Hah! Better! There was even a breeze that stirred the hot air, bringing the aroma of summer vegetation to her nostrils.

She sat down, tasted the beer -- it was cool in her mouth and pleasant on her tongue -- then thought about her current situation.

Merhit was asking her to oppose her own mother, as well as all the other senior women of her lineage. No woman did this lightly. Many women -- most women -- would never do it.

But it was wrong to make a contract with the intention of breaking it, and even more wrong to break a contract made solid by children; and to break the contract in such a way!

No one would question the right of senior women to examine newborn children and decide, "This one should be kept. This one should not."

The job had to be done. A decent self-respecting family, one such as Sorg had always been, could not allow any of its members to die slowly. Nor could a decent family let children who had come out badly continue to live. What future did they have? How could they be happy or useful? The children who were killed held no grudge, as was known by the behavior of their ghosts.

The ghosts of adults are almost always resentful and dangerous. Hungry and angry, they haunt the living, looking for revenge or restitution. But the ghosts of newborn children cause no trouble. They appear in the houses where they were born and died, as if they don't know where else to go, causing no rouble,

merely lingering. In time they grow dim and transparent. Finally they vanish. No one is the worse for them. This proves no wrong has been done. The children have lingered out of ignorance and confusion, not because they were angry or felt they had been dealt with unjustly.

The job of judging fitness to live was necessary. But it was the kind of decision that could not be left to the mothers who had borne the children; young women as a group were unsuited to this kind of work; and men were obviously utterly unfit. Beyond question the job was best done by matriarchs full of experience. They judged, then made sure the children -- the ones not kept --

died without pain.

The children were not always sickly. In times of famine Sorg women had killed healthy children. A great loss, but unavoidable. In addition, Ahl had heard of families who used infanticide to control the number of males and females in each

generation. If times were difficult and violent, it made sense to have sons. In good times, one wanted daughters. As far as Ahl knew, the Sorg had never done this. Always confident and proud, they trusted in the Goddess and their own ability to turn any healthy child to a good use, providing the rains fell and

crops rose from the soil.

Maybe she would be justified in opposing the matriarchs of Sorg in this case, though the idea made her queasy. But how could she get Leweli and the child away? By ship, of course. But a ship that belonged to Sorg would not take them; and what story could she tell to foreign sailors? Two women alone were certain to look odd. Why weren't they traveling with kin?

The innkeeper came out. "Those men are quarreling."

"Hah?"

"Quietly, and in a language I don't understand. Nonetheless, it's a quarrel. I didn't want to stay."

Ahl tilted her head in agreement. It was the worst kind of discourtesy for men to argue in front of unrelated women.

"They're actors. Something happened to split their company. These two are all that's left. For some reason they don't want to go home, though it's difficult to see what else they can do."

"Actors are often men of irregular behavior." Ahl said. This was a way of saying the men might be in trouble with their families. A terrible idea, but such things happen, and happened more often in the period of this story. It was the age called the Unraveling. An apparently endless war raged to the north of Sorg, on the continent's Great Central Plain. For a while it had seemed that the great warleader Eh Manhata would bring peace by defeating all rival armies. But Manhata had died a year before; and the war continued with increased savagery.

The innkeeper sat down and drank from the cup she carried. "I've thought they might be criminals or outcasts, though they're both very civil, and the older man has been through here before, causing no trouble.

"I saw him act the last time. He had a company of five, and they did the death of some hero. I forget which one, but he had a red robe and died impressively, after a lot of talk -- about honor, mostly, as I remember. When the talk stopped, he gave a yell, and crash! Down he went! The men of Sorg are usually quieter when they die. What is there to talk about, anyway, in these

situations?"

Ahl could think of no comment, though she'd enjoyed the few plays she had seen. She finished her beer and went to get her tsin, going around the outside of the inn, so as to avoid the quarreling men. When she looked closely, she saw the

cart was shabby, its carving worn, its paint chipped and faded.

She got home at dusk. Great tall clouds were blowing in from the southwest, lightning flickered around their tops.

The storm broke after dark. Thunder woke Ahl. She lay in bed, listening to wind and rain. This was the way summer ended in her country. The season for safe ocean travel was almost gone. The task she had been given would become more difficult with every day that passed.

SHE WENT to Sorg Harbor the next morning. This was not a harbor town like the ones she had visited in the south: rows of houses climbing over hills; steep streets paved with stone; marketplaces, also paved; and gar dens, mostly private; but the people of the far south were not clutching, nor did they live

in fear of thieves. It was a habit for them to share their gardens with passersby. Not everything, but something. Vines grew on the tops of walls. Potsof flowers stood by doors. Trees were left untrimmed, so their branches stretched over the street, dropping seeds in spring and leaves in autumn. In one

town Ahl had walked through clouds of floating gauze. In another the streets had been carpeted with leaves as orange as fire. In a third there had been flowers, tiny and purple, dotting pale gray paving stones. Looking up, she had seen a flowering tree.

The Sorg preferred living on the farms established by their ancestors, and they saw no reason to make the stays of foreign visitors comfortable. Their harbor town consisted of storage barns. Here and there it was possible to find an inn, though most foreign sailors and merchants stayed on their ships, which were more pleasant and less expensive. The streets were unpaved and badly rutted. Unused ground was either bare or full of weeds.

The harbor itself was a wide bay. Five docks extended into it. Two were for local fishing boats, empty at present: the boats were at work far out on the ocean.

It was the other docks that interested Ahl. Five deep-bellied freighters were tied along them. Shading her eyes, she surveyed each deck. All the sailors were black and white: members of her lineage or of closely allied families.

This was bad news, but it might not be the only news. Ahl reined her tsin at one of the taverns along the waterfront. These were the only structures in town that looked welcoming and pleasant. They were a kind of building that used to be common along the south coast. A wooden framework is anchored in large ceramic

pots. Vines grow out of the pots and over the frame, creating an arbor open on one side. The taverns all looked toward the harbor. What else would interest sailors?

Inside were benches and more pots, these with narrow mouths. Beerflies whirred around them or crawled on their lips. Ahl dipped beer into a cup, paid for it and sat down.