They turned to her, startled, their lifted sticks beginning to lower. “A witch?” said the man in Shaftalese, as though he thought Zanja had spoken a word of his language by simple accident.

“Your people are singing someone into death, are they not?” Zanja had noticed the melancholy murmur of sound, but until she spoke she had not known what it signified. “The sham’rewill save that person’s life.”

The man spoke to his companions, not translating, but announcing in his own convoluted tongue that these three strangers were sent by the gods. “Well,” Zanja said to J’han, “I think they might let us come in now.”

“But will they feed us sand porridge?” he asked.

It was porridge, sure enough, made not from sand but from some kind of ground seed that looked fit for chickens, with bits of dry goat meat mixed in it, and chunks of something chewy and sweet that Zanja did not attempt to identify. In a storage hut hastily converted to guest quarters, Zanja and J’han contrived a laundry line and hung their blankets and clothing over the dung fire to dry. Karis returned, consumed a great bowl of the chickenseed porridge, and lay down on a pallet of goat hides. “The place is crawling with vermin,” she said. “The people are so crowded together they can scarcely find room to separate sick from well. They kept handing me their babies–babies the size of calves! They know what an earth witch is good for.” Karis shut her eyes. “I’ll kill the fleas,” she promised, her words already blurred by sleep. “Why am I so tired?”

“Zanja and I will manage,” J’han said.

*

They went out again into the rain and found the six head‑crackers, crowded with two dozen others into a bursting hut where the only people not talking were wailing children. The din fell still as the two of them ducked through the skin‑hung door. The fetor was overwhelming. Zanja said to the man who spoke some Shaftalese, “You must help me to explain something to your people. They are in great danger, and we have come to help them. This illness has traveled to you from the north, and we have followed it. We know it well. We have seen it kill entire families.”

The man sat still, his big hands folded. “That may be so,” he said. “This sharri’rewho healed Si‑wen‑ga‑sei‑ko’che‑ni‑so‑sen. She is a Juras woman‑born‑outside‑the‑plain? Whose child is she?”

“She does not know her mother’s name. She was born among strangers who did not care to remember her mother for her. Please, I know that you are curious, but your people are in danger. Do you understand?”

The man said, “You want me to speak to my people. But they will not hear my words until they know this woman’s mother‑name.”

J’han murmured at Zanja’s elbow, “Your people also had peculiar ways, didn’t they?”

“And many’s the time I wanted to scream at them, too,” Zanja muttered. “Perhaps you could barge your way into the sick room without being invited.”

She gave him the bags of supplies she carried, and watched him walk out of the door before she turned again to the man and explained, “Karis did not know her mother or her mother’s name.”

“Ka‑ris, that is her name? And has she had no life since she was born?”

The people within hearing repeated, “Karis!” And then the din began to rise. At least they were not a gesticulating people like the Midlanders, but their big voices filled the hut. They argued among themselves and shouted questions that the man was hard put to translate, and Zanja to answer. Was Karis born in the autumn, they asked, and how many years ago, and had her mother been enamored of sweets, and what had her mother been so ashamed of, to run away from the comforts of the Ka clan? A gray‑haired woman rose and began to chant what seemed to be a list of names all beginning with “Ka,” which Zanja realized must be a genealogy, frequently interrupted by other elders who seemed to be arguing that this or that could not be Karis’s particular branch, for reasons Zanja could not decipher.

“Huh!” said her translator at last. “I guess she owns a lot of goats.”

“Goats?” Zanja said in some bewilderment.

“They say her mother must be Ka‑san‑ra‑li‑no‑me‑la, the eldest daughter of Ka‑ri‑sho‑ma‑do‑fin‑brae‑kon, the eldest daughter of …”

Zanja interrupted as politely as she could. “And this Kasanra, what happened to her?”

“She had a restless heart and ran away.”

“Karis’s mother died when Karis was born, thirty‑five years ago.”

He turned and spoke at length with several other people. Zanja sat upon her heels. She could tell Karis her mother’s name! And, apparently, though Kasanra had not been remembered by anyone in Lalali, she had lived long enough to name her infant, and that name had been remembered. So now that name alone was enough to give Karis a clan, a genealogy, and even living relatives.

The translator turned to Zanja and said, “Yes, Karis is rich! Her mother’s sister’s eldest daughter, Ka‑mo‑le‑ni‑da‑he‑fo‑so, is holder of the goats, but everyone thinks they belong to the daughter of Ka‑san‑ra‑li‑no‑me‑la.”

“I doubt Karis wants those goats, though. Kamole can continue to keep them.”

This statement excited much comment, for Kamole had a fine herd and any of them would certainly want those goats. And Kamole was overly self‑important, and perhaps deserved to lose her herd to a stranger. Their eyes danced at the possibility.

“Karis does not want them for her daughter, and her daughter’s daughter?” said the translator.

Zanja gathered that these people would not count Leeba as a daughter, and said, “Karis can bear no children of her own body.”

At this, the gathered people groaned and cried as though someone had died. The translator explained, straining the limit of his vocabulary, that the Ka women were good breeders, but the clan had long thought the Ka gift had died out, for in three generations there had been no sham‑re.That Karis could not pass on her talent to her own children was a dreadful tragedy.

The people demanded to know why Karis could not breed and what the names of all her parents, friends, and lovers were, in the order that she met them. “Shouldn’t Karis tell you this herself?” Zanja asked, but gradually it became clear that to tell one’s story was the duty of one’s shushan,which the man confusedly translated as “the people of her name.”

“Her clan?” she asked, using the Juras word.

“No, no, her shushan.”

Zanja was getting tired, and the camp’s fleas had worked their way to her skin by then, and she was not enduring the discomfort of their sharp bites with a stoicism that would have made her teachers proud. She said, “Am I in her shu’shan?”

“You know her story, don’t you?”

She rubbed her eyes, which were burning from the smoke. The rain pounded on the stretched hide roof, and leaked into some well‑placed containers. She said, “Karis cannot bear children because her womb was injured. Her father’s name she does not know. I do not know the names from Karis’s childhood, for she has chosen to forget them. The first one to befriend her was named Dinal, whom she calls her mother, though she did not know her long. Dinal’s foster daughter, Norina, became her first and oldest friend. I am her first and only lover, Zanja, of the Tarwein clan. And then her friends all came at once: J’han, the healer who is with us now, his daughter, Leeba; Emil, our elder; and Medric, a wise man. That is her entire shu’shan.”

The man, diverted by curiosity, asked, “Your clan‑name is your second name? Do your people do everything backwards?”

“I come from the furthest northern borderland of Shaftal, and the Juras live in the furthest southern borderland. My homeland is as wrinkled as yours is flat, and the mountains are so high that some of them at their peaks have stars shining on them in the middle of the day. Your people are large and fair and full of noise. My people were small and dark and full of silence. You Juras seem backwards to me!”