The Ancestor

by Danielle Trussoni

  “Her parents called her Anna.” Aki said the word with difficulty, as if it stung his tongue. “She was on the other side of the mountain. On a hiking path with her parents.”

  “She’s hurt,” I said, my gaze falling to her bloody clothes.

  “She struggled,” Aki said, glancing down at the girl. “She fell.”

  “Give her to me,” I said, gesturing for her. “I’ll bring her to Uma.”

  Anna had red hair and pale, freckled skin. She glanced at me furtively, her green eyes red from crying. She trembled as I carried her to the medical hut. I whispered to her that everything would be okay, that she shouldn’t worry, that I would help her. She spoke Italian, I assumed, maybe German or French, but I hoped the tone of my voice would soothe her. She listened to me, her eyes wide, but said nothing.

  Uma met us at the door, and seeing Anna in my arms, gestured to a cot, where I lay the girl down, placing her arm on a folded blanket. Uma cut away Anna’s shirt with a pair of scissors, revealing the damage. Her arm was fractured. The bone had broken through the skin, leaving a bloody wound the size of an apple on her forearm. Uma examined it from a number of angles, and Anna whimpered with pain. Uma instructed me to crush some pills and dissolve them in water. But when I brought the cup to Anna, she wouldn’t drink.

  “She is lucky it is just her arm,” Uma said. “Aki is not very careful.”

  I understood, then, that finding Anna had been no accident. Aki and Jabi had taken her, just as I suspected they had taken Joseph and Nonna Sophia’s brother, Gregor. Maybe she had been hiking in the mountains with her parents, playing near the trees, when Aki and Jabi found her. I imagined Aki and Jabi had watched her, waiting for her parents to turn away for a minute. I never learned the details of how they stole the children. I never asked Aki about their methods. And I didn’t know if they targeted certain villages—as they had Nevenero—or if they took the children randomly, from the ski resorts and hiking trails, one child here, another there, so that the disappearances would not cause too much attention. I only knew that Vita had been wrong. Children went missing. The Icemen took them and brought them to the village. But if this was the case, where were they? What had happened to them?

  Uma gestured for me to hold Anna down as she set the arm, cracking the bone quickly into place. Anna screamed and kicked, then collapsed in tears, sobbing in my arms as Uma lay a piece of wood on the wound, making a splint, and wrapped a bandage around it. When she had finished, Uma brought a clean tunic and a blanket, gesturing for me to dress the girl.

  I sang softly, trying to soothe Anna. The songs were children’s songs I knew from my own childhood, lullabies, as if she were a baby. My voice calmed her a little. She lay in bed, tears rolling down her cheeks, but she didn’t fight when I gave her the pain medication.

  After she drank it down, I stood to go. “No,” she said, her voice filled with fear. “Don’t leave me.”

  I started at the sound of my language.

  “You speak English?”

  She nodded, pale and terrified, her skin slicked cold with sweat. “I want to go back to my parents,” she said, gazing up at me with tear-filled eyes.

  “I know you do,” I said. “Don’t be scared. I’ll help you.”

  I took her hand and squeezed it. This time, she didn’t flinch. She held my hand. She met my eyes. “Stay with me,” she said, and I understood that she trusted no one but me. She was so afraid, so vulnerable, that I couldn’t bear it. A surge of anger overtook me. Aki had done this. And Vita—how could she have been unaware of this? When we sat together in her rooms, she had said that she didn’t believe that the Icemen were capable of harming children. She believed that Joseph had been taken by his father. But I was certain, standing in Uma’s hut, an injured child before me, that she was wrong.

  Shooting a wary look toward Uma, who stood at the far end of the hut, Anna whispered, “Are they monsters?”

  Our eyes met. “They are people,” I said. “Like us.”

  She narrowed her green eyes, as if weighing what I said with what she had witnessed. “No,” she whispered. “They are not like us.”

  “They won’t hurt you.”

  She looked down at her arm, proving me wrong.

  “That was an accident.”

  “Don’t leave me with them,” she said. “Please.”

  I sat by Anna’s side until she fell asleep. I found a blanket and covered her, so that she would be warm. “I will help you,” I whispered in her ear, wiping the sweat from her brow. “I promise.”

  It was not long after Anna’s arrival that Ciba went to stay in Uma’s hut. She had been having mild contractions, slow and irregular, for days. Uma was sure the baby would come any moment and wanted to keep her close by. “It is rare, to have a baby that survives,” Uma told me, after Ciba was settled on a cot. Ciba was asleep, and she wouldn’t have understood us, even if she had been awake, but I found myself whispering.

  “This baby is healthy, though,” I said. “It kicks all the time.”

  It was true—the baby could kick so hard Ciba’s stomach would jolt. It thumped rhythmically, which led to Aki calling the baby their little rabbit. One night, Aki and I sat with Ciba, and Aki had put his hand on her stomach and the baby had pushed against his palm. “Is it a girl or a boy?” I had asked. “It is a boy,” Ciba said, smiling with confidence. She was absolutely sure. “We will name him Sibi.”

  That night, after Ciba fell asleep, Aki and I walked to the grotto, where the tribe sat around the fire. Aki brought us cups of sour wine and a bowl of roasted carrots. I took a sip of the wine, remembering the rush of pleasure I had once taken in drinking—my gin hangovers, my addiction to genepy after my surgery, all the bottles of wine I had taken from the Montebianco cellar. I hadn’t made a decision to stop drinking and yet, since I had arrived in the village, I had no interest in losing myself in that way anymore.

  Aki gazed up at cave paintings. I loved the drawings. The Icemen may not have articulated time as we did, but they had recorded the history of their tribe, all the stories of men and women who had struggled to survive in that remote, unknown crevice in the mountains. Aki pointed to a cluster of pictures that showed a man with black hair: Leopold.

  “When he arrived,” Aki said, “the Icemen tried to kill him. We had never allowed such a man to enter our village before. We did not want him here. He was beaten and held in one of the caves of the arcade, left without food or water, to die. We were afraid of him, and all his kind. You did not know we existed, but our kind had watched you for hundreds of years. We knew you were more powerful than us. You had developed machines and weapons. We knew you grew food and manufactured clothes. And Leopold looked different from us. He carried objects that we had never seen before. A gun. Books. He spoke a language we could not understand.”

  Aki drank his wine down. He looked at my cup, full in my hand. I gave it to him.

  “But Zyana, a direct descendant of the Ice Giants, a fearless woman, went to see Leopold. She found that he was not dangerous, as the others had believed. She taught him our language and she learned his. She insisted that this man was not so different from us. With time, she fell in love with this dark man. He began to teach her the ways of your kind. She called him kryschia.

  “At first, we did not accept him. But soon, he spoke our language very well and explained himself to us. He was very”—Aki stopped to find the correct word—“critical about your kind. He told us about war. He explained what happened when one group of people dominated another group. With time, we came to understand he was our friend. We freed him. After this, Leopold and Zyana were happy. They had children. Healthy and strong children. This was a great joy for my kind. We were weak in those years. When a child was born, it was often small and sick. Sometimes a baby would live for a few days. Sometimes, it died later, after a year or two. Few grew to be men and women. Our population became smaller every year. Kryschia saw this. He examined all of us and said that we were in danger. He was a wise
man. He told us what we needed to do to survive. We had lived too long in isolation, he said. The mountains protected us from outsiders, but such protection would also kill us. We must find others, he said. Find people different from us and mix their blood with our blood. It seemed very strange to us, who had always known only our tribe, but we trusted him. We did as he said. We wanted our children to be strong and healthy, like your children. Leopold taught us to go down the mountain, to the villages. Not only near the castle, but farther away, many days’ walk. We found children and we brought them here.”

  “Like Anna?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Yes, like her.”

  It made sense to me that Leopold would suggest such a thing. He had been a student of the earliest writings on heredity and genetics. The books of natural history in the library—Mendel, Huxley, Darwin—attested to his seriousness, and his field notes were filled with observations about mating and sexual habits and the diminishing population. He must have discerned that the tribe was too small and isolated, and that interbreeding over generations had caused infertility and sickness. He understood that bringing Homo sapiens into the tribe would strengthen it. But to suggest that the Icemen steal children was cruel. How many parents had been thrown into Greta’s hell of uncertainty and longing? How many children had longed, like Anna, to go home? The pain such a practice had caused was immeasurable.

  “How many children were brought here?” I asked at last.

  “Many,” he said, looking at me with a curious expression. He saw how his story upset me. I remembered everything Nonna Sophia had told me—people waking with their children gone, the village filled with terror. But even as I understood what the Icemen had done, I felt a small, niggling doubt: If these children had been integrated into the population, and grew up to mate with the Icemen, why didn’t the Icemen look more like me? Why was Ciba the single person with brown eyes?

  “Your population hasn’t grown,” I said. “It has only declined since Leopold was here.”

  He flinched, as if I had struck him. “Do not doubt us,” he said. “One day there will be many children. And they will be strong, like Leopold and Zyana’s children. Like the children of your people.”

  Because I had grown to care about Aki and Ciba, and because I had come to see the Icemen not as a foreign tribe but as my own people, I wanted this to be true.

  I went to Uma’s hut the next afternoon, took Ciba by the arm and led her along a flat path near the village, where blackberry bushes grew wild. Uma thought walking would help relieve Ciba’s discomfort. She had been in pain all morning, the pressure of the baby pressing into her organs so that she couldn’t sleep.

  It was a beautiful summer day. The sky was blue and the bushes bursting with berries. The plan was to find a shady spot and sit together. Ciba hadn’t had fresh air for days.

  The path was not far from the village. We could have filled our sack with berries and been back to the hut in a few minutes. But the blackberries were fat with juice, so ripe that they dropped with a brush of a finger, and we lingered. We ate as many as we collected. I held a leather sack open and Ciba shook a branch, sending a rain of berries down, until the sack was full. My fingernails were stained black. Sweet purple juice had tinted Ciba’s lips, creating a stark contrast to her pale skin. In the past week, she had swelled. Capillaries had burst under her eyes, giving her a mask of bruises. She smiled and looked ghoulish. I reached out and took her hand in mine, to help her along the path.

  It felt good to be there with Ciba, to feel her weight against me as we walked. She had been inside the stone hut for days and days, lying on the bed, doing nothing but sleeping and eating. It struck me that this stolen moment of sun and friendship was the first moment of pleasure Ciba had experienced in weeks, and I hoped it would give her a respite before the baby arrived, for it was sure to come soon. Two days before, Uma had examined Ciba and said the birth could happen anytime. At night I woke every few hours to check on her. If waiting was excruciating for me, I could only imagine how Ciba felt.

  Ciba stopped near a birch tree, took a labored breath, and walked on. Sweat soaked through her white tunic. Her hair clung to her forehead and neck. The baby both anchored and unmoored her. It was misery, I thought, carrying a child. The heaviness and discomfort of it should have driven any woman away. And yet, the inconveniences of pregnancy—the bloated breasts, the swollen ankles, the body distorting under the weight of a new life—didn’t detract from the magic of what was happening. Ciba would experience something I could not, and although I understood she would suffer, I felt a pang of jealously at this gift.

  I was thinking this when the first wave of pain stopped Ciba cold. She bent over and groaned. As another contraction came, she clutched my arm so that her nails dug deep into my skin. I helped her stand, urging her to walk with me back to the village, but she couldn’t move. I could feel her shaking against me. Another contraction came, and she doubled over again, clutching at me as she groaned with pain. I steered her back to the path, and we were making our way down to the village, when fluid slid over her bare legs. The baby was coming, and I needed to get her back to Uma, but another contraction came, then another, each one stronger than the one before, and soon Ciba was unable to walk at all. She fell against a birch tree, clinging to it. She panted and sobbed, trying to breathe. The baby was coming.

  “Uma,” she gasped.

  I looked past her, toward the village. It was so close I could see the slate roofs. If I ran, I could be back in a few minutes. But a lot could happen in those minutes.

  “There isn’t time,” I said. “I’ll stay and help you.”

  She whimpered as another contraction shook through her. “Go,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “Please.”

  I ran to the village as fast as I could. Aki wasn’t in the hut, but I found Uma right away, and soon we were running back up the path, rotting blackberries staining the ground. I heard Ciba cry out ahead. Every second seemed long and distended, thick as a minute. When we finally made it back, Ciba wasn’t where I left her. She had crawled into the blackberry bushes, where she lay on a bed of crushed berries. She was giving birth. I heard her sharp breathing and her cries of pain.

  Uma turned to me. “Water,” she said. “Go back to my hut. Bring water and towels, a needle and thread. There is a scalpel. Get that, too.”

  I ran to the village again, collected the towels, found the scalpel in Uma’s supplies, filled a jar with water, grabbed the sewing kit, and ran back up the path. I hadn’t wasted a second, but as I reached the blackberry bushes, I knew something was terribly wrong. Ciba was still. There was blood everywhere. Pooled over the berries, around Ciba’s legs. Soaked into her tunic. Blood on Uma’s hands. Blood. Blood. So much blood that my stomach turned. There had not been nearly so much blood during the birth of my son.

  I squatted at Ciba’s side. I took her hand. “Ciba,” I said. Ciba. Ciba. I said her name over and over. She didn’t move. She didn’t respond. I shook her shoulders, touched her forehead, tried everything I could to reach her. Her eyes were fixed open, and she stared up into the blue sky, lifeless.

  Tears filled my eyes, so that the blood seemed to swirl at my feet, a hot magma burning around us. I had to leave. I couldn’t see her that way another moment. My heart would break. I couldn’t bear to see another dead baby.

  That is when I saw it: a tiny foot. Bloody, thick with tissue, the foot was flat and wide, with a hooked second toe. The baby had arrived feetfirst, which had caused the problem. I put my hand on Ciba’s arm, to steady myself, when, to my astonishment, the tiny foot twitched. A delicate toe flexed. I caught my breath. Ciba had died, but the baby was still alive.

  Uma jumped up and grabbed the scalpel. I watched, frozen with disbelief, as the blade sliced into Ciba’s abdomen, cutting through skin and muscle. The incision was wide, gaping. Blood spilled through the cut, over Uma’s fingers. I looked to Ciba’s face, half expecting an expression of pain, but it was waxen and still. Uma pee
led Ciba’s body open like the skin of a fruit and, pulling gently, removed the baby from her body.

  Uma poured water over the baby, washing the blood away. It was not a boy, as Ciba had predicted, but a girl. A beautiful girl, white-skinned and shriveled, stunned to silence by light and atmosphere. Uma gave her to me and I held her close. She was warm and still, watchful. She didn’t cry, only blinked in the sunlight. Then she turned her gaze to me, and I saw that this little being was a miracle, a creation so perfect that I couldn’t help but believe her to be the highest expression of all who had come before her.

  Something in my mind shifted, and I recalled Eleanor’s account of Vita’s birth—the monstrous teeth, the exposed spine. I couldn’t help but remember my own child, dead in my arms, its body covered with hair, the sweet expression on its monstrous face. I looked for signs of these deformities in the baby. She had none of them—the spine was straight. The skin hairless. The only evidence of her lineage was the albino coloring and her large, flat feet with the hooked second toes. Soon, she would be hungry. Soon, she would need more than my arms. But at that moment, as we stood there together, the baby taking her first breaths, she only needed me.

  I wrapped the baby in a towel, grabbed the leather sack stained with Ciba’s blood, and walked back to the village to show Aki his daughter.

  Thirty-Four

  When I brought the baby to Aki, he looked at her with a coldness that chilled me. We stood at the center of the village, the baby not an hour old, so new to the world that she struggled to open her eyes. I offered him the baby, but he would not touch her. He would not look at her. Ciba’s death had made the child invisible to him.

  “What will you name her?” I asked.

  “Ciba must name her,” he said, without meeting my eye. “It is our tradition that the mother chooses the name.”