Sisa Quispe brought the skeins out before the sun had cleared the ridge.
She carried them in a cloth bundle from the store room and set them on the low wall beside the loom post, and then went back for the second bundle, and then for the water pot and the work cloth and the bag of bobbins. The morning was cold, the cold of the dry season in the altiplano in the month of July, a cold without moisture, the air at this altitude thin and clear and carrying no warmth even after the sun appeared. She wore her heavy lliclla over her shoulders, the large weaving cloth she used as a shawl in the early morning, its wool thick from decades of use and washing, the colours of its pattern faded but the cloth still dense and warm.
The courtyard in the pre-dawn cold was empty except for her. The frost that had settled through the night was visible on the stones nearest the north wall, a thin white film on the flat surfaces that would not survive the first half-hour of direct sun. She had felt it under her sandals when she crossed the courtyard to the store room, the freeze-stiffened surface of the packed earth slightly different underfoot from the dry earth of the working day. The temperature at this hour on a dry-season morning was close to zero, the high altitude of the altiplano releasing the heat of the day quickly into the clear night sky without cloud cover to retain any warmth.