Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [33]
Cattagus tilted his head in dry greeting. “So, this is what all the fuss is about. Cute as a kitten, I’ll grant you that.” His voice was wheezy, with a sharp whistling running through it. He looked her up and down, a little smile playing around his lips, shook his head wryly, drew breath again, and added, “Absent gods, boy. I’d never have got away with something like this. Not even when I was thirty years younger.”
Dag snorted, sounding more amused than offended. “’Course not. Aunt Mari would’ve have had your hide for a tent flap.”
Cattagus chuckled and coughed. “That’s a fact.” He waved aside with his knife. “The girls from Stores brought your tent by.”
“Already?” said Dag. “That was quick.”
Fawn tracked their gazes to a large handcart set at the side of one cabin, piled high with what appeared to be old hides, with a stack of long poles sticking out the back.
“They said, bring back their cart soon as you get it empty.”
“That I can do. Where do Mari and Sarri want me to set up?”
“Better go ask ’em.” Cattagus gestured toward the shore.
Fawn followed Dag to peek over the bank. To the left of the dock, at which two narrow boats were tied, a sort of wooden cradle lay in the water, perhaps ten feet long and six feet wide. A woman wearing long black hair to her hips and nothing else, and a black-haired girl-child, were tromping vigorously up and down in it. Marching with them, Razi, equally nude, was clapping his hands and calling to the little girl, who looked to be about four, “Jump, Tesy! Jump!” She squealed with laughter and hopped like a frog, splashing the woman, who ducked and grinned. The cradle was apparently for retting some sort of long-stemmed plant, and the treaders were engaged in kicking off the rotting matter to clean the fibers. Beyond them, Utau, standing in water to his waist, was supporting the clutching fists of a small boy of perhaps two, whose fat little legs kicked up a fountain of foam. Mari, dressed in only a simple sleeveless shift hemmed at the calf and sandals like her husband’s, stood on the dock with her hands on her hips watching them, smiling. She seemed to be halfway through either loading or unloading a couple dozen coils of rough-looking rope from one of the boats, much like the rope netting Fawn had seen on the plunkin panniers.
Dag called down over the bank, “Hey, Mari! We’re back.”
Indicating that he’d been here once already this morning, likely to arrange this. Fawn wondered if this had been his first idea, or his third, and just how he had gone about explaining his needs. His ability to persuade had not entirely deserted him, it seemed.
Mari waved back. “Be right with you!”
Steps laid from flat stones made a stairway down the steep bank to the dock. In a few moments, Fawn was treated to the somewhat startling sight of a whole family of nude, wet Lakewalkers climbing up from the shore. They seemed quite unconscious of their undress. Fawn, who had never done more than wade in the shallows of the river with her skirts rolled up, supposed it made sense, given that these people were likely in and out of the water a dozen times a day for various purposes. She was nonetheless relieved when they streamed past her with only the briefest greetings and emerged a few minutes later from the cabin on the north of the clearing dressed, if simply: Razi and Utau in truncated trousers like Cattagus’s, and Sarri and her daughter in shifts. The little boy, escaping, streaked past still in his skin in a beeline for the water, only to be scooped up and tickled into distraction from his purpose by Utau.
Mari followed up the steps and stopped by Dag. “Morning, Fawn.” Her expression today was ironic but not unsympathetic. “Dag, Sarri thought you could set up under the apple tree over there. There’s a bit of rising