He acknowledged her slight interrogative tone with a nod. “Btw Damfels,” he said, emphasizing the honorific “Stavenger and Rowena bon Damfels would have been pleased to welcome you, but they are in mourning just now.”
“Ah?” she said in a questioning tone.
“They recently lost a daughter,” he said, an expression of distaste and embarrassment upon his face. “At the first spring Hunt. A hunting accident.”
“I sympathize with their sorrow.” She paused for a moment, allowing her own face to reflect an appropriately assessed measure of compassion. What could she say? Would too much sympathy be effusive? Would curiosity be misplaced? A hunting accident? The expression on the man’s face indicated it would be safer to let more information be given rather than ask for it. She waited long enough for the Obermun to continue, and when he did not she returned to the safety of the former subject. “What does it mean when the Cloak of Kings shows purple along its bottom?”
“The color will be halfway up the stems in a matter of days, and you will begin to see the flush of the gardens—rose and amber, turquoise, and emerald. This estancia was named Opal Hill because of the play of color each spring evokes. These gardens are young, but well laid out. The flat place there at the bottom of the stairs is what we call a first surface. All grass gardens have such an enclosed, flat area of low turf It is the place from which all garden walks begin. From that place, trails lead from prospect to prospect. In a week, the winds will soften. We have entered upon the spring collect. By the end of the period—“
“A period being?”
“Sixty days. An arbitrary choice made by the earliest settlers. When a year extends over two thousand days, it is hard to make shorter lengths of time mean much. A period is sixty days, ten periods make a collect, four collects—one corresponding to each season—make a year. We reflect our Terran ancestry by dividing each period into four fifteen-day weeks, but there is no religious significance attached.”
She nodded her understanding, risked saying, “No Sabbath.”
“No planetary religious holidays of any kind. Which is not to say there is no religion, simply that matters of faith have been irrevocably removed from any civil support or recognition. Our ancestors, while all benefiting from noble blood, came from a variety of cultures. They wished to avoid conflict in such matters.”
“We have much to learn,” she said, fingering the limp leather of the little testament in her pocket. Before they left Terra, Father Sandoval had sent it to the Church in Exile to be blessed by the Pope. Father Sandoval, claiming to know her better than she knew herself, had said it would help reconcile her to the experience after her first enthusiasm wore off. So far she had noticed little reconciliation. “The authorities at Sanctity told us almost nothing about Grass.”
“If you will forgive my saying so, Terrans know almost nothing about Grass. They have not, in the past, been particularly interested.”
Again that confusion between Terra, the planet, and Sanctity, the religious empire. She nodded, accepting his not ungentle chiding. Either way, it was probably true enough. Terrans had not cared about Grass. Not about Semling, or The Pearly Gates, or Shame, or Repentance, or any of the hundred human-settled planets far and adrift in the sea of space. What was left of human society on Terra had been too busy forcing its own population down and restoring an ecology virtually destroyed by the demands of an insatiable humanity to concern itself with those emigrations that had made its own salvation possible. Sanctity squatted on the doorstep of the north, regulating the behavior of its adherents wherever it could, while everyone else on Terra got on with trying to survive. Once each Terran year Sanctity celebrated with flags and speeches and off-planet visitors. The rest of the time Sanctity might as well have been somewhere else.
Sanctity was not Terra. Terra was home, and this was not. Though Marjorie wanted to say this loudly, with emotion, she restrained herself.
“Will you show me the stables?” she inquired. “I assume our horses have been revived and delivered?”