I returned to the house where I had swapped away Livia’s child. I climbed down the chimney and peered about the place, moving through room after empty room. There was no activity. In the bedchambers, no snarls or mewls or murder or love-making, no action. In the den, no practicing of the tuba. On the fire, no stew.
Out the front door I skirted and moved about the stables. In the pigpen, the hogs rolled about happily in the mud. Sadly, they all had their heads. My stomach tumbled. Again I wondered, how could oregano possibly be a malfeasance upon one’s innards?
A well-trod path led into the woods. I followed for a quarter mile until I heard laughter and music. The pan pipes, the piccolo, the drumming, the triangle. I hid in the brush and looked upon a clearing full of revelers.
Several farming families shared food and wine and played and danced together. It seemed to be one of those farmer celebrations. They were always feasting and frolicking for some agrarian reason or another. A bountiful harvest or the end of a drought or the girth of the maypole. There was always something to excite and extol.
Liva’s child of light stood out among them, breathtaking, exquisite, lithesome, and diaphanous amidst the craggy faces and plodding feet of human neighbors.
She was now a nearly grown woman. Time had become mischievous again, and had stretched and sped while I’d been home buckled in my buckles. I guessed seventeen years had unfurled and whirled past. She was blithe with laughter, which bubbled from her and buoyed the mood of the world.
I heard her parents calling to her. Her name was Eva.
Young men lined up for a chance to cavort with her. The music rolled on, the bards and minstrels singing songs named for her. She jigged and jagged and swung in the heavy arms of the farmer men, who whispered in her ear. One proposal after another, no doubt. She held them tightly and planted kisses on their hairy faces, and it was enough for them for the time being, for a while. Eventually she would choose one of them, and the rest would love her from afar and watch while she raised a passel of golden children who would blaze like sunlight.
This world needed her. This world full of hangings. This world could use all the happiness and fairness it could possibly wrangle. They needed our blood as much as we needed theirs.
It was wrong to think I could change the course of my duty. Or steal back a girl who was obviously so happy here. You can’t unswap.
I turned to go, and Eva sang a note that only my ears could hear. It was directed at me, I realized. I could hide from the humans but not from her. She called to me, to feast and prance with her.
Sometimes our kind forgot they were not human and went on to lead the average lives they must lead. But Eva clearly had not forgotten. She recognized me from when she was a baby.
Despite Livia’s pain, it wasn’t fair that I ask Eva to return beyond the wall and give up her parents and siblings and inamoratos. I had known better than to come here again. It wasn’t the way to fulfill my obligations. Livia would have to learn to accept her human child. She would have to do as she must do. She would have to love as humanity loved. If not, then I supposed Harella and I could raise the swapling.
How much more just could justice be than for me to be Da to a blunt awkward-footed common beastly girl?
For the return trip I had to journey to the human town of Limwelt, where another hanging was occurring in another square. This time there were five women and two goats being hanged. The women were all quite beautiful by human standards, still wearing corsets and flimsy short skirts that showed ample amounts of muscular leg. I moved among the crowd, watching eager faces as the charges were read.
Apparently the women were being executed for entrenching many impure thoughts into the minds of several pubescent boys. The crowd jeered and shook fists. The two goats appeared complacent and content with chewing their last mouthfuls of curd. Then the goats’ crimes were read off. They were very similar to the women’s crimes. I turned and met the eye of a goat and its grace met my grace. I lifted my hand in farewell. The goat chewed. I spun toward a wall of miscreant, drunken revelers crying for death. The hangman pulled a lever and the crowd gasped in shock and joy, and I was beyond the wall and home again.
Harella was in the garden, fiery and glowing with sweat streaming upon her lovely face. I spread my arms to hug my wife and she barked, “Where’s the child? What took you so long? Where’s Livia’s girl?”
“I couldn’t steal her away,” I admitted.
“What?”
“She was too happy. She’s a child of light in a grossly dark world.”
Harella said nothing, and the volume of the nothing rang in my ears until I had to raise my palms and press them to the sides of my head to drown out the silence.
“What’s happened?” I asked.
“She never took to the human child. She … was abusive.”
“Abusive?”
“Yes. With the lash.”
“The lash?”
“And her elbows. And sometimes her feet, I suspect.”
“Elbows? And — ”
“Stop repeating what it is I tell you.”
I swallowed. My hands were fists. My fists were red.
“We … we are not abusive to children,” I said, “not even swapling children, no matter how upset it might make us when we do the thing we must do.”
“You sound so naive, my love.” She looked at me with eyes that were full of sorrow. A sadness not for abused rosy infants, but for the cruel thieves of such.
“I must see the human girl,” I said. “I must visit them. Has she named it yet?”
“Of course. Its name is Grot.”
“Grot?” The word was sour on the tongue. “That’s quite unpleasant.”
“Exactly the purpose of such a name. Livia called the girl that as a curse. And it’s what she is. Cursed. She lives alone in the caves down by the beach.”
“But — ”
“She’s seventeen. History has a memory here, too. Don’t you know how long it is you’ve been gone? Aren’t you aware?”
I wasn’t. This was the first occurrence of time becoming merry with me on this side of the wall. I wondered whether if I looked around too quickly I would see myself glaring and performing evil gestures in my direction.
“The caves?” I repeated. It seemed I could not quit this repetition. My whole life was comprised of recurrence now, like an echo of an echo. Doing the same thing over and again in order to somehow undo it. “Our people allow her to live alone in the caves?”
“They want her there. If she didn’t live there by choice, the elders might have forced her there.”
“That’s not the thing — ”
“Stop saying that!”
“Where is Livia?”
“She’s left. She’s gone. No one knows where. Personally I suspect she has become a siren. It seems to fit with her character, all the crying and lying about on sandbars. All the remoteness, the standing and looking indifferent in the shallows. When the architect goes on journeys to other lands to study foreign buildings, she can swim alongside his vessel and sing to him.”
The grief in her eyes, the heartache for me, was almost more than I could bear. I turned away and saw myself glaring at me. There I was. Myself raised his fist. Myself shook it at me. Myself made stabbing motions as if he wanted to gut me.
I knew of human mothers who brutalized the swapling children in the desperate hope that their own offspring would be returned, but I had never heard of one of our people ever harming a human charge. There was a reason Livia hated humanity. Her great-grandmother had been swapped by my great-Da. Livia had human blood in her, and fell back into savage ways.
“It had to be done,” I said weakly. My wife was right. I was naive. I repeated old sentences, commands, and biddings too often. Strange and morbid happenings.
Harella hissed. “And so we defile and thin our blood to save them.”
“We thicken our blood. It’s not just for them. It’s for us as well. It’s a necessity.”
“So the elders say. So you say.”
