Angelica (39 page)

“I have left your cart at the bottom of the hill,” Miriam said somewhat baldly to Shua. “Shall I go fetch it? Where will you be?”

Shua waved a languid hand. She was always so tired by the end of the day. “Thaddeus will get it when I need it,” she said. “But won't you stay and have dinner at our fire? We will eat with my family tonight.”

“No—thank you—I must go find Tirza,” Miriam said, hoping she did not sound rude. “It was very nice to meet
you all, of course,” she added politely before turning away. She heard the chorus of replies as she stalked through the camp, looking for her own tent.

But it was hard to find anything or anyone here. The Corderras were a big tribe, twice as many as the Lohoras, and everywhere she turned, there was another strange face and another cadre of children, heedlessly careening past the fires. She could not find the Lohora section of camp—or, no, that tent looked familiar, sandwiched between two tents that she did not recognize at all. Was that it, then? The Lohoras were pitching their own tents in the spaces between Corderra campfires, deliberately trying to be absorbed into the larger group, to erase their own identity—to become, for this one night, at least,
Edori
and not merely Lohoras.

Miriam did not like it at all.

She was standing there frowning, looking about for her own tent or at least someone she recognized, when a little boy came darting out from around a cart and headed unsteadily in her direction. He tripped and fell, an action that triggered a look of incredible surprise on his solemn face. And then he screwed up his eyes and began to wail, more in anger and consternation, Miriam thought, than real pain. No young mother came instantly running. He had, it seemed, escaped all supervision in his one quick dash for freedom.

Miriam crossed over to him and caught him up in her arms, cradling him against her to stop the crying. “There now, mikale, it is not so bad,” she said, swinging him from side to side in an instinctive rocking motion. “Did you hurt yourself? Or are all those tears for show, just because you do not like the way the world is ordered? I could cry just as hard as you could, you know, and for the exact same reason, but I try not to make such a spectacle of myself. I try to have a little pride.”

He had stopped sobbing almost as soon as she picked him up, and now he was staring at her with great interest, his big eyes only inches from hers. He took his fingers out of his mouth and extended them, wet and sticky, to touch her cheek and then, wonderingly, her hair.

“Yes, I am a blond allali girl, not a type you've seen very often, I'll guess,” she said, still rocking him, still staring
down at his perfect little serious face. “But let me tell you, where I come from, more people look like me than look like you.
You
would be the strange one among my family, little mikale.”

A light laugh behind her turned her around, the child still in her arms. “You would appear to have a way with children,” said the young man who had come from nowhere to eavesdrop on her ridiculous conversation. He was slim and tall, with his black hair tied back in a braid and his dark eyes huge and long-lashed. “He will not sit still for me for five minutes.”

“Is he yours?” Miriam asked, making no effort to return him.

“My sister's son. I was supposed to be watching him, but he escaped from me. He always does. I keep hoping she will soon stop trusting him to me, but she insists I will one day learn the knack of controlling a small evil child.”

Miriam laughed and bounced the boy on her hip. He squealed with laughter. “He does not seem so evil to me,” she said.

“That is because you have only known him for five minutes,” he said. “But he seems to like you. You must have little siblings of your own.”

“No,” Miriam said, thinking briefly of the one sibling she did have. “No, I think I was always the evil child. Maybe that is why I feel such an affinity for your nephew.”

“I am Daniel, by the way,” the young man said. “You must have arrived with the Lohoras, but I do not remember seeing you with them before.”

A polite way to put it. If she had not known better, she would have thought he was angling for information, covering up his mild astonishment at her presence among them—a blond allali girl who so clearly did not belong. But she had come to understand the Edori by now. There was nothing, not even curiosity, behind his remark. Merely, he had never met her before. He did not think it strange that he was meeting her now.

“I am Miriam,” she said. “I joined the Lohoras a few weeks back. I sleep in the tent of Eleazar and Tirza.”

He glanced around. “Which I think I saw them putting
up—yes, over there. Were you trying to find it?”

She laughed. “Actually, I was. I am a little lost among so many Corderras.”

He started walking with her slowly through the camp, past the smoking campfires and the groups of gossiping women. Miriam continued to carry the baby. “We are a big clan,” he said seriously. “I like it that way, but some of the others feel a small group is easier to travel with. We have talked of splitting up, but no one can bear the idea. Still, I think one or two tents may pull away from us once winter is over. It makes these last few months very precious.”

Miriam sighed. “And I am feeling the same way, only backward,” she said. He looked over at her with a smile, since her words made no sense. “I am feeling jealous of the Lohoras, with all you Corderras around to take their attention away from me,” she explained. “I know that it makes no sense. But I saw your camp here, and I wanted us all to run in the other direction.”

“That is because you have not been with the Edori long enough,” he said. “What you will learn is that everyone loves you as much as your own clan does. You are welcome at every fire, in every tent. You will come to see a mixed camp like this as a great opportunity. You will say to yourself, ‘Aha! I have not been loved enough by the twenty people in my own camp, who lavish affection on me every day. Look, now, here are thirty more people who will give me hugs and tell me I am beautiful. I will fill myself up on emotion, so much of it that even I, hungry little Miriam, will have enough.' ”

She laughed, because his eyes danced even while his mouth remained prim. “That was not the way of things where I was raised,” she said. “There was not enough love to go around, even when there were only one or two people in the room.”

“Why, where did you grow up?” he asked, astonished.

She did not feel like giving details. “In Bethel,” she said.

“And nobody loved you? I find that hard to believe.”

He might have been flirting. It was hard to tell. He might just have been espousing the basic Edori philosophy. In any case, she thought about it. “Actually,” she said slowly, “many
people loved me. I guess many people do still love me. It is just that I didn't know what to do with their love—or I didn't like the way their love was showed to me.”

“Sometimes all you have to do is give it back,” he suggested.

She smiled. “Yes, maybe that's what I should try instead.”

She didn't specify what she had already tried, and he did not ask. At any rate, they had arrived at her tent, and Tirza was looking around in complete distraction. “Miriam! There you are! Can you—oh my goodness, is that Daniel? Come give me a kiss, and then go ask your sister if she has any mint leaves. I wanted to make something special for tonight, but I—Miriam, are you watching the baby? Or can you help me for a little bit?”

“I can do both,” Miriam said, but Daniel took the baby from her arms.

“I will find my sister and come back with every spice in her wagon,” he said solemnly. “But I will leave this little one in her hands and tell her he has worn me out.”

“Tirza, can Daniel eat with us tonight?” Miriam asked.

“Of course he can! I was hoping he would.”

He smiled at them both and turned the baby upside down to dangle by his feet. The boy screamed with delight. “Now I will hurry back even faster,” Daniel promised.

He left and Miriam sent a swift glance around her own campfire. The tent was up, but the men were all gone, and Anna was nowhere in sight. No wonder Tirza looked so harried. Miriam pushed up the sleeves of her blue dress.

“What can I do to help?” she asked.

After the dinner, most members of both clans gathered around the central fire to trade stories and sing songs. Daniel and Miriam stood for a little while on the edge of the fire, drinking hot sweet drinks and talking, and then, by common consent, they wandered away from the firelight and the circle of their friends. The night air was downright cold, but Miriam was wearing a jacket that was too small for Eleazar, and she had begun wearing heavy socks inside her sturdy shoes, and she felt quite comfortable.

Anyway, when they spread a small blanket and sat down
on it, they almost immediately began to kiss, and that combination of body heat and excitement made her warm all the way to her toes and fingertips.

They were innocent kisses, kisses that would lead to nothing else, and Miriam knew the difference. She was not sure Daniel did. She didn't think he was much older than she was, a few months maybe, and not nearly as experienced. Kissing Elias had never been like this, so full of joyous wonder at the act itself, the pleasurable exchange of softness and sweetness, without a hot impatience to follow up with the next even more intoxicating act.

Thinking of Elias made her feel small and uncertain. She pulled her mouth away from Daniel's and buried her face against his chest. But she clung to him more tightly, anxious for the reassurance of his body, the proof that he was alive and full of ageless unchanging desires.

He kissed her hair. “You're so sweet,” he murmured.

She shook her head, not lifting her face. “No, I'm not.”

“Maybe you aren't such a good judge.”

“Maybe you don't know some of the things I've done.”

Now he bent in and kissed her cheek, half exposed, though she'd tried to shake her hair over her face when she laid her forehead against his chest. “Very bad things?” he said gently. “That brought harm to others?”

She sighed. “Very, very bad things,” she said. “And they brought very great harm.”

He kissed her cheek again. “Did you intend the harm when you did them?”

“No.”

“Would you do the same things again?”

She considered that, because she had not previously given it any thought. Would she go to the home of a married man and make love to him, knowing his wife was in another town and his daughters would be shamed by their father's actions? Would she do this even knowing that, if she were not the one in his bed, some other young girl would be, and so the fault was not really hers, or not hers entirely? Would she leave a man, covered with knife wounds and possibly dying, and run away, afraid for her own safety and good name?

Would she steal something just to see if she could do it?
Would she entice a friend to run away in the night, just to prove her personal charm was so great that no one could fail to respond to it?

Would she hurt herself, just to hurt the people who loved her? Even if that was the only way she could think to prove to herself that they did, in fact, hold her dear?

“I would not do some of those things again, ever,” she said slowly. “But I am not sure I am entirely reformed.”

He lifted a hand to stroke her hair, and the motion was both soothing and infinitely warming. He would make a fine lover someday, a gentle and caring lover, someone who would shield his partner from the storms that raged both within her and without. But he would not be hers. “It is enough that you are trying,” he said. “And that you have learned a little. And that you are willing to learn more.”

She tilted her head back so she could see his face again, so he could kiss her again if he wanted to, and she was sure he wanted to. “Yes,” she said. “I am very willing to learn.”

They camped with the Corderras for two more days, and both days seemed, to Miriam, like the feast days and wedding celebrations she had attended at the holds and the river cities. She began to look forward to the Gathering that they talked about so much, a time when all the clans came together to recount tales of their winters apart, news of the tribes, stories of the road. To renew their deep bonds of friendship and to bask in their combined love. If the joining of just two clans could provide such joy and merriment, she could hardly imagine what the joining of all clans could produce.

She was sad, but she was ready, when, on the third day, the general consensus was reached: It was time for both tribes to move on. There were many hugs and exchanges of gifts and last-minute bits of advice given out. Daniel gave Miriam a little carved bird he had made from a stick of kindling, and she gave him a kiss, since she had nothing else. Thaddeus and Shua took clothes and gifts and good wishes from her family but did not, as Miriam had feared, decide to stay with the Corderras. No, they were Lohoras, they would travel as the Lohoras traveled and pitch their tent beside a
Lohora fire. The Corderras could see the new baby at the Gathering.

And so the Lohoras moved on, turning northward now, and then west. They were somewhere in central Jordana, Miriam thought, between the Heldoras and the Caitanas, halfway between the Breven desert and the Galilee River. Actually, she had no idea where they were, and she didn't particularly care. She was happy to be on the move again, to see the landscape changing before her eyes, growing stern and cold as a disobeyed parent. Food was harder to find, though there was still some game, and Anna taught her how to dig for tubers that she never would have realized were hiding just under the surface of the ground. Their meals changed, but they never went hungry. And even on the coldest nights, when they made sure to put up the tents and sleep together, pallet to pallet, they were always warm.