Sect Year 3 · twelfth month · night of day 2 · the thirty-fourth life: the Tolu uplands, his eighth year
The ewe that would not rise in the autumn grass was the first to start labouring in the spring. Edrik knew it by the way she kept turning her head toward her own flank, and by the low, short sound she made, as though she were apologising to someone who had not asked her to. It was the first night of the lambing.
The lamp hung from a nail in the stone fold, and its oil smell mixed with the wet straw and the sharp grease of the fleeces. The wind leaned on the felt wall. The rest of the flock stood packed into the far corner with their breath going up in the lamplight. Every so often one of them shifted and bumped its neighbour, and the bump went down the line from ewe to ewe.
“Sit with her,” Ulla had said at dusk, handing him the wool blanket. Her man had gone over the pass with the wool and would not be back before midsummer, so the tent and the fold and the lambing were hers. “You count too much. Sit with her and count nothing. She doesn’t need your numbers. She needs somebody warm beside her.”
