wait for now.
Oftentimes I come home late from these games. Jemiu would be all in a rage with me then, and we would argue, her saying I should stay home and do the work that had got to be done, me saying I was close enough to Waiting, and thence to man, that I could do as I liked. I should of knowed better. Jemiu’s rage wasn’t because I was slacking; it was because when I stayed out so long she didn’t know but what something bad might have fallen on me. She always showed her love in a hard way, like I said.
And then the days drawed in at last and Summer ended. Falling Time was a time for rebuilding the fences, catching wood for building and laying in as much food as we could against the lean days to come. We marked the end of Summer with the Summer-dance, and the end of Falling Time with the Salt Feast. Both of them days was greatly looked forward to.
So that was our life, and it seemed like nothing would ever happen to change it. But it’s when you think such thoughts that change is most like to come. You let your guard down, almost, and life comes running at you on your blind side. Because life is nothing but change, even when it seems to stand still. Standing still is a human thing, like a defiance we throw, but we can never do it for long.
5
I got to be fifteen at last, which is a time in a boy or girl’s life when everything changes. In Mythen Rood it worked like this: from your fifteenth year-day to the next Midsummer, you lost your family name and took the name of Waiting in place of it. Until that time was passed, you left your family and went to live in the Waiting House, which was to the setting side of the gather-ground, right next door to Rampart Hold. I guess it was put there to say that any of them that went Waiting might be Ramparts themselves after they took the test.
The Waiting House was enormous. There was twelve beds in the boys’ sleep room and twelve more for girls. Maybe if I had thought about that I might of come to some conclusions about how many people there used to be in Mythen Rood in times past and how few was left now. But a boy of fifteen Summers doesn’t have no sense that what’s passed has got a bearing on what’s still here. For me, that thinking come later, in a very different place, and it didn’t come for free.
In my year, anyway, there was just the three of us. Veso Shepherd would of been the fourth, but because he wouldn’t agree to go Waiting under the girl’s name his mother put on him, Rampart law said he couldn’t go. Veso said he was happy for it. Rampart law at least let him stay what he was, though it didn’t seem to allow him much respect. His mother was somewhat crueller, being a believer in Dandrake’s hard lessons.
Anyway, Haijon went Waiting first, and he had the house to himself. By the time I come along in Abril and Spinner in May, he had changed the place around to his liking. There was a stone-game board drawed out across the floor of the boys’ sleep room, and pictures of eagles and tree-cats on the walls. Haijon drawed in chalk that someone – I think it was his aunt Fer – had brung back from a hunt. Drawing was another thing he was good at. Seeing the size of him, and the size of his hands in particular, you wouldn’t of thought he could have such a skill. He just had the one colour of chalk, which was white, but he made it look different by drawing the lines various ways, so you got the sense of an eagle’s feathers or a tree-cat’s fur.
“Thank Dandrake you come,” he says to me the day I walked into the house with my bedroll under my arm. “I was like to die from the boredom.” But he said it with a grin on his face. The first thing he done – after we give each other our secret sign, which was the thumb of one hand hooked into the thumb of the other hand – was to show me everything in the house from top to bottom like it was a big adventure