So, now I am with child and am no longer favorite anything to Hallach, songfather. Now I become part of the promise, part of the covenant, part of the choice. For this time between the planting and the dancing, only that. Nothing more.
“A day has been appointed for you,” says songfather, not looking at me.
I feel myself shake all over, like a tree in wind, like a newborn little woolbeast experiencing the coldness of air for the first time. Is it fear I feel, or is it anger at their pushing me so? “Soon you will be old enough. Soon you will have a lover. Soon you will have a husband. It is the way of Dinadh.” I learned these words when I was first able to talk. Now it is all I can do to stand until the shudder passes, leaving me chilled beneath the sun.
“You are prepared?” It is the ritual question.
“Songfather,” I say, “I am prepared.” The words are the correct words. I have been trained since babyhood to say those words, but no amount of training has made them sound sincere, not even to me! What is it I am supposed to be prepared for? No one will say. They whisper. They hint. But no one ever says!
“You were made for this,” he says solemnly. “As the Gracious One has told us, you were made for the giving of this gift. Who will go with you?”
I say, “Masanees, sister-mother.” Masanees has done this thing before, several times, successfully! She is of my mother’s generation, though my mother is gone.
Hah-Hallach knows all this. “She will watch over you,” he says, approvingly.
“Yes, songfather.” I suppose she will.
“Attend to the day. Soon you will go and our songs will go with you.” He strides past me, toward the song-study house.
So. The Gracious One has been mentioned in passing. I have fulfilled my destiny and said my words. The songfather has said his words. Sweet-Sally and Grandpa have said no words at all. The thing is resolved upon, whatever the thing is, and all Dinadhi know their parts in the pattern. They are they, and I am Saluez, who turns and goes back into the hive, for there is much preparation to be made.
Still I cannot keep my head from going back, far back to let my eyes look high, there, among the rimrock, among all those piles of stones where stands the House Without a Name. It has stood there since the Dinadhi came to this place. One stands above every hive. This was the choice we were offered by the Gracious One. This is the choice we made, so songfather says. We people of Dinadh.
But deep inside me I say no! No! This is not the choice I made. I had no part in it. You songfathers made this choice for me, and I have no part in it at all!
Songfather spoke to me at Cochim-Mahn on Dinadh. In another place another man spoke to another woman. That place was the city of Alliance Prime on the world now called Alliance Central. The world had once been called earth, when Alliance Central was only a department, a bureaucracy, that grew and grew until all the earth was covered by Alliance Central and no one called it earth anymore. So I have been taught, as all Dinadhi children are taught, for Dinadh is a member of the Alliance.
The powerful man was the Procurator himself, and the woman was Lutha Tallstaff. She was part of a happening thing and I was part of the same happening thing, a branching of the pattern, as we say, though she and I knew nothing of one another at the time. While we live, say the weavers, we are only the shuttles, going to and fro, unable to see the pattern we are making, unaware of other shuttles in the weft. After years we can look back to see the design we have made, the pattern Weaving Woman intended all along. A time comes when one sees that pattern clear, and then one says, remember this, remember that; see how this happened, see how that happened. Remember what the songfather said, what the Procurator said.