Sect Year 5 · eleventh month · night of day 28 · the fifty-second life: the Haskett bend on the river, his eighteenth year
The fourth moon ran out while he waited, and the neighbours sowed their lower fields. Emmer watched them from the headland. Across the lane the Tenney men walked the furrows in a line, each with a sack at the hip, flinging the seed out in long pale arcs that caught the light and dropped into the dark earth. They sang as they walked, a rising call with no words in it, and the sound carried over the wet grass to the bend, where nothing moved but the ox.
The smell of the sown seed came across the lane on the wind, a dry sweet smell with the wet earth under it. Emmer had ploughed for Haskett since he was eight years old, and he had never once been the one to throw the seed. That had always been the old man’s work, done from a sack at his hip with a slow flat sweep of the arm, and it had been the one part of the year Emmer had watched from the headland and wanted to be nearer to.
