When her farrowing time came upon her, Kiki took rags and straw Sula offered her and made them into a nest at the far end of the cave Sula had carved for her out of the flank of the hill that nudged the house. Sula woke one morning to discover that the man mite's cloak was gone from where she had hung it on a peg by the door. She held a candle into Kiki's cave and peered toward the pig. The cloak had joined the nest. For a little while Sula fretted about that—the weave had been good and strong, and the cloak strangely warm—but then she decided to respect the pig's wisdom. Piglets would need all the warmth they could find, and this nest was too far from the chimney.
Whenever Sula crept toward the nest, Kiki would moan and grumble and mutter at her, shrieking louder the closer Sula came, until the pig's cries pierced the air and almost Sula's ears. Well, most pigs would protect their lying-in place; this one was just a little more protective than the others had been. She left Kiki's food on the cave floor halfway between the nest and the entrance to the house.
Six days after the winds changed direction and spring started, Sula heard the cries of young and the cooing purrs of a nursing mother from Kiki's nest, and she smiled over her knitting. More than anything she wished to count the babies so that she could make her marketing calculations, but Kiki would not let her near, even to clip the piglets' needle teeth.
She went out foraging instead and came back with an apronful of early grasses. As she crept closer to the nest she heard soft snores coming from the pig. Ah. Just a glance she could take, if she could get close enough before Kiki woke. Sula edged silently across the cave floor, holding her candle up.
Tiny and pink, eight—no, nine—small creatures lay snuggled against the pig's belly. Nine was a lovely number.
Sula spilled the sprouts from her apron. She was edging away when one of the babies woke, turned nose to the air, and wailed.
It sounded wrong.
She glanced back. Its head was too round. Its ears were too short. Its face showed in the flickering light of her candle—ugly as hunger, human as a hand print. It rolled over and pressed its mouth against a teat, quieting.
Horrified, Sula studied the others. All their heads were wrong. None of them had tails.
Well, this was a fine kettle of kithi. Not a one of them would sell at market, not looking as they did.
She crept back to the house and sat on an upturned bucket, staring into the embers. Her parents, who had taught her piglore, had never had problems like these with their pigs. What was she doing wrong? How was she going to make it through next winter without the supplies she had planned to barter the feeder pigs for? Had someone cursed her? Why?
Well, she thought, the little man had had reason enough, but he had gone down happy with the kithi tickling his brain, and she had killed him fast, with least hurt, and dressed him out immediately. He had not had time enough to cast a curse.
She glanced up at the yarn-tied bunch of dried kithi hanging from the rafters and wondered if she should make tea for herself. She was tired of scrounging and searching and scratching. She could do it if she knew that after marketing there would be a cone of crumbling brown sugar from the islands to the south, and a bag of coarse salt teased from the sea, and sacks of flour soft as feathers and finer than any earth to cook with all the coming winter; but now there would be none of that.
She sighed and looked up to see Kiki watching her from the cave entrance. The sow looked larger than ever. Firelight flickered in her small red eyes.
They had been friends ever since Sula had bought Kiki for a small silver nugget the previous spring. Sula had let Kiki choose among the village boars the one she wished to sire her farrow; Sula and Kiki had foraged together through summer and fall and winter. And now the sow was staring at her with the eyes of a stranger.
"What shall I do now?' she asked the air.
"Find me some taters," said the sow in a voice low and rough as rush matting.
"They're all gone, a fortnight ago," Sula said. Then she blinked. Kiki had never spoken to her before.
"I smell them," said Kiki. She lifted her snout. "And new-laid eggs, and just-open flowers. Get them for me."
"But I—but you—but—"
"Now," said the pig, lowering her snout and glaring at Sula. Sula noticed that Kiki had tusks now, long ones, and that her snout was shorter than it had been. This was not the conversation Sula had imagined she might have with her pig if the pig could talk. Sula rose, took her gathering basket and the sky knife from pegs near the door, stepped into her clogs, and went out into the rain. She glanced toward the houses of the others, farther from the forest and the midden, closer to the square and the tavern. She had no friends among them. Should she choose to step out of her life and walk away from her house and everything in it, no door would open to her; no one would offer her so much as soup, not unless she brought them something they could use.
She turned into the forest instead and spent the afternoon robbing bird nests. The only taters she knew of were in other peoples' root cellars, where she let them stay, but she found some windflowers beside the stream and picked them to take home.
Kiki was waiting beside the fire for her when she came back. She set her finds on a wooden trencher on the floor and watched as the pig ate everything, carefully and delicately, spilling nothing. Its eyes watched her watching it. When she stooped to pick up the trencher, the pig whipped its head to the side, slashing her arm with its tusk. Sula was so surprised that she fell backward, and Kiki came at her where she sprawled on the rushes. She wondered if the pig would kill her now. She held her arms up to protect her face, and the pig licked the arm it had bloodied, then backed away from her, muttering and murmuring small sounds that resembled a song.
Sula's head swam. She sat up slowly and studied her arm. The slash burned, but it was not deep; it had scraped away skin to the blood beneath, but it had not sliced into muscle. The strange small song of the pig flowed into her ears, and she found her head weaving in time to it, and then her whole body swayed.
The pig finished singing and said, "You're mine now; do you understand?"