But today Juna was in no mood for a lesson in humility. She tried to stare back, defiant, resentful, but, before Sheb’s ferocious glare, she broke down. “Oh, Sheb—” The weeping came suddenly and easily; she rested her head on Sheb’s shoulder and let her tears fall to the arid ground.
“Tell me. What can be so bad?”
Sheb listened gravely to what she had to say. She asked specific questions: Who was the father, how he had approached her or she him, why she had chosen to conceive now. She seemed most dissatisfied with the news that it had all been a childish mistake. In response to Juna’s agonized questions — “Sheb, what am I to do?” — for now, at least, Sheb would say nothing. But Juna thought she saw the shape of her future in the hard, sad lines of Sheb’s set expression.
And then there was a keening wail from the village. Juna took her grandmother’s arm and helped her to hurry home.
It turned out that Pepule, Juna’s mother, Sheb’s daughter, had gone into labor early.
As she entered the camp with Sheb, Juna saw the beer man, Cahl, walking away eastward, back toward his mysterious home. A sack of goods over his arm, he ignored the labor cries of the woman with whom he had lain only that morning, and Juna glared with futile hostility at his retreating back.
In Pepule’s hut, Sion and other kinswomen had gathered. Juna hurried to Pepule’s side. Pepule’s bleary, pain-filled eyes turned toward her daughter, and she grasped Juna’s hand. Juna saw a bruise the shape of a man’s grip on her mother’s shoulder.
As was their way, the women had set up a frame of wood to which Pepule clung, squatting. Meanwhile others were moistening the patch of earth under Pepule to soften it, and were digging a shallow hole nearby. There was a strong smell of vomit and blood.
Juna had witnessed and aided at many births before, but, bearing her own small burden within, she had never before shared so much pain herself.
At least this birth was quick. The baby dropped easily into the arms of one of Pepule’s sisters. With a brisk, confident motion she cut the infant’s umbilical and tied it off with a strip of sinew, and wiped off the birthing fluid with a bit of skin. Then the older women, including Sheb, clustered around the baby, examining it closely, picking over its limbs and face.
Juna experienced a sudden, unexpected surge of joy. “He’s a boy,” she said to Pepule. “He looks perfect…”
Her mother gazed back at her, her face empty. Then she turned away. Juna became aware that there was muttering from the women working on the baby; some of them glared up at Juna disapprovingly.
Now Juna saw what they were doing. They had put the baby on the ground, where he grasped at the air feebly. He had wisps of blond hair, Juna saw, stuck to his scalp by the fluids from the birth. Pepule’s sister took a stick. She pushed the baby into the hole the women had dug, as if she was shoving away a bit of sour meat. Then the women started to fill in the hole. The first dirt fell on the baby’s uncomprehending face.
“No!” Juna lunged forward.
Sheb, with surprising strength, took her shoulders and pushed her back. “It must be done.”
Juna struggled. “But he is healthy.”
“It,” said Sheb. “Not he. Only people are he, and that baby is not yet a person, and never will be.”
“But Pepule—”
“Look at her. Look, Juna. She is not hurt, not grieving. It is the way. She does not yet feel anything for the baby, not for these first few heartbeats when the decision must be made. If it were to live, to become a he, then the bond would grow firm, of course it would. But the bond is not there yet, and now it can never be.”
On and on.
Pepule was coughing. She sounded exhausted — ill. Juna thought of Cahl lying with her mother just hours ago, and she wondered what filth he had brought with him.
Still Sheb was talking to her.
At last Juna dropped her head. “But the baby is healthy,” she whispered. “He is healthy.”
Sheb sighed. “Oh, child, don’t you see? We cannot feed it, however healthy it is. This is not a time for a child — not for Pepule, anyhow.”
“And me?” Juna raised her head and whispered. “What will become of me? What of my baby?”
Sheb’s eyes clouded.
Juna twisted away and ran out of the hut, with its stink of shit and blood and useless milk.
The two sisters sat whispering in a corner of the small shelter they had constructed for themselves as children.
Juna had told Sion everything.
“I have to go,” she said. “That’s all. I knew it the moment they pushed the baby into that hole. Pepule is strong and experienced, where I am a child. And Acta, for all his drunken flaws, is beside her still. Tori doesn’t even know my baby is his. If her baby is pushed into a hole, then what of mine?”
In the dusty dark, Sion shook her head. “You shouldn’t speak like that. Sheb was right. It was not a person, not until it was named.”
“They killed him.”
“No. They could not let it live. For if all the babies were allowed to live, there wouldn’t be enough to eat, and that would kill us all. You know the truth of it. There is nothing to be done.”
It was ancient wisdom, drummed into them since birth, an echo of tens of millennia of human subsistence. Jo’on and Leda had had to face this. So had Rood’s people. It was the price you paid. But for some in each generation, it was too high a price.
“I don’t care,” said Juna.
Sion reached for her sister’s hand. “You can’t leave. You must give birth here. Let the women come to you. And if they decide the time is not right—”
“But I’m not like Pepule,” Juna said miserably. “I won’t be able to give it up. I just know it.” She looked into her sister’s shadowed face. “Is there something wrong with me? Why am I not as strong as our mother? It feels as if I love my baby even now, as strongly as Pepule ever loved you or me. I know that if they take it from me, then I may as well follow it into the hole, for I could not live.”
“Don’t talk like that,” said Sion.
“I will go in the morning,” Juna said, trying to sound stronger. “I will take a spear. That is all I need.”
“Where will you go? You can’t live alone — and definitely not with a baby at your breast. And wherever you go the people will drive you off with stones. You know that. We would do the same.”
But there is one place, Juna thought, where the people are at least different, where, perhaps, they do not murder their babies, where the people may not drive me off.
“Come with me, Sion. Please.”
Sion, her eyes drying, pulled back. “No. If you want to kill yourself, I — I respect your choice. But I will not die with you.”
“Then there is nothing more to be said.”
Carrying nothing but a spear and a spear-thrower, wearing a simple shift of tanned goat hide, she jogged easily. She covered the ground quickly, despite the unaccustomed burden in her belly.
The land was so dry that Cahl’s footsteps were crisp. Here and there she found his spoor — splashes of half-dried piss on rocks, a neatly coiled turd — hunting beer men, it seemed, was not hard. Even far from the village, farther than the hunters would usually roam, the land was empty.
After Jahna’s time, once more the ice had retreated, brooding, to its Arctic fastnesses. The pine forests had marched north, greening the old tundra. And across the Old World people spread out from the refuges where they had survived the great winter, islands of relative warmth in the Balkans, the Ukraine, Spain. Quickly their children began to fill up the immense depopulated plains of Europe and Asia.