“Songfather?” Hazini said in a self-important voice. “This woman has learned the rest of the rain names and would recite them for songfather.”
“Umpn,” Hallach said around a mouthful. “Not tonight, Hazini. It is not a proper time.”
She made a disrespectful sound behind him, almost a rudeness.
He put down his food and turned to look at her. Her lips were compressed into that pinched line Hallach found so annoying. Just like Chahdzi’s second wife, Zinisi. Pinch-pinch, whine-whine, never satisfied with anything. Pretty, though. The way she turned her head and looked at men under her lashes, with that half smile, letting that whiny little voice come out like a seeking tendril to wind around their loins. Songfather remembered how Zinisi had wooed poor Chahdzi, the poor widower. “Chaa-dzi. Can liddle Zinisi have the pretty feathers, Chaa-dzi?” Poor Chahdzi hadn’t been able to resist her. Now look at him! With only Saluez to listen to him, only Saluez to …
Hallach felt sudden fury. He fixed Hazini with a songfather glare. “Girl, do not make that tightness with your mouth. You cannot recite sacred names from a mouth like that.” Rage filled him. He dared not stop to question why. “Also, your voice is too whiny. It must be full and generous if you are to pray to Daylight Woman and Weaving Woman and Great Lightning Wielder.”
Shalumn’s mouth puckered as though she might laugh, but as Hallach turned toward her she bowed hastily, hiding her face. Hazini, shocked into movement, turned and ran back toward the great dark slab of the hive.
Hallach, ignoring Shalumn for the moment, turned back to his food. He did not ask himself where this rage had come from. He knew. Saluez. Feelings he was supposed to have put behind him.
Affections a songfather might not indulge in. His anger was unworthy of him, but nonetheless, he felt no remorse at chiding Hazini. The Gracious One had decreed this conflict from the time they had come to Dinadh. Age must discipline youth. Men must teach women the proper way of things. Some must lose that others may gain. Cold against heat, dry against wet, life against death, every quality must strain to contain its opposite, the whole requiring songfathers to sing the pattern into balance.
Though sometimes it was hard to accept … what happened.
Hallach shifted uncomfortably. It wasn’t wise to think about that either. Such thinking smacked of doubt, and of course he didn’t doubt. She’d be fine. She was his … his son’s daughter. Of course she’d be fine.
No longer at all hungry, he set the half-emptied bowl aside.
Shalumn saw all this and drew her own conclusions. She moved slightly toward him, her hesitancy reminding him she had not been dismissed. Hallach held one finger upright, stopping her where she stood.
“Saluez,” he said, a mere whisper. It would not have been proper for a songfather to ask about a mere girl, but he had not asked. He had merely said a name.
Shalumn had seen Masanees return. Shalumn had seen her leave again, with two of the sisterhood. Then, in the dusk, they had returned again, a cluster of women who had carried someone, someone alive, perhaps, or dead, perhaps, but who had in either case gone into a side entrance to the hive and down into a shadowy place below, a place Shalumn could not go, where even songfathers could not go.
No one had mentioned this to songfather, and he could not ask. He had not asked, and Shalumn did not move or speak. She did not look up. Her eyes remained down. There were certain things a woman would never say to a man. Not any man.
After a moment Hallach waved the finger at her, letting her take the bowl and go.
It was many days later that I came upon Shalumn in a corridor. She knew me by the borders painted upon my outer robe. Had she not painted them? Had the robe not been her gift to me? Now she turned away, as she must, and began to speak to the corridor wall. She told the wall about songfather, and Hazini, and how songfather had looked and what songfather had said. She knew I was standing in an alcove just behind her. She knew I could hear.