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The sky burns blue.
Her steps are light, clad in supple bast that barely disturbs the wheat as she passes. The wheat stalks hang their heads; they suffer from the sun as much as any living thing, but it is not yet their time. Soon she will pass, and the shadows shall lengthen, and the weary heads of wheat will be turned over into the far more forgiving domain of her older sister.
But not yet.
She walks onward in her bast shoes. The waist-high wheat parts around her and smoothly closes up, as if it had never been disturbed.
It is quiet. The wind is still. Even the field mice have gone to ground, in their exhausted sleep, deep within their burrows.
The wheat turns sparse. Wildflowers take over, for a spell. A dusty road.
There is an old dog in the dusty road, lying on its side. Its tongue is hanging out. Its flanks are heaving. Fifty paces away, there is a muddy puddle of water, and a dash of shade from a struggling birch.
She draws her sickle and puts the poor creature out of its misery. Kindness is for her younger sister, warm and giving like the blood that courses through a ripening womb.
She walks onward in her bast shoes.
She crosses another field, rapeseed this time, blistering and yellow. The silence here is less complete, it has a hum and life to it, when she bends her head to the striking blooms. The bees are shameless, ravenous in their hunt for nectar. She leaves them be. Many of them will drop dead before the hour is out, lost to exhaustion, but she has no hope of swaying them and never will.
She walks onto a road, and stops when she meets a human shape crouched by a small field of turnips. The woman is stout, middle-aged. Her russet hair is silvered beneath her wide-brimmed hat woven from straw and grass. The woman staggers upright when she sees her, her hand flying to that hat as if reaching for a talisman.
“Good day, my lady,” says the woman, all manners and petrification.
“Good day, good woman,” she replies. “Is this your field, then?”
“Ye, it is.”
“And it is turnips you are harvesting?”
“Aye, that is so.”
“How many do you hope to harvest?”
“As many as I can..” The woman sounds cautious. She brushes dirt from her thick bare forearms.
“How many do you hope to harvest?” she repeats.
The woman pales; beneath her wide-brimmed hat, she is sweating, her russet hair turned nearly black with moisture. Her ample neck has a red flush to it. She turns to her field and starts to count - slow and laborious, pointing her finger at each green sprout as she goes.
She waits with patience. Some minutes pass, but it is always midday.
“Forty-nine turnips there are that I hope to harvest,” the woman says, beaming with a nervous pride. “That's seven by seven. I planted nearly twice that number, but the aphids struck, you see...”
She leaves the woman to her turnips and walks on.
The sky burns blue but she leaves no shadow, no respite for the struggling. It is midday here, and it always will be.
She leaves the field and walks into another: rapeseed once more, its pods have dried and ripened and their little black seeds are spilling forth. Not a speck of yellow to be seen, from sky to sky. There is an old man at the edge. He tries to wrap the thick bushel of dried rapeseed in a stretch of cloth, but it keeps spilling out, and every time his hands are slower. His skin is sun-browned and his sun hat is in tatters. He is not sweating very much at all.
“Is this your field, then?” she asks him softly, like the whisper of a scythe.
The old man turns a wary stare at her and licks his cracking lips to no avail. His eyes are dim. He fumbles for his waterskin, but that has been empty for too long.
Her hands are gentle on her sickle's grip, but the blade is not.
She walks onward in her bast shoes. The sky burns blue, and all things that cling to life have scurried underground, or otherwise found shelter.
A thin little brook runs by the side of this road, kept from the worst of midday by a mighty row of poplar. The trees stand tall and indifferent, their silvered leaves quivering in the nonexistent breeze. They offer solace - wide, and blue, and cool, her older sister's promise of a kiss.
A young man lies in the grass, in those blue shadows. His sun-blistered skin is bare and his eyes are clear as he stares at her from within the shade.
She stops there for awhile, to watch him back.
But there are no questions she can ask him.
She walks on.
