Read Online Children of God by Mary Doria Russel - Free Book Online Page A

that bent trees nearly double, broke loose.
    The rain came down so hard during the worst of the tempest, she was afraid she’d have to name her child Noah, and she could hardly have been wetter if she’d stood in the ocean. Her water must have broken sometime during the storm; there was no warning when the contractions started in earnest a few hours later. "It’s too soon," she cried to Kanchay and Tinbar and Sichu-Lan and a few others who crowded around her when she squatted, waiting for the contraction to let go.
    "Maybe it will stop again," Kanchay offered, steadying her when the next wave came. But babies have their own agenda and their own logic, and this one was on its way, ready or not.
    She had been through a great deal in her life, so the pain never overwhelmed her, but she was undersized and had not fully recovered from a nearly fatal injury only two months earlier. She paced a good deal of the time early in her labor because it made her more comfortable, but the walking wore her out; by sunrise the next day she was very, very tired and had stopped thinking about the baby. She just wanted to get through this, to be finished with it.
    All the fathers had advice and opinions and observations and commentary. Before long, she found herself snarling at them to shut up and leave her alone. They didn’t; they were Runa, after all, and saw no reason to shun or abandon her. So they went on talking and kept her company, their long-fingered hands busy and beautiful, reweaving windbreaks and sections of thatch for roofing damaged in the storm.
    By midday, exhausted, she gave up trying to control what was going on and fell silent. When Kanchay carried her to a small waterfall near the camp, she did not argue, and sat with him under water that beat coolly down on her shoulders, drowning out the irritating voices of the others with its steady roar. To her own surprise, she relaxed, and this must have helped her dilate.
    "Sipaj, Fia," Kanchay said after a time, watching her with calm eyes of Chartres blue, "put your hand down here." He guided her fingers to the crowning head and smiled as she felt the baby’s wet and curling hair. There were three more crushing contractions and as the child emerged, she was swamped by the terror of a remembered nightmare. "Sipaj, Kanchay," she cried, before she knew if she had a daughter or a son. "Are the eyes all right? Do they bleed?"
    "The eyes are small," said Kanchay honestly. "But that’s normal for your kind," he added by way of reassurance.
    "And there are two," his cousin Tinbar reported, thinking this might have worried her.
    "They’re blue!" their friend Sichu-Lan added, relieved because Fia’s strange brown eyes had always been a source of vague unease to him.
    There was a silence as she felt the infant’s legs slip from her and she thought at first that it was born dead. No, she thought, it’s all the other noise — the talking and the waterfall. Then, finally, she heard the baby squall — jolted into breathing by the chilly water that had been such a comfort to its mother at the end of this stiflingly hot and endless day.
    Kanchay brought leaves to wipe it down and Sichu-Lan was laughing and pointing to its genitals, which were external. "Look," he cried, "someone thinks this child is in a hurry to be bred!"
    A son, she knew then, and whispered, "We have a little boy, Jimmy!" She burst into tears — not of grief or terror but of relief and gratitude— as strong warm hands lifted her from the cool water and the hot breeze dried her and the baby. With a shock, she felt again skin on human skin, and slept. Later, her son’s lips closed for the first time around her nipple: a gentle, almost lazy suckling, as sweet as Jimmy’s, as beautiful to feel, but feeble. There’s something wrong, she thought, but she told herself, He’s newborn, and premature. He’ll get stronger.
    Isaac, she decided then, whose father had, like Abraham, left his home to travel to a strange land;