Offspring (9 page)

There were guns, too, in the pile—shotguns, rifles, pistols. They had long ago run out of bullets and shells. They kept them anyway.

She watched his hard body move in the rich glow of the fire.

In First Stolen she had chosen well.

She had seen his ghost immediately
.

His ghost was strong.

The kitten was on a string. The boy would drag the string into the pounding surf until the kitten screamed and tumbled over itself in the waves and then he would allow the string some slack, let the kitten return to the shoreline for a moment, then repeat the process until the kitten’s eyes were dazed and it no longer cared to scream. The boy did not laugh, did not seem to enjoy the game. Only watched
.

Night had only just fallen and he was playing alone by the shoreline
.

At her approach he looked up and she knew he was upset to be caught with the kitten that way
.

He started to talk. Like all of them he talked too much. Trying to distract her from what he was doing with the kitten.
Asking her questions. What was her name. Where did she come from. Saying that he was staying with his parents on the big house on the hill, pointing to it, saying he hated the house and hated his parents, saying to her defiantly that the kitten was his to do with as he liked
.

She smiled. She picked up the kitten and walked into the water and held it under
.

It had scratched her only a little
.

That was eleven years ago, only months after the Night of First Tears, and the wound in her side was still draining despite the poultice she had made from the raw linings of eggshells and her diet of stolen moldy bread.

The boy was curious about the wound and asked her questions as they walked along the shoreline.

She knew she would have to teach him not to talk so much and not to ask questions. It would not be hard. At fifteen summers, she was his elder by four summers and despite the wound she was stronger than he was and knew that she would always be stronger.

She watched him now select the largest ax and set it aside for himself against the wall of the cave, then return to the pile and tuck a claw hammer into his frayed belt. The hammer and ax were always his weapons of choice.

He was naked to the waist. His man’s body had formed strongly. She looked at his body. She remembered teaching him.

At twelve summers he was a father. She had borne his first child, the Girl, on a bed of seaweed at the shoreline. It was night and the moon was full just as it was tonight
.

The Woman still was teaching him.

She ran the flat of the sharp blade over her naked breasts, down across her thighs, and between her legs as she thought of him.

The Girl, their daughter, sat beside him in front of the fire, picking lice from the heads of the twin males who had been born the summer after her. She flicked the lice into the fire.

The lice sizzled, threw thin wisps of smoke.

A ring of clear faceted stone that sparkled in the firelight dangled from a cord around the Girl’s neck. A necklace of bones hung lower. There were egret, owl, and gull’s feathers tied into her long dark hair.

More than any of them the Girl cared for adornment.

The Girl wore breasts, the skin stretched low and tight and tied around her middle. The breasts had been taken many years ago. They were deep yellow in color and cracked in many places, particularly across the left nipple where the skin had nearly worn through. But the Girl had no breasts of her own yet. She wore them proudly.

She frowned, fussing over the lice in the twin males’ hair. The males ignored her, concentrating instead on the greasy bones that were all that remained of last night’s feast.

Their only other child together, the Boy, a male of six summers, played with the Cow deep in the shadows of the cave, tormenting the Cow with a rusted fireplace poker, jabbing it in the ribs. The Cow bucked and strained against its chains.

The Boy was able to see out of his right eye only and held his head at an angle. His left eye had been
clouded by a hornet’s sting shortly after the Woman bore him and it had never become clear again.

The Boy had been tormenting the Cow for some time now. The Boy was stronger than he thought himself to be. The Cow would be bruised all along its rib cage tomorrow. It bellowed.

It was not unusual for the Boy to play with the Cow in this manner but Second Stolen had perhaps grown tired of hearing it bellow for a while because she walked to the boy and took his poker and whacked him with it once across the bottom. The Boy looked up at her resentfully but did not cry . . . though now he too would have a bruise tomorrow.

He ran to Eartheater and soon they were playing on the floor of the cave, tossing the sun-bleached bones of a rat in some game they had invented together and which none of the others but the Boy, Eartheater and Rabbit had ever understood.

The Woman did not mind that Second Stolen had disciplined the Boy. The fact that he was her son and not Second Stolen’s made no difference to her. To her they all were the same. Her children by First Stolen were the same to her as Rabbit, her son of seven summers by the Cow. And Rabbit was the same as Eartheater—so called because she would eat anything, even handfuls of earth when she was hungry—the daughter of the union between First and Second Stolen. And Eartheater was the same to her as Second Stolen’s infant daughter by the Cow, sleeping now in the browse bed made of pine boughs by the fire.

There was no disgrace in having been fathered by the Cow. That was what the Cow was for.

As Second Stolen was using him now.

The Woman smiled. Clearly it had not been the Cow’s bellowing that made Second Stolen chase the Boy away—but this.

The Woman had no concept of beauty
.

She herself was not beautiful. Not unless power was beauty, because she was powerful, over six feet tall, with long arms and legs, almost simian in their lean strength. But her wide gray eyes were empty when they were not watchful and she was pale from lack of light, filthy as they all were filthy, parasite and insect bitten and smelling of blood like a vulture. A wide smooth scar ran from just below her full right breast to just above her hip where eleven years ago one of the shotgun blasts had peeled her flesh away. Over her left eye and extending an inch beyond her ear, a second blast had left another scar. Neither her eyebrow nor her hair from forehead to the back of her ear had ever grown in again
.

She looked as though struck by lightning
.

The Woman was not beautiful, and had no concept of beauty. But she recognized a certain delicacy in Second Stolen. A mastery of the Cow that was almost beauty and to her as pleasing
.

She watched the familiar ritual.

The Cow whimpered as Second Stolen approached—as he had whimpered nearly every day of the eight full summers they had used him.

Whether the Cow whimpered in anticipation of pain or pleasure the Woman had never known and did not care.

Second Stolen had just bathed. It was the first she had bathed in a very long time, but it was necessary. Both she and the Cow were naked. The Cow was always naked.

His breath was coming faster, his chest heaving.

She watched Second Stolen grip the slack flesh of his belly and twist it for her pleasure, and then reach down.

Second Stolen milked the Cow.

The Cow began to rise.

The Cow was much older than the Woman, yet he could be counted upon to rise quickly—even more quickly than First Stolen, who sometimes allowed himself to become distracted from their need of him. But the Cow had no mind and no distractions. As though the milking were necessary to him.

She watched Second Stolen wrap her legs around his back, grasp his shoulders and trap him inside her.

In a matter of moments she shuddered. They were finished.

It was good, thought the Woman, that she had taken the moment to use the Cow. Second Stolen’s part would be hard tonight. There was pain in it. And Second Stolen had already had pain. She had taken it upon herself when she had failed to find the children the night before and then received it again from the Woman and First Stolen, when they knew what the children had done.

Not even the spoils of the hunt could allow her to forgive what the children had done. Each had received a beating. Second Stolen’s most severe because at seventeen summers she was the eldest and had failed to find and stop them.

The infant’s ghost haunted her. Even now
.

The children had been impatient for her to know them as hunters on their own. The Woman knew how dangerous that was. It had been the reason for her family’s destruction eleven summers ago. And somehow last night she had felt another disaster moving toward them through the clouds, that the children were not just chasing down a rabbit or running after land crabs in the moonlight but were involved in another kind of hunt entirely. A hunt fraught with peril.

She sheathed her knife. She glanced at the still white bag isolated in the far corner of the cave opposite the Cow and felt a sudden chill.

In a sense it had been her fault. She had spoken to them far too often for far too many days and nights about the other child—the one on the hill—and of the power in the blood of children. It had made them impatient. She knew that now.

So they had taken this other child and the mother and the girl.

They had not meant to, but they had done so in the worst possible way.

The child had died
inside
the bag. Because it could not breathe.

No blood had been spilled.

No blood
released
.

And it was release that held the power. To release the blood was to release the ghost and the power of the ghost. And though the body might struggle, the ghost was always thankful for it
.

While this ghost lay in a bag filled only with the body of
a child and the child’s shit and urine. Angry, trapped inside its body
.

The ghost was a danger to them now.

A ghost so young it had barely lived. It would be filled with resentment toward them, filled to bursting.

There was no appeasement possible. The harm was accomplished. It could only be thrust out to sea now, to drift far away from them on the tides.

They would go north again after tonight. The tide would draw the body south.

And tonight they would take power from the other infant. For their journey. To strengthen the Woman and her family.

And tomorrow night they would leave here.

The cave was good, but caves were many.

It was time.

She gestured to First Stolen. He came forward and stood beside her. The others stopped what they were doing and watched, knowing and expectant. Only Rabbit smiled. But then Rabbit was a fool whose brains had formed no more properly than his brown-pitted teeth.

Rabbit was always smiling.

His ruined teeth made her irritable. She preferred the ones the Girl had fashioned for each of the children, strange and ugly as they were, thin and multicolored, to Rabbit’s real ones.

The Woman gestured to Second Stolen and she came forward too, and stood between them. She turned so that she presented her back to them and raised her arms above her head.

Her back, buttocks and thighs were dark with crusted blood and some of the wounds had opened since bathing.

“No,” said the Woman. This was not punishment, this was the hunt. It made other demands upon Second Stolen, and though they were alike they were not the same. And Second Stolen knew this. But because the demands of the hunt were more painful, she had been reluctant to face them.

She turned and faced them now.

She raised her arms again, while the Woman and First Stolen each took thin birch switches off the floor of the cave.

She did not cry out as the switches slashed across her belly, thighs, neck and shoulders—even across her face, though they were careful not to harm the eyes and ears, and careful too of the nipples of her breasts for the sake of the suckling baby. Nor did she try to move away. Yet the Woman saw her pain. It was good to give pain and good to receive pain because that was what life was, and Second Stolen knew the reason for this pain and that it was a good thing, that it had to be.

The children watched, learning.

The Cow rattled his chains.

When it was finished all three were sweating in the humid heat of the cave and Second Stolen stood before them washed with blood as though they had painted her body with the juices of berries—except that the wounds were visible too as was necessary and their switches dripped with blood.

They needed only their weapons now.

She slipped into the torn checkered shirt they had taken from the fisherman long ago; the one she had beheaded with a single perfect stroke of the ax to show First Stolen how well and swiftly it should be done. The fisherman’s knife she wore sheathed in her belt.

The children rose and walked to the pile and in moments they were ready.

They walked the beach. Beneath their feet the sand gleamed in the moonlight, studded with stones.

The Woman knew this place.

Not far from them lay the cave where they had lived on the Night of First Tears.

Across the channel, invisible in the dark, was the island where she was born.

She remembered it dimly. She remembered that they had hidden for many days, had finally been driven away by men with guns searching for those other men they had taken for the hunt. The Woman had not known about guns then, though her elders understood the threat and had fled to the mainland.

She remembered that fish were abundant on the island, and birds, and that while true feasts occurred only rarely, the hunting was always safe.

Now that she was elder and leader of her family,
the hunting was never safe. Guns were everywhere. Planning was necessary, and caution.