a foot wrong, and I asked her if nobody told stories or sang story-songs. She laughed. "We do," she said.
"Women?"
"Ao."
"Men don't."
"Eng." She giggled.
"Why not."
She didn't know. And when I asked her to tell me one of the stories I might have heard if I'd been a little boy growing up in the women's village, it shocked her. "Oh, Gavir, I can't," she said.
"And I can't tell you any of the stories I learned."
"Eng, eng, eng," she murmured. No, no, no.
I wanted to talk to my aunt Gegemer, who could tell me about my mother. But she still held aloof from me. I didn't know why. I asked the girls about her. They shied away from my questions. Gegemer Aytano was, I gathered, a powerful and not entirely beloved woman in the village. At last, on a winter day when Tisso Betu and I were walking in the pastures behind the rest of the group, I asked her why my aunt didn't want anything to do with me.
"Well, she's an ambamer," Tisso said. The word means marsh-lion's daughter, but I had to ask what that meant.
Tisso thought about it. "It means she can see through the world. And hear voices from far away."
She looked at me to see if I knew what she was talking about. I nodded a little uncertainly.
"Gegemer hears dead people talking, sometimes. Or people who aren't born yet. In the old women's house, when they do the singing, Ennu-Amba Herself comes into her, and then she can walk all across the world and see what's happened and what's going to happen. You know, some of us do some of that kind of seeing and hearing while we're children, but we don't understand it. But if Amba makes a girl her daughter, then she goes on seeing and hearing all her life. It makes her kind of strange, you know."Tisso pondered for a while. "She has to try to tell people what she saw. The men won't even listen. They say only men can have the power of seeing and an ambamer is just a crazy woman. But Mother says that Gegemer Aytano saw the poison tide, when the people who eat shellfish in the Western Marshes got sick and died, a long time before it happened, when she was just a child. ... And she knows when people in the village are going to die. That makes people afraid of her. Maybe it makes her afraid of them. ... But sometimes she knows when a girl's going to have a baby, too. I mean, even before she is. She said, 'I saw your child laugh, Yenni,' and Yenni cried and cried, she was so happy, because she wanted a child and she'd never got one. And a year later she did."
All this gave me a great deal to think about. But it still didn't answer my question. "I don't know why my aunt doesn't like me," I said.
"I'll tell you what Mother told me, if you won't say anything to any of the other men," Tisso said earnestly. I promised silence, and she told me. "Gegemer tried and tried to see what had happened to her sister Tano and her babies. For years she tried. They had singings for her that went on and on. She even took the drugs, and an ambamer shouldn't take the drugs. But Amba wouldn't let her see her sister or the children. And then—then you came walking into the village, and still she didn't see you. She didn't see who you were, until you said your name. Then everyone saw. She was ashamed. She thinks she did something wrong. She thinks Amba is punishing her because she let Tano go alone so far south. She thinks it was her fault the soldiers raped Tano and sold you and your sister. And she thinks you know this."
I was about to protest, but Tisso forestalled me: "Your soul knows it—not your mind. It doesn't matter what your mind doesn't know, if your soul knows. So you are a reproach to Gegemer. You darken her heart."
After a while I said, "That darkens my heart."
"I know," Tisso said sadly.
It was strange how Tisso made me think of Sotur. Utterly different in everything, they were alike in their quickness to feel pity, to understand grief, and not to say too much about it.
I gave up the idea of trying to approach my aunt through her armor of guilt. I longed to learn more about her powers,