A WOMAN'S DEBT DOES NOT WASH AWAY by Awadifo Olga Norah.

The rains had not yet come when the news reached Nyandeng that her son would not be returning from the cattle camp. It was Achol, the fish seller, who brought the word, standing at the edge of the compound with her basket forgotten upon her head, unable to find a gentle way to say that Deng had been struck down near the river where the herdsmen of Aliab watered their cattle.

Nyandeng did not scream. She sat down slowly upon the low stool by her cooking fire, the one Deng had carved for her three dry seasons before, and she looked at her hands as though they belonged to a stranger. Around her the compound filled with the women of Padang, their voices rising and falling like wind moving through sorghum stalks heavy with grain, and beyond the thornbush fence the young men were already whetting their spears against stone, speaking in low voices of what must be done before the moon grew fat again.

It was an old story in that land, older than the oldest man could remember its beginning. A boy of Padang would fall, and then a boy of Aliab, and the cattle would be driven back and forth across the river until no one living could say any longer who had first done the taking or the killing. The elders called it the way of the ancestors, a debt that must always be repaid in kind. The women who dug the graves for their sons had begun, in secret, to call it something else, though for many seasons none among them had dared to speak that word beneath the open sky.

Nyandeng rose from her stool three days after the burial, when the wailing in her chest had settled enough to let thought move again, and she walked to the river crossing where she knew Nyabuoy would be beating her cloths clean upon the flat stones. Nyabuoy was a woman of Aliab, the midwife who had once reached into the dark and pulled Nyandeng's own daughter into the light of morning when the child came feet first and the old women had already begun murmuring of misfortune. They had not exchanged a word in two harvests, not since the raiding took root once more like a stubborn weed, but a debt of that kind does not wash away merely because the water keeps flowing.

Nyabuoy looked up from the stones and her hands went still upon the wet cloth. For a long moment the two women only regarded one another across the narrow current, and then Nyabuoy said, without the courtesy of greeting, that her own sister's son had died in that same skirmish by the river, and that she had lately taken to thinking, in the hollow hours before the cocks crowed, that sorrow did not know how to tell a mother of Padang from a mother of Aliab.

They did not speak that day of peace. They spoke instead of the dead boys, of the men they might have grown into had the ancestors been kinder, of the daughter Nyabuoy had once delivered who was now nearly ripe for marriage. But when Nyandeng walked home in the falling light, something within her had shifted its position, quiet and obstinate as a seed forcing its way through baked earth.

What had begun between two women at a river crossing did not remain the property of two women for long. Nyandeng spoke to her sister and to the woman who ground her millet beside her each dawn. Nyabuoy spoke to the wives who gathered at the well before the sun grew merciless. The word travelled the way water travels through cracked ground, finding its own channel without any hand to guide it, and before the moon had turned twice there were women on both banks of the river who had begun to ask, quietly, in those places where men did not think to bend their ears, whether the killing might be permitted to end with their sons rather than pass, like a cursed inheritance, to their grandsons.

It was not a labour without thorns. Nyandeng's own brother accused her of forgetting Deng before the earth upon his grave had properly settled, and there were nights she lay awake turning over in her mind whether he was right to name her a traitor to her own blood. Nyabuoy was told by the young men of Aliab that a woman's proper place was to mourn and not to meddle in matters that belonged rightfully to spears and to the counsel of elders. Both women were called foolish, and worse things besides, by people who had once, in gentler seasons, called them wise.

But grief, it turned out, was a far more patient teacher than pride. Slowly the women wove what the men had never thought to weave, a web of small conversations reaching from one village to the other without ever declaring itself so grand a thing as peace. They gathered at the grinding stones and beside the racks where fish were laid out to dry in the sun, and when enough women of both banks had come to agree that the wheel of vengeance must at last be broken, they carried that agreement to their husbands and their brothers the way water is carried upon the head, steadily, without spilling so much as a drop before it reaches the place it was intended for.

The turning came upon a market day, when word arrived that a party of young men from Padang had crossed the river bearing spears, resolved to answer blood with blood before the dry season closed its fist upon the land. It was the women who reached the crossing first, Nyandeng and Nyabuoy among them, walking out into the open ground between the two gathering parties with nothing in their hands but the cloths torn from their own heads, which they laid upon the bare earth as their mothers before them had laid such cloths when a matter needed settling in the sight of the ancestors themselves.

The young men halted, as young men will sometimes halt when their own mothers stand before them with heads bared and eyes unflinching. There were hard words exchanged that day, and there was weeping without shame, but no spear left a man's hand, and by the time the sun leaned low and orange over the grasses, the elders of both villages had been summoned to sit beneath the great tamarind tree and speak of compensation, of a marriage that might bind together the two households whose sons lay in the ground, and of a shared season of grazing along the river that had for so long been a place of blood and was now to be, once more, only a place of water.

Nyandeng did not believe, on that first evening, that every old wound had closed. She knew that certain men would nurse their bitterness a long while yet, and that peace, like a newborn calf, might still stumble more than once before its legs held firm beneath it. But when she looked toward the river the next morning and saw children of Padang and children of Aliab driving their goats together toward the same green patch of grass, laughing at some small joke that belonged only to children, she understood that something enduring had been planted, something no raiding party would easily tear up by its roots.

And Nyabuoy, watching from her own bank of the water, thought of the daughter she had once drawn crying into the world, and hoped that when that daughter herself became a mother in her turn, the river running between the two villages would carry nothing upon its current but water, and nothing more.