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"So--is your responsibility over? Do you inflict the wounds and leave it to others to heal them?"
"Not wounds, Bishop Peregrino. Surgery. And if I can help to heal the pain afterward, then yes, I stay and help. I have no anesthesia, but I do try for antisepsis."
"You should have been a priest, you know."
"Younger sons used to have only two choices. The priesthood or the military. My parents chose the latter course for me."
"A younger son. Yet you had a sister. And you lived in the time when population controls forbade parents to have more than two children unless the government gave special permission. They called such a child a Third, yes?"
"You know your history."
"Were you born on Earth, before starflight?"
"What concerns us, Bishop Peregrino, is the future of Lusitania, not the biography of a speaker for the dead who is plainly only thirty-five years old."
"The future of Lusitania is my concern, Speaker Andrew, not yours."
"The future of the humans on Lusitania is your concern, Bishop. I'm concerned with the pequeninos as well."
"Let's not compete to see whose concern is greater."
The secretary opened the door again, and Bosquinha, Dom Cristao, and Dona Crista came in. Bosquinha glanced back and forth between the Bishop and the Speaker.
"There's no blood on the floor, if that's what you're looking for," said the Bishop.
"I was just estimating the temperature," said Bosquinha.
"The warmth of mutual respect, I think," said the Speaker. "Not the heat of anger or the ice of hate."
"The Speaker is a Catholic by baptism, if not by belief," said the Bishop. "I blessed him, and it seems to have made him docile."
"I've always been respectful of authority," said the Speaker.
"You were the one who threatened us with an Inquisitor," the Bishop reminded him. With a smile.
The Speaker's smile was just as chilly. "And you're the one who told the people I was Satan and they shouldn't talk to me."
While the Bishop and the Speaker grinned at each other, the others laughed nervously, sat down, waited.
"It's your meeting, Speaker," said Bosquinha.
"Forgive me," said the Speaker. "There's someone else invited. It'll make things much simpler if we wait a few more minutes for her to come."
Ela found her mother outside the house, not far from the fence. A light breeze that barely rustled the capim had caught her hair and tossed it lightly. It took a moment for Ela to realize why this was so startling. Her mother had not worn her hair down in many years. It looked strangely free, all the more so because Ela could see how it curled and bent where it had been so long forced into a bun. It was then that she knew that the Speaker was right. Mother would listen to his invitation. Whatever shame or pain tonight's speaking might have caused her, it led her now to stand out in the open, in the dusk just after sunset, looking toward the piggies' hill. Or perhaps she was looking at the fence. Perhaps remembering a man who met her here, or somewhere else in the capim, so that unobserved they could love each other. Always in hiding, always in secret. Mother is glad, thought Ela, to have it known that Libo was her real husband, that Libo is my true father. Mother is glad, and so am I.
Mother did not turn to look at her, though she surely could hear Ela's approach through the noisy grass. Ela stopped a few steps away.
"Mother," she said.
"Not a herd of cabra, then," said Mother. "You're so noisy, Ela."
"The Speaker. Wants your help."
"Does he."
Ela explained what the Speaker had told her. Mother did not turn around. When Ela was finished, Mother waited a moment, and then turned to walk over the shoulder of the hill. Ela ran after her, caught up with her. "Mother," said Ela. "Mother, are you going to tell him about the Descolada?"
"Yes."
