The Returning by Christine Hinwood Page A

from the war.”
    Swimming in the river, wild? Ban laughed aloud. “He could hardly make the pull to the bank.”
    â€œAye, well. Think on it.”
    Mam was at the fire, stirring the stew pot. There was always a fire, and a stew pot on it. “Where you been, the day?”
    â€œHere’s the milk, Mam.”
    â€œDon’t want to tell me, then?”
    â€œI have some work haying with the Fieldsters,” Tobian said.
    â€œDo they pay you?” asked Da.
    â€œMy food, and feed toward keeping the goats through winter.”
    â€œAye, well done.”
    Calister brought home fish, guddled from the brook. Da and Mam had gathered blackberries.
    Ban got in the firewood and cleaned the pot after supper, for shirking his work all day, for Ardow’s words at him. Eleven sons: not one stillbirth, not one child lost to illness, not one daughter. Not one of them wed, and Dance on the farther side of thirty. So Ban and his ten brothers did women’s work along with the men’s.
    It was midsummer that Ban had started to skite off: Cam had been drinking at the tavern, fencing with words, all the village men at him to know how the war had dealt with brother or father, uncle, nephew, cousin, son. Cam slid around their questions.
    â€œWhat are you hiding?” Bailey Nelsan’s da had asked. It wasn’t only he who had looked dirty at Cam, and then muttered to his pot-mate. And Cam . . . Cam had caught Ban staring and Ban had gone red. At the sudden heat in his face he’d turned away. But Cam had come over.
    â€œHiding!” He’d sat on the bench beside Ban. “They think they want to know, but they do not.”
    â€œWhy don’t you tell them?” he had said. Him, Ban Coverlast, who never opened his mouth. Somehow Cam made the words come into his head and out on his tongue.
    â€œDead.” Cam stared into his beaker as if the contents entranced him. “Dead, dead, dead. Each and all of them. Spear or arrow or sword or disease. What is there to tell?”
    There had been a long pause then, while Ban found the nerve to speak. “They do have a right to know.”
    â€œIf I had never come back—and I nearly did not—who then would they ask?”
    â€œThey would still want to know. Would you not?”
    Cam had lifted a shoulder. That he would not want to talk about it . . . Ban thought he could understand: To talk about it was to think about it, when all Cam wanted, it seemed, was to forget.
    It was night now, and the eleven of them lay down together, boys by the fire and Mam and Da in the loft. Ban squeezed against the wall for some aloneness. He thought of Cam—the thick dark hair under his arm, fine dark hair on his chest—touching himself, and in his mind making it Cam’s hand on him.

    BAN HAD FELT bad going to sleep. He felt bad on waking, and determined to go with Ardow today, work. Coverlasts farmed no land, owned no land to farm, only their goats; they harvested only what nature put there. If Ban did not help in that unending gathering of food, all the family hungered. How was it, then, that he found himself slipping off to the water hole, to see if Cam waited there for him? Tomorrow , he told himself. Tomorrow I will work .
    Cam was floating leaves on the water. “Soon it will be too cold to swim.”
    â€œI could have told you that.”
    Cam said nothing.
    â€œI should be working.”
    Cam said nothing again.
    â€œWhy are we not?”
    â€œBecause . . .” Cam spread his one hand. “We’re going to swim.”
    While Cam swam, Ban fidgeted about on the bank and told Cam about the guilty feeling he had been holding, the length of summer.
    â€œI can fix that,” said Cam. “Do you meet me here on dusk.”
    That evening Ban followed Cam through the forest to Fenister’s land. First in rank there was the Lord in Dorn-Lannet, whom none in Kayforl did ever see—not their own before,