Location:Wild Confederacy — Settlement Windbreak; the roofs; the long house; the south gate
Date/Time:TC1858.03.19
Voices carried from roof to roof across the lanes, and nobody was in the lanes to hear them.
Naida lay on the Speaker's roof with her cheek on the sod and listened. A child two houses down was asking for water in the voice children use when they've asked already. Somebody on the roof behind answered him. Farther off, a man was coughing, the long dry cough of somebody who'd slept with his mouth open in the cold, and a woman told him to put his scarf over it. The talk went over the lanes the way it went over a table. Nobody raised their voice. In the gray light everybody could see everybody else, and that seemed to be enough to make them quiet.
