CIRCLES OF STONE (THE MOTHER PEOPLE SERIES) (17 page)

The infant began
to wail lustily again.  Cere held it close, to comfort it.  Her own
had never cried like that.  It had never made a noise at all, except to
gasp for breath it could not draw.  This one was much bigger, and it
wriggled energetically.  She touched its round cheek gently, marveling at
the perfection of its features.  Its head jerked immediately in the
direction of her hand, and its tiny lips pursed.  Amused, Cere turned its
face toward her nipple.  The infant stretched its body taut and began to
suckle eagerly.  Its fingers scrabbled at her chest.

A strong, sharp
thrill shot through Cere as the sucking at her breast intensified.  She
had never felt such a sensation before.  It was like fire, except much
softer.  It settled, glowing, in a place just below her belly.  She
stared at the baby, entranced by its tiny form, by the feelings it evoked in
her.  She hardly noticed the other women as they gathered around her to
peer at the tiny one.  Each of them touched it gently and murmured a
blessing.

Then, one at a
time, they went to Mina's body.  Chanting the word of caring, each woman
placed fragrant leaves over her, until the terrible wound was covered, and
kissed her forehead.  Cere rose, to take her turn.  She held the
infant over Mina, so her spirit could see that the baby lived. 

"See your
small one, Mina."  She pointed to herself, then to her heart, then to
the infant.  "I will care for it now; it is in my heart, more
precious even than my own."

Emotion overcame
her as she kissed Mina's forehead, and she began to sob.  Kalar raised her
gently, signaling to two of the women.  With comforting hands, they
steered Cere away from the birthing place toward the shelter in the clearing. 
There they prepared fresh bedding of rushes, and settled her on it.  They
brought cool water from the stream that flowed into the river, fruit and nuts
for her to eat.  Cere accepted them eagerly.  All through the long
night, she had taken neither food nor water.  But even as she stretched
out a hand for more, sleep claimed her, and she did not move again until the
infant stirred in her arms.

When she awoke,
Kalar was standing beside her.  She reached for the baby and juggled it
expertly in her arms.  Once again, her face was serene, as if the night
had never happened.  The infant turned its head toward her breast and made
sucking noises with its tiny pink lips.  When no food came, it screamed in
protest.  For a long moment, Kalar stared into its rapidly purpling face, then
she handed it to Cere.  Triggered by the baby's cry, milk was already
leaking from her breasts.  As soon as the infant touched a wet nipple, its
squalling stopped.  Cere and Kalar laughed at the suddenness of the
silence.

Kalar turned away,
her laughter suppressed by the questions that had arisen as she stared at the
baby.  They had been with her for so long.  Would she never
understand?  This infant was well  grown, sucking strongly before it
had been in the outer world for even a few hours.  It was big enough to
live, but too big to be born.  After such a long time in the womb, its
head, especially, was too large to fit through the narrow passage between its
mother's legs.  Cere's infant, and many others who had emerged at the
normal time, were not developed enough to live.  But they could be born,
the others could not.  What was the answer?  For a moment, her brow
furrowed.  Then her habitual serenity returned.  When the time was
right, the Mother would provide an answer.

*************************

That is how Zena
was born.  The story was told over and over again, as the group sat around
the fire in the long evenings.  It was such an astonishing event, that
Kalar had plucked a living infant from its dead mother's belly.  Just as
remarkable was Zena herself.  Even as a small child, she was determined to
make sense of everything she saw and heard and felt.  She examined the
world around her - animals and birds, plants and flowers, even tiny insects or
seeds - with endless curiosity.  Sometimes the others laughed at her for
looking so serious and asking so many questions.  Cere, though, never
laughed.  She listened carefully even when she was incapable of
understanding what Zena meant or of answering her, and she watched over the child
with great care.

Kalar, too,
watched Zena carefully as she grew, seeking clues to the problem that
confronted her.  It was obvious that the child had abilities the others
did not possess.  Zena could make words easily, for her thoughts as well
as for objects, could accomplish things with her hands and form ideas that
never occurred to any other.  Was it, perhaps, her unusually large head,
that had made it impossible for Mina to bear her, that also made Zena so
intelligent?  If that was the case, Kalar could think of no
solution.  It was good to be intelligent, bad to be unable to be born, and
she could not imagine how even the Mother could resolve such a cruel dilemma.

Sighing, she went
off to help still another woman struggling in childbirth.  Again, the
woman died; again, Kalar wielded her sharp stone and pulled the infant
out.  It, too, had an unusually big head, she noticed, not as big as
Zena's, but still bigger and with a much higher brow than babies in the
past. 

In the ensuing
years, Kalar repeated her procedure many times, sometimes for the women of her
own tribe or another tribe that lived nearby, sometimes for women in more
distant tribes who sent for her in desperation when babies were unable to
emerge.  Some of the infants lived, but many were born dead when she was
too late with the cutting.  But always the mothers died.  Kalar gave
them her herbs, over and over again, to ease their suffering.  And she
waited, wondering if her tribe would survive the decimation.  Six women
had died already; now only five were left.  

Surely, she
thought, the Mother would send her another message soon, so she could help her
tribe.  But all that came to her was a picture of a female with enormous
buttocks and large, pendulous breasts.

She looked down at
her sturdy, wide-hipped body.  Then she thought of Mina, with her boyish
frame.  Most of the women who had died had looked like Mina, with hips no
wider than those of the men.  But she, Kalar, had given birth to Mina,
whose head had been big and high-browed, to other young ones as well, and she
had lived.  Perhaps, after all, the Mother was showing her a
solution. 

Kalar knelt and
scraped at the earth with her digging stick.  After much effort, a sketch
of the imagined female emerged.  The figure had almost no head, for its
features were not important, but it had wide, encompassing hips, and huge
breasts that hung luxuriantly across its swollen belly. 

A woman like this
could give birth with ease, Kalar thought with satisfaction, and feed the
infant well. 

She went to find
Lett.  Handing him a chunk of wood, she showed him her picture and
indicated with gestures and a few words that he should carve the figure from
the wood.

Lett stared at
her, astonished.  He made cutting and scraping stones of many sizes; he
sharpened digging sticks for all of them, for his were the best.  But
never before had he made a carving in wood. 

He shook his head
doubtfully, but he went off to try.  All day, he sat by Kalar's drawing
and stared at it while he chipped at the piece of wood, trying to make it
conform to the picture on the ground.  The wood broke, and he threw it
down in disgust.  But now, Kalar could see, he did not want to give
up.  He was the most skilled of all of them with cutting stones, and he
did not want the others to see him fail.  He went off to find more wood,
stronger this time, and set to work again.

Two days later, he
approached Kalar with his handiwork, and she was pleased.  The figure was
clumsy, but it resembled the picture the Mother had given her.  The hips
were wonderfully wide and encompassing, the belly extended, the breasts full
and drooping.  She smiled gratefully at Lett, and showed the figure to the
others in the tribe.  Some of them leaped away from it in fear. 
Kalar said the word Mother, to reassure them.  They did not touch it, but
they looked at it curiously when they passed it at the birthing place. 
Kalar placed it there, certain that the Mother intended it to help those who
would come next.

The figure did
seem to help, for in the years that followed, the women's birth problems slowly
began to ease.  The first sign came early one morning, when a live female
infant was born to Nyta at the usual time, after ten cycles of the moon. 
Twice before, Nyta's infants born after ten moons had died.  Like Cere's,
they had been too small to breathe.  But this time the infant lived
despite its apparent frailty.  It was much smaller than Zena had been, for
more than thirteen moons had passed before she had tried to  emerge. 
Unlike Zena, Nyta's infant could not support itself at all, but just flopped
helplessly.  Still, it had a lusty scream and seemed quite healthy.

Feeling the baby's
skull with her sensitive fingers, Kalar discovered a soft place near the top,
where the bones did not meet.  Consternation creased her forehead. 
Never before had she seen an infant with a soft skull!  It would probably
die.  How could a child with a hole in its head manage to live? 

Disappointed,
Kalar returned the baby to its mother.  She showed her the soft place, and
gestured that she should be careful not to let the baby drop.  But she did
not think her warning would do much good.  Even if the infant grew
stronger in its body, it would never be able to play normally.  One blow
to the head would kill it, if it even lived that long.

In the years that
followed, three more infants were born that resembled Nyta's.  Like hers,
they arrived after only ten or eleven moon cycles, and they had the strange
soft places in their skulls.  Two of them lived, but still Kalar shook her
head in despair.  It seemed impossible that they could survive for
long.  But to her surprise, they seemed to thrive, as did Nyta's
infant.  Even more surprising, the holes in their heads gradually
closed.  All three children were slow to develop; even after a year, they
were unsteady on their feet.  Zena had walked after only seven
moons.  But in spite of their slowness, it seemed to Kalar that they
possessed some of the abilities Zena displayed.  They spoke words very
early and watched everything that happened around them with bright, inquiring
eyes.  Like Zena, they had heads that were disproportionately large for
their bodies.

They could never
have been born had they stayed longer in the womb, Kalar realized. 
Perhaps that was the Mother's solution, to cause infants to emerge as soon as
they were strong enough to live, but before the big, high-domed heads that
promised such intelligence were too large to fit through the passage to the
outer world.  If that was true, good might come from their ordeal, as She
had promised.

Kalar was
gratified to see, too, that as the years passed many of the women really did
begin to look more like the figure Lett had carved.  The Mother's sign, so
incomprehensible at first, had been a good one.  Almost every woman who
survived a birth was wide hipped, and as they grew, their daughters' hips
became even more rounded.  Kalar had lived through almost three
generations, and she was certain she could see the difference.  She could
not be absolutely sure that the picture the Mother had given her, and Lett's
carving, had helped to make the changes, but she took no chances.  She
instructed Lett to make many of his figures, and each time the Mother caused an
infant to form in a woman's belly, she gave her one to keep in the sleeping
place.

Soon the women
became accustomed to the figures, and were reassured by them.  They felt
closer to the Mother when they had one in their hands.  In the years when
they had watched so many die in childbirth, all the members of the tribe, men
as well as women, had become closer to the Mother.  They came often to the
blessed circle of stones to ask the Mother to let the women who labored there
live.  The first figure Lett had made still rested within the circle, and
they stood before it or held it in their hands as they spoke.  And as the
years passed, She continued to hear their pleas.  Women still struggled in
childbirth, but they no longer died in such terrible numbers, and more infants
lived, even when they were born very early.

There were other
changes.  Some Kalar could see;  others were invisible, or part of a
process that would continue long after she had returned to the Mother. 
The widening of the women's bones beneath their newly rounded hips was hidden
from her eyes, though she suspected it must be there.  She would have been
surprised to know, though, that beneath the big skulls she observed, brain
tissue would become ever more convoluted, turning over and over on itself so it
could grow without taking up more space.  That skulls continued to become thinner
and less rigid, she did perceive.  Zena's skull had been huge and thick,
as hard as a rock.  Now, almost all the infants that lived had thinner
skulls, with the worrisome holes that closed up later.  Kalar had
realized, finally, after assisting at so many births, that the gaps allowed the
skull to be compressed as the infant struggled to emerge.

Truly, she
thought, the Mother had wondrous solutions.  Kalar thanked Her constantly,
especially when she attended a birth and saw labor progressing as it
should.  The pain of watching women struggle uselessly all through the
long nights had become almost too much to bear.  But at the same time, she
was aware that the welcome changes were causing unexpected problems.  In
the past, infants had always been able to hold on to their mothers, but now
they could not even hold their heads up or keep their backs straight. 
Kalar was sure they would one day be very intelligent, but in the meantime they
were completely helpless.  Their mothers had to use both arms to keep them
safe, and that made food gathering difficult.  If a mother wanted to pick
berries or dig tubers, or drink water, she had to put the infant down. 
Then it screamed and she was forced to pick it up again lest it attract
predators.