Ki neared the turnoff where a narrow wagon trail left the main road to seek out a stump-dotted clearing. There Romni might camp unmolested for a night. The grays slowed, tried to turn. Ki tugged their heads back to her chosen path, tried not to hear the welcoming nickers of the camped horses calling to her team. She heard a rise in the tide of Romni voices by the fires. They would know she had passed. Some would be wondering who it was, and others would be telling in hushed voices. If she kept to her solitary ways, she might become a legend for them. Ki, the lone rider with her wagon full of ghosts. She smiled sourly. Ki, who had chosen to be alone over the customs of her adopted people.
The year had turned twice since Ki made her choice. Children were learning to speak that had been but belly bulges the night she had ridden, swaying, into a bright circle of firelight and wagons …
Big Oscar came at a run to catch her as she sagged off the wagon seat. Rifa took Ki’s light body from his arms and put her on soft skins by a small fire. With a jerk and a twist, Rifa brought Ki’s arm back to painful life; she adjusted the crude sling and gave Ki a hot spicy tea to drink, with herbs of healing steeped into it. Limp on the skins by the fire, Ki watched the big burly Romni men unharness and lead off her team. Children ran to do what they knew was needed: to refill the drained water casks, to bring out onto the grassy sward Ki’s own sleeping-skins and weavings. They let her sleep a full night. She spent the next day watching the large women in their bright flowing skirts and loose blouses, the dark, bird-eyed children in their bits and rags of clothing as they ran and shrieked at play. Among all the peoples of the world, here Ki felt most at home.
There were seven wagons at this encampment, a large group of Romni. The women were large, dark, heavy-breasted creatures. The beauty of their size and strength reminded Ki of their teams – tall, heavy horses with thick falling manes and bobbed tails. The men were thick, age making them burly as old tree stumps. The children played the ageless games of childhood, rolling and tumbling on the moss under the trees. People moved among the wagons, spreading bedding to air on the clean moss, putting flat slabs of dough to rise and bake on hot stones by the fire embers. A young couple entered the clearing from the trees, a brace of fat rabbits swinging from the woman’s belt, the basket of wild plums they had gathered filling the man’s arms. Oscar’s hands were black with the gooey mix he was spreading on a beast’s split hoof. Rifa was ever busy, oiling harness, nursing her latest baby, patching a worn coverlet, but somehow never far from Ki. She brought Ki tea and food before she could think to ask for it, smoothed a cool salve into the ragged gashes on Ki’s face. No questions were asked of her. To the Romni, it was an old story. The man and the children missing, the woman battered and bruised. The Romni were not a people that shared and savored their hurts. They were a folk that lived their lives around the bad times, cauterizing their wounds with silence.
Night fell softly around them, the fires blossoming higher in the darkness. The dark of the trees became soft black walls enclosing an airy room roofed by the star-sprinkled sky. There was a coziness to children curling up on blankets by fires. A peace as palpable as the warm night air pressed down on the gathering. Slowly the adults began to gather at Oscar and Rifa’s fire, drifting over to it after children were settled in sleepy rows on bedding by their own fires. The adults all brought firewood, piling it up on Rifa’s fire until it became a blaze too hot to be enjoyed. Ki sat slightly apart from them all, one of her own sleeping furs slung across her shoulders. Her arm ached with a dull, unceasing pain. She could not blink an eye or move her mouth without the scabs on her face pulling at her skin. But the physical pains were only the shadow of the emptiness inside her and the knowledge that tonight her disjointed life would take another turn for the worse.
They spoke no word to her. She knew the custom they waited for her to follow. They expected her to go to her wagon, to bring out from it everything that had belonged to Sven and the children. The possessions of the dead must not be kept by the mourner. They must be gifted out among friends so that the spirits of the dead could be free of them. Things too personal for Ki to give away she would place on the blaze for the fire to consume. And when the wagon was empty of all save Ki’s own possessions, the women would help her unbind her hair from the knots and weavings that proclaimed her mourning. The time of grief would be over. Little mention of the dead would ever be made again, lest it trouble their spirits in the world they had passed on to.
Ki watched the tall flames of the fire reaching. The tips of the flames seemed to rip free of the fire, to blink into nothingness in the dark above the flames. Ki did not move. The Romni waited.
Rifa it was who took her courage in her hands and approached Ki. ‘It is time, sister,’ she said firmly. ‘You know how it must be done. When Aethan, your father, went on before you, you did not shrink from what you had to do. Come, Ki. It is time. Let the grieving be over.’
‘No.’ Ki breathed the word. Then she rose, to stand beside Rifa, facing the other Romni who stood waiting by the fire. She let the fur drop from her shoulders. The cool of the night prodded her injured shoulder, making it leap to fresh complaints. As she spoke, she felt the drag and pull of the dried cuts on her face.
‘No.’ She said it clearly, loud enough to carry to all ears. ‘I am not yet ready to do this thing, my friends. My grieving is not yet over. I respect your ways. I have made them my own since I was a tiny child, playmate to many of you. But I must respect my heart’s counsel as well. And I am not ready, yet, to bid them farewell. I am not ready.’
The dark eyes stared at her, returning her look steadily. She knew there would be no rebuke, no anger, no raised voices. There was among them only regret for her. They would speak of it quietly among themselves, sad that she insisted on clinging to her grief, on linking her life to the deaths of her family. To Ki they would say nothing. They would speak no words to her, make no sign. She would be as a ghost among them, a person who had set herself apart. They could not have anything more to do with her, lest they and their families should also become contaminated with her longings for things dead. Ki knew the words they would say: ‘With one butt you cannot sit on two horses.’ She must choose between the living and the dead.
Ki watched them disperse from the fire, drifting away like swirls of smoke back to their own small campfires, their sleeping children, and their gaudy wagons. Theirs were the full wagons of the Romni, who live on the road by their wits and their love of the lands. Ki looked at her own wagon. Two thirds of it was empty and flat, left bare to carry cargo or items she would buy in one place to sell in another. She had never surrendered herself to trusting the road to support her. She had never fully given herself over to the Romni way.
‘I am not a Romni.’ She said it aloud to herself, to hear the way the words sounded in her ears.
‘Then what are you?’ Ki’s body jerked in surprise. She had not noticed that Rifa still stood in the shadows beside her, had not drifted off with the others. Ki’s green eyes met Rifa’s. The woman’s broad face was in shadow, only her eyes speaking her feelings to Ki. Ki pondered the question. Her mind ranged over the lists of all the peoples she had ever seen, past all the settlements and towns she had ever trundled through on a wagon. No culture came to her mind, no set of customs to claim as her own. She thought of Sven’s people, tall blond farming folk far to the north. She would have to seek them out soon with the news of his death. Were they her people now, whose customs she should share? Her heart shied away from the prospect. No, she had not taken on Sven’s ways when they came to their agreement. Rather Sven had built a wagon, chosen a team, and taken on her own ways. He had lived like Romni, and now he was dead, and his children with him. But Ki did not mourn him as a Romni woman would mourn her man. Because she was not Romni. The question came back to her. Then what was she?
‘I am Ki,’ she said. The words came out clearly, with a certainty Ki had not known she possessed. Rifa received her words in the darkness. Her black eyes shone brighter for a moment, and then she cast them down.
‘So you are. Return to us when you can, Ki. You will be missed among us.’
Ki had left the campsite early the next day, before morning had even begun to gray the sky. No one had bid her farewell. No one had watched her leave or seemed to hear the creak and rattle of her wagon as it moved off. Now as she moved down this road in darkness,