The man cocked his head, straining to hear any sound-weeping, perhaps.

They had completed the weaving room several days earlier. All the necessary purifications had been made. The room stood waiting for her whenever she was ready to begin-no, he thought, she must begin right away. Yet Oneh had wept and shouted and cursed and would not go near it. “It’s too cruel,” she had said, clinging to the old man’s robes. “Please stop this. Do not ask this of me.”

He had no choice but to let her cry until her tears ran dry. Then he spoke to her, explaining patiently, as one talks to a child. “You knew this would come. You knew it on the day he was born.”

He had pleaded with her from sunset of the day before until well into the night. Finally, around dawn, Oneh had allowed him to lead her into the weaving room. From his study, he had heard the heavy sound of the loom’s shuttle. It was an unfamiliar sound, which made its absence even more noticeable.

The old man looked out the window at the leaves shaking in the grove. Birds were singing. The light of the sun was bright, and it warmed the room where its rays struck. Yet there were no sounds of children playing, and when the villagers shuffled out to work the fields, they did so in silence. Disconsolate sighs rose in place of the forceful thudding of hoes that echoed down the furrows. Even the hunters, the old man imagined, stopped in their chase along the tracks that ran through the mountains and exhaled long laments as they looked down upon the village in the distance.

It was the Time of the Sacrifice.

The old man was the elder of Toksa Village. He had turned seventy this year, thirteen years after inheriting the position from his father. He had only just stepped into his post, filled with ideas of how he would do the things his father had not been able to do, and the things his father had never tried to do, when the boy had been born. That unlucky child, doomed to be the Sacrifice.