Free Being a Green Mother by Piers Anthony

where I was going, and before I knew it I had stumbled over it,” she confessed tearfully.
    In the Gypsy culture, in some regions, women were fundamentally unclean; Orb had learned this along with the language, but had not encountered it before. The onus was worst at the time of childbearing; the woman’s clothing of the time would be burned. But her nether region could besuspect at any time. Thus she could not step over copperware without defiling it, and the same evidently applied to buried water pipes. No one here would drink the water that Csinka had defiled by her passage over the pipe.
    Orb knew better than to argue the merit of such a custom. Such things varied from tribe to tribe and from region to region, but were honored tenaciously where they held. But by her definition Csinka was innocent, and she wanted to help. “I once helped a woman to burn her husband’s body,” she said. “Perhaps I can help you, too.”
    For an instant Csinka’s eyes lighted. Then despair resumed. “There is no way. We cannot lay a new pipe.”
    “But if I can banish the defilement on the present pipe—”
    “Are you a sorceress?” Csinka asked with interest.
    “No, only a musician, of a sort. I came to meet Csihari, but they will not let me see him.”
    “Nobody sees Csihari!” Csinka said. “He sees whom he will, and only whom he will.”
    So Orb had gathered. “Perhaps if I sing him a song, he will come.”
    Csinka shrugged. “He might. But how can this remove the defilement from the pipe?”
    “It is my hope that the music will do that.”
    Csinka shook her head, not understanding. But Orb made her show the place where she had inadvertently stepped over the pipe. Then, in the middle of the day, Orb set up a chair at that spot, sat on it, and began to play her harp.
    She sang a song of water: of mountain springs, clear flowing streams, shining ponds, and deep pure lakes. She spread her magic out, not to an audience, but to the water in the pipe below her, willing it to respond, to assume the purity of the water of which she sang.
    An audience formed, as was always the case when Orb sang. Gypsy men, women, and children, the Tziganes, standing and listening. She continued singing, songs of clean water, rendering them as well as she could in Calo. The audience continued to grow, until it filled the street.
    When Orb first touched the water with her magic, she had felt the defilement of it; anyone who drank it would be sickened, and clothes washed in it would remain unclean. The soul of the water reeked of its special pollution. But as shesang, interacting with it, it clarified, until it became as clean as the water she sang about. She had not suspected she could do this until the need arose and had not been sure until she actually felt the response of the water, but now it was certain. The magic of her music had this power.
    She paused and gazed across the audience. “The water is undefiled,” she said. “Who will drink it now?”
    They merely stood, not accepting this. After all, she was sitting right over the pipe, continuously defiling it herself.
    “I touched it with my song, and it is clean,” she said. “It will not hurt you. Drink of it and see.”
    “I will drink of it!” Csinka exclaimed. She went to the tap on the pipe that rose from the main line and filled her cup and drank.
    She stood and was not harmed. The water had not sickened her.
    “She is not harmed because she defiled it!” a man said. The others nodded; it was no test.
    “But
I
am over it now,” Orb pointed out.
    Point well taken. They glanced at each other, uncertain.
    “You need this water,” Orb said. “I am a woman; my body defiles it. But my music counters the ill, and this water is pure. Who else will drink of it?”
    But no one trusted this. No one volunteered to try.
    Was her effort to fail, even though the water had been restored? Orb did not know what else to do. Reluctantly she got up and put away her harp.
    “I will try the