Gathering Blue - Lois Lowry [5]
Today, facing Kira, she was once again preparing to destroy someone's young.
Unlike the forest creature, Kira had no claws with which to fight. She gripped her wooden cane tightly and tried to stare back with no hint of fear.
"I've returned to rebuild my cott," she told Vandara.
"Your space is gone. It's mine now. Those saplings are mine."
"I will cut my own," Kira conceded. "But I will rebuild on this space. This was my father's space before I was born, and my mother's after he died. Now that she is dead, it's mine."
Other women emerged from surrounding cotts. "We need it," one called. "We're going to use the saplings to build a pen for the tykes. It was Vandara's idea."
Kira looked at the woman, who was holding the arm of a toddler roughly. "It might be a good idea," Kira replied, "if you want to pen your little ones. But not on this piece of ground. You can build a pen somewhere else."
She saw Vandara lean down and pick up a rock the size of a tyke's fist. "We don't want you here," the woman said. "You don't belong in the village anymore. You're worthless, with that leg. Your mother always protected you but she's gone now. You should go too. Why didn't you just stay in the Field?"
Kira saw that she was surrounded by hostile women who had come from their cotts and were watching Vandara for instructions and leadership. Several, she noticed, had rocks in their hands. If one rock were thrown, others would follow, she knew. They were all waiting for the first.
What would my mother have done? she thought frantically, and tried to call wisdom from the bit of her mother's spirit that lived on in her now.
Or my father, who never knew of my birth? His spirit is in me, too.
Kira straightened her shoulders and spoke. She held her voice steady and tried to meet the eyes of each woman in turn. Some lowered their gaze and looked at the ground. That was good. It meant they were weak.
"You know that in a village conflict that could bring death, we must go to the Council of Guardians," Kira reminded them. She heard some murmurs of assent. Vandara's hand still gripped the rock, and her shoulders were tense, preparing to throw.
Kira looked directly at Vandara but she was speaking to the others now, in need of their support. She appealed not to their sympathy, because she knew they had none, but to their fear.
"Remember that if conflict is not taken to the Council of Guardians, and if there is a death..."
She heard a murmur. "If there is a death..." she heard a woman repeat in an uncertain, apprehensive voice.
Kira waited. She stood as tall and straight as she could.
Finally a woman in the group completed words of the rule. "The causer-of-death must die."
"Yes. The causer-of-death must die." Other voices repeated it. One by one they released the rocks. One by one each woman chose not to be a causer-of-death. Kira began to relax slightly. She waited. She watched.
Finally only Vandara still held her weapon. Glaring, Vandara menaced her, bending her elbow as if to throw. But at last she too dropped the rock on the ground, with a slight harmless toss toward Kira.
"I will take her to the Council of Guardians then," Vandara announced to the women. "I am willing to be her accuser. Let them cast her out." She laughed harshly. "No need for us to waste a life getting rid of her. By sunset tomorrow this ground can be ours and she will be gone. She will be in the Field, waiting for the beasts."
The women all glanced toward the forest, deep in shadows now: the place where the beasts waited. Kira forced herself not to follow their looks with her own eyes.
With the same hand that had held the rock, Vandara stroked the scar on her throat. She smiled cruelly. "I remember what it was like," she said, "to see your own blood pour upon the ground.
"I survived," she reminded them all. "I survived because of my strength.
"By night-start tomorrow, when she feels the claws at her throat," she went on, "this two-syllable mistake of a girl will wish she had died of sickness beside her mother."
Nodding in agreement,