The Physiognomy

Then one night, very late, about three years ago, the boy came to my house. It was raining and there was thunder and lightning. He pounded on my door and called, "Cley, Cley."

When I answered the door, he was standing there drenched. He looked scared and was shaking.

"What is it?" I asked.

"My father is away hunting, and the baby wants to come out," he said. "Mother is calling for help."

We raced across the field. Inside their cottage, I found Aria lying in bed, writhing in pain. I still remembered my physiology and my anatomy from my days as a professional man. Childbirth was one of the things we studied at the academy, since it was at this point it was believed that your physiognomy was formed.

I threw the covers off Aria and looked down to see a tiny foot sticking out from between her legs. "Get me a knife," I told the boy. He brought me one immediately, one of his father's stone ones. The thing was as sharp as one of my scalpels. Holding the implement in my hand, knowing what I intended to do, filled me with great doubt. I had never believed in religion, but in that moment I truly prayed that I would not butcher her again.

She must have come around just then as I stood there holding the weapon, and she began to scream. The green veil was moving like a curtain in a windstorm. I told the boy to hold her arms down, and though he looked warily at me, he trusted me and did what I said. I walked over and shoved the blade of the knife into the fire and let it heat up for a second or two to sterilize it. As soon as it was somewhat cool, I made the incision across her stomach. From that opening, I was able to retrieve the infant—a dark-ski

I tell youy it was the most useful I had ever felt in my life, as if with all of the harrowing adventures I had been through, all the pain and misery I had survived, I had finally come to the moment that defined my reason for ever having been born at all. That child was called Cyn, a name her father had come up with. She was a special child, for after having given birth to her, Aria's face slowly, miraculously, began to change. By the next year, all of those mutilations I had inflicted on her had disappeared, and she no longer needed the veil to protect others. Still, she said nothing to me. When we met at the outdoor market by the river, she simply lowered her gaze and passed by.

Ea, on the other hand, often visited me with Jarek and Cyn. He let me hold the baby, and there were times when he smiled that caused me to wonder if he had not gone hunting that particular night for a reason. Whenever this notion cropped up, I quickly dismissed it as a dangerous delusion. It was during one of these visits that he told me they were leaving the next day to travel into the Beyond.

The news made me weak, and I had to hand his daughter back to him before sitting down. "Why?" was all I could say.

"We will return," he said "but it is necessary that I explain myself to my people."

"But you're a criminal there," I said. "You said so yourself."

He nodded and reached down to place his hand on my shoulder. "Things have to change, Cley," was the last thing he said to me before leaving and heading out across the field. I watched them through the open doorway with tears in my eyes. Before they were out of sight, the boy turned and waved good-bye to me.

That afternoon and evening I spent trying to alleviate the loneliness I felt by finishing off the two bottles of Rose Ear Sweet I had bartered for years back when we had first settled by the crisscrossing rivers. They did their job, and I passed out somewhere late in the night.

My troubled dreams eventually took me back to the ice floe, where I, instead of Beaton, kneeled on the frozen surface next to a dying Moissac. His branch of a hand wrapped weakly around my wrist as the wind howled, stinging my face. Through his touch, he told me to cut his chest and take the seed from it. A knife appeared in my hand. After the life left his eyes, I hacked away at the thick foliage above where his heart would have been. When I had broken a sufficient opening in him, I cried out above the fury of the storm and plunged my hand into the hedge . . . only to come fully awake in that instant to the vague echo of a door having been shut. Sunlight was shining in through the one window of my home, and I could hear the birds singing. I sat upright on my bed and brought my clenched fist into view. The nightmare had been so intense, it took great concentration to pry open my fingers, but when I did, I found within, the green veil, gathered up like a dream seed on my palm.