Vercingtorix
—
A
nd what do you do to the saved fawn and the found lamb? Is now the time, Elena, to tell you that to bless my mother’s pregnancy, my father slit a white lamb’s throat over her swollen belly?
It was to ask the Old Gods for a boy; to beg them for the right to sire a son. And it worked.
But I know it is not the time. It will never be the time, to explain what cannot be understood by those who have not lived it. “Whatever needs doing.” I answer, intentionally vague. For the better of the flock, there must occasionally be a culling of the fold.
But that, is not, what this is about. The analogy fails at a simple point of friction: she is not lamb, she is not a fawn.
What do you do with me now?
“I listen,” Vercingtorix offers, quietly. There is a moment, briefly, when she reminds him of his youngest sister, Laoise. Her first husband had died in the war, and she had refused to take on a second. There was something in her many women in Oresziah had not had for their husbands, and it was love.
I have seen the way sorrow guts a man—it is different, I think, seeing it in a woman. And that is why, I think of Laoise, and how her eyes went dead when I told her Darra had been killed. But the difference is not so large, it seems. There are many ways to suffer for love. Elena takes several long breaths; until I do not believe she will add anything, or elaborate upon her tragedy. At last:
I’m pregnant.
She is looking at me, again, instead of deep into the sea; with eyes hollowed out. She does not look like the first time I had met her, full and brimming with emotion; this is colder, singular, a feeling so great it encompasses everything.
“And why does this hurt you?” I ask. My voice is soft. My voice is patient—and Damascus, too, sighs in the night. His heart is made up of all my tragedies, and in some ways it has made him empathetic. There is a moment between my speaking and the silence after, I wonder—
Would it comfort her to know that, when my heart was broken, I did not eat for four days? I had stayed locked away; my father came and visited often, in those days, to say you did the right thing. He meant by turning her in. He meant by waiting until her father, the General, died—and it would be no dishonour upon him to reveal her, Boudika, the Betrayer.
Would it comfort her to know that, when I ask myself about love, I know I will never love again? It is not apathy; it is because I had found my soul-mate, the one destined for me.
I think of my son, too, and how when Cillian had told me she was pregnant, I told her it could not be mine.
And she had said, it can be no one else’s.
I swallow now; and breathe away my tragedies with the ease of years of practice.
I know it would comfort her for me to say, I hurt myself before, too. I betrayed the one I loved, abandoned a child, I—
There is a long list, of transgressions against myself.
“You’ve lost someone.” I say, rather than reveal them. The observation is a quiet certainty.
How woeful, strange, are the alleys of the City of Pain,
where in the false silence created from too much noise,
a thing cast out from the mold of emptiness
swaggers that gilded hubbub, the bursting memorial.
