by Tanith Lee
Her son was unmistakable.
He was black, as she was, but although he had the beauty of a god to her eyes, it was not like her beauty. Not even, as she considered it in the dream, Rehger’s beauty, quite. But he had the eyes of Rehger the Lydian, and coming up to her smiling and calm, he put into her hands a gift. It was a living leaping breathing burning dancer—of somber wood.
“For the Giving Feast,” he said, “Cah’s festival.” Then, without demand or unease, “Do you like it, mother?”
He was happy. It was not in the smile. But in the substance of the inner depth behind his visionary seer’s eyes. He was entire.
She turned the dancer in her hands, amazed, and Teis leaning on her shoulder said, “Mother, that’s you.”
And suddenly her whole body sloughed from her and her soul, yes the soul of her, was dancing the fire dance, with all the nonsense of the body scorched away— But in that second a shriek of pain ran through her core.
• • •
He began early and he hurried to the world.
In the agony she remembered to call out the appropriate sentence: “Cah aid me!”
Cah aided.
The head of her son, black as charcoal, pushed into life. Once the torso and the limbs came out, Panduv saw she had birthed a perfect living creature.
Arud when—against the tenets—he entered the room and took the boy, lifted him up and swore.
“Your color, you Zakr woman. But he has my eyes. Look, do you see? My eyes and my race—male, by the goddess.”
Exhausted, Panduv drifted on her pillows. Arud put earrings of gold into her hand, just as, in a dream, some other present had been placed there—but the idea of it had gone from her in the toil of labor.
Then they gave her the baby and she suckled him.
He had the Lydian—the Lan’s—eyes, but it was benign that Arud should mistake them for his own. He would be a generous father. In all but flesh and blood, this would be his son.
She would convince Arud that the child must have an Iscaian name, an old name of the uplands, which in Iscah was mostly given as Raier.
Against her breast, the child slumbered. His face was composed and couth. Within its pliable contours she beheld, clear as moon in cirrus cloud, the serene and sleeping face of a man of sixteen or twenty-five years. But that was still to come.
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