1Many lifetimes after the seed-woman, her people had fields, and still they had no home.
2They sowed in autumn below the spring. They cut the grain at the start of summer. Then they did as their mothers had always done. They tied the doors of their huts shut and walked up into the high country, after the herds and the wild fruit, and they did not come down until the leaves turned.
3Each autumn they came back to find what the summer had done. Wild pigs had been in the store pits. Mice had made nests in the seed. One year strangers had passed and taken everything that could be carried, and left a dead dog in the spring.
4There were two brothers among that people, sons of one mother. Garo was the elder, a broad, slow man who liked to finish what he began. Besh was the younger, and he was lean and quick, and he could not sit through a meal without standing up to look at the sky.
5In the year the strangers fouled the spring, Garo stood up at the autumn fire and said a thing that had not been said before. "I am not going up next summer. I am going to stay beside the grain."
6People laughed. Besh laughed loudest, but not because he found it funny. "Stay?" he said. "All year, in one place, like a tree? Brother, do you know what happens to trees? They get cut."
7"What happens to walkers," said Garo, "is that they come home to mice."
8"We are walkers. Our mother walked, and hers. The road is what we are. You want to tie us to a post like a dog, and call the rope a house."
9"I want to eat in winter," said Garo. "And I want to know, when I put seed in the ground, that I will be the one who cuts it."
10They argued for three nights. At the end of it the people split, which they had never done. A third of them stood with Garo, mostly those with small children and old parents. The rest stood with Besh. When summer came, Besh's people tied their doors and went up the hill. The brothers did not embrace. Besh called down from the ridge, "I will bring you a bone to chew, dog." Garo did not answer. He was already digging.
11Now hear what staying cost, for it was not as Garo had thought.
12They built houses to last through the heat, with stone at the foot and mud above. They dug new store pits and lined them with clay, and burned fires in them to bake the clay hard, so that the mice could not come through. They built a wall of thorn around the field. Garo's daughter Lio, who was twelve, learned to plaster, and went about grey to the elbows.
13But people who stay in one place live beside their own filth, and beside their neighbours' coughs. In the second summer a sickness of the belly went through the houses. It had never found the people when they walked. It took four children and it took Garo's wife. He buried her under the floor of the house, as was done then, so that she would still be at home.
14Some who had stayed began to look up at the ridge. An old man said, "Besh was right. The ground is punishing us for sitting on it."
15Garo did not think the ground punished anyone. He walked up and down the settlement for two days, looking. Then he had them dig a pit for their waste far down the slope, below the spring and not above it, and he made it a law that no one fouled the ground near the water. He did not know why it worked. He had only seen that the sickness began in the houses nearest the old midden. The sickness went out of the village slowly, like a tide.
16That harvest was the best in memory, for there had been hands to weed the field all spring and eyes to guard it all summer. And Garo did a new thing with it. He made two stores. One was the eating store, and anyone might go to it. The other was a pit of baked clay for the seed. When it was full, he laid a flat stone over it and sealed the stone with wet clay, and he had Lio press her hand into the seal.
17"When the clay is broken, the hand is broken, and we will all know," he said. "It is opened on the day of sowing. Not before. Not for me, and not for my child, and not for hunger."
18Then the cold came, and it was a hard cold, and on a day of sleet the walkers came down the hill.
19There were not as many as had gone up. The herds had not been where the herds had always been. Besh had led his people from valley to valley after tracks that were always three days old. They had eaten their dogs. They came into the village like their own ghosts, and the children had the round bellies and thin arms that everyone there knew.
20Besh stood in front of his brother's house. He had brought no bone. He did not ask. He could not make his mouth do it.
21Garo looked at him for the space of one breath. Then he said, "Lio. Open the eating store. Heat water first; they must have broth before bread." And he took his brother's youngest out of its mother's arms himself, and carried it in to the fire.
22So the village that had laid in food for thirty fed seventy. Garo measured the eating store each morning with a notched stick. Each morning he cut the share smaller. He did not send the walkers away, and he did not let anyone speak of it. But by the dead of winter the stick stood very short, and spring was two moons off.
23Besh had seen the sealed stone by then. Everyone had.
24He came to Garo at night. "There is grain under that clay."
25"There is seed under that clay."
26"My children's bellies do not know the difference."
27"Mine do," said Garo. "It is not mine to give you, brother. It is not even mine. It belongs to the summer. If we eat it, we have a moon of full bellies and then nothing, ever again. We would have to go back up the hill, all of us, after herds that are not there."
28"You talk as if the summer were a person," said Besh. "As if it were standing here with its hand out. I see my son. I do not see any summer."
29"No," said Garo. "That was always the difference between us."
30Besh went out without another word. I will say this for him: he did not give the order for what came next. But he had young men who had watched their sisters starve, and he knew what they were whispering, and he lay down and turned his face to the wall.
31Lio slept beside the seed pit that winter. Nobody had told her to. On the night of the new moon she woke to the sound of stone grating on stone. There were five of them, with skins to carry the grain. She knew every one. She had given them broth with her own hands.
32She did not scream at first. She threw herself across the pit and held the edge of the stone. "It is asleep," she said, which was what the children of that people were taught to say. "You cannot. It is asleep."
33A boy named Dak, not much older than she was, pulled her off. He did not mean to do what he did. She fell across the rim of the pit with her arm under her, and all of them heard the bone go. Then she screamed.
34By the time Garo came with a torch, the seal was in pieces on the ground, with the print of his daughter's hand broken across the palm. The pit was empty to the bottom. And the houses where the walkers had slept were empty too. All of them had gone, the guilty and the others, out into the dark and the sleet. Besh had gone with them. He could not stay and look at the girl.
35Garo bound Lio's arm between two sticks. He did not speak while he did it. Then he took his spear and eight men and went out on the track, which was plain in the mud: forty people and twenty heavy skins.
36They found them on the second evening, in a gully out of the wind. They smelled them before they saw them, and what they smelled was grain parching on hot stones. Garo stopped where he stood. Of all the smells in the world, that was the one. Every skin they had opened was not eaten only. It was dead. It had been through the fire, and nothing would ever wake in it now.
37He walked down into the gully. The walkers saw him and went still. Children sat with their cheeks full, and looked at his spear, and did not stop chewing.
38Besh stood up. He left his own spear lying. "Do it, then," he said. "I would, in your place."
39The eight men behind Garo wanted it. He could feel them wanting it, like heat at his back. One said, "They broke the girl's arm."
40Garo walked past his brother. He went to where the skins lay, and he counted them. Eleven were opened and parched or eaten. Nine were still tied.
41He stood over the nine a long time. He was a slow man. He was counting more than skins. If he took the nine home and left these people in the gully, they would be dead by spring, and nine skins would sow less than half his fields. If he let his men do what they wanted, there would be the same nine skins, and a gully that he would see every night for the rest of his life. And there would be no one to help him break new ground.
42"When I was small," he said at last, to nobody, "our grandmother told us about the fire. That you can give it away and still have all of it. I thought seed was like that. I was a fool." He turned around. "Seed is not like fire. Seed you give is seed you have lost, unless it goes through the ground first. Then you may give it ten times over. You could not wait for the ground, brother. You have eaten our summer."
43"I know what I have eaten," said Besh.
44"Then you will come back and help me grow another one."
45Nobody spoke. Besh stared at him.
46"Nine skins," said Garo. "It is not enough, sown as we sow it. But if it is sown thin, over twice the ground, and every weed pulled, and water carried to it by hand when the rain is late, each plant will give more. I have seen it at the edges of the field. For that I need forty more backs. You have forty backs. They are thin, but they will do."
47"And until harvest? What do seventy people eat until harvest?"
48"That is your part," said Garo. "I cannot hunt. None of mine can any more; we have forgotten how. You will hunt for seventy, and fish, and find every root in these hills, and you will not rest. That is the price of the eleven skins. Then in summer, after the cutting, walk where you like. Walk to the end of the world. Only be here at the sowing and be here at the cutting."
49Besh looked at his brother's spear, which was still pointing at the ground. He looked at the children. He said, very low, "The girl. Is she alive?"
50"Her arm is broken. She held the stone."
51Besh covered his face with his hands. When he took them away, he bent and lifted two of the tied skins onto his own shoulders, and began to walk back the way he had come.
52That was a thin year, the thinnest any of them lived through. They sowed the nine skins over twice the ground. The walkers hunted as they had never hunted, and came in at night too tired to eat what they had killed. The stayers weeded on their knees from the first light. Twice the rain was late, and seventy people carried water up from the spring in skins and gourds, a line of them like ants. Nobody died. In summer the grain stood thin and tall, each plant heavy, and when it was cut there was enough for the eating store and enough for the pit.
53Lio's arm healed with a bend in it. Each year after, it was her hand that was pressed into the wet clay of the seal, and you could tell her print from any other. The boy Dak sat guard beside the pit for three winters, by his own asking. Nobody had to tell him why.
54Besh never learned to sit through a meal. Every summer, when the cutting was done, he was gone over the ridge with a few others like him. But every autumn he came down again for the sowing, and he did not come empty. He brought black stone that took an edge like nothing else, and shells from a sea no one there had seen, and once a she-goat with two kids, alive, on a rope. He brought news of other springs and other peoples. The village was richer for having a walker in it, and Garo was the first to say so.
55So that became the way of that place. There were those who stayed and those who went out and came back, and the place had need of both. And in the middle of it was a pit with a stone on it, and on the stone a seal of clay with a hand pressed into it, which said to anyone who looked: not yet.