Gathering Blue - Lois Lowry [6]
One woman was soon to give birth; perhaps that would happen tonight, and the others would attend her, muffling her cries and assessing the value of the infant. Others would be coupling tonight, creating new people, new hunters for the future of the village as the old ones died of wounds and illness and age.
Kira did not know what the Council of Guardians would decide. She knew only that whether she was to stay or go, to rebuild on her mother's piece of land or to enter the Field and face the creatures who were waiting in the forest, she would have to do it alone. Wearily she sat on the ash-blackened earth to wait for night.
She reached for a nearby piece of wood and turned it over in her hands, measuring its strength and its straightness. For a cott, should she be permitted to stay, she would need some sturdy lengths of solid wood. She would go to the woodcutter named Martin. He had been her mother's friend. She could barter with him, maybe offering to decorate a fabric for his wife, in exchange for the beams she would need.
For her future, for the work with which she thought she might earn her living, she would also need some small, straight pieces of wood. This one was too pliable and would not do, she realized, and dropped it on the ground. Tomorrow, if the Council of Guardians decided in her favor, she would look for the kind of wood she needed: short, smooth pieces she could fit together at the corners. She was already planning to build a new threading frame.
Kira had always had a clever way with her hands. When she was still a tyke, her mother had taught her to use a needle, to pull it through woven fabric and create a pattern with colored threads. But suddenly, recently, the skill had become more than simple cleverness. In one astounding burst of creativity, her ability had gone far beyond her mother's teaching. Nov/, without instruction or practice, without hesitancy, her fingers felt the way to twist and weave and stitch the special threads together to create designs rich and explosive with color. She did not understand how the knowledge had come to her. But it was there, in her fingertips, and now they trembled slightly with eagerness to start. If only she was allowed to stay.
3
A messenger, bored and scratching at an insect bite on his neck, came to Kira in the dawn and told her that she must report to the Council of Guardians at late morning. When the sun was approaching midday, she tidied herself and went, obedient to his instruction.
The Council Edifice was surprisingly splendid. It remained from before the Ruin, a time so far past that none of the people now living, none of their parents or grandparents, had been born. The people knew of the Ruin only from the Song that was presented at the yearly Gathering.
Rumor said that the Singer, whose only job in the village was the annual presentation of the Song, prepared his voice by resting for days and sipping certain oils. The Ruin Song was lengthy and exhausting. It began with the beginning of time, telling the entire story of the people over countless centuries. It was frightening too. The story of the past was filled with warfare and disasters. Most especially it was frightening when it recalled the Ruin, the end of the civilization of the ancestors. Verses told of smoky, poisonous fumes, of great fractures in the earth itself, of the way huge buildings toppled and were swept away by the seas. All of the people were required to listen each year, but sometimes mothers protectively covered the ears of their smallest tykes during the description of the Ruin.
Very little had survived the Ruin, but somehow the structure called the Council Edifice had remained standing and firm. It was immeasurably old. Several windows still contained patterned glass of deep reds and golds,