After three months they attended their first ceremony at the Great Temple, Tudju's coming of age. They all went in procession to the Great Temple. To Modh it was wonderful to be out in the open air again, for she was weary of walls and ceilings. Being Dirt women, they sat behind the yellow curtain, but they could see Tudju choose her sword from the row of swords hanging behind the altar. She would wear it the rest of her life, whenever she went out of the house. Only women born to the Crown wore swords. No one else in the City was allowed to carry any weapon, except Crown men when they served as soldiers. Modh and Mal knew that, now. They knew many things, and also knew there was much more to learn-everything one had to know to be a woman of the City.

It was easier for Mal. She was young enough that to her the City rules and ways soon became the way of the world. Modh had to unlearn the rules and ways of the Tullu people first. But as with the language, some things were more familiar than they first seemed. Modh knew that when a Tullu man was elected chief of the village, he had to marry a slave woman, even if he already had a wife. Here, the Crown men were all chiefs, and they all had to marry Dirt women-slaves. It was the same rule, only, like everything in the City, made greater and more complicated.

In the village, there had been only one kind of person. Here there were three kinds. You could not change your kind, and you could not marry your kind. There were the Crowns, who owned land and slaves, and were all chiefs, priests, gods on earth. And the Dirt people, who were slaves, less than human, even though a Dirt woman who married a Crown might be treated almost like a Crown herself-like the Belendas. And there were the other people, the Roots.

Modh knew little about the Roots. She asked Nata about them and observed what she could from the seclusion of the hanan. Crown men must marry Dirt women, but Crown women, if they married, had to marry Root men.