What they saw, rubbing the caul and blood off the skin—was it just a trick of the light? After all, following the storm the grass did seem to throb with its own color, the roses zinged and hovered with crazy glory on their stems. But even with these effects of light and atmosphere, the midwives couldn’t deny what they saw. Beneath the spit of the mother’s fluids the infant glistened a scandalous shade of pale emerald.
There was no wail, no bark of newborn outrage. The child opened its mouth, breathed, and then kept its own counsel. “Whine, you fiend,” said the crone, “it’s your first job.” The baby shirked its obligations.
“Another willful boy,” said the fishwife, sighing. “Shall we kill it?”
“Don’t be so nasty to it,” said the crone, “it’s a girl.”
“Hah,” said the bleary-eyed maiden, “look again, there’s the weather vane.”
For a minute they were in disagreement, even with the child naked before them. Only after a second and third rub was it clear that the child was indeed feminine. Perhaps in labor some bit of organic effluvia had become caught and quickly dried in the cloven place. Once toweled, she was observed to be prettily formed, with a long elegant head, forearms nicely turned out, clever pinching little buttocks, cunning fingers with scratchy little nails.
And an undeniable green cast to the skin. There was a salmon blush in the cheeks and belly, a beige effect around the clenched eyelids, a tawny stripe on the scalp showing the pattern of eventual hair. But the primary effect was vegetable.
“Look what we get for our troubles,” said the maiden. “A little green pat of butter. Why don’t we kill it? You know what people will say.”
“I think it’s rotten,” said the fishwife, and checked for the root of a tail, counted fingers and toes. “It smells like dung.”
“That is dung you’re smelling, you idiot. You’re squatting in a cow pattypie.”
“It’s sick, it’s feeble, that’s why the color. Lose it in the puddle, drown the thing. She’ll never know. She’ll be out for hours in her ladylike faints.”
They giggled. They cradled the infant in the crook of their arms, passing it around to test it for weight and balance. To kill it was the kindest course of action. The question was how.
Then the child yawned, and the fishwife absentmindedly gave it a finger to nurse on, and the child bit the finger off at the second knuckle. It almost choked on the gush of blood. The digit dropped out of its mouth into the mud like a bobbin. The women catapulted into action. The fishwife lunged to strangle the girl, and the crone and the maiden flared up in defense. The finger was dug out of the mire and shoved in an apron pocket, possibly to sew back onto the hand that had lost it. “It’s a cock, she just realized she didn’t have one,” screeched the maiden, and fell on the ground laughing. “Oh, beware the stupid boy first tries to please himself with her! She’ll snip his young sprout off for a souvenir!”
The midwives crawled back into the clock and dropped the thing at its mother’s breast, afraid to consider mercy murder for fear of what else the baby might bite. “Maybe she’ll chop the tit next, that’ll bring Her Drowsy Frailness around quick enough,” the crone chuckled. “Though what a child, that sips blood even before its first suck of mother’s milk!” They left a pipkin of water nearby, and under cover of the next squall they went squelching away, to find their sons and husbands and brothers, and berate and beat them if they were available, or bury them if not.
In the shadows, the infant stared overhead at the oiled and regular teeth of time’s clock.
Maladies and Remedies
For days Melena couldn’t bear to look at the thing. She held it, as a mother must. She waited for the groundwater of maternal affection to rise and overwhelm her. She did not weep. She chewed pinlobble leaves, to float away from the disaster.
It was a she. It was a her. Melena practiced conversions in her thinking when she was alone. The twitching, unhappy bundle was not male; it was not neutered; it was a female. It slept, looking like a heap of cabbage leaves washed and left to drain on the table.
In a panic, Melena wrote to Colwen Grounds to drag Nanny from her retirement. Frex went ahead in a carriage to collect Nanny from the way station at Stonespar End. On the trip back, Nanny asked Frex what was wrong.
“What is wrong.” He sighed, and was lost in thought. Nanny realized she had chosen her words poorly; now Frex was distracted. He began to mumble in a general way about the nature of evil. A vacuum set up by the inexplicable absence of the Unnamed God, and into which spiritual poison must rush. A vortex.
“I mean what is the state of the child!” retorted Nanny explosively. “It’s not the universe but a single child I need to hear about, if I’m going to be any help! Why does Melena call for me instead of for her mother? Why is there no letter for her grandfather? He’s the Eminent Thropp, for goodness sakes! Melena can’t have forgotten her duties so thoroughly, or is life out there in the country worse than we thought?”
“It’s worse than we thought,” said Frex grimly. “The baby—you had better be prepared, Nanny, so you don’t scream—the baby is damaged.”
“Damaged?” Nanny’s grip on her valise tightened and she looked out over the red-leafed pearlfruit trees by the side of the road. “Frex, tell me everything.”
“It’s a girl,” said Frex.
“Damage indeed,” said Nanny mockingly, but Frex as usual missed the dig. “Well, at least the family title’s preserved for another generation. Has she got all her limbs?”
“Yes.”
“Any more than she needs?”
“No.”
“Is she sucking?”
“We can’t let it. It has extraordinary teeth, Nanny. It has shark’s teeth, or something like.”
