Mercedes Morgan's Arc

Chapter 17 of 21

The herd fed and drank by turns through the morning, and Mercedes knew the camp would hold without her for a day. She left the bull chewing at the post and walked west through the trees to her grandmother's house. The old woman sat by the fire wrapped in a wool blanket, hands folded in her lap. Mercedes knelt beside her and said the herd was home. Her grandmother smiled but did not turn her head. Mercedes said it again. Her grandmother asked who she was. Mercedes held her hand and waited until the name came back. Then she asked about the binding rites, the words spoken over a returning herd to tie them to the ground. Her grandmother nodded slowly and began to speak. Halfway through the first line she stopped and said she had lost the thread. She tried again. She lost it again. Mercedes felt the cold in her chest that had nothing to do with the weather. She fetched the prepared hide her grandmother kept rolled behind the wood box, and a feather pen, and ink. She spread the hide flat on the floor by the fire. She asked her grandmother for the rites one line at a time, in any order they came, and wrote each line down as it was spoken. The old woman gave her fragments. A phrase about the bull's shadow on the snow. A song for the cows in calf. A short word said four times over the water. Mercedes wrote them all, then read them back, and her grandmother corrected two and forgot a third by the time Mercedes lifted the pen. They worked until the fire burned low. By dark Mercedes had thirty-one lines on the hide, some whole, some broken. Her grandmother slept in the chair. Mercedes rolled the hide and tied it with a strip of leather. She did not have the rites. She had what her grandmother could still give, and it was written down now, and it would not fade further. She walked back through the trees toward the herd with the hide under her arm and the missing lines already working in her head like a wound she would have to close herself.