"Buck,DorisP.-Giberel, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Buck Doris Pitkin)

"Harm might conic from my surrender."

"How so?"

"Dreads press her down like weights. I have felt them since I was a child and they took me out, ready to bury me. An old man said then I could never breed true and were better dead."

"From such desire as mine, only good can come. Our child will be truest giberel of them all. I will prove you can breed true."

"But if I should fail you?"

"If we laugh in the fullness of delight, you cannot fail."

She looked at him mutely, trembling.

"Did your courage fail when you were a child and they called you toadling, she-freak, death-morsel?"

"Then it was I alone. Never could I be brave for myself and for a child too." She wept in his arms. "This cannot be. Cannot. II-" But she clung tightly. "Comfort me," she cried.

"Who is true will breed true," he said, and worshiped her with his eyes. "And now," his voice grew in power, "now our minds chime, I shall go to bespeak our wedding circle."

Aramere turned her head toward the Easer of Labor, the deft fingered toadwife, the one strange-race who ever touched a giberel and then only at childbirth. "He said that from happiness such as ours, only good could come. But I have given birth to a monster."

"Sleep. Sleep for now."

"Take away our son. Tell my husband when he comes back from hunting-" Aramere broke off.

"Nah. Nah. Tell your husband this son of his will shoot better arrows than the best hunter."

"He will hate his child. So sure he was it would be a wonder."

"Say then, with plenty of tears and some sobs, mind, how you were forced in the forest by a Thing come from the stars to look 'into your long, large eyes. Who knows those eyes of yours didn't call something?" She winked.

"A lie. I would have killed myself." Aramere pulled her babe's cover up to its chin and held it there.

"Rest. Every mother rests after a birthing."

"But his father . . ."

"Tish posh. Face that when he comes."

Aramere sat up straight in her bed, for all her weakness. "He will aver believe in me again," she said in a voice of winter. Then words died in her throat.

The Easer pushed her back on the pillow. "Drink this. Brewed from the best."

Aramere turned her head away. "Nothing can ease me." She pulled the baby's sheet tighter round its chin. "Nothing." But the midwife forced some of the drink into her mouth.

After Aramere slept, the Easer turned the baby's sheet down. "Giberel," she muttered, "except the hand. Except the hand," she repeated several times. She squinted. The thumb was like nothing on any child she'd seen. It could twist around. The child flexed it. It met any finger neatly. It even doubled up in the palm.

"Could be no calamity at all," the woman told the baby. "With a thumb like yours, what couldn't I do?" She glanced at her own hand as her fingers patted the newly born.