by Melanie Rawn
For as Second Children were born day after day, First Daughter stirred, and woke, and lived, and spoke the word Rebirth. First Mother cried out in happiness. First Man wept gentle, joyous rain. Second Children welcomed their Eldest Sister joyfully, and gave her the name Gelenis. And as new children were born of Second Children—except Sirrala the Virgin and Venkelos the Judge—and more children were born of them, Gelenis was kept very busy. First Mother and First Man watched their progeny multiply, and She thanked him for his kindness in comforting her sorrow. He replied that he had learned such from Her, and this is the Third Truth: Women teach men compassion, so that men may comfort women in their inevitable sorrow.
Now, the last born of Second Children was Venkelos, and alone of them all he was born into the darkness of night. And as he was born the rest looked at each other in worry, for his first word was Death.
Venkelos asked First Mother why at the moment of life he spoke of death. She replied that it meant that, with Gelenis First Daughter, he was the dearest of Her children, for it was he who would guide the return of all Life to Her. His was the judgment of what would live and what must die. Venkelos nodded thoughtfully. And he and Gelenis became close companions.
But one night he withdrew, saying he must contemplate anew his weighty responsibilities. And for a long time nothing died—not a blade of grass, not an insect on the wing, not a stalk of wheat, not a single animal or bird or any of the multitudes of people now in the world.
Consider what this means, Cailet. If grass cannot be bitten from its root, animals starve. If wheat cannot be harvested, people starve. If nothing dies, there is no food. In this way, life requires death.
First Mother summoned Venkelos. With all respect and humility, he told Her that his duties were meaningless as far as he could see. For had not First Daughter died, yet now lived? First Mother thought long and hard on this matter, and finally took First Daughter aside to discuss it with her.
“Truly told,” said Gelenis, “I was dead, and now am alive. I would know why this is so, First Mother, if You will tell me.”
From his favorite cloud, First Man let forth a polite peal of thunder to attract their attention. “If I may, Ladies,” he said, “I think it is because you were reborn as She created Second Children. Nothing can withstand the power of Her creating, not even death.”
“First Man is wise,” said Gelenis. “But Venkelos has a valid point, and because I know him well I know he is sincerely troubled by this. He has attended many a birthing with me, and it grieves him when he is forced to reclaim a Life for You when that Life has barely begun.”
First Mother nodded. “He is as gentle as Jeymian and as compassionate as Gorynel. That is why I gave judgment to him instead of, say, dear foolish Kiy—who would either bring a Life back to Me and forget why, or else forget to return any Life to Me at all!”
They laughed in fond exasperation. Then Gelenis said, “But, First Mother, why do I live again?”
Heavy of heart, First Mother and First Man traded glances, and he said what She could not bring Herself to say: “Firstborn, do you wish to die?”
“No, but it may be necessary. Venkelos’s right to judge who must die was given after my death, but my renewed life makes for an unbalance.”
First Mother considered. “Firstborn, you are wrong.” And She summoned Venkelos once more to Her. “Gelenis First Daughter will live. Remember, Venkelos, her first word on waking: Rebirth. She who watches over birthings does in truth watch over each life being reborn from My original creation.”
Venkelos knelt in gratitude. “I understand, and I am glad to hear You say it, because I have been sorely disturbed by Life’s hatred of me.”
She exclaimed in surprise. “Do you mean that you are feared, my son?”
“Truly told.”
“I should have anticipated this and dealt with it sooner,” said First Mother. “You must have suffered great pain, Venkelos. I am sorry for it.”
“No matter. Henceforth I will not be so terrible a presence, or so dreaded. I am a man. I cannot create Life. I personify Death. But Gelenis’s rebirth is proof that Life is ever and always returned to You to be renewed. If they will but understand this, I will find peace in their eyes when I come for them.”
And that is the Fourth Truth: Venkelos the Judge is not to be feared, for he but returns us to First Mother, who creates and renews Life.
“But you said St. Caitiri was a real person, a Mage Guardian. How’s that fit with being one of the Second Children?”
“Did I ever say that any tale I tell is the absolute, carved-in-stone truth?” Rinnel wiped silver rain from his dark face. “You are the most literal child! Still, I suppose that’s to be expected in a matter-of-fact place like The Waste. No room for allegory or symbolism or—”
“I don’t believe every word you say,” she protested. “And I understand when a story’s just a story! But why don’t they all fit neatly together?”
“Does life?”
She had to admit it did not. Still, she grumbled, “They might at least try to keep their stories straight.”
“Cailet, dear,” he said in an oh-so-patient, oh-so-annoying tone, “getting the stories straight—otherwise known as figuring out what you believe—is your problem.”
“What about Wraiths?” she challenged. “They’re the spirits of the dead and they come back to haunt you—and that don’t sound to me like they’re reborn.”
“Doesn’t sound. Mind your grammar. And Geridon’s Golden Balls, girl, who taught you theology? Didn’t you hear a word I said? The idea here isn’t that each of us gets literally reborn into another body. Our lives continue—what we think and feel and know, what we are. The most obvious way—obvious to everyone but you, it seems—is through our children. Have you got that much straight?”
“I understood that part of it, thanks,” she muttered.
“Very well, then. We also live on in what we do. What we teach others. How we’re remembered. Are you still with me?”
She made a face at him. “If all Life returns to First Mother to be reborn, then what are Wraiths?”
“Well, I suppose becoming a Wraith is a kind of rebirth into a different sort of existence. Personally, I’m not looking forward to it. But I could be wrong, and being a Wraith might be almost as much fun as being flesh and bone.” He grinned suddenly. “I’ll let you know!”
“I still say it don’t—doesn’t—make much sense.”
“My very precious and relentlessly literal child, it’s religion. It doesn’t have to make sense.”
9
Through the years her understanding improved (and her grammar), but she remained instinctively literal. Rinnel despaired of her other instincts; symbols meant nothing to her unless he explained them, and allegory was just as much of a struggle. Still, he always managed to get the point across. She wasn’t unintelligent, he’d tell her, just woefully unimaginative at times.
They were out hiking one morning—Rinnel was remarkably spry for his years, and he had to be at least seventy—when they came across a galazhi doe huddled in tense misery five yards from a stagnant puddle. The old man left off his lecture on the erstwhile Grand Duchess of Domburronshir and knelt by the suffering animal. After a feeble toss of her horns in warning, the doe sank her head into his cupped palm and shivered. He stroked gnarled fingers down her flanks, probing carefully.
“She must’ve been desperate for water to take a drink from that.” Cailet wrinkled her nose at the smell. “And now she’ll die of it, instead of thirst.”
“She won’t die. Bring me a handful of that purple ruff up on the rocks—with roots, please.”
Cailet did as requested. Rinnel fed the doe, who chewed rapidly as if fearing her strength wouldn’t last. At last she gave a great sigh and laid her head on his knee.
“There now,” said the old man, nodding. “We’ll wait with her until she�
��s up and about again.”
“But isn’t it too late? I mean, once they sicken on bad water, they always die.”
“Only if they can’t get to the cure. Look at the ground behind her, where she was dragging herself toward the rocks. She knew what she needed, she just couldn’t get that far. They’re stupid beasts, truly told, but instinct sometimes serves almost as well as wits.” He petted the galazhi’s long, supple neck. “Her belly isn’t distended, which means she made her mistake less than half an hour ago. Another ten minutes and it would indeed have been too late.”
Cailet sat on a flat rock and smiled at him. “And now you’ll link this very convenient sick animal to the Grand Duchess.”
Rinnel harrumphed irritably. “Learning all my tricks, are you? If you’re such a clever child, you tell me what this poor little girl has to do with it.”
“They both drank poison. Only there wasn’t any cure for Veller Ganfallin.”
“She wouldn’t have taken it if there was. Ambition is poison of a sort. But I’d call it a disease. Like arrogance or ignorance. She was ambitious, and most of her advisers were morons.”
“Now you sound like Domna Lodde.”
“Who?”
“The healer First Daughter hired when Master Irien spent a year in Gierkenshir.”
“Oh. Why do I sound like her?”
Cailet scooped up a handful of pebbles and began sorting them for likely bits of sand jade for carving. “She never referred to people by name. One person was ‘fish allergy,’ and somebody else was ‘mild concussion’ or whatever. I was ‘simple fracture’ even though she wasn’t anywheres near Ostinhold when I broke my arm that time. We didn’t have names, we had ailings.”
“Physicians do tend to categorize people that way,” he mused.
“But it’s like it was the only thing she saw. As if everybody could be defined by a single trait.”
“I see. If I were only ‘arthritic knees,’ she’d miss all my other aches and pains. One label obscures others, I think.” Green eyes twinkled in his dark face. “I rather enjoy Crazy Old Man of Crackwall, though.”
Cailet snorted and tossed away rejected stones. “First Daughter likes her label, too.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“It doesn’t bother you? That people think so about you?”
He smiled, scratching the galazhi’s ears. “Those who truly know me know the truth of me. And what about you? How do we label you?”
She thought it over. She was orphan and fosterling, and that was all. Neither said much about who she really was. Tentatively, she answered, “I don’t know. Nothing seems to fit.”
“Well, what do you do with yourself all day?”
“Study. Read. Go to school. Do my chores. Ride the herds, muck out stalls, and other suchlike.”
“I’d hardly term you a scholar. You’re no ranch hand, either.”
“And I come visit you. Does that make me crazy, like they say you are?”
“Impertinent monster. And you’ve quite failed to define yourself, Cailet. What label do you want?”
With a little shrug, she said, “The ones I already have are ‘orphan’ and ‘fosterling.’ But I didn’t have anything to do with either.”
“Words other people have defined you with?” he suggested.
She nodded. “It’s not exactly fair, is it? I think a label is just a convenience, so a person knows what place you hold.”
“And sometimes it keeps others from seeing who you really are. From what you’ve said, Geria Ostin knows that on instinct. And uses it.”
“Like you?” she asked shrewdly. “Nobody but me ever comes out here. They all think you really are crazy.”
“How do you know they’re not right?”
She laughed at him. “Did I say they weren’t?”
“You’re a disrespectful, ungrateful wretch who didn’t get spanked half as much as she ought. Whatever Lilen Ostin’s ideas on child-rearing, I’ve found little to approve thus far. I must say—”
Suddenly he gave a start as the galazhi doe leaped to her feet. She shook her head, pawed the ground—and simultaneously emitted a thunderous belch and a flood of purplish urine. Then she bounded away up the rocks to find the herd.
Cailet stared after her. “Who’d believe that skinny little thing could make such a great big noise!”
“Or such an appalling stench.” Rinnel clambered to his feet, wincing. “Which I fear will be with us all the way back to my house. Her aim was not the best. Talk about lack of gratitude—!”
“Well, I’ve got a title for her,” Cailet laughed. “‘Rivermaker!’”
He chuckled. “May everything they call you in your life be as appropriate—and well-earned! Now, walk upwind of me, Cailet, and don’t you even think of adding ‘Stinky’ to Crazy Old Man!”
A few nights later Cailet woke very abruptly in her pitch-black bedroom. Her heart pounded and sweat broke out on her skin: the tiny lamp always left on the corner table had gone out. Darkness—endless, suffocating, imprisoning—
Frantically she repeated Lady Lilen’s advice: listen to the sounds of Ostinhold at night, regular soothing sounds of the breeze shifting the shingles and the house settling, the soft footsteps of her elders going late to bed, the yips of puppies in the kennels. She heard them, but none could block the rush and roar of blood in her ears. Sheets tangled around her limbs like jesses on a hunting hawk. She was paralyzed, she couldn’t move or cry out, she could scarcely even breathe—there was nothing of calm or strength within her to combat her shaming, gibbering terror of the dark.
She didn’t even know what she was afraid of. She only knew that she ached for light, that the darkness was a wall shutting her in—
A wall?
Rinnel had shown her how to build a wall. Perhaps she could put it between her and the darkness.
Brick by heavy brick, shaking with fear and sweating with the effort of concentration, she built it as wide as her shoulders and as high as her head. And it held. And it glowed. Darkness threatened on either side, but her wall protected her with softly radiant white light.
She collapsed against damp pillows, sucking in great breaths. Her heartbeats gradually slowed. She stopped trembling. Within a few minutes she was able to unwind the sheets and sit up, slightly sick and a little dizzy, but no longer terrified.
To relight the lamp, she had to see. She crossed to the door and opened it to let in what illumination filtered down the hall from the cresset lamp at the far end. Her eyes hungrily sought that distant light—but someone’s shadow blocked it, lengthening with every stride, someone wearing a ragged black cloak she recognized.
Rinnel paused at the turning for Lady Lilen’s rooms. Cailet watched in frank amazement as her foster-mother hurried into view, something clasped close in her arms. Rinnel accepted the bundle, shaking his head, then disappeared quickly down the stairs. Lady Lilen stood there for a long moment, her face both angry and sad. Cailet hesitated, then boldly stepped out of her doorway and ran barefoot down the hall.
Her sudden appearance made Lady Lilen catch her breath in a little gasp. “Cai! What are you doing up? Go back to bed.”
“Why’d Rinnel come here? What’d you just give him?”
“Hush, you’ll wake everyone.” With a sigh, she went on, “Come to my rooms, dear. If you saw, then I suppose I’d better explain.”
An hour later, sworn to secrecy, Cailet returned to her own chamber. She lit the lamp and lay back down in bed, but she knew she wouldn’t sleep. What Lady Lilen had told her was too terrible.
Several days ago at Scraller’s Fief, a slave had given birth. The infant boy had a maimed foot, the little bones twisted somehow in the womb. With care and a good healer’s help, there was a fine chance that he would grow up with only a slight limp.
But at Scraller’s, he would not be allowed to grow up. He had been born defective, malformed.
Therefore, he would be killed.
“No, Caisha, I can’t have it stopped,” Lady Lilen had said in response to her horrified question. “It’s not just Scraller. It’s common practice all over Lenfell. Any child not perfect at birth is put to death. Some places are gentle about it—an overdose of sleeping drops is the favored method, I’m told. In other places, the babies are left on hillsides to die, or their throats are cut, or—I know, darling, it’s hideous. But not all of them are killed. Some of us help as best we can. I sent word to Rinnel to come take the baby away to—to a place of safety he knows about. This little boy will live. Thousands die, and for imperfections less severe than a lame foot.”
This wasn’t the first time she’d saved a newborn’s life. Just as it was never admitted that some children were born less than perfect, it was never acknowledged that a few people could be relied upon to spirit these babies away from certain death. But thousands more died—and no one ever talked about it.
“It happens rather more often in The Waste than elsewhere, or so Taig tells me. The pollution was worst here, of course. It lingers even now. Most people don’t even know these babies are born. Those who do usually know only because it becomes their personal tragedy.”
Collusion usually assured that no one discovered the truth. Birth of a flawed baby did more than shame and grieve the parents: it was an insult to Lenfell’s collective sensitivities. It meant the system of Bloods and Tiers hadn’t worked as perfectly as everyone wanted to believe. So everyone who knew kept quiet. Many healers who attended such births recommended choosing a different father for the next baby. Some comforted the stricken parents by telling them that the chance of repetition was very small, and even less for a woman who had borne a healthy child before the maimed one. Some took it upon themselves to sterilize the mother, lest she bear another defective child.
But all of them took the babies away, usually already dead, and left the parents to select a reason. Strangled by the mother-cord, too lengthy a labor—there were a dozen possible explanations for a stillborn child that would not reflect badly on the parents’ heritage or the healer’s skills.