3 - The delicate bones of a cold-slain infant

My earliest memory is my mother’s fire. A pair of square orange eyes with gold edges I would see, or a monster with stickles in his spine made of fire-jewels – then the poker in Mama’s great hand destroying all in a hail of sparks, and creating new.

My floor, warm sheep-fur that tickled my skin; my roof, the creaking base of her wicker chair; my door, her legs. The dogs would shove their noses at me until I took them in under my arms. A thread of yarn stretched from the ball to above, twitching now and then; she’d be crocheting socks or a marya or a crib-blanket for the next sib coming, still in her womb. My blanket was blue and green, the colours of Yeola-e; of course she’d made me a marya in the Vae Arahi pattern, with the single and double stitches interlacing and reflecting each other to a child’s eyes running over them, to mean balance and transaction. I’d wear it all my life, from now when the fringe dragged on the floor until I was a man and it fell just to my waist.

“Do you remember your father and me tossing you back and forth?” my mother once asked me. “Of course I do!” I answered. “It was like flying.” The swoop upwards, the rush of air on my naked skin, the moment of weightlessness, the firm warmth of huge hands full of love catching me; you can never forget such a thing. I was about six when they told me I was too big for it any more, and I wept bitterly.

I was four, and she was big with child, but reading instead of crocheting. Irritated, since reading made her oblivious to me, I twirled a lit twig to make light-trails in the air. “Fourth Chevenga, you’re not allowed to do that and you know why, yet you’re doing it,” she said. “Why?”

“Why aren’t you making a blanket for the baby coming?” I asked.

Instead of upbraiding me for answering a question with a question, as she should have, she said, “I’m doing something else for the baby coming.”

I had always been taught strictly never to lie, punished far worse for denying I had done wrong than for doing it, so this was a shock. I’d never imagined she could. “Mama…” How to put this? Politely, was all I could think of. “If you please, may I know why you’re lying?”

My mother is quiet by nature, but not from timidity. She is a warrior who fought with distinction beside my father in the wars against Tor Ench, before she went asa kraiya to have children—not one whose eyes went wide or whose cheeks reddened easily. Her eyes were so much like mine that I could very easily become her in my mind, as I did now, my chin and nose adult and female, black love-locks brushing my face, the heat of tears in my eyes just enough to shimmer like faint sun on the edge of a cloud. My question forgotten, I wanted to fling my arms around her and say “There there” as she did me when I cried; I’d never seen her cry in my life.

“I owe you truth, my child,” she said finally, a tear trickling down her cheek. “But I can give you only very little—only that there is a reason I am not making a blanket for the baby coming, but you are too young to know it. I’m sorry, Chevenga; will you forgive me?”

I wrapped my arms around her neck and kissed her in answer, and never mentioned it again.

She gave birth without trouble, but the baby died in the stream. They gave him his rites in the hearth, after the rest of us were supposed to be in bed, but I crept in silently, and with their eyes fixed on the fire, none of my four parents caught me. I saw the flames curling around his body, turning it black, heard his tiny delicate fingers crackling. I fled back to bed and wept my pillow soaking, then dreamed. Such dreams always slip out of my mind when I try to understand them, like a faint star that one cannot see looking straight on, only a little off to the side.

But when I thought about it, I understood it all. She had foreknown his death and that he’d never need a crib-blanket, but had wanted to spare the rest of us the pain of knowing in advance. This didn’t seem out of the way to me.