Calamity's Child Read Online Free PDF Page B

told her, of spaceports, and
shops, and healers, and traffic, and sometime before the gray
uncertain dawn wavered into being, she fell asleep. He held her
then, silent, his thoughts still on the city, his kin, the sky he
would never see again...
    *
    Arika gained weight as they traveled
into the light, until he was forced to believe what he had not
thought possible. And one night, as they sat companionably at the
fire; he mending a frayed rope, she mending a broken basket, he
asked a question.
    "I wonder," he said, watching her face
out of the sides of his eyes. "Will the tent soon welcome a
child?"
    Her hands froze, and she raised her
head to stare at him across the fire.
    "Perhaps," she said haughtily. Arika
was always haughty in fear.
    He preserved his pretense of oblivious
industry. "A child in the tent would be -- a joy," he said. "But
the hunter should be informed, if he will soon need to hunt for
more."
    She looked away, throat working. "As
to that -- it is not certain. The women of my tent ...do not
always... birth well."
    Her sister, he remembered, whose baby
had been born dead -- and who had herself died of the birth. He
plaited his rope in silence for a few heartbeats, then asked,
quietly, "Is it the Finder blood that puts the babes at
risk?"
    She swallowed. "The grandmothers
believe so. They call it a ‘gift', but it eats us up, even those it
allows to be born."
    "It does not have to be," he said,
carefully. "My mother, my brother, my sister -- all are gifted as
you are, with an extra pair of eyes, that see what others cannot."
He raised his head and met her stare across the fire.
    "You have the blood," she said, with
certainty.
    "I do. My mother bore three healthy
children; my sister and my brother, who have extra eyes; myself,
who has but two. So..." Here was the dangerous ground, for hunters
knew nothing of such matters. "So, Arika, my wife, if the child in
your belly is one that we made together, it may be that my
...blood... will lend her strength enough to be born -- and to
thrive."
    "It may be," she said quietly, and
sighed, putting her basket aside. "Slade. How do you know these
things?"
    He opened his eyes wide and made a
show of innocence. "Things?"
    "That without a hunter, there is no
child. How does a hunter put a child in a belly, Slade?"
    Well, he had botched it. He sighed,
then smiled at her. "Why, when we enjoy each other, and you take me
into yourself..."
    "Enough." She sighed in
her turn. "These things are
erifu
."
    "Among the Sanilithe, they
are
erifu,
" he allowed. "In my mother's tent, these things are common
knowledge, shared among sisters and brothers."
    She closed her eyes. "You make me
tremble," she murmured, and looked at him once more. "But I see the
fire has not leapt up to consume you, so it must be that the
spirits of your grandmothers allow you this knowledge." She bent
her head. "The child who -- will -- come to us is a child of my
blood -- and yours." She smiled, very slightly. "May your blood
make her strong."
    *
    Arika waned as the child waxed. Slade
held her at night and tried to will his strength into her, for she,
his precious, for whom he hunted, did not have his blood to make
her strong. Lying awake in the dark, he made plans to dose her from
his dwindling supply of supplements; plans which he abandoned as
morning overtook him. His Arika was a child of this world, and even
as her world was slowly poisoning him, so his needed vitamins might
very well poison her.
    He did insist that she refrain from
gathering, and when she protested, told her that he would gather.
Gineah had taught him something of plant lore. This was true
enough, though not as she heard it. Gineah had shown him the fruits
of her labors in the evenings when they both had returned to the
tent, laying out and naming those things she had
gathered.
    "I will bring everything to you, and
you will decide if it is good," he told Arika. "But you will not go
out alone, soft on your feet as you are! You put our