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An-no said.
    After Dalin had changed the rags of the corpse, they brought it down and laid it on the woven slats which they had tied together to make a coffin. Beside it burned a candle which Istak had given her. Their job done, the men and their women dispersed. Only Dalin stayed near the improvised coffin.
    Istak dozed in the house. When he awoke, he peered out thedoor and saw Dalin sitting alone on the stump. He went down to her.
    “It is not for you to keep the wake,” she said. “I have already been a burden to all of you.”
    “God sent you here,” Istak said. “We have to accept God’s will.”
    “No, not God,” Dalin said. Her voice carried with it a challenge, but Istak did not want to argue with her. Besides—the thought came quickly—she was in mourning and she did not even have a black dress.
    “It will soon be light,” Istak said. “How far have you traveled? Where did you come from?” He sat on the fork of the cart behind her.
    She bowed and cupped her chin in her hand. “It does not matter anymore where I came from or where I will be going.”
    The fine contours of her face, her straight back; she looked at him then and for the second time, their eyes locked.
    “I am impolite,” she said. “You have all been helpful, you particularly. You really want to know where we came from?”
    Istak nodded.
    She turned away and cupped her chin in her palms again. “My parents were traders,” she said. “We had a boat—a fine boat—and we sailed up and down the coast twice a year. When its sails were full, its prow could slice the water with the case of a blade. Then came a storm and one evening, off the coast of Bawang, we were wrecked. Many things happened to me. I clung to the mast for two days. My husband—it was he who rescued me. He was going south to look for land and had found what he wanted there. We were going back to his people so that he could tell them the news—to Lawag. He was old enough to be my father, you know that. But I was grateful and I had nothing to give.”
    Istak understood, but was curious just the same about how the old man had lost his hand.
    She turned to him abruptly. “You don’t know?” she asked. “Isn’t your father without a hand, too?”
    Istak was miserable and he regretted having asked the question at all.
    “They called him a thief.” Her voice was almost a whisper. “It is the simplest crime and it could mean anything, from stealing time or a sack of grain for which you have slaved a week. They hung him by the hand. Now, does it really matter where I come from or where I am going?”
    What was there to say? Istak closed his eyes and tried to blot out the vision flowing to the narrow pit of his brain—the old man with eyes closed, the stump for a hand.
    “But don’t pity me,” she said with that brightness that steered him away from his thoughts. “It is fate. Now I have no more home.”
    “Then stay with us,” Istak said. “You are safe here and there is food—not much, but you will not be hungry. And there is always work and we will not bother you with your memories. Let the scabs harden and fall without our prodding.”
    “I would rather keep moving,” she said. “Return to my home if there is a boat that will take me back, or to that plain which my husband saw, farther down Pangasinan, up the mountains, and then below—”
    “Did you se it?”
    She nodded. “I have been there,” she said, and then was silent as if remembering all the bitterness that was banished. She spoke again, this time in quiet joy. “You can smell the land. Its freshness is in the air, in the light—all through the day. You can taste it in the water from the spring, in the flavor of the three-month grain. The plain is all around you, vast as the world, andwithout hills. It melts, hazy and blue with the sky, as far as you can see. The forest is there, too, alive with wild boar, deer, and pythons as big as coconut trunks, they say, and just as long. But it is a