Sect Year 1 · third month · night of day 15 · the fifth life: Carrow Flat, his twenty-second year
Two winters went by before the field showed anything at all. The first spring came in with no rain behind it. The seed lay in the dry ground under the furrows, and the wind went over the flat and took the tops off the rows, and by midsummer Dathi had stopped walking out to look. The second winter came down hard. It was less the cold than the length of it, a grey season that would not give back the light, and the village lost what the first winter had left. Two of the old men at the lane’s end went in their sleep.
In the first spring he had pushed two fingers into the furrow and found the earth dry to the first joint and cool below it. He had kept them there a long time, as though the seed might answer him. It hadn’t.
The tithe-book was read out at the headman’s door in the second winter, and the list was longer than it had been the year before. Dathi went to hear it. The headman stood on his step with the book open along one forearm and read the names in the flat voice of a man reading out weather. Each name came with a number and a word. Dathi’s came with two goats and ten sacks, which were gone, and the words paid in kind, which…
