Son of a Bitch sat on what the old folks called "loose ground." It was consequently
possessed of almost as many holes as rocks, not to mention at least one cave that puffed
out draughts of nasty, decay-smelling air. Who knew what boggarts and speakies might
lurk down its dark throat?
And the worst holes weren't out where a man (or a mule) could see them. Not at all, sir,
never think so. The leg-breakers were always concealed in innocent-seeming nestles of
weeds and high grass. Your mule would step in, there would come a bitter crack like a
snapping branch, and then the damned thing would be lying there on the ground, teeth
bared, eyes rolling, braying its agony at the sky. Until you put it out of its misery, that
was, and stock was valuable in Calla Bryn Sturgis, even stock that wasn't precisely
threaded.
Tian therefore plowed with his sister in the traces. No reason not to. Tia was roont, hence
good for little else. She was a big girl—the roont ones often grew to prodigious size—and
she was willing, Man Jesus love her. The Old Fella had made her a Jesus-tree, what he
called a crusie-fix, and she wore it everywhere. It swung back and forth now, thumping
against her sweating skin as she pulled.
The plow was attached to her shoulders by a rawhide harness. Behind her, alternately
guiding the plow by its old iron-wood handles and his sister by the hame-traces, Tian
grunted and yanked and pushed when the blade of the plow dropped down and verged on
becoming stuck. It was the end of Full Earth but as hot as midsummer here in Son of a
Bitch; Tia's overalls were dark and damp and stuck to her long and meaty thighs. Each
time Tian tossed his head to get his hair out of his eyes, sweat flew out of the mop in a
spray.
"Gee, ye bitch!" he cried. 'Yon rock's a plow-breaker, are ye blind?"
Not blind; not deaf, either; just roont. She heaved to the left, and hard. Behind her, Tian
stumbled forward with a neck-snapping jerk and barked his shin on another rock, one he
hadn't seen and the plow had, for a wonder, missed. As he felt the first warm trickles of
blood running down to his ankle, he wondered (and not for the first time) what madness it
was that always got the Jaffordses out here. In his deepest heart he had an idea that
madrigal would sow no more than the porin had before it, although you could grow devil-
grass; yar, he could've bloomed all twenty acres with that shit, had he wanted. The trick
was to keep it out, and it was always New Earth's first chore. It—
The plow rocked to the right and then jerked forward, almost pulling his arms out of their
sockets. "Arr!" he cried. "Go easy, girl! I can't grow em back if you pull em out, can I?"
Tia turned her broad, sweaty, empty face up to a sky full of low-hanging clouds and
honked laughter. Man Jesus, but she even sounded like a donkey. Yet it was laughter,
human laughter. Tian wondered, as he sometimes couldn't help doing, if that laughter
meant anything. Did she understand some of what he was saying, or did she only respond
to his tone of voice? Did any of the roont ones—
"Good day, sai," said a loud and almost completely toneless voice from behind him. The
owner of the voice ignored Tian's scream of surprise. "Pleasant days, and may they be