your face into something worth watching.”
“Looks like someone already did,” Athen says. I didn’t realise until then that I took some bruises when I run into that wall in the Underhold. They had flowered up in the night, so now there was a line, all purple and yellow, down from my left eye to my chin. It seemed like I was raising a cry against my own self, every way I could.
“Did you get in a fight?” Jemiu asked me, giving me a harder look.
I put on a kind of a smile, or the closest I could get to one. “I did, Ma, if you want to know,” I says. “I got in a fight with a door, and the door give me a smack when I wasn’t looking. But I’m gonna win next time. I’m gonna wait till it’s bolted and drub it good.”
Jemiu laughed, and so did my sisters. I took up the plane again and put my back into it, hoping they would let it lie there, which I’m happy to say they did.
In the afternoon, when things was a mite quieter, I went and looked at the tech for the first time since I took it. You might wonder that I didn’t steal a look as soon as the sun was up, but there was a kind of a fear on me that pushed me away from it. What I had done in the night seemed more like a dream than a real thing now that it was daylight again, and the tech was the onliest thing that would prove it true. It was like the longer I stayed away from it, the longer I could make pretend I wasn’t a thief or a law-breaker and hadn’t done any such crazy thing.
But when I kneeled down and looked under the bed, there it was. There wasn’t no denying it, or making it be something different than it was. So I might as well go forward, for there certainly wasn’t no chance of going back. I took the seven pieces out from under the bed to get a better look at them.
Now I seen my mistake, very clear. When I seen the tech on testing day, it had seemed to me to be all kinds and shapes and sizes and conditions of things all throwed in together. But that was in the hot moment, as they say. I was seeing something different now.
The seven pieces of tech