Evon glanced at her briefly. "It's up to the elders of the Geoark," he muttered without interest, and prepared to return to his own meditations.
"And all the _big_ girls will run away with them," she purred with a tight smile, and stretched a languorous leg out in front of her to waggle her foot.
Evon shot her a quick glance, held it for a moment, then looked skyward again. She pursed her lips in irritation and glared at him. Gradually, she forgave him. Evon was distraught. He _must_ be--because she hadn't seen him sit still this long in years. He was _always_ doing something, or looking for something to do. It wasn't like Evon just to sit still and think. He was a restless, outgoing fellow, nearly always reacting boisterously, or laughing his staccato laugh. Now he just sat there and looked puzzledly in the direction of the sky-fleet. Looking puzzled didn't fit his face, somehow. It was a bony brown face, slightly oily, with a long narrow jaw that jutted forward like a plowshare under an elastic smirk. It was a rubbery kind of a face, the kind that could twist into horrid masks for the amusement of the young. Now it just drooped.
She stirred restlessly, driven to seek sympathetic understanding.
"You wonder what it's like, Evon?" she asked.
He grunted at her quizzically and shook his head.
"To be one of the children of the Exodus, I mean," she added.
"_Me?_ What _are_ you thinking of, Letha?"
"Of your face. It looks suddenly like a nomad's face. You remind me of an old schnorrer who used to wander through our gardenboro every year to play his fiddle, and sing us songs, and steal our chickens."
Evon paused, hovering between irritation and desire to express. "It's strange," he murmured at last. "It's as if I know them--the star-birds, I mean. Last night, when I saw them first, it was like looking at something I expected to happen ... or ... or...."
"You think he has the genemnemon, Marrita?" she asked the blonde girl who sat on the cool rock by the spring.
Marrita looked up from dabbling her toes in the icy trickle. "I don't believe in the genemnemon. My great grandfather was a thief."
"He buried a fortune, they say. If there was a genemnemon, I'd remember where he buried it, wouldn't I?" She pouted, and went back to dabbling a club toe in the spring.