She buried her face in her hands and merely sat until her dizziness subsided, then staggered to the top of the pile where the rope hung. Her first two attempts were abortive, and on the third try she managed only with excruciating difficulty, as though she had never climbed the rope before. In the light, she could see her bruises and bloody abrasions. All the air was thick with dust and smoke. The way back to the valley took forever, even though there were two moons still almost full that rose as the sun set in a blaze of crimson, purple, and orange. She lost her way, coming to a hot waste she had never seen before and losing herself as she tried to go around it. The mountain trembled again as it grew darker, emitting wavering fumes across the faces of the moons. Eventually, weariness conquered and she fell into a little grassy pit, pulling her coat around her and relinquishing everything else. Mama and Papa would be furious, but she’d deal with it in the morning.
Morning came. She rose, looked around herself, told off her landmarks and realized she had gone past home. She went toward it and came upon the same waste she had encountered the night before, ash and mud and stink, with smoke rising from the edges where things had burned and there, at the far side, a piece of roof she recognized as from the chicken coop and beside it a tall post that had stood at the gate to the vineyard, crowned with a circlet of dried vine.
She screamed first, then ran about, then trembled and merely wept. She tried, but could get no closer, for the earth burned under her feet. Either her people had fled or they were dead under all that black. The nearest people were at the mines, along the foot of the scarp, but the way there was blocked by smoking rock. The nearest farm was down valley, and she finally turned in that direction, walking along the hills above the black, realizing along toward midmorning that she had gone long past the neighboring farm, that everything down this valley was gone.
There was a family one valley over. She crossed the ridge and came there in the early evening, trudging up their lane to be confronted by dogs and people.
“Why it’s Oram,” cried the woman of the house. “That’s your name isn’t it, boy?”
Ornalia didn’t correct the misapprehension. “My family, all gone,” she cried. “Buried, and all the cows and chickens. All but my sister Pearla. Oh, they’re gone, all gone … “
And the farm folk, between questioning and answering and giving her tea and food and offering the use of a washbasin, at once made plans to send a wagon to Sendoph to report what had happened to the neighboring valley. Oram, they said, could ride along.
Pearla was alone in the house when Ornery came, for the dowerer and his parents had gone to Naibah to arrange payment of the dowry. Oh, she had seen the mountain blow, she said. Oh, she had feared for her family.
“The vineyard gone,” grieved Pearla. “Oh, Ornery, I can’t imagine it gone. I can’t imagine Mama and Papa, gone. So quick, like that.”
“There’s just mud and ashes,” sobbed Ornery. “No house, no barn, no storage houses, no poultry house, no orchard. Mama … I hoped for a while maybe, well, maybe, but everything’s gone, all down the valley … “
They cried on one another’s shoulders and told one another it would be all right, though it was a good deal easier for Pearla to say, who, though orphaned, would not have her life much changed from the one she had already planned. Still, they both wept, taking a long, uninterrupted time in which to grieve and talk of their sadness and despair, and after that of the fact that Ornalia was adrift, with no place to call home.
“Oh, you can stay here,” Pearla wept. “They’ll let you. I mean, you’re old enough to be dowered for, even now.”
“I’d rather die,” spat Ornery, all yesterday’s anger bubbling up through her grief, like mud roiled up from the bottom of a clear stream.