Day after day, building boats for his father, Yaltring’s thoughts went with his hands, to the way wood carved could ride the waves, sliding out of the safety of a grounded home to the ever-slicked roadways of wind and tide. It was winter now, the stormy season, and not often could he venture into the billowing deeps to prove his new-won manhood. Here he sat instead, slowly and as patiently as he could, crafting the vessels that would carry Drengo in balmier times upon the encasing waters, in which his little land, like all the others, was embedded.

It was wearisome, but it was his obligation, binding everyone on Imme with a living father. Even children five years old were starting to do little tasks for their fathers, but it was from the ages of ten to sixteen--the time called alshwahadak, or father-service--that the duty lay the heaviest. After that, it was expected that adult obligations would take over. A mother must provide for her children, supporting them with her own labor, as a husband must for his wife and her kin. Together, these three ties formed the Triple Bond, the cornerstone of social life in the Southeast Islands.

But even for mothers and husbands, the duty was not done. Old men could be seen in the brightness of Imme’s early mornings, traipsing off for the cabins of their even older fathers to do odd chores for them. Sila still sent gifts to her two remaining fathers on the rare occasions when traders passed by who were bound for the distant island of Tizrach. Her mother, Augaza, had been married to three men as of her last menstruation before her pregnancy with Sila; according to the custom of that land, all of them were considered Sila’s fathers. Her obligation was lifelong and divided itself evenly among them, though the third father had long since run off and disappeared.

Boat-building was the work Yaltring’s father asked of him; but in truth, Drengo did not burden him heavily. He had already benefited from the completed alshwahadaken of four other children, and was comfortable in life, more interested in Yaltring’s promise as a seaman than his value as a drudge. Nonetheless, he saw to it that Yaltring did the work that was part of becoming a man.

Working away one windy day, on a stone-ridden dirt plateau at the top of a small slope between Afa and a beach of Imme’s northeast coast, with tools and wood shavings strewn all around, Yaltring thought to himself how much he was now caught up in the world of men--the fellowship he’d entered the night of his initiation, when he left his mother’s protection to became a guardian of the law, a law tied to a bloodshed which he himself had shared, the slowly fading scar on his cheek a legacy of the beginning of death and his own acceptance amongst the others. His life now revolved around his father, for whom he worked on a daily basis; the elders who trained him into manhood had been supplanted by Drengo’s fishing buddies. When the weather was better, he went along on many fishing trips, usually doing all the work while his father chatted with friends, shouting occasional words of encouragement to his diligent son. All this was part of Yaltring’s duty, and in principle none of the catch belonged to him, though actually Drengo always served him the best pieces of fish when they got back and cooked it all up.

It had not always been this way, even after his alshwahadak began. Not very long ago, before the training for his manhood, he had lived in his mother’s world, and Rosa’s.

He smiled, thinking of her. He no longer saw his sister, who once had played such a part in his daily life, mothering him when his real mother was not around, though she was barely four years older. Nor would he see her again till the fall, when his father planned to accompany him on his maiden voyage, a two-week trip through the deep waters to the island of Alozea where she now lived. Yaltring loved her dearly still, but over the year since her wedding, something within him had consented to her departure. He had learned to let her go. Was it, perhaps, because he had moved to the world of men?

He thought back, now, to the day she became a woman, a cool, cloudy day three years ago. He had been ten, she fourteen. She was to partake in a celebration from which he was then excluded, the biannual Feast of Passing, after being made a woman in a winter ritual he still knew nothing about. But she had not forgotten him, not even on that great day of her own journey, the one day that would cut her life forever into two pieces.

"Yaltring," she said. He was outside, digging idly in the dirt with a stick, waiting for his father to come back so they could go fishing together in the late afternoon.

He turned around in surprise. "Rosa?" he said, almost timidly. "Don’t you have to--" His voice trailed off.

"I don’t have to be there for a while. Listen, my brother. You can’t follow me where I’m going--not this time! Tonight, I’m going to be a woman." She smiled knowingly. Yaltring was silent. He looked awed, although secretly he found her comment quite irritating, and rather hurtful.

"Yaltring!" said Rosa again, in a lower, gentler voice, dropping her jousting tone. She bent down on the ground beside him, looking straight at him. "Yaltring, you know I will not let you be alone, just because I’m a woman."

Yaltring said, with mild amusement, "But I’m not alone. For one thing, Dad’s coming by to fish with me soon."

"You know what I mean!" said Rosa loudly. Yaltring just looked at her, very pleased. He did a good job of hiding it, and said nothing. He was hoping Rosa would say more comforting things.

"Listen, Yaltring, I don’t care how much time you spend with Father, you still need a sister. I know you’re going to be silly and say you don’t, but you do and that’s all there is to it." She looked at him scoldingly.

Yaltring grinned. He tried not to, but his smile just got bigger and bigger. He couldn’t help it.

Rosa smiled too. "Oh, you are so silly!" was all she could say.

It wasn’t until a few days later that she began to address his serious questions about womanhood, and the passage.

"Oh yes, Yaltring," she told him, "we women are members of a very high order, all of us--one you can’t possibly hope to follow! However smart you are, you are still only a boy."

"I will be a man, though," Yaltring said drily. As the youngest of the brood, his gift for responding without backing down had often served him well.

"Yes, Yaltring, of course you will--and I’m sure you’ll be a very good man--one of the best that ever lived! Only, you still won’t be a woman--and that is your loss."

"Why?" said Yaltring, getting into the spirit of the contest. "What’s so great about being a woman?" He looked at her impudently.

"Yaltring!" Rosa looked indignant. "Is that how you talk to your sister, now that she’s grown?"

Yaltring refused to say a word, eyeing her in that same unflappable way, so that Rosa went on:

"I have become, Yaltring. Oh, I wish I could tell you!"

"What do you mean?"

"Yaltring, Yaltring, I’m not just me any more! Listen. You boys, when you become men, get marked in the flesh. We don’t have that. No scars to cut our pretty faces. We keep them unmarred, so that men will see them and want to marry us! But, that is only a barrier, a shell. We live behind our faces, and--" She stopped suddenly.

"Oh, come on," said Yaltring teasingly. "If you don’t tell me more than that, I’m going to think that you’re making it all up and you were really disappointed!"

"Oh, Yaltring," she said, and put her hand on his shoulder. "I really wish I could tell you. I could say to the other women that this isn’t for men, or boys, just you alone, and no one else. And I would trust you! You would keep a secret. But, they wouldn’t trust you. And anyway, they’d never agree that even one--" she stopped a moment--"I can’t tell you what they call you, male folk." She stifled a giggle. "They’d never agree that even one of you should know, not even if you didn’t tell another soul.

"That’s the worst of it: in going there, I have sworn myself, and now I can’t tell you about it. You, my brother! I always tell you everything. And now look at us. Here I am, on the other side, and there you are. And I can’t meet you!

"Well, we can talk about everything else. I just wish--" Her voice trailed off again.

"You wish what, Rosa?" said Yaltring, his voice suddenly somber.

"I wish I could take you there, at least after you’re a man. I wish you could be part of the secret too. But men don’t have secrets, just pain and scars and blood, and rules to live by."

"That’s not what I’ve heard," said Yaltring, who was already being slowly, quietly prepared by elders for his later passage.

"Well, what do you expect?" said Rosa, bouncing out of her reverie. "Men always talk big, that’s for sure."

Yaltring argued, but could get nothing more out of her; and hours later, on that day three years ago, his mind was still fixed upon the question: what is a woman? And what good was it to be a man, if you never got to find out? Why was everything so divided?

The questions haunted him beneath an overcast sky as he stomped barefoot from one beach to another, not caring where he went. He was walking a few feet from the waves, dragging a stick in the wet sand, a stick now heavy with seaweed. He heard voices and looked up.

A party of men and women was approaching, from a family that lived not far from Afa, plus one girl his age. But who was she?

Yaltring froze. He found, to his bafflement, that he couldn’t think of her name. He felt choked up by his memory’s failure, suddenly recalling a dream in which he’d been challenged by other Afa children to name his father, but could not. In his dream, they all laughed at him, and opened him up, and stuffed him full of sawdust.

Yaltring knew everyone on his small island. He knew the others in this party quite well, and recognized them at once; but he just could not think who this girl was. Yet somehow he knew that she, too, was their kin.

Now they had seen him, and were approaching swiftly across the sand. He wondered if they noticed his stiff, awkward gaze. There was nothing he could do but be ready to greet them. He relaxed, looking away from the girl--and something slid into place.

Nera--yes! That was her name. How could he have forgotten her? When he was younger he used to play sometimes with her cousin Shengo, also his age. Once in a while she’d come out to watch them, saying little, gazing mysteriously from deep-set brown eyes, perhaps making stray sarcastic remarks. He remembered telling her once to go away; he also remembered, oddly enough, that her watching made their games more meaningful, more exciting, as if she were some secret scribe, recording every move they made in a great book of deeds. Or so he’d imagined, looking into those eyes, strange and distant, yet following them intently as they played with a ball or a piece of wood, while she sat upon a stone wall above them, kicking her heels against it, or munching on a piece of squash.

He looked back to her--yes, this was Nera, all right. But something was wrong. She looked different than before, so different his memory had skipped right across her. Could she have changed so much in the few months since he’d seen her last?

"Good evening to you, Yaltring!" several of them called out. "Good evening, gentle sirs, kindly misses," he responded courteously. His mind was still fixed on the girl, and he tried to look at her without staring. What had happened to her?

Her eyes seemed rounder than before. She had grown taller, and there were faint swellings at her breasts and hips. Also, she had grown her hair long for the first time, and that gave her whole look a different aspect. Such changes he had seen in other girls, but always he had recognized their faces.

But there was something else, a difference in bearing and expression, a thing hard to give a name to. Nera, the girl cousin of his boyhood friend, had shed something of the girlishness about her. Her eyes had lost their hard, immediate imprint; when she looked at him, her glance came in slower and sank in deeper. She drew her hand to her long hair, and the movement had a languor that was wholly new to her. There was something womanlike about her now; and yet, like him, she was not even close to the age of passage.

His thoughts turned again to his sister’s words. Could this be some presentiment of the mystery of women?

By now the little party had passed by. Why was he thinking these strange thoughts? They were not his usual thoughts. He didn’t even understand what they were about.

Yet he found, the next day and the day after, he still was thinking of Nera.

"I saw Nera the other day," he told his mother. "She looks different than she used to."

"Ah, yes, you noticed that, did you?" said Sila. "I thought so too. She’s quite a pretty girl, isn’t she?"

Yaltring said nothing. He wasn’t used to being asked questions like that. Grown-ups were always fussing about "pretty girls." What did it matter to him?

Yet when he saw Nera after that, even at a distance, a tightness came to his throat and gut, a lightness to his head, and his thoughts became fast and muddled. Once, passing through the marshy lands between their houses, she turned to him while he was looking at her. He froze up unaccountably, and saw her smile at him before he managed to wrest his gaze away.

After that, he avoided her. For a while he would not even go towards her house. He felt as though he had won some battle he’d not been ready to fight, and the spoils belonged to another. It was a relief when she and her father moved further away, to the Shaxa Outposts, trading places with her uncle Lazak.

He told Sila all this and more at long last. Even at ten he felt ashamed to discuss such things with his mother, but could not bring himself to tell Rosa or anyone else. Sila listened, smiled, and said,

"Though yet a boy, Yaltring, you are not immune to love."

"Love?" he said, frowning. "For Nera?" That was not at all how he thought of it. He loved his parents, his siblings, his close friends. This was more like a disturbance.

When he told her so, Sila said, "That sounds like love to me!" She smiled knowingly at him, and Drengo came into the room, and her gaze was for him, now. She put her hand on the top of his back, pressing it in, looking at him with that same mysterious smile. Yaltring was unsettled and did not know what to think, feeling as though his own birth was a ship which had suddenly lost its anchor.

All the same, he felt quite sure there was something involved which did not go by the name of love.

Yaltring felt a hand on his own back. There he was, upon the rocky mount, still working on the boat, his hands making small moves while his mind roved. He turned, and there was Drengo.

"How’s it coming, young man?" he asked.

"Fine," said Yaltring, yanking himself out of his memories. "Father?" he went on after a while.

"Yes?" said the older man, raising his eyebrows.

"How did you meet my mother?"

"You know that story, son. I landed on Imme because my boat was leaking badly and I needed time to fix it. Actually, I’ve never told you this part, but I was only near Imme in the first place because a storm blew me off course. I’d been around to most of the Southeast Islands by then, but on the map, Imme just looked like a little piece of nowhere. I’d never bothered to come near it. But when I got here, it turned out to be the prettiest, most peaceful place I'd ever seen--and some of the easiest fishing, too. People were very hospitable, one thing led to another, and I ended up staying for a couple of years.

"Then, just as I was getting ready to leave, along comes your mother, on her first voyage away from Tizrach. Her brother had died, and she wanted to get far away. A good thing for me, too, or I might have wandered around until I disappeared in the Eastern Sea! I was restless when I was young, Yaltring, more restless than you can imagine. I bounced all over the place, like Hanuak of Deth Guil. Ever hear that story? His marriage had already been arranged, he got cold feet, the bride’s father did a malakhana, and they chased him from island to island for six months until he disappeared. Forty years later, they found out that he was still alive in the interior of Koela, going by a different name, and married to the sister of the one he was supposed to marry in the first place." The malakhana, or groom search, was an ancient practice of the Southern Group, still occasionally used. Young men and women who had not moved away from their families could not marry without their elders’ consent, but nor could they be forced to wed--except through a malakhana, which gave a young woman’s family elders the right to demand than an unwilling groom be found, seized, and dragged off to marry her. The bride had to agree to the match, as did the groom’s elders--usually because they wanted to drive the eldest son out of a crowded house, and into the heavy duties of a husband.

"Yes, but about my mother," said Yaltring. "How did you know, when you met her, that she was--" His words trailed off, and his hands gestured at empty air.

"Hmm. Well, son--" Drengo, too, stopped, and did not go on for a while. "Well, to tell you the truth, I didn’t know much of anything about her when I first met her. Well--except that she was very pretty." There was that word again. Yaltring was older now, and the word itself was enough to trigger a cascade of feelings. But what did it really mean?

Drengo’s yellow face was flushed with a slightly embarrassed grin, and his speech was nervous and quick. "I was introduced to her amidst a group of others," he went on. "It was later, when I spoke with her alone, that my heart opened up. And hers to me! We soon decided that we had to be together. She talked of taking me back to Tizrach, but I would have none of that."

"Why?"

"Well--" Drengo said, that same sheepish grin returning to his face. "I didn’t really want to be one out of seventeen husbands, for one thing. That’s what I figured would have happened, by the time she got through with her admirers. You do not know how your mother was when she was young, Yaltring. She looked like a warrior princess who refused to fight. There must have been many hearts in her sway, back on her home island."

"And what was the other reason?" asked Yaltring, both amused and slightly shocked by his father’s unexpected admission. He’d noticed that of late Drengo had opened up about many things he’d never discussed when Yaltring was a boy.

"I don’t know the language they speak there," said Drengo. "You seem to understand it pretty well, but I’d never heard a word of it before I met her. I didn’t know their ways, either. It’s a different world, Tizrach, from what I hear, though I’ve never been there. I was afraid."

"Afraid of what?" Yaltring asked, frowning. He was not used to the idea of his father being afraid.

Drengo’s face grew sober and solemn. He looked down. "Afraid of being totally and utterly alone," he said at last, in a low voice.

Yaltring looked back at him for a long while. Then he nodded, in a slow repeated gesture, and his father returned, and held, his gaze. A bridge of understanding that had always seemed to stretch between them had just gained a new stone.

"Your mother wouldn’t hear of living in the Northern Group. And she wanted a steady home. Well, that was reasonable enough. Can’t expect your babies to live the life of the sea. I’d already made some friends on this island, and she felt more at home here after she met others with kin on Tizrach. So in the end, I talked her into staying here with me.

"I don’t think she was really so keen on going back to Tizrach anyway. She just didn’t want to be too far away. She said Imme was close enough. I knew the sea-maps well, and I knew exactly where Tizrach was. I told her, ‘You’ve just had your first sea-voyage. You’re inexperienced. Maybe you don’t realize how far you came.’

"But she just laughed. ‘Oh, I realize!’ she said. ‘This is a long way from home. As are all lands, and in more than the miles of the sea. But Imme’s closer than most.’"

"She was right, of course. But they speak Eastern here, and wives only take one husband at a time. So, it was agreed. Instead of trading the little shack I’d built for a set of shiny harpoons, I fixed it up and built more rooms on so we could live there together. And in it we still live!"

As he spoke of building, Drengo’s eyes slid away from Yaltring to the half-finished boat. He scrutinized his son’s handiwork. "You’ve been making a lot of progress."

"Yep. You’ll have quite a fleet by the time I’m seventeen."

Drengo looked earnestly into his eyes, touching his shoulder, and he spoke gently. "Now, Yaltring, don’t get all worried about that. I can finish the boats myself if I have to. You must work for me as long as you are here, but I do not bind you here. If you have to leave, to do what you have to do, then go. I have enough already, and other sons if I need help. I’ll be all right. It’s more important that you find your own way."

"My own way," Yaltring said quietly.

"Yes, son. What you began at the last Feast of Passing is not yet complete. You have crossed the great threshold into manhood, taken by the hand; but no one will ever guide you through the still more dangerous times ahead. Manhood begins with the parting of the ways. You stand in an open space, and your word now is your only bond, stronger than kin.

"In you, I have every confidence, as I always have, my son. But there are still two dangers. You must not mistake some small distraction for your path. Wait for what is truly worthy of your life’s effort, what is beyond yourself and worth dying for. And when you find it, don’t wait for another, better chance. It will never come along, or if it does, you will already be too lost to see it. Seize hold of the first, and never let go."

Yaltring nodded, his mind wandering away, as it had so many times, to the sun-pointing tube he’d found on the wall of the Stone Circle. Despite much scrutiny and searching, he’d learned little more since discovering it on his last birthday, its brilliance piercing him for a few precious minutes. Could it be his Summons, the first signpost of the long path he was to follow?

There could be no doubt of its importance. It was the very leavings of legend. It must have been laid down by ancient people, with knowledge and skill far greater than anyone now living. Yet they had been forgotten, their purpose and doings lost to the lore of Imme. And they had placed it in his place, to shine upon his day, inside the Stone Circle, where he had spent so many hours of his childhood, amidst the woods he knew so well. He felt as if, without knowing it, he had all the while grown up within this mystery.

Though understanding still escaped him, sometimes, in silent secret moments beneath the sun, the thought came to him that that brief, blinding light was the fire of his own life, that he but lived out its brilliance in a slow unraveling ray. He wondered what far seas he might have to sail to learn its meaning.

His eyes turned to his father’s, anxious and open, as Drengo’s were deep and calm. He smiled at his son. "I, too, was a young man once," he continued. "You must get restless, sitting here building these boats day after day, instead of getting to sail them. You are my son, after all! I didn’t stay put for long, once I reached manhood. I moved from Zernoi to Pana, then I started feeling cramped again and traipsed all over the islands. I learned a lot of things, but I never did quite figure out what I was looking for." He stopped and chuckled.

Yaltring just looked at him, saying nothing.

"Your brothers are good boys, staying close to home, always ready to help their father. I think you have more of my spirit than they do. So does your sister! Well, it’s up to you, of course. If you want to stay here and marry Nera, you can do that, too."

"Marry Nera?" said Yaltring, startled to find his memories coming back at him. Before this day, he’d hardly thought of her in a long while. "What are you talking about?"

"Apparently, your mother’s been talking to her folks. They seem to want her to marry you."

"Don’t tell me Mother told them about--that thing with Nera," Yaltring cried. "Why would they want to make her marry me, anyway?"

"Make her? Well, that’s not what I heard! You have more of a way with women than you seem to realize, Yaltring."

Yaltring made a face and looked embarrassed.

"Well, you don’t have to marry her, son! But it’s an option some other young men wouldn’t mind having. As far as I know, everyone else has consented--your mother, Nera, and her folks. I didn’t give my consent, because I don’t want to risk them pulling a malakhana on you. From what I’ve picked up, I believe Nera’s folks are planning to surprise you with the offer some time in the summer, after your birthday, when you’re old enough to go through with it--but I thought you should know now. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell your mother I told you."

Yaltring looked down at his hands and smiled sheepishly. "Well, thanks, father. Don’t worry, I’ll act real surprised. Actually, I wasn’t really planning on getting married right away. I’ve got enough else to think about."

"I thought so too," said Drengo. "Well, I’ll leave you to it now. Keep building the boats. And don’t forget to keep dreaming, too! That’s half the point of boat-building." Drengo winked, nodded, and disappeared over the slope.

That evening, Yaltring asked Sila about his father’s account of their marriage. "Didn’t you want to go back to Tizrach and have more husbands?"

Sila giggled girlishly, and playfully slapped at Yaltring’s arm. "The whole time I was growing up, I always thought I would have dozens of husbands. Maybe hundreds!" She laughed again. "And then, when I got old enough, I couldn’t find a single man I wanted as one of them.

"After I met your father, I toyed with the idea of having two or three other husbands, but I didn’t think it would be fair to them. I loved your father too much to give them the attention they deserved. So I decided that one was probably enough for me after all.

"It’s worked out well on the whole. It’s much easier to manage one husband at a time--ask my mother!" And she laughed again. "Drengo’s easy to manage, anyway. He’s a hard worker."

"And a hard taskmaster." Yaltring looked wearily over his calloused hands. Then he remembered his father’s words, releasing him to pursue his future path. "Well--not too bad, I guess," he muttered. He thought of the far seas, and the far-off lands he had never been to.

"What are you thinking about?" Sila asked, gazing curiously at his intent, dreamy face. There was a roaring fire on the hearth, and he was staring into it as if worlds far beyond opened up from every shoot of flame.

Yaltring looked up. "Do you miss Tizrach a lot?" he said.

Sila’s face grew more solemn, and her voice was sad. "Well," she said, and stopped for a while. "I miss your uncle Yaltren, for whom you were named. He and I were the best of friends, when I was young, and we lived together, safe on the last solid earth, there in the far southeast. He, too, went on a voyage, the long voyage from which there is no return. Too young, too young he left.

"I left myself soon after, and met your father, and have not wanted to return. There is not much left for me there. I miss my family, of course. I was happy when my mother came, and one of my fathers too, when you were only a young boy. I would go visit them, but I had to raise a family of my own. It is what I wished--but it is a relentless burden!"

Suddenly she moved to Yaltring, giggling once more, and squeezed him in her arms. He made no protest, and at length clasped his hand tightly on her shoulder. The fire roared upon them, two together, mother and grown son, a woman who had left her home behind, a man who had not embarked.