Gathering Blue. Lois Lowry

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СКАЧАТЬ But his face was impassive.

      “Her father was killed by beasts even before her birth. And now her mother is dead,” Vandara went on. “There is even reason to think that her mother may have carried an illness that will endanger others—”

       No! She was the only one to fall ill! Look at me! I lay beside her when she died, and I am not ill!

      “—and the women need the space where their cott was. There is no room for this useless girl. She can’t marry. No one wants a cripple. She takes up space, and food, and she causes problems with the discipline of the tykes, telling them stories, teaching them games so that they make noise and disrupt the work—”

      The chief guardian waved his hand. “Enough,” he announced.

      Vandara frowned and fell silent. She bowed slightly.

      The chief guardian looked around the table at the eleven others as if he sought comments or questions. One by one they nodded at him. No one said anything.

      “Kira,” the white-haired chief guardian said, “as a two-syllable girl, you are not required to defend yourself.”

      “Not defend myself? But—” Kira had planned to bow again, but forgot in her urgency. Now she remembered, but her bow was an awkward afterthought.

      He waved his hand again, signaling her silence. She forced herself to be still and to listen.

      “Because of your youth,” he explained, “you have a choice. You may defend yourself—”

      She interrupted again, unable to stop. “Oh, yes! I want to def—”

      He ignored her outburst. “Or we will appoint a defender on your behalf. One of us will defend you, using our greater wisdom and experience. Take a moment to think about this, because your life may depend upon it, Kira.”

       But you are strangers to me! How can you tell the story of my birth? How can you describe my bright eyes, the strength of my hand as I gripped my mother’s thumb?

      Kira stood helplessly, her future at stake. She felt the hostility beside her; Vandara’s breath was quick and angry though her voice had been silenced. She looked at the men seated around the table, trying to assess them as defenders. But she felt from them neither hostility nor much interest, just a sense of expectation as they waited for her decision.

      As Kira agonized, her hands pushed their way into the deep pockets of her woven shift. She felt the familiar outline of her mother’s wooden comb and stroked it for comfort. With her thumb she felt a small square of decorated woven cloth. She had forgotten the strip of cloth in the recent confusing days; now she remembered how this one, this design, had come, unbidden to her hands as she sat beside her mother in the last days.

      When she was much younger, the knowledge had come quite unexpectedly to her, and she recalled the look of amazement on her mother’s face as she watched Kira choose and pattern the threads one afternoon with a sudden sureness. “I didn’t teach you that!” her mother said, laughing with delight and astonishment. “I wouldn’t know how!” Kira hadn’t known how either, not really. It had come about almost magically, as if the threads had spoken to her, or sung. After that first time, the knowledge had grown.

      She clutched the cloth, remembering the sense of certainty it had given to her. She felt none of that sureness now. A speech of defense was not within her. She knew she would have to relinquish that role to one of these men, all strangers.

      She looked at them with frightened eyes and saw one looking calmly, reassuringly back. She sensed his importance to her. She sensed something more: awareness, experience. Kira took a deep breath. The threaded cloth was warm and familiar in her hand. She trembled. But her voice was certain. “Please appoint a defender,” she said.

      The chief guardian nodded. “Jamison,” he said firmly and nodded to the third man on his left.

      The man with the calm, attentive eyes rose to defend Kira. She waited.

      

      SO THAT WAS his name: Jamison. It was not familiar to her. There were so many in the village, and the separation of male and female was so great, after childhood had ended.

      Kira watched him stand. He was tall, with longish dark hair neatly combed and clasped at the back of his neck with a carved wooden ornament that she recognized as the work of the young woodcarver—what was his name? Thomas. That was it. Thomas the Carver, they called him. He was still a boy, no older than Kira herself, but already he had been singled out for his great gifts, and the carvings that came from his skilled hands were much in demand among the elite of the village. Ordinary people did not ornament themselves. Kira’s mother had worn a pendant hanging from a thong around her neck but she kept it hidden, always, inside the neck of her dress.

      Her defender picked up the stack of papers on the table before him; Kira had watched him marking these papers meticulously as he listened to the accuser. His hands were large, long-fingered, and sure in their movements; no hesitancy, no uncertainty. She saw that he wore a bracelet of braided leather on his right wrist, and that his arm, bare above the bracelet, was sinewy and muscular. He was not old. His name, Jamison, was still three syllables, and his hair had not grayed. She judged him to be midlife, perhaps the same age that her mother had been.

      He looked down at the top paper of the stack in his hands. From where she stood, Kira could see the markings that he was examining. How she wished she could read!

      Then he spoke. “I will address the accusations one by one,” he said. Looking at the paper, he repeated the words that Vandara had said, though he did not imitate her rage-laden tone. “The girl should have been taken to the Field when she was born and still nameless. It is the way.’”

      So that was what he had marked! He had written the words so that he could repeat them! Painful though it was to hear the accusations repeated, Kira realized with awe the value of the repetition. There would be no argument, afterward, about what had been said. How often among the tykes fistfights and battles had begun from You said, I said, He said that you said, and the infinite variations.

      Jamison set the papers on the table and picked up a heavy volume bound in green leather. Kira noticed that each of the guardians had an identical volume.

      He opened to a page he had marked during the proceedings. Kira had seen him turning the pages of the volume as Vandara had made her accusatory presentation.

      “The accuser is correct that it is the way,” Jamison said to the guardians. Kira felt stricken by the betrayal. Hadn’t he been appointed her defender?

      He was pointing now to a page, to its densely written text. Kira saw some of the men turn in their green volumes, finding the same passage. Others simply nodded, as if they remembered it so clearly there was no need to reread.

      She saw Vandara smile slightly.

      Defeated, Kira felt again the small cloth square in her pocket. Its warmth was gone. Its comfort was gone.

      “Turning, though,” Jamison was saying, “to the third set of amendments—”

      The guardians all СКАЧАТЬ