“I think of my children! If I die, what do I leave them? A field and three bondwomen, a house and its gear and a few webs of cloth! But Mardurbo dies, and what is not taken by Kadoumin!”
“Harran is not rich like Mardurbo,” said Lonami, “as I am not rich like you, Vana! Yet I would that Harran’s great bow and his bronze-handled long knife might go to Eninumo his son! Harran would so, too,—and Eninumo.”
“I knew that you would understand! When no one was richer than any one else, it did not matter. But now it matters—if you wish your children to go fine in the world!”
“I do not see that anything can be done about it,” said Lonami.
Vana looked at her out of dark eyes beneath dark-red hair. “There are long reasons why one makes patterns in cloth that is woven and one makes them not!”
That night she watched the moon again. The next morning she went to Kadoumin’s house where it was told her that Kadoumin was in the barley-fields. Vana betook herself to the fields, moving swiftly, with a clinking of silver anklets. Kadoumin, mounted upon an ass, was watching five bondmen reaping the field with sickles of iron.
“A bounteous day, Vana!” said Kadoumin.
“A bounteous to Kadoumin!” answered Vana, her eyes travelling down the swathes.
Kadoumin dismounted from his ass and sat in the shade of a tree and Vana sat beside him. “I had a dream of Mardurbo,” said Kadoumin. “He was by the sea and he had a jar which he dipped into the wave. When it was filled he emptied it upon a tent cloth spread beside him, and the water was not water, but earrings of gold and pieces of silver as large as your fist. It seems to me a lucky dream!”
“A lucky dream for you, Kadoumin, who when Mardurbo dies will get the gold and silver, the tent cloth and the jar!”