The Physiognomy

After we arrived here, I saw Aria every so often across the fields, working in her own garden. She and the Traveler had settled fairly close to me and raised her boy. His name is Jarek, and sometimes in the afternoon, he ran across the fields and sneaked into my room and talked to me when I was trying to write. Eventually I had to get up and go for a walk with him in the woods or go fishing down by the river.

He asked me all sorts of questions, and I did the same of him. Ea had taught him some of the ancient ways of the Beyond, and already he was well versed in the use of plants and trees to cure illness and induce visions. Ea had told him that I was a man of great learning, but I felt the most I could offer him was my silent reassurance that he was a remarkable fellow. Though my paper supply—which I purchased from the Minister of the Treasury's wife in exchange for my old top coat— was quickly dwindling, the boy and I used it for drawing pictures of the frogs and rabbits and other denizens of the field.

Aria had nothing to do with me. I saw her passing on the path, and I said hello, but her veil did not so much as stir. It was a great effort for me to prevent these moments from crippling the pleasure of my new life, but how, in good conscience, could I have expected more? Ea stopped and chatted sometimes, and I quizzed him about paradise. He laughed and told me about the time before his long sleep. His stories about the Beyond were always designed to show me that the real Wenau was, itself, less than perfect.

One day I asked him, 'Is there really a paradise on earth?'

'Oh, yes,' he said.

'Where is it?' I asked. 'What is it like?'

He rested his bow against the ground and put his hand on my shoulder. 'We are journeying toward it,' he said. 'It is everything you thought it would be.'

From then on, when I saw him across the field, he called to me, 'We are close, Cley. We are almost there.' That went on for years and finally became our joke. Many a morning, I came out onto the steps of my home and found an animal for cooking or an armload of fruit freshly gathered from the fields, and I knew he had been there.

Then one night, very late, about three years ago, the boy came to my house. It was raining and there was thunder and lightning. He pounded on my door and called, 'Cley, Cley.'

When I answered the door, he was standing there drenched. He looked scared and was shaking.

'What is it?' I asked.

'My father is away hunting, and the baby wants to come out,' he said. 'Mother is calling for help.'

We raced across the field. Inside their cottage, I found Aria lying in bed, writhing in pain. I still remembered my physiology and my anatomy from my days as a professional man. Childbirth was one of the things we studied at the academy, since it was at this point it was believed that your physiognomy was formed.

I threw the covers off Aria and looked down to see a tiny foot sticking out from between her legs. 'Get me a knife,' I told the boy. He brought me one immediately, one of his father's stone ones. The thing was as sharp as one of my scalpels. Holding the implement in my hand, knowing what I intended to do, filled me with great doubt. I had never believed in religion, but in that moment I truly prayed that I would not butcher her again.

She must have come around just then as I stood there holding the weapon, and she began to scream. The green veil was moving like a curtain in a windstorm. I told the boy to hold her arms down, and though he looked warily at me, he trusted me and did what I said. I walked over and shoved the blade of the knife into the fire and let it heat up for a second or two to sterilize it. As soon as it was somewhat cool, I made the incision across her stomach. From that opening, I was able to retrieve the infant—a dark-skinned girl with her father's beauty and her mother's disposition. I had to use catgut Ea had made from one of the animals he had taken to sew Aria back up.

I tell you_y it was the most useful I had ever felt in my life, as if with all of the harrowing adventures I had been through, all the pain and misery I had survived, I had finally come to the moment that defined my reason for ever having been born at all. That child was called Cyn, a name her father had come up with. She was a special child, for after having given birth to her, Aria's face slowly, miraculously, began to change. By the next year, all of those mutilations I had inflicted on her had disappeared, and she no longer needed the veil to protect others. Still, she said nothing to me. When we met at the outdoor market by the river, she simply lowered her gaze and passed by.

Ea, on the other hand, often visited me with Jarek and Cyn. He let me hold the baby, and there were times when he smiled that caused me to wonder if he had not gone hunting that particular night for a reason. Whenever this notion cropped up, I quickly dismissed it as a dangerous delusion. It was during one of these visits that he told me they were leaving the next day to travel into the Beyond.

The news made me weak, and I had to hand his daughter back to him before sitting down. 'Why?' was all I could say.

'We will return,' he said 'but it is necessary that I explain myself to my people.'

'But you're a criminal there,' I said. 'You said so yourself.'

He nodded and reached down to place his hand on my shoulder. 'Things have to change, Cley,' was the last thing he said to me before leaving and heading out across the field. I watched them through the open doorway with tears in my eyes. Before they were out of sight, the boy turned and waved good-bye to me.

That afternoon and evening I spent trying to alleviate the loneliness I felt by finishing off the two bottles of Rose Ear Sweet I had bartered for years back when we had first settled by the crisscrossing rivers. They did their job, and I passed out somewhere late in the night.

My troubled dreams eventually took me back to the ice floe, where I, instead of Beaton, kneeled on the frozen surface next to a dying Moissac. His branch of a hand wrapped weakly around my wrist as the wind howled, stinging my face. Through his touch, he told me to cut his chest and take the seed from it. A knife appeared in my hand. After the life left his eyes, I hacked away at the thick foliage above where his heart would have been. When I had broken a sufficient opening in him, I cried out above the fury of the storm and plunged my hand into the hedge . . . only to come fully awake in that instant to the vague echo of a door having been shut. Sunlight was shining in through the one window of my home, and I could hear the birds singing. I sat upright on my bed and brought my clenched fist into view. The nightmare had been so intense, it took great concentration to pry open my fingers, but when I did, I found within, the green veil, gathered up like a dream seed on my palm.