by BC Powell
“How are you?” I ask, kneeling in front of the bed.
“I just had the first contraction,” she tells me. “I’ll keep count of how far apart they are.”
“Can I get you anything?”
“Not right now,” she answers.
“I’d like to stay with you for her birth,” I say. “If you want me to leave, just say so. It’s up to you.”
“I want you here,” she replies.
For several hours, we sit side by side on the bed. With one arm around her, I try to comfort her through the contractions. As they grow closer together, I can see on her face how much pain she’s in, but she never complains or makes a sound. After what I guess is about six hours, Sash tells me it’s time to deliver.
“Will you get a knife from the shelves, please?” she asks. “There’s also a small metal clamp there. Bring that, too.”
After helping her stand, I cross to the other side of the room and grab the clip and a knife. When I meet Sash by the entrance to the waterfall cavern, she’s already stripped out of her clothes. Her skin is radiant in the golden light of the Swirls, and the amber in her eyes is electric and alive. She takes the metal clip from my hand and clamps it to the end of her hair, but has me keep the knife.
I follow her to the center of the shallow stream in the waterfall cavern. Facing the fall, Sash crouches over the water. She asks me to stay behind her, so I drop to my knees on the spongy rock. After kissing the back of her neck, I clench the knife between my teeth.
Although her breathing becomes sharper and faster during the next contraction, she doesn’t make any other noise. I softly stroke her hair and rub her shoulders until her muscles relax.
“One more,” she says between slow, deep breaths.
A few moments later, her body tenses and the pace of her breathing increases. She lowers her hands to the water beneath her while I stabilize her with my hands. She pushes so hard during the contraction that she lets out a loud shriek.
As her body jerks forward, she grunts from the pain. Her muscles remain tense for another few seconds while she continues to groan. She finally falls back against me, takes a few long breaths, and then raises her hands. Our baby girl is safely in their grip.
Her lustrous blue eyes are already open and focused on Sash. Instead of crying as I’d expect a newborn to do, she’s quiet and calm with an expression of what seems to be curiosity on her face. Still panting from the delivery, Sash lays our baby her on her back in the gentle flow of two-inch deep water and reaches a hand back to me.
“Give me the knife,” she says.
I remove the blade from between my teeth and lay the handle in Sash’s palm. Using the fingers of her other hand, she makes a small loop in the umbilical cord and holds it over our baby’s stomach. After the knife slices through the cord, she takes the metal clip out of her hair and clamps it to the small stub still attached to our daughter’s belly button.
On her knees in the stream, Sash cups water in her hands and rinses off our baby’s body. Running her fingers through our daughter’s short, thick black hair, Sash finishes bathing her. The baby never cries out or makes the slightest sound, but appears to be alert the entire time.
“She’s so beautiful,” I whisper.
“She really is,” Sash replies.
“Do you feel okay?”
“I’m tired,” she says, “but relieved it’s over. I’m glad you’re here with me.”
I rest my hands on Sash’s waist. “I wouldn’t have missed it for anything in the world. Shouldn’t she be crying or something?”
“She’s breathing and looks healthy,” she answers. “I guess she doesn’t feel the need to cry right now.”
Sash lifts our daughter out of the stream and cradles her in her arms. Gripping Sash’s waist, I help her stand to her feet.
“Do you want to hold her?” she asks.
“Of course,” I answer with a grin.
Carefully supporting her head, Sash holds the baby out to me. I slip one arm under her body and the other behind her neck. After gently clutching her to my chest, I look down at her face. Her eyes immediately find mine.
“Welcome to the world, baby girl,” I say and then look at Sash. “It’s weird not having a name for her.”
“I like the way you call her ‘baby girl.’ I guess that’s what it has to be for a while.”
Sash steps to the fall and spends several minutes washing off in the water. Every few seconds, she glances in my direction to check on our daughter. Despite how exhausted Sash looks, there’s a fiery intensity in her eyes and a slight flex in her muscles. She’s like a tiger in the wild watching over her cub, ready to leap to her defense if needed.
After Sash finishes cleaning off, she retrieves the knife from the stream. We walk together to the main cavern. Baby girl stays in my arms while Sash puts the knife away and dresses in shorts and a tank top. Sash then spreads one of the baby blankets out on our bed.
“Lay her down,” Sash says to me.
I carefully place our daughter on top of the blanket. Seemingly mesmerized by the Swirls, baby girl gazes at the crystal ceiling. Sash folds the corners of the blanket around her and securely wraps her inside. While our daughter lies on her back looking up, Sash stacks a few pillows on the mattress. Using the pillows to prop herself up, Sash sits down on the bed. Once she finds a comfortable position, she picks up our daughter and cradles her to her chest.
I change into shorts, sit by Sash’s side, and reach one arm around her shoulder. Baby girl’s eyes slowly sway back and forth between us. After Sash lifts her tank top to expose one breast, she guides our daughter’s mouth to her nipple. Baby girl instantly locks her lips to it.
“How are you feeling?” I ask Sash.
“A little sore,” she says.
I softly kiss her lips and then ask, “Do you want some sap?”
“I would, thank you. And bring a cloth.”
I get up from the bed and soon return with a cup of sap and a cloth. I hold the cup to Sash’s lips for her to sip from while our daughter continues to nurse. When the cup is empty, I set it by the side of our bed. Baby girl pulls her mouth away from Sash’s nipple, apparently full for the time being, and looks up at her mother. A few drops of blood roll down the underside of Sash’s breast.
“You’re bleeding,” I say. “Is something wrong?”
“It’s the blood stored in my breasts,” she answers. “That’s what she was drinking.”
“You don’t make milk . . . a special liquid for the child?”
She shakes her head. “Our breasts fill with blood. That’s how babies get their sap. I’ll wean her to pure sap several morrows before her Naming Ritual.”
I look away in thought for a moment. “That explains it,” I mumble.
“Explains what?” she asks.
I return my eyes to Sash. “I could never figure out why the Murkovin drink blood.”
“If it’s what I needed to stay alive,” Sash says, “I’d drink it, too.”
Sash uses the cloth to wipe blood off her skin and clean our daughter’s lips. After pulling her shirt back down, she leans back with baby girl in her arms. Our daughter’s eyes begin to droop a little, but they still bounce back and forth between Sash and me.
“She has your eyes,” Sash comments. “They look exactly like yours.”
Wanting to see our daughter as she truly exists in this world, I press my palm to the floor beside the bed. I close my eyes and whisper, “Please show me what she looks like.”
After a few moments, I reopen my eyes and stare at our daughter. In the space between her face and mine, vibrant blue blooms from her eyes. The texture of her skin fades away, replaced by a semi-opaque, translucent film. Swirling molecules of glowing white matter shape her skull and skeleton. In the center of her head, a stunning starburst of color slowly rotates, every hue as pure and rich as I could imagine.
“She has your spectrum,” I say. “She’s perfect.”
Chapter 8
Marking each Darkness on my calendar as it passes, I begin a new count of seventy. I also make notes of milestones in baby girl’s development process. Her hand-eye coordination, motor skills, and mental alertness increase much more rapidly than anything I’ve ever seen or heard of in an infant, not that I have a lot of experience in that area. But I’ve always been under the impression that babies don’t do much for the first few months.
From morrow one, baby girl’s eyes follow Sash or me whenever one of us walks across the cavern. If either one of us says something, she immediately turns her head to the sound. At two weeks, if we lay her on her stomach, she raises her head and uses her arms to push her chest up. At four weeks, she grasps things with her hands.
She soon becomes attached to the Krymzyn version of a baby rattle—a tiny steel shaft with padded material wrapped around hollow balls on either end that are filled with metal pellets. The toy provides our daughter with hours of entertainment. As though she’s a mariachi musician with a maraca in her hand, she shakes it in distinct, rhythmic patterns.
At six weeks, she begins babbling incessantly in her own private language. Like many new parents, I conclude that she’s magically gifted in a way far superior to any child ever born. Sash takes the wind out of my sails by explaining that her maturation process is the same as any other child in Krymzyn. Children simply develop much more quickly in this world, and our daughter’s behavior is within the norm—except for two things.
The first anomaly is something that neither of us can explain. Baby girl never cries. She softly moans when she’s hungry, but the sounds never escalate into anything more. If she wants something, she reaches a hand towards it and grunts, but a tear never once falls from her eyes.
The second difference from other infants in this world is easily explained by me being her father. When baby girl looks at Sash or me, she almost always smiles. I’ve never seen the other children in Krymzyn smile, even when they’re playing a game. Just like the adults here, the kids are always serious and focused.
In a strange way, our daughter’s smile doesn’t always look like one of happiness or contentment. It’s often subtle and accompanied by a knowing expression on her face. The corners of her lips curl up slightly while her sparkling blue eyes look at Sash or me in a captivating way. It’s as though her smile is saying, “I know something amazing, but I can’t tell you about it yet.”
Other than having my blue eyes, baby girl’s resemblance to Sash is striking. When I sketch my first portrait of our daughter, it doesn’t take much imagination to think that it might be a drawing of Sash at that age. And the more our daughter grows, the more uncanny her resemblance to her mother becomes.
Sash spends every morrow doing nothing but taking care of baby girl. As far as I can tell, she never once lets her out of her sight. When my duties for each morrow are finished, Sash and I take our daughter for walks around the Delta. Taking turns with her draped over our chests in a baby carrier, we stroll to the top of the Empty Hill, or sometimes to the top of the Tall Hill.
We sit in the grass, hold her in our laps so she can look at the world around her, and listen to her “coo.” If she points a hand up at the clouds or towards a tree, we tell her what the words are. She can’t repeat them yet, but she seems to enjoy translating them into her gibberish.
At the end of each morrow, our daughter always sleeps with us in our bed. Even though we have a cradle for her, Sash never once considers putting her in it. Cuddled between Sash and me, we shower her with affection until she falls asleep.
Only once does Sash correct me for doing something that she considers wrong. At the end of one morrow while Sash bathes in the fall, I walk around the cavern with our daughter in my arms. After stopping in front of the painting of Sash at Ovin’s tree that hangs near the tunnel entrance, I point to the image of Sash.
“Mommy,” I say to our daughter.
“Sasasa,” she replies in baby-babble.
“That’s right,” I say, smiling with pride. “Her name is Sash. But to you, she’s Mommy.”
“Chase,” Sash calls to me from the other side of the cavern. When I turn to her, she’s slipping into her sleep clothes. “I don’t think we should teach her terms like that from your world.”
I nod my head. “Sorry. It’s just habit.”
“I know you mean well, but I don’t think anyone else will understand.”
There’s no anger or reprimand in her voice. She’s simply staying on top of what we both agreed to. Our daughter will be raised in the same way that the other children in this world are.
“I’ll remember from now on,” I say.
I return my eyes to baby girl. She peers straight into them and all the way to my soul. As has happened with Sash several times in the past, I feel tingles in my stomach and chest as my daughter uses her Krymzyn sense of awareness to reach inside me. I lean my face down and kiss her forehead.
“I love you,” I whisper.
“Mugaba,” she says in gibberish.
* * *
Over the next few morrows, Sash and I discuss several ways to spend time with our daughter after she’s living at Home. I suggest one idea not only because it will give us an excuse to visit her, but also because it won’t exclude the other children. Sash tells me that she thinks it’s a brilliant idea. I’ve already seen that the children here play Red Rover, so it’s reasonable to think that they might like another game. I’m going to introduce them to soccer.
After my duties have been completed one morrow, I stop by Home to see Marc, the senior Keeper. Stressing that it combines physical exercise with mental focus while teaching the children to work together, I explain the game to him. He decides that learning a new game from another world could be beneficial to the children in several ways. In the ultimate Krymzyn justification, he declares it should help them achieve balance.
Since I’m already there, I ask Marc for a tour of Home. I’ve never been inside the caverns, only to the field in front of the entrances. The interconnected habitats lie under a mile-wide range of rounded hills that run across the central portion of the Delta. He leads me through the door on the eastern side of the field. Another entrance is located on the western end of the hills.
As soon as we step inside, I notice how much larger the tunnel is than the one leading to mine and Sash’s habitat. With a ceiling at least ten feet high, the tunnel is wide enough for four adults to comfortably walk side by side. Instead of a solid granite top like in our tunnel, the rounded ceiling is made of crystal with Swirls inside lighting our path. When Marc closes the door behind us, I see another noticeable difference. On the inside of the door is a large steel bolt to lock it against the outside.
“We lock the doors during Darkness,” Marc says. “We always make sure the children are safe from Murkovin who might enter the Delta. The Keepers stand watch in the tunnel until Darkness passes.”
Carefully examining the six-foot-eight Marc, I move my eyes from his spiky, black-and-gold hair to his square face with a strong jaw, and then finally down to his toned, burly shoulders and arms. One thought jumps into my mind. His demeanor is always gracious, but if it came to a fight, he’s someone you wouldn’t want to tangle with.
“Is this the only tunnel?” I ask.
“There are two that join,” he answers. “This one is a long semi-circle from the eastern entrance to the western door. Another tunnel leads from the center point of this tunnel to a back entrance in the hills above us.”
He leads me farther into the tunnel until we reach an opening to a cavern. The cave is about twice the size of my entire habitat. Large pillows are neatly arranged in a circle on the floor. In the center of the room stands a monolithic black marble stone about four feet tall.
“We call this school,” he says. “The children sit on the pillows while Keepers provide education in science, mathematics, and a variety of other subjects.”
“What’s the rock for?” I ask.
“That’s the Stone of
Education,” he explains. “Keepers have the ability to focus our thoughts on the Stone so that images are projected for the children. It helps them learn anatomy, physics, and many other areas of their studies. Would you like me to demonstrate?”
“Please do,” I excitedly reply.
“I remember hearing a story from the Disciples of another world,” Marc tells me. “It might have been the one that you come from, or a world that’s very similar. Do you have large bodies of water on a circular planet?”
“We do,” I answer. “We call them oceans.”
“That’s right,” he says. “I learned the word once before. I was fascinated by them since the only above-ground water in this world is the river. They told us tales of large vessels called ships that sail on the oceans. Let me show you how I envisioned them.”
He focuses on the Stone and his eyes glaze over with intense concentration. Almost immediately, rays of golden light shoot up from the top of the rock. As the beams slowly rotate, a three-dimensional image forms in the air, much like the holographic displays I saw during the story of The Beginning. The only difference is, the picture from Marc’s mind gradually turns from gold to full color.
In the image he creates, calm swells roll across the surface of an aqua sea. Cutting through the water is a three-masted schooner with a few “Krymzynesque” changes compared to sailing ships on Earth. The hull and masts are made entirely of steel, while the huge, billowing sails are woven from the same black fabric that’s used to make our clothes.
“That’s incredible!” I exclaim.
The image fades away and the light rays recede into the stone.
“Is that what a ship looks like?” Marc asks, turning to me.
“Right on the money,” I say, still in awe of what I just saw.
“Money?” he asks.