Chapter 8: Lois Steps Through

The tunnel was not made for a woman of fifty-eight with a stew pot.

Lois pushed it ahead of her along the stone, inch by inch.

The clothesline of sacks dragged behind, and Ilu's small hand was locked around her ankle.

Her knees burned.

Her coat caught on the ceiling twice.

When she finally slid out into the long dark cave, she lay on her side breathing.

"Mar okay?" Ilu asked, hovering over her.

"Mar is fine," Lois wheezed. "Mar is just dying."

Then she looked up, and the breath went out of her again.

The cave mouth was full of people.

They stood in the pale morning, thirty or more, in a ragged half-circle.

They wore furs and hides and wrapped leggings, and every face was gaunt, and every eye was on her.

Hurn had moved the whole camp up from the valley in the night.

Lois understood it at once.

He wanted them all to see what came out of the hole.

Children clung to their mothers' legs.

A baby wailed, thin and high, in a mother's arms.

A man at the front, with a spear and a braided beard, lowered his weapon an inch.

The sight of her had bent it.

She looked, from her knees on the cold stone, like nothing any of them had a name for.

She was big and soft and pale, in a coat the color of a berry, and she carried a steaming black pot in both arms.

Kesh climbed out of the hollow behind her and stood.

She said a few clear words in her own tongue, and the half-circle stirred.

Lois got to her feet.

She had stood in front of six hundred hungry kids every day for twenty-six years.

She knew exactly what to do with a room.

"Good morning," she said, in her loud lunchroom voice. "I brought breakfast."

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