a bit. A deep melancholy filled my heart, which is a thing that happens to us, but doesn’t happen often. I felt muddled.
She put a hand to my face and I nearly bowed before her luminescence. Her lips brushed mine, her twining arms so powerful I was swept up as if by the wind of an encroaching storm. I shut my eyes and began to hum.
“You smell of hog’s head!” she cried. “The doctor said, no more hog’s head.”
I knew I should have had a sprig of mint after the hog’s head ladling.
“The doctor,” I said, “is a nit.”
“The doctor is the doctor and knows the ways of doctoring. When he tells you no more hog’s head, then no more hog’s head it shall be. And no salt, paprika, cinnamon, mead, oregano, ground chuck, fried pickles, processed veal, four-day-old lumpfish — ”
“How can oregano possibly inflict evil upon my innards?” I asked.
“I am not the doctor and neither are you.”
The human girl child, which already stank, began to stink exponentially. It was doing the thing that humans do too often. The birds in our trees stopped singing. The animals on nearby farms began to buck horns and chase their tails and go into labor.
The child reached for my finger again and brought the tip to its gnawing maw.
“I must bring the swapped child to Livia,” I said. “It’s hungry. I should hurry.”
Harella said nothing, which, so far as my wife was concerned, meant she was saying a thing and saying it loudly.
So loudly that my own tongue was compelled to speak the words. “I fear there will be trouble with Livia.”
“I fear that your fear is a reasonable one,” she said.
“I saw tears this morning.”
“She is more sensitive than most, full of even deeper graces.”
It was the truth, and an overwhelming one at that. There was a painful tug at my heart. I looked my wife in the eye and saw depths and light and sadness that shook me. I asked the question that had to be asked.
“Do you think she will harm the baby?”
Harella said, “She is one of great resolve and implacability.”
This was a cautious way for my wife to explain that yes, indeed, she believed Livia might very well harm the human child she would have to care for now, to raise as her own to become one of us.
“We’ll watch her closely.”
The human girl child began to cry then. I held it up. It reached for my nose and gave it a good squeeze. I smiled and it smiled back. I extended it to Harella for no reason I could understand. I knew she would not want to touch it.
“It’s a bald and beastly thing,” she said, retreating a step.
“It was probably admired by its family and neighbors.”
“They are blind.”
“They know how to love as much as we do.”
“Not quite as much, and without any virtue or purity.”
“With some,” I said.
I carried the child to Livia’s home, down the paths through the heart of our city, along the canals on the River Solitude, under which my Da is buried. She had no husband but was paramour to a married architect who was attempting to decipher a way to build spires beyond the highest spires, which were considered by many to be too high already. He had previously tried to bring his vision to fruition, drilling deep into the earth to pour millions of metric tons of concrete foundations. It caused a minor volcanic eruption that toppled the theology wing of the Grand Museum.
The baby hiccupped and giggled as I walked with her in my arms. I tossed her in the air a few times, and she clapped her small hands. The cool air of night brought out rosy circles on her cheeks that burned in the moonlight.
Livia’s home was out on the bluff, high above the white beaches. Far below, seashells glittered while out in the waves the sirens rose from the deep and crooned to the shipmasters and crewmen passing from port to port. They saw me on the road and sang my name. They walked upon the waves and danced in my honor. Their song grew more powerful. The baby tightened its grip upon me in terror.
In the doorway Livia stood waiting with a mottled face. With her arms wrapped around herself she grasped the fringes of her thistledown robe so firmly that she had shredded the fabric. Her lips curled and stayed in motion, twisting, contorting. Words began and died. I wagered that the architect had not yet left his wife.
She barely glanced at the baby.
“It’s a beastly thing,” she said.
“It is your daughter.”
“It has no grace. It is awkward-footed, it’s bald and toothless and — ”
“All true, but it’s still your daughter now. Time to feed it. Give it milk.”
“It will drain me. It will drink my blood.”
“It will drink your milk, which is what these things do. Feed it. Teach it. Love it.”
“I will never love it.”
“It’s what you must do, Livia. It’s what we all must do, when it is time for us to do what we must do.”
“You talk like a damn fool.”
She took the baby in her arms and gave it her breast, and the human infant gagged for a moment as they all gag on something so sweet, but after a minute settled down. Livia’s eyes burned with hatred. It was astonishing to watch.
“Perhaps it will smother itself upon my breast,” she said.
“Livia — ”
“One hopes. One still has hope.”
She turned away and scurried back into the house with the child, who immediately began to wail. The sirens also cried.
I sat reclined in my library before the fire, thinking of my mother, who had said, “You buried your father
Harella entered with a vase of fresh-cut roses and placed it on the table I had whittled for her from a great redwood as a show of my love before we were married. I was young then and wondered if such talent had abandoned me by now.
She sat in her chair and took my hand in hers. She sensed my dark backward mood. I sensed her sensing and realized there was something else on her mind as well. I kissed her palm and turned fully toward her.
She told me, “The annual fencing trials are tomorrow.”
“Already?” I huffed air. Time is playful when traveling through the wall. It stretches, contracts, curves, the tempo changes. I have met myself twice on the cobblestone roads so far. I didn’t nod or wave. I said nothing, but I peered at myself angrily. I was beautiful, but not as beautiful as I’d always thought before meeting myself twice on the road.
“Don’t go,” she said, “this year. Stay with me.”
“I will look like a coward.”
“You will look like you are above their matters.”
But I wasn’t above their matters. I wasn’t of them, but I wasn’t above them. I never missed the fencing trials. I was the best fencer. I had always been the best fencer. But I’m excluded from the trials because my duty is to sneak beyond the wall. Their argument is that while I am out of sight from the referees, the masters, the other swordsmen, I might be partaking of secret instructions given by savage humans. I argue that no human can fence worth a dead lumpfish, but this argument falls on deaf, though graceful, ears. The human world is a mystery to them, even more than it is a mystery to me.
As such, they fear I have an unfair advantage, and so I am excluded from trials. But not from sparring. I have sparred with them all and beaten them all, probably because they hate me, which causes them to become distracted easily. I have a title where they have none. They have names but no designation, no station. They have jobs where I have duty. They have families where I have lineage. They perpetuate while I save the races.
