Outside the skin tent, Rak sat by a blazing fire, eating boiled meat the other women had prepared for him. On the opposite side of the fire, Benu’s hunters shared his vigil. All were dressed for hunting; all looked toward the new father. He gripped his best bone-headed spear, its butt grounded against the frozen earth. His deep voice obscured the crackling of the fire, carrying his proud complaints through the leather walls of the tent. ‘No doubt that useless woman of mine has birthed a puny, whimpering babe no bigger than a squirrel. Such is my luck. She is too young and foolish to bear a child.’
‘Foolish man!’ chided one of the passing women daringly. Her voice carried clearly through the cold night, meant to be overheard by all. ‘Your firstborn is so large a child, doubtless your wife will have all she can do to pack him about and tend him, let alone see to your needs!’ The laughter of the other women of Benu’s band swept the night.
‘He will fill her arms and bend her back,’ crowed another.
‘To sew a shirt for such a babe will be the work of a day and a night, while you, poor man, will go naked in the wind, and spend every moment hunting meat enough to fill him!’
‘Bold ones!’ chided one of the men. ‘Dare you speak to a man so? Get back to your own fire!’
But the shouts of laughter that greeted her daring compliment belied the rebuking words. Such tribute made the young father flush even darker with pride. Meanwhile the rejoicing women were cooking delicacies for him, fresh tender tongues and fat ribs simmering in their own rich broth. The tempting odors penetrated the tent, making Tillu aware of her own hunger. She did not need to peer out to know what went on. The young man basked in the honor due one whose wife had just increased the strength of the hunting band. The men of Benu’s folk paid their silent respects with the items they dropped unmentioned at the young father’s feet. Sinews for bowstrings and bone arrowheads; fit gifts for a firstborn son. Had it been a daughter, it would have been the women who would have casually ‘lost’ bone needles and hide scrapers beside the mother’s pallet. Such gifts were never mentioned by giver or receiver but were quietly set aside and cherished until the child was of an age to use them. Any birth was a cause for celebration, but tonight the small band of hunters rejoiced as if this were the first babe ever born. After their losses this summer, they needed the comfort of new life, even a babe born this close to the fangs of winter.
She glanced about the tidied tent and poked at the wick of the stone lamp to shrink its flame. Her duties were done here. Tillu scratched away a flake of dried blood on her wrist, thinking. The other women of Benu’s folk had already borne away the afterbirth, to set it out on an altar of five stacked stones. Tomorrow, Carp would study the signs of the animals that had visited it during the night, and then would announce the child’s guardian spirit. Tomorrow would be Carp’s day, to shake his rattles of leather and bone and speak in strange voices. Tomorrow Carp would be very busy, receiving the honor due him as a shaman. All the folk would be caught up in celebrating the birth of a new hunter. Tonight would be a good night to leave.
The decision surprised her. She tried to reconsider it as she lifted the tent flap and peered out into the night. The world balanced on the knife edge between autumn and winter. Only a fool would leave the safety of a tribe at this time of year. The tiny tent village around her was as much civilization as this part of the world knew. Beyond the temporary bounds of this hastily pitched camp was the forest. She knew the forest was not eternal; a lifetime away, to the south and east she thought, was a land of farmers and cultivated fields, of riders of horses and reapers of grain. It was the land of her childhood. But this was the reality of her adulthood: this northern forest, and the small bands of semi-civilized people who inhabited it. From group to group she had wandered; this was the farthest north she had ever been, and Benu’s folk the poorest of any she had lived with. Of bones and stones, hides and meat were their lives wrought. She pulled her wolf hood up and forward to shelter her face from the early winds of winter as she left the humid warmth of the skin tent.
The blazing light of the fire against the stark blackness of the night blinded her. The men had built it high, fueling it with branches both green and dry, and sometimes splashing precious oil on it to make the flames roar wildly. The dancing flames cast strange shadows that made the surrounding trees seem to writhe in the unexpected warmth. Close to the fire, the men feasted on the boiled ribs and juicy tongues, their faces shining with heat and grease and joy at the new hunter’s birth. Tillu walked past them silently, her soft boots crunching frozen moss and grass underfoot. None of the men deigned to notice her passage. It was unworthy of hunters to pay attention to a woman and a midwife.
For a moment the night held her closer. It was a clear night of black skies and the stars were as thick as yellow pollen on a quiet pond. The camp had been made in a small vale between two hills, a place protected from most of winter’s wind. The forest in this area was an open one, of paper birch and alder and willows that merged with brushy thickets and then bog grasses. Years ago this area had been burned over. Fire-blackened stumps and scarred giants of trees were reminders of that time, but most of the live trees were no bigger than she could span with her two hands. It was fine hunting for small game and browsing deer, and Benu’s folk had summered well in the winding river valley. But the sparse leaves that now clung to the branches were gold on the birch, dirty yellow on the willow and red on the alder. The edges of the coarse grasses and fallen leaves that carpeted the ground were outlined tonight with shining silver frost. It was time for Benu’s folk to seek out the older forest of spruce and pine that offered more shelter from winter’s blasts. There they would cope and struggle through until spring. So Tillu knew from their talk. She had once thought she would go with them. Now she shivered and pulled her arms inside the loose sleeves of her coat to hug her body.
At a proper distance from the birth tent and the men, the women clustered together about their own, smaller fire, discussing every detail of the birth, and arguing as to whether the child was as large as Ardee’s firstborn had been, or even larger. They were eating dried egg yolks, passing a sack made of deer intestine, each squeezing up a mouthful of the sticky, rich yolk and biting it off before passing it to her neighbor. Their hoods were pushed back in the heat of their fire. Their sleek black-haired heads showed glints of blue as they nodded to one another, and they muffled their giggling behind small browned hands so as not to annoy their menfolk. The joy of this small band of humans at now being eighteen instead of seventeen folk was a warm and tangible glow in the night.
Tillu could have gone to join the women at the fire. On this night, at least, she would have been welcome to share their yolk-sack and to chatter with them of babies and births she had presided over. She would be but the Healer and Midwife, just another woman at the fire. No one would mention the events of the summer. No one would speak of her son, Kerlew.
Tillu turned away from the small fire and the congenial women. She was too tired, she told herself. That was all. And her decision, sudden as it had been, was still strong. She was going tonight, and that would take some preparation. Besides, she was hungry for more than the rich stickiness of egg yolk. Her midwife gift would be in her own tent, borne there by the women as soon as the child’s cord had been safely bitten. The father would know nothing of it. Among Benu’s folk, birthing and midwives were the province of the women, and for a man to stoop to being interested in such things would be strange indeed. And dangerous, for spirits had been known to become offended at those who did not keep to their proper roles. The child was still especially vulnerable until Carp announced his guardian spirit tomorrow. Thus the huge fire that burned before the birth tent, and the father’s brave vigil through the night. The spirits could be jealous and vengeful to those who flaunted their will.
Like Tillu.
She pushed the thought away. She had not been brought up to believe in such spirits as populated every cranny of these hunters’ world. She would not be cowed by them now. Had she lived so long among wandering hunters as to share their childish fears? Then it was time to move on. Somewhere there were other folk who would welcome a healer and midwife, people who knew more than skin tents and tools of bone. She squared her narrow shoulders against the night fears she would not admit and hurried through the darkness and clustering