“Because it’s the truth. New blood is needed to avoid dissolution from inbreeding. Consanguinity.”
She tucked her chin in. “What’s that?”
“It has to do with chromosomes,” I explained. “Genetic variation, deleterious alleles.”
“What are they?”
“Human words that haven’t been invented yet, but which are still very important.”
“Auh! You and your talk of curved time and parallel futures and meeting yourself on the road. I think you and your Das have done what you have simply because you’ve all been crazy.”
“A handful of my family have been crazy,” I admitted. “But only a handful. A mere pocketful.” I tried once again to make her understand. “Our people are long-lived, but there are few of us.”
“There are too many already, and far more of the humans, and so we tilt the odds and rush toward our own destruction.”
She was right, in her way. We were losing our grace. She was proof of that. So was I. Only someone who was thick with humanity could be called a Cruel Thief of Rosy Infants. It was why I could fence so well. The secret instructions of barbaric humanity were in my blood. My Da had more temperance and dignity than me. And his Da more than him.
“What must I do?” I asked.
Myself leered. Myself continued to gesture obscenely. Myself fled. I took a step after him and stopped. My wife stared at me strangely.
“Go visit Grot,” she said. “The girl’s fate is not her fault. It’s yours. Go explain, if you can. Perhaps it will ease her burden.”
I wasn’t the only naive one. Harella was idealistic and irrational if she thought you could ever explain people’s fate to them. How could I have understood or truly believed the word of my Da before standing in this spot where I now stood, watching myself rush up the road waving his arms in outrage?
I trudged across the city and saw that Livia’s architect had indeed built spiring towers higher than the highest ones that had towered across the city before. What Livia must have thought when looking up at those immense, soaring strongholds.
I scampered down the bluff precipices and over the white sands, on to the caves where colossal black grottos and fissures in the cliff walls beckoned.
“Hello?” I called. “Hello? Is there a Grot in current residence?”
I continued on into the twisting tunnels and cavities. It was far too dark for human eyes to see, but I managed to maneuver well enough down the various shafts, following footprints in the dust. In the distance I saw the flicker of flames.
I called again. “Hello? Greetings?”
“Finally,” a voice like a moan, a breathless groan, echoed from the deep stone interior.
Approaching the light, I found myself in a cavern, more a burrow really, with a ring of stones in the center where a fire burned. Meager belongings sat clustered on the thick stalagmites being used as tabletops. Some clothing, bits of leather, pots. Hanging from the walls were nets, ropes, and spears for fishing.
Many more tunnels connected to this hub, opening farther into the cave system. The ceiling was high with chimneystack channels.
I thought of Livia’s majestic home on the bluff. I heard her clearly in my mind saying how she hoped the baby would smother itself on her breast. My hands clenched and unclenched as if I were holding on to something and trying hard not to let go.
“Grot?” I called.
The unpleasant name meant to hurt the girl also hurt me in saying it. The elders had been nits, witless nits, not to step in and do something at the first signs of the lash and the elbows. I turned and turned again. I spoke the name. The echoes of heavy breathing filled the burrow. I turned some more, looking for myself and perhaps seeking forgiveness for my mistakes.
I turned and Grot was there in all her malignant resilience.
She’d taken on many aspects of my kind. The angle of the chin, the radiant eye, the fiery expression. But none of the beauty. What had once been plain and blunt was now ugly with scars and welts. The nose, bent. The hair, missing in spots, perhaps torn out. The teeth, chipped. Her back, curved. The arms, well muscled but creaky from old fractures.
Livia, Livia, where did your grace go? I wanted to follow her into the sea and drag her up from the depths.
I put my fingers in my mouth and thought, Da, you never told me what to do when something like this happens. Your instructions were incomplete. I remain less than confident in my capacity. My parameters persist in their unquantification.
I took my fingers from my mouth and parted my lips to speak, to introduce myself and tell her about her true parents, to explain, at least to the extent that I knew, exactly who I was and why we were both here. She slid a curved short blade from the back of her skirts and cut a rope tied to a steel piton hammered into the cave wall. A sound like a hunting bird descending fell from high above, and an iron cage dropped directly atop me.
It was good thick metal, forged properly with hate. Spikes pointed at me like open scissors. Dependably harmful measures.
I was trapped again.
“You,” she said. “Cruel Thief. I’ve been waiting for you.”
“Yes.”
“At last you’ve come.”
“I’ve been away.”
She moved to the bars and presented herself with the pride of ugliness. “And what have you come to do? What is it you wish to say to me?”
The questions were too large. They were larger than I could fully carry.
“I don’t really know,” I said.
“Did you wish to tell me about my birth? About my mother? About your duty to exchange the swaplings?”
I nodded. There was little else to do. I flexed my hands and remembered her pinching and gnawing at my index finger, laughing with a laughter no different from Eva’s laughter, which shone upon a gloomy land.
“So tell me,” she demanded.
“I have nothing to tell you.”
“Can you at least say my true name? The name I was born with before you stole me away?”
“I’m not certain I know what it is,” I admitted. “I never heard your parents say it. But perhaps … perhaps it was Eva.”
She mouthed the word, and the tip of a black tongue jutted and flicked itself. “Eva. No, that is not my name. Eva is not my name.”
“Probably not.”
“So tell me why you would hand me over to … my mother.”
“Because you were a swapling. By definition, that is what’s done with swaplings. They are swapped.”
She twined closer so the firelight would blaze across the ruin of her face. She said nothing. I took a breath and turned away in my little cage.
“Occasionally there are,” I said, “unhappy occurrences.”
“Is that all I am, an occurrence?”
“An unhappy one. In the greater design of fate, I suppose.”
It made her smile. It was an ugly smile but a smile nonetheless. I welcomed it.
“Do you know what I’m going to do to you?” she asked. She retrieved a whip from her wall of tools and weapons. She snapped it at my chest, but the bars were too small to allow the lash passage. “I’m going to beat you one thousand eight hundred and sixteen times. That’s how often I was whipped by Livia.”
“You’ll have to lift the cage to do that.”
“I can hurt you.”
“I know.”
“I
