forward to stare at me, and a sharp-eyed, sharp-nosed, dark-skinned woman of forty or so asked, "How many years ago?"
"About fifteen, ma-ío," I said. "I was taken with my older sister Sallo."
An old woman cried out—"Tano's children!"
"Sallo and Gavir!" said a woman with a baby in her arms, and the old woman carrying the dead swan by its large black feet pushed up close to study me and said, "Yes. Her children, Tano's children. Ennu-Amba, Ennu-Mé!"
"Tano went for blackfern, down the Long Channel," one of the women said to me. "She and the children. They didn't come back. Nobody found the boat."
"Some said she drowned," another woman said, and another, "I always said it was the slave takers," and the older women pressed forward still closer to look at me, looking in me for the woman they had known. The young women stood back, eyeing me in a different way.
The dark woman who had spoken to me first had said nothing and had not come forward. The old woman with the swan went and talked to her, and then the dark one came close enough to say to me, "Tano Aytano Sidoy was my younger sister. I am Gegemer Aytano Sidoy." Her face was grim and she spoke harshly.
I was daunted, but after a minute I said, "Will you tell me my name, Aunt?"
"Gavir Aytana Sidoy," she said, almost impatiently. "Did your mother—your sister—come back with you?"
"I never knew my mother. We were slaves in Etra. They killed my sister two years ago. I left and went to the Daneran Forest." I spoke briefly and said "left," not "escaped" or "ran away," because I needed to speak like a man, not like a runaway child, to this woman with her crow's face and crow's eyes.
She looked at me briefly, intensely, but did not meet my gaze. She said at last, "The Aytanu men will look after you," and turned away.
The other women clearly wanted to keep looking at me and talking about me, but they followed my aunt's lead. The men were beginning to straggle back to their village. So I turned and followed them.
Rava and a couple of older men were having a discussion. I couldn't follow all they said; the Sidoyu dialect was strange to my ears and contained a lot of words I didn't know. They seemed to be talking about where I belonged, and finally one of them turned back and said to me, "Come."
I followed him to his cabin, which was wood-framed, with a wooden floor, and walls and roof of reedcloth. It had no door or windows, since you could open up a whole side of it by raising any of the walls. Having put away the box and clay pot of food which he'd got from the women, the man raised the wall that faced the lake and tied it up on posts so that it extended the roof, shading that part of the deck from the hot late-afternoon sunlight. There he sat down on a thick reedcloth mat and set to work on a half-made fish hook of clamshell. Not looking up at me, he gestured to the house and said, "Take what you like."
I felt intrusive and out of place, and did not want to take anything at all. I did not understand these people. If I was truly a lost child of the village, was this all the welcome they had for me? I was bitterly disappointed, but I wasn't going to show any disappointment, any weakness to these coldhearted strangers. I would keep my dignity, and act as standoffish as they did. I was a city man, an educated man; they were barbarians, lost in their marshes. I told myself that I'd come a long way to get here and might as well stay the night at least. Long enough to decide where else I might go, in a world where evidently I belonged nowhere.
I found another mat and sat down on the outer edge of the deck. My feet dangled a couple of inches above the mud of the lakeshore. After a while I said, "May I know the name of my host?"
"Metter Aytana Sidoy," he said. His voice was very soft.
"Would you be my father?"
"I would be the younger brother of that one, your aunt," he said.
The way he spoke, keeping his face down, made me suspect that he was not so much unfriendly as very shy. Since he didn't look at me, I felt I shouldn't