>>5636614[CD]
> Magical Fundamentals: The music of shaping> Agricultural Revolution: Domestication of Spear Rice (Canadian Wild Rice)Loamkin, seventeen year old acolyte of Diane, is dancing in the rain. She’s always had a talent for rhythm and movement and a song on her lips. For the past six hours she has been painstakingly etching a copy of the words of Mukind, a punishment for shattering one of the original stone tablets. For six hours she has read and repeated and written the old words, setting them to a rhythm and song only she seems to see and feel, more to keep herself sane than any other reason.
But after six hours of humming and tapping and singing outright when her superior stepped away she had to dance! So let Volos take the rain and mud, she was going to run and leap and spin until the cramps in her hands faded. The rhythm of the prophet’s words still rang in her mind, carrying her forward, a stomp here, a sweep of the hands there, sometimes a slide or a kneel.
When it was done she found herself atop a mound of mud ten feet high, not quite knowing how it happened. Her superior, waiting to tell her off for leaving before her task was finished, had seen everything though.
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On the other side of the floodplain another idea was taking root. A dirkish mother by the name of Tah-mah was gathering wild plants to supplement the evening meal, her children running every which way alongside the river bank. Fiddleheads, watercress, nuts from trees, berries, and spear rice all went into the basket. She glanced up at the drooping light of Sehul with annoyance, it was a long walk for a little food, and a long walk back as well.
“Momma! Momma! Look, it's still here! Our river is still here! Look! Look! Look!”
Tah-mah turned toward her two eldest children who were covered head to toe in muck and mud. They stood proudly before a heap of river stones that marked a small curving ditch they had carved into the floodplain. A placid flow of water meandered through it before rejoining the Diane proper, even a few stalks of spear rice had sprouted along it. She smiled at their efforts, kneeling to look at their work.
“Good work little ones. Shame we can’t dig one of these closer to home for the rice.”
“Why not momma?”
It turns out to be an important question.
