The Revenants

Who Talks With Birds’ because of the feathered creatures that flocked there in answer to her whistles and in appreciation of her scattered grain.
It might have been recalled, but was not, that when Jaera was about five her mother bought from a neighbour a quantity of black dye, saying that the wool from her one black sheep was insufficient for a certain striped cloak she planned to weave. No such cloak was ever woven, but after that time, Jaera was seen without the cap.
These later recollections, however, were not to be part of the village tittle-tattle for some years. Jaera grew as did the other children. With them she learned to scratch a few message words, to card and to spin, dye and weave, plant, harvest, preserve and cook. It might have been noticed, from time to time, that Jaera’s sisters seemed to show her little affection. It could have been determined that man Widdek never spoke of her or to her. Still, there are families and families. Indeed, there were those who argued that since the Separation love was always risky and unwise. Others claimed that in such places as the village, pure since earliest memory, tender sentiment might be indulged – if carefully.
The seasons circled uneventfully. The Deputy Observer died and was put to the flame with stingy ceremony. There was no precedent for appointing another to take his place, so the office remained unfilled. There was a brief flurry of concern over a stranger who appeared one evening at the riverward end of the village, leaned awhile on a gate, then passed around the settled area and away up the Eastern Mountain. He was seen climbing the trail to the place the wizard lived. The gate he had leaned upon was burned and a new one built. The farmwife in the nearest house was whipped on general principles, and the matter was allowed to end there.
The Widdek daughters grew, came to the time of Passage, and put on the maiden bells which advertised them for sale into families as middling as their own. Daughters of those same families were bought in turn for the Widdek sons. Both daughters and sons’ wives paraded big bellies through the square, and only Jaera was left in the house.
A festival of Passage was held in the fall of the year in which Jaera was twelve. Wife Widdek let it be known that Jaera was not yet a woman. The same the following year. Such delay was not really rare, but still the tongues began to wag. The girl had no breasts yet. She did not bathe with the other girls at the village bath house but went instead to the river with her mother. There was no festival of Passage in the following year, but a great one was planned for the year after. The daughter of the village Speaker was to come to Passage then. One old wife, her tongue sharpened by a lifetime of inconsequent malice, told the Speaker’s daughter that her companion in Passage might well be that Widdek daughter of whom such interesting things were said. The girl cried to her mother. The mother spoke to her man.
He was not Speaker out of political accident. He was one to move swiftly, decisively though tactfully, in all things. He called to him another old woman, one who had lived in his house in good care for some years, and spoke quietly with her. The woman went out of the house in the evening, to the river, and there for three evenings concealed herself among the reeds until, on the third night, Jaera came to bathe. The old one was somewhat crippled by her years, but her eyes were as keen as in youth. She returned to the Speaker with the information which he sought.
‘Speaker, her hands and face are the good colour of our people, and the hair is the colour of our people, but her breast and belly and legs are white, and the hair on her body is not coloured like the hair on her head’
The Speaker drew in his breath and cautioned himself to go carefully. There had been whispers about others from time to time. The Speaker’s own mother had been lighter than average. ‘Go among the women and the birthers,’ he said. ‘Find if there is cause to believe the laws of Separation broken. The year of that girl’s birth was the year of the great rock fall. Ask if there were strangers here who might have caused the rock fall….’ Even as he spoke, he knew he spoke foolishness. How would any stranger have come and he not known of it?
Still, the old woman spent a hand of days wandering about the village, helping with weaving here, taking a pot of soup to a Gram there. At the end of that time she returned to say that no stranger had come to the village before the girl was born. ‘The people do not believe that strangers were here. There was the man who came through and leaned on the Blinnet woman’s gate; that was the only stranger. Those last Sealed are in their twenty-fifth year, and no other stranger has been seen in all that time.’
‘The wizard?’ hazarded the Speaker. ‘The Woman Who Talks With Birds?’
‘The wizard has not been seen in years. His fires only are seen, or his smoke sometimes. The Woman Who Talks With Birds is watched by the young men, Speaker, your own sons among them. Some of the women go there, sometimes, to buy medicine for fevers or the itch. But they do not go near her house. She does not come here.’
‘Then, if the laws have not been broken, there is an atavist among us. Go to the wife Widdek and bring her here.’
The village learned what had happened when the wife Widdek returned from the house of the Speaker. She returned weeping. The man went that night into the fields, and when morning came there