From Threyne just then came a new sound, higher, sharper.
“Her time has arrived,” Torlyri said. “I’ll have to go to her. We’ll be on the march again soon, I promise you that.”
Koshmar nodded and walked off. Torlyri, watching her go, shook her head. It amazed her that Koshmar, ordinarily so level-headed and clear-minded, had needed to be told that they would have to halt here for a while, and probably even now was having trouble accepting the idea. But Koshmar lacked all aptitude for these matters of women. She had never let a man put his hand to her thighs; she had never thought for a moment of bearing a child; she had aimed herself from childhood on for the chieftainship and nothing but the chieftainship, and to Koshmar that had excluded the idea of motherhood. Chieftains did not bear children: it was the tradition. But only because it had been necessary to regulate population within the cocoon so strictly, Torlyri thought. All sorts of traditions about who could bear children and who could not had sprung up over the centuries, but the underlying reason was always the fear that unlimited breeding would choke the cocoon and drive the tribe out into the harshness of winter before the true time.
Minbain called to her. The child was coming.
Torlyri hurried to the bower, just barely soon enough. Already a tiny head was jutting from between Threyne’s thighs. Torlyri smiled. Koshmar could never bear to watch the moment of birth, but Torlyri thought it was beautiful. She knelt at the foot of the bower, holding Threyne lightly by her ankles as she uttered the prayers to Mueri the Mother.
“A boy,” Minbain announced.
He was very small, noisy, wrinkled, pink all over, with scattered patches of thin grayish fur that would eventually expand to cover his entire body. His little sensing-organ moved stiffly from side to side, beating the air: a good sign, a sign of vigor and passion. Torlyri remembered when she had helped at Minbain’s own childbed nine years before, when Minbain had been delivered of Hresh, how Hresh had whipped the air furiously with his sensing-organ. Certainly he had lived up to the omen, had Hresh.
“The old man,” one of the women said. “We need the old man here now, to give the birth-name.”
Minbain made a muffled sound, a smothered laugh. Some of the other women laughed also.
“The old man!” Galihine said. “Who ever heard of a child as old man!”
“Or a child presiding at a childbirth,” said Preyne.
“Nevertheless,” Torlyri said firmly. “We need him to do what must be done.”
She turned to a girl named Kailii, who was almost of the age of motherhood herself and watching the delivery with fascination, and sent her off to fetch Hresh.
He arrived in a moment. Torlyri saw his sharp little eyes take in the scene in a series of quick sweeps: the women clustering close about the bower, the exhausted Threyne with streaks of blood staining the fur of her thighs, the little wrinkled babe, more like a radish than a man. Hresh looked uneasy, perhaps because his mother was here, or perhaps because he knew these matters were not ordinarily things for boys to witness.
“A child has been born, as you can see,” Torlyri said. “A name must be provided, and it is your office to do so.”
At once Hresh seemed to put his uneasiness beside him. He stood tall — though how absurdly small he still was, Torlyri thought! — and appeared to cloak himself in the majesty of his position.
Solemnly he made the sign of Yissou, and then that of Emakkis the Provider, and then that of Mueri the Mother, and then that of Friit the Healer. And then, finally, the sign of Dawinno the Destroyer, subtlest of gods.
Torlyri felt a surge of pride and delight. Hresh was doing the proper things, and in the right order! Old Thaggoran would have done no better. And Hresh had never been present at the giving of a birth-name. He must have looked up the rite in his books. The shrewd boy: how remarkable he was!
“A male child has been given us,” said Hresh resonantly. “By Preyne, from Threyne, to us all. I name him for the great one who has been taken from us so cruelly. Thaggoran shall he be.”
“Thaggoran!” Preyne boomed. “Thaggoran son of Preyne, Thaggoran son of Threyne!”
“Thaggoran!” cried the women at the bower. “Thaggoran!” said Threyne faintly.
Hresh held out his hands to the mother, to the father, to Torlyri, as the rite required. Then he went around to each of the women in the group, one by one, even his mother Minbain, touching them on each cheek in a sort of blessing. Torlyri had never seen that done: it was something that Hresh must have invented, unless he had revived some ancient rite described in his books. He came last to Torlyri and touched her in the same way. His eyes were shining. What a splendid moment this must be for him, she thought: this boy-chronicler of ours, this strange little Hresh-full-of-questions, who seemed now both man and child, man in a child’s body. She thought of him that day at the cocoon’s hatch when she had seized him before he could flee, and remembered the terror in his eyes when she had told him that he must be taken before Koshmar for judgment. How utterly different everything had become for them all, since that day! And here was that same Hresh, in a land far from the cocoon, proclaiming a new Thaggoran to the world with all the seriousness of the old one.
Afterward Hresh took her aside and said, “Did I do it well? Did I do it properly?”
“You were magnificent,” she told him; and, impulsively, she swept him up against her bosom, holding him dangling off the ground, and kissed him twice.
He seemed ruffled by that. He gave her an odd look when she set him down, and preened his fur with a distinct attitude of offended dignity. But when she smiled and put her hands to his shoulders in a more seemly caress he looked less irked. No one could stay irritated at Torlyri for long.
“There’s another ceremony we must do soon,” Hresh said.
“Nettin’s baby, you mean.”
“That too. But I meant one for me.”
“And what is that?” Torlyri asked.
“My naming-day,” he said. “I will be nine, you know.”
She struggled against laughter, could not suppress it, let it finally burst out.
Hresh stared at her, offended all over again.
“Did I make some joke?”
“No, there was no joke, Hresh, nothing funny at all — but — but—” She started to laugh again. “I’m sorry. It’s wrong of me.”
“I don’t understand,” Hresh said.
“Your naming-day. You are the old man of the tribe; you have just given a child a name yourself. Without even having had your own naming-day! Oh, Hresh, Hresh, these are truly strange times!”
“Nevertheless,” he said. “It is the proper time for me.”
She nodded. “Yes. You’re absolutely right, Hresh. I’ll speak to Koshmar about it this afternoon. Which day should it be, do you know?”
Sadly he said, “I’ve lost count, Torlyri. In these weeks and months of wandering. I think it may have gone past already. Some days back.”
“Well, no matter. I’ll speak to Koshmar,” she told him.
What might be the correct procedure for a naming-day in this new life was a puzzle to Torlyri and Koshmar both. There had been no occasion to perform such a rite since the Going Forth.
In the cocoon times the naming-day, which marked a child’s formal entry into adult life, had been one of the three sacramental days on which it was permissible for a member of the tribe to pass the threshold and briefly enter the outer world. Accompanied only by the offering-woman, the trembling nine-year-old would step through the hatch, proclaim the name that he or she had chosen to wear thenceforth, and — though dazed, astounded, by the view of the cliff and the river and the open vault of the sky, by the clutter of bleached old bones, and by the intoxicating impact of fresh cold air — perform the appropriate offering to the Five. A few years later would come a second rite, the twining-day, to mark the formal acknowledgment of maturity of soul; and the next time that most tribe members would go outside would be at the time of their death, when if they were strong enough to walk they would be escorted to the hatch by the offering-woman and the chieftain or sometimes the senior warrior, and otherwise would simply be carried out by the offering-woman and left to await the wind and the rain.