Vinge, Joan D - SS - Mother and Son.pdf - Joan D Vinge - przemosta

MOTHER AND SON

By Joan D. Vinge

Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

* * * *

Part 1: The Smith

All day I have lain below the cliff. I can’t move, except to turn my head or twitch

two fingers; I think my back is broken. I feel as if my body is already dead, but my

head aches, and grief and shame are all the pain I can bear. Remembering Etaa . . .

Perhaps the elders are almost right when they say death is the return to the

Mother’s womb, and in dying we go back along our lives to be reborn. Between

wakings I dream, not of my whole life, but sweet dreams of the time when I had

Etaa, my beloved. As though it still happened I see our first summer together herding

shenn, warm days in fragrant up-land meadows. We didn’t love each other then; she

was still a child, I was hardly more, and for our different reasons we kept ourselves

separated from the world.

My reason was bitterness, for I was neaa, motherless. The winter before, I

had lost my parents to a pack of kharks as they hunted. My mother’s sister’s family

took me in, as was the custom, but I still ached with my own wounds of loss, and

was always an outsider, as much from my own sullenness as from any fault of my

kin. I questioned every belief, and could find no comfort. Sometimes, alone with just

the grazing shenn, I sat and wept.

Until one day I looked up from my weeping to see a girl, with eyes the color

of new-turned earth and short curly hair as dark as my own. She stood watching me

somberly as I wiped at my eyes, ashamed and angry.

—What do you want? I signed, looking fierce and hoping she would run

away.

—I felt you crying. Are you lonely?

—No. Go away. She didn’t. I frowned. —Where did you come from,

anyway? Why are you spying on me?

—I wasn’t spying. I was across the stream, with my shenn. I am Etaa. She

looked as if that explained everything.

And it did; I recognized her then. She belonged to another clan, but everyone

talked about her: Etaa, her name-sign, meant “blessed by the Mother,” and she had

the keenest eyesight in the village. She could see a bird on a branch across a field,

and thread the finest needle; but more than that, she had been born with the second

sight, she felt the Mother’s presence in all natural things. She could know the feeling

and touch the souls of every living creature, some-times even predict when rain

would fall. Others in the village had the second sight, but not as clearly as she did,

and most people thought she would be the next priestess when she came of age. But

now she was still a child, minding the flocks, and I wished she would leave me alone.

—Your shenn will stray, O blessed one.

Old hurt pinched her sun-browned face, and then she was running back

toward the stream.

—Wait! I stood up, startled, but she didn’t see my sign. I threw a stone; it

skimmed past her through the grass. She stopped and turned. I waved her back,

guilty that my grief had made me hurt somebody else.

She came back, her face too full of mixed feeling to read.

—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you unhappy too. I’m Hywel. I sat

down, gesturing.

Her smile was as sudden and bright as her disappointment, and passed as

quickly. She dropped down beside me like a hound, smoothing her striped kilt. —I

wasn’t showing off ... I don’t mean to. ... Her shoulders drooped; I had never

thought before that blessedness could be a burden like any-thing else. —I just

wanted to— Her fingers hesitated in mid-sign. —To know if you were all right. She

looked up at me through her long lashes, with a kind of yearning.

I glanced away uncomfortably across the pasture. —Can you watch your

shenn from here? They were only a gray-white shifting blot to me, even when my

eyes were clear, and now my eyes were blurred again.

She nodded.

—You have perfect vision, don’t you? My hands jerked with pent-up

frustration. —I wish I did!

She blinked. —Why? Do you want to be a warrior, like in the old tales? Some

of our people want to take the heads of the Neaane beyond the hills for what they do

to us. I think in the south some of them have. Her eyes widened.

The thought of the Neaane, the Motherless ones, made me flinch; we called

them Neaane because they didn’t believe in the Mother Earth as we did, but in gods

they claimed had come down from the sky. We are the Kotaane, the Mother’s

children, and to be neaa was to be both pitiful and accursed, whether you were one

boy or a whole people. —I don’t want to kill people. I want to be farsighted so I can

be a hunter and kill kharks, like they killed my parents!

—Oh. She brushed my cheek with her fingers, to show her sorrow. —When

did it happen?

—At the end of winter, while they were hunting.

She leaned back on her elbows and glanced up into the dull blue sky, where

the Sun, the Mother’s consort, was strug-gling to free his shining robes once more

from the Cyclops. The Cyclops’ rolling bloodshot Eye looked down on us

ma-levolently, out of the wide greenness of her face. —If was the doing of the

Cyclops, probably.

Etaa sighed. —Her strength is always greatest at the Dark Noons, big

Uglyface; she always brings pain with the cold! But the Mother sees all—

—The Mother didn’t see the kharks. She didn’t save my parents; She could

have. She gives us pain too, the Great Bitch!

Etaa’s hands covered her eyes; then slowly they slid down again. —Hywel,

that’s blasphemy! Don’t say that or She will punish you. If She let your parents die,

they must have offended Her, She lifted her head with childish self-righteous-ness.

—My parents never did anything wrong! Never! My mind saw them as they

always were, bickering constantly…They stayed together because they had managed

to have one child, and though they’d lost two others, they were fertile together and

might someday have had a fourth. But they didn’t like each other anyway, and

maybe their resentment was an offense. I hit Etaa hard on the arm and leaped up.

—The Mother is a bitch and you are a brat! May you be sterile!

She gasped and made the warding sign. Then she stood up and kicked me in

the shins with her rough sandals, her face flushed with anger, before she ran off

again across the pasture.

After she was gone I stood throwing rocks furiously at the shenn, watching

them run in stupid terror around and around the field.

And because of it, when I had worn out my rage, I discovered one of my

shenn had disappeared. Searching and cursing, I finally found the stubborn old ewe

up on the scarp at the field’s end. She was scrabbling clumsily over the ragged black

boulders, cutting her tender feet and leaving tufts of her silky wool on every rock

and thorn bush. I caught her with my crook at last and dragged her back down by

her flopping ears, while she butted at me and stepped on my bare feet with her claws

out. I cursed her mentally now, not having a hand to spare, and cursed my own

idiocy, but mostly I cursed the Mother Herself, because all my troubles seemed to

come from Her.

Scratched and aching all over, I got the ewe down the crumbling hill to the

field at last, whacked her with my crook, and watched her trot indignantly away to

rejoin the flock. I started toward the stream to wash my smarting body, but Etaa was

ahead of me, going down to drink. Afraid that she would see me for the fool I was, I

threw myself down in the shade of the hillside instead and pretended to be resting. I

couldn’t tell if she was even looking at me, though I squinted and stretched my eyes

with my fingers.

But then suddenly she was on her feet running toward me, waving her arms. I

got up on my knees, wondering what crazy thing—

And then a piece of the hill gave way above me and buried me in blackness.

I woke spitting, with black dirt in my eyes, my nose, my mouth, to see Etaa at

my side still clawing frantically at the earth and rubble that had buried my legs. All

through her life, though she wasn’t large even among women, she had strength to

match that of many men. And all through my life I remembered the wild, burning

look on her face, as she turned to see me alive. But she didn’t make a sign, only kept

at her digging until I was free.

She helped me stand, and as I looked up at the slumped hillside the full

realization of what had been done came to me. I dropped to my knees again and

rubbed fistfuls of the tumbled earth into my hair, praising Her Body and begging Her

forgiveness. Never again did I question the Mother’s wisdom or doubt Her strength.

I saw Etaa kneel beside me and do the same.

As we shared supper by my tent, I asked Etaa how she’d known when she

tried to warn me. —Did you see it happening?

She shook her head. —I felt it, first ... but the Mother didn’t give me enough

time to warn you.

—Because She was punishing me. She should have killed me for the things I

thought today!

—But it was me who made her angry. It was my fault. I shouldn’t have said

that about your parents. It was awful, it was—cruel.

I looked at her mournful face, shadowed by the greening twilight. —But it was

true. I sighed. —And it wasn’t just today that I have cursed the Mother. But I’ll

never do it again. She must have been right, to let my parents die. They hated staying

together; they didn’t appreciate the blessing of their fertility, when others pray for

children but can’t make any.

—Hywel…maybe they’re happier now, did you ever think? She looked down

self-consciously. —To return to the Mother’s Womb is to find peace, my mother

says. Maybe She knew they were unhappy in life, so She let them come back, to be

born again.

—Do you really think so? I leaned forward, not knowing why this strange

girl’s words should touch me so.

She wrinkled her face with thought. —I really think so.

And I felt the passing of the second shadow that had darkened my mind for

so long, as though for me it was finally Midsummer’s Day and I stood in the light

again.

Etaa insisted on staying with me that night; her mother was a healer, and she

informed me that I might have “hidden injuries,” so gravely that I laughed. I lay

awake a long time, aching but at peace, looking up past the leather roof into the

green-lit night. I could see pallid Laa Merth, the Earth’s Grieving Sister, fleeing

wraithlike into the outer darkness in her endless effort to escape her mother, the

Cyclops, who always drew her back. The Cyclops had turned her lurid Eye away

from us, and the shining bands of her robe made me think for once of good things,

like the banded melons ripen-ing in the village fields below.

I looked back at Etaa, her short dark curls falling across her cheek and her

bare chest showing only the softest hint of curves under her fortune-seed necklace. I

found myself wish-ing that she would somehow magically become a woman,

because I was just old enough to be interested; and then suddenly I wished that then

she would have me for her man, something I’d never thought about anyone else

before. But if she were a woman, she would become our priestess and have her pick

of men and not want one without the second sight…I remembered the look she’d

given me as she dug me out of the landslide, and felt my face redden, thinking that

maybe I might have a chance, after all.

* * * *

Through the summer and the seasons that followed I spent much time with Etaa and

slowly got used to her strange skills. I had never known what it was like to feel the

Mother’s touch, or even another human’s, on my own soul; and since I had few

close friends, I didn’t know the ways of those who had the second sight. To be with

Etaa was to be with some-one who saw into other worlds. Often she started at

nothing, or told me what we’d find around the next turn of the path; she even knew

my feelings sometimes, when she couldn’t see my face. She felt what the Earth feels,

the touch of every creature on Her skin.

Etaa’s second sight made her like a creature of the forest (for all animals know

the will of the Mother), and, solitary like me, she spent much time with only the wild

Vinge, Joan D - SS - Mother and Son.pdf

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: