* Kesh towns were built on the pattern of the heyiya-if, two spiral curves with a common center or Hinge. The Four-House (sacred) arm consisted of the five heyimas or sacred meeting-places, the Five-House (secular) arm consisted of dwelling-houses, spaced out in a curve surrounding a common place or plaza.

There were so many houses in Telina that the secular arm had become three arms, outer, middle, and inner, each curving around its own plaza.

(Note that lower-case “house” means a dwelling-house; upper-case “House” refers to the Nine Houses into which the Kesh divided all being.)

† The largest and most prosperous town of the central Valley, lying between the Old Straight Road and the River Na.

‡ A pun both on the meaning of the phrase and on the author’s name, Arravna, River of Words.

§ A familiar literary evasion, understood to mean that though Hardcinder House is a real house, the characters are fictional and the story is a fiction (possibly with some historical or legendary basis).

¶ Marai, household, means any number and any combination of blood kin and married-ins living in one house. The Kesh were matrilocal, and house ownership matrilineal, so a mother or grandmother was likely to be at least nominally the head of the family, responsible for the upkeep of the house and the behavior of family members.

** Shamsha, the grandmother at the time of the story.

†† Water was piped into Kesh town-houses, which had interior flush toilets, sinks, and baths. Drinking water was kept cool in summer by various devices, often large earthenware storage jars that cooled by evaporation, fitted with a faucet.

‡‡ Many wildflowers had symbolic meaning to the Kesh; chicory signified pregnancy. There are other significations. Hwette is in the morning of her life. The blue chicory flower will live only when growing untouched; if picked, it closes quickly and dies.

§§ Sou = daughter, -bí attached to a word expresses affection.

¶¶ Members of the Madrone Lodge undertook to keep records and archives and write chronicles and history either locally or for the Kesh people as a whole (in the latter case they worked at least part of the time in the Madrone Lodge Archives of Wakwaha). Because it dealt with the past, rather than with actuality, the Lodge was considered to belong to the Houses of Sky. Any person “living in the Sky Houses” was considered to be, to that extent, a “dangerous” person.

*** Shamsha is also a member of the Oak Society, in the Third House of Earth (Serpentine), made up of people interested in literature, written and oral. Closely connected to both Madrone Lodge and Oak Society was the Book Art, specifically concerned with the manufacture of paper, ink, paints, the tools of writing, printing, and visual art, and books of all kinds.

††† Concerning the Kesh attitude towards preservation of documents, etc., see “Pandora Converses with the Archivist of the Library of the Madrone Lodge at Wakwaha-na,” pages 369–372.

‡‡‡ One of the seven annual wakwa hedou, great dances, the Moon was a festival of ritual license, the most “dangerous” of all the great dances. It went on for ten nights beginning at the second full moon after the vernal equinox—mid-Spring. The references place the time of the story as late May or June.

§§§ The computer center at Wakwaha, installed and maintained by the super-terrestrial cybernetic/robotic network known to the Kesh as the City of Mind.

¶¶¶ To do research on the computers.

**** In early or mid-August.

†††† The noun or verb hinge, íya, is never used lightly; it always hints at further meaning or implication.

‡‡‡‡ The town of Chúmo is in these hills.

§§§§ Souv giyouda, daughter’s husband, so called having formally married Hwette at the Wedding ceremonies of the World Dance.

¶¶¶¶ Han es im, the usual Kesh hello; amabí, dear grandmother.

***** The physical site of the spiritual center of one’s Earth House (maternal clan—in the case of Shamsha and her daughters the Obsidian). The five heyimas of the Five Houses were one arm of the double spiral formed by all Kesh towns; the other arm consisted of the dwelling houses.

††††† The Obsidian House provided the ritual Clowns for several of the great dances. Fefinum and Hwette have joined the Blood Clown Society to learn and perform Clown roles in the women’s dances of the Blood Lodge.

‡‡‡‡‡ The Kesh idea of property was complicated. Only sacred things were held entirely in common; only one’s own body was considered entirely one’s inalienable property. Everything else fell between those extremes. They used the possessive pronouns, but their meaning is often very shadowy, and is a kind of shorthand. Speaking carefully, one would not say “my family” “my house,” or “our trees,” but “the people I am related to,” “the house I am living in,” “the trees my family looks after.” The produce of farming and hunting was always shared to a degree determined by complicated traditions and rules. The farm holdings of a Kesh family were usually scattered here and there in a patchwork, cultivated partly by the individual owners and partly as a cooperative enterprise; work and produce were shared according to rule and custom. Shamsha’s family may have had various apricot trees in other orchards.

§§§§§ Hwette as a child was called Sehoy, Barnswallow; she renamed herself Hwette, scrub oak, when she was adolescent or grown.

¶¶¶¶¶ Gift=badab, give=ambad; the two words in Kesh interplay and interlock to the extent that one implies the other; to have a gift is to give it, the gift is in the giving.

****** The Doctors Lodge was under the auspices of the Third House, the Serpentine, but people of other Houses could join it. Shamsha is thinking of Duhe as a member of her House, the House of the undomesticated plants such as wildflowers.

†††††† To the Kesh, a written text was “performed” by reading it aloud, or by hand-copying it, or printing it in letterpress.

‡‡‡‡‡‡ Divorce was usually by agreement, but a wife could make a one-sided divorce public and final by putting her husband’s belongings in a pile on the balcony or outside the ground-level door and telling the other people of the household that he did not live there any more. A man refusing to accept such a divorce would face community disapproval and ostracism. Either party of a marriage could request and usually obtain divorce by putting the matter to arbitration by the Councils of his House.