The Monster’s Corner: Stories Through Inhuman Eyes

THE CRUEL THIEF OF ROSY INFANTS by Tom Piccirilli

THE CRIB WAS FREE OF IRON, foxglove, open scissors, or any other protective measures or charms. On the crackling hearth a pot of hog’s head stew sat cooking, almost as an invitation. It could be a trap. Sixty years ago I’d been snared by eight waiting men prepared with clubs of ash and an iron cage. It had taken me four days to escape up the chimney.

This, though, didn’t seem like a lure despite the human girl child lying beneath an open window, alone in the cool evening breeze.

A remote noise upstairs caught my attention. Snarls, grunts, mewls, and caterwauls. Murder, I thought, murder and evisceration! It took another moment to realize it was the human sound of lovemaking. Coarse but full of bounce. One could play the fiddle to it, the drums, the pan pipes. My foot tapped. My nose itched. I sneaked a ladle of the stew. Then another. I’d always had a fondness for hog’s head. The doctor warned me away from it, and my wife would surely shame me. I needed a sprig of mint to camouflage my breath.

The child in its crib grinned at me. Clear-eyed, crimson-cheeked, it gripped my index finger fiercely. I perceived no obvious weaknesses or illnesses. It had not been touched by plague. It had no fleas or worms, no ticks. Its heart rang with a solid thump within its small chest, no arrhythmia, no congestive failure. The pulse was a nice counterpoint to the cries of the mother. It would grow up able-bodied and average.

It was what it was. It could not help being what it was. Plain and blunt. Bald, smelly, and toothless. Heavy-handed, awkward-footed, easily replaceable, utterly common. A laugh escaped its bubbling lips. It sought my finger again. Its parents were already making siblings that would look just like it.

In this world, on this side of the wall, the human girl child would eventually grow to milk cows and goats, weave gray scratchy clothes, and then go on to bear its own ungainly offspring. It would know overwhelming love and great, sharp sorrow, but it would never, except perhaps at the moment of death, achieve any grace.

I drew back my coat and Livia’s child stared at me, her eyes alive with understanding and acceptance, golden-blond hair draping across her angled, intelligent features. She shined as all our kind shine, radiant and exquisite.

I said, “You’re needed here, bright one.”

She seemed to nod in understanding. She held no malice at the swapping. We do the things we do because we must do them.

It was Livia I was worried about. She was more reluctant to let go of the child than I’d anticipated. I thought I had even seen tears glimmering in her eyes before she had turned away and hastened back to her dwelling on the bluff.

We do not often shed tears, and never when doing the things we must do.

I swapped the children, as is my duty. As it was my Da’s, and his Da’s before him, back and back until the beginning of the races, so I’d been told. My family had been in charge of doing this thing for no less than fifteen hundred years, although time is playful when traveling from one side of the wall to the other. Perhaps fifteen centuries, perhaps fifty. A long time nonetheless.

Humanity has given us a name. We were known, each of us, in turn, as the Thief of Rosy Infants. It is not a title that fills me with joy. It is not a designation that compels strangers to hurl roses. It is not a name I want written in the great accounts of our people.

Upon his deathbed, my Da told me, “This is a sacred and terrible responsibility we are charged with. It will likely drive you mad if you ponder it at length.” He held my face in his hands and kissed my brow. “Traveling will leave you lost in place and time, my son. Humanity will hate you. Our own people will hate you, whether you see it in their faces or not. I’m sorry you were born to me, and that I must pass this painful commitment on to you now.”

Then he died and I buried him at the bottom of a rushing river, as was his wish, so that his great sins might be washed away. I wondered if it worked.

The parents of the human girl child would scream when they found the swapling, cry out even louder than they were doing right now, and wail, and call for the queen’s guard, and kneel in their churches, but eventually, and without as much difficulty as they might have imagined, they would adapt. The beautiful swapling child was difficult to resist, even for the barbarous human heart.

I made my way back to the wall with the girl tucked beneath my coat.

On this particular journey, the wall was a wall of river stones and mortar surrounding the eastern edge of the city of Luftvillion, which was vulnerable to attack from the savage tribes of the highlands. Sometimes the wall was a different wall. Sometimes it was a wall of brick in a small chapel devoted to strange gods, or a wall of loblolly trees in the deep forest. Once I crossed over through a wall of skulls ten feet high and a hundred yards in length, built on a battlefield where riderless, armored horses wandered with gore-soaked manes.

It was night now, and the elderly had crept from their homes to sit on their porches and smoke their pipes and knit their socks and rock in their rockers. The elderly liked to look at the evening stars. The young were making love or in the pubs drinking or planning to overthrow governments and murder those with skins and languages different from their own. The elderly had poor eyes. They waved and nodded as I passed in the glow of the gas lamps. I waved back.

Before long I stood before a cathedral, where mass was in progress. Mass was always in progress. A tempestuous sermon rattled the stained glass windows. The stone figures of their faith stared down from the steeples and belfries, stern, commanding, yet with open arms, bodies wracked in torment so that pain and torture become appealing to humanity. I couldn’t help myself and peeked in the mail slot.

In the aisles were weeping bodies, in some places three deep. Mostly middle-aged. The middle-aged were in the churches begging for more money and the cure for black lung and syphilis. The choir set to braying. They were high in the balcony dressed in red robes, hands clasped in prayer or reaching out for the symbols of divine entities that hung on chains from the rafters. Their mouths gaped, their eyes narrowed.

Struck with hysteria, two altos fell from the balcony rail, hymns issuing forth until the very instant they hit the pews. The faithful spit the names of their mortgage brokers and tax collectors. They rolled around and barked like dogs. The minister beat them about the face, shoulders, and groin with his silver staff. He puffed smoke at them. He fed them biscuits and alcohol. They dropped to their knees and flopped on their faces.

Supplication is the thing humans do better than any other thing that they do. It’s the thing they do best, besides killing.

The child was snuggled against my belly, snoring softly as I struck out again for the cobble path. It burped, sighed, and farted. Its moment of grace remained a long way off.

Finally I came to the eastern slope of the city and picked up my step over the viaduct as I neared the river-stone wall. The rapids bustled and churned. I crossed the bridge and watched a longboat making its way down the river. On board there was drunken revelry, hooting, the clashing of swords, and laughter.

I felt along the stones looking for a crack large enough to bring the human baby through the wall. It always took extra time because, small as the rosy infant was, it was still larger than me, in its own fashion, when traveling between. I held the swapling tightly and put my back to the polished stones. As I passed through I thought of something else my Da had told me. “You’ll experience mysterious and morbid happenings. Not only within the confines of the human world but within yourself. Prepare for damage.”

My wife, Harella, stood waiting for me on the other side, as she sometimes did when I went visiting. She was so beautiful that I almost had to cover my eyes for a moment. My time beyond the wall sometimes affected me for a bit. A deep melancholy filled my heart, which is a thing that happens to us, but doesn’t happen often. I felt muddled.

She put a hand to my face and I nearly bowed before her luminescence. Her lips brushed mine, her twining arms so powerful I was swept up as if by the wind of an encroaching storm. I shut my eyes and began to hum.

“You smell of hog’s head!” she cried. “The doctor said, no more hog’s head.”

I knew I should have had a sprig of mint after the hog’s head ladling.

“The doctor,” I said, “is a nit.”

“The doctor is the doctor and knows the ways of doctoring. When he tells you no more hog’s head, then no more hog’s head it shall be. And no salt, paprika, cinnamon, mead, oregano, ground chuck, fried pickles, processed veal, four-day-old lumpfish — ”

“How can oregano possibly inflict evil upon my innards?” I asked.

“I am not the doctor and neither are you.”

The human girl child, which already stank, began to stink exponentially. It was doing the thing that humans do too often. The birds in our trees stopped singing. The animals on nearby farms began to buck horns and chase their tails and go into labor.

The child reached for my finger again and brought the tip to its gnawing maw.

“I must bring the swapped child to Livia,” I said. “It’s hungry. I should hurry.”

Harella said nothing, which, so far as my wife was concerned, meant she was saying a thing and saying it loudly.

So loudly that my own tongue was compelled to speak the words. “I fear there will be trouble with Livia.”

“I fear that your fear is a reasonable one,” she said.

“I saw tears this morning.”

“She is more sensitive than most, full of even deeper graces.”

It was the truth, and an overwhelming one at that. There was a painful tug at my heart. I looked my wife in the eye and saw depths and light and sadness that shook me. I asked the question that had to be asked.

“Do you think she will harm the baby?”

Harella said, “She is one of great resolve and implacability.”

This was a cautious way for my wife to explain that yes, indeed, she believed Livia might very well harm the human child she would have to care for now, to raise as her own to become one of us.

“We’ll watch her closely.”

The human girl child began to cry then. I held it up. It reached for my nose and gave it a good squeeze. I smiled and it smiled back. I extended it to Harella for no reason I could understand. I knew she would not want to touch it.

“It’s a bald and beastly thing,” she said, retreating a step.

“It was probably admired by its family and neighbors.”

“They are blind.”

“They know how to love as much as we do.”

“Not quite as much, and without any virtue or purity.”

“With some,” I said.

I carried the child to Livia’s home, down the paths through the heart of our city, along the canals on the River Solitude, under which my Da is buried. She had no husband but was paramour to a married architect who was attempting to decipher a way to build spires beyond the highest spires, which were considered by many to be too high already. He had previously tried to bring his vision to fruition, drilling deep into the earth to pour millions of metric tons of concrete foundations. It caused a minor volcanic eruption that toppled the theology wing of the Grand Museum.

The baby hiccupped and giggled as I walked with her in my arms. I tossed her in the air a few times, and she clapped her small hands. The cool air of night brought out rosy circles on her cheeks that burned in the moonlight.

Livia’s home was out on the bluff, high above the white beaches. Far below, seashells glittered while out in the waves the sirens rose from the deep and crooned to the shipmasters and crewmen passing from port to port. They saw me on the road and sang my name. They walked upon the waves and danced in my honor. Their song grew more powerful. The baby tightened its grip upon me in terror.

In the doorway Livia stood waiting with a mottled face. With her arms wrapped around herself she grasped the fringes of her thistledown robe so firmly that she had shredded the fabric. Her lips curled and stayed in motion, twisting, contorting. Words began and died. I wagered that the architect had not yet left his wife.

She barely glanced at the baby.

“It’s a beastly thing,” she said.

“It is your daughter.”

“It has no grace. It is awkward-footed, it’s bald and toothless and — ”

“All true, but it’s still your daughter now. Time to feed it. Give it milk.”

“It will drain me. It will drink my blood.”

“It will drink your milk, which is what these things do. Feed it. Teach it. Love it.”

“I will never love it.”

“It’s what you must do, Livia. It’s what we all must do, when it is time for us to do what we must do.”

“You talk like a damn fool.”

She took the baby in her arms and gave it her breast, and the human infant gagged for a moment as they all gag on something so sweet, but after a minute settled down. Livia’s eyes burned with hatred. It was astonishing to watch.

“Perhaps it will smother itself upon my breast,” she said.

“Livia — ”

“One hopes. One still has hope.”

She turned away and scurried back into the house with the child, who immediately began to wail. The sirens also cried.

I sat reclined in my library before the fire, thinking of my mother, who had said, “You buried your father where?”

Harella entered with a vase of fresh-cut roses and placed it on the table I had whittled for her from a great redwood as a show of my love before we were married. I was young then and wondered if such talent had abandoned me by now.

She sat in her chair and took my hand in hers. She sensed my dark backward mood. I sensed her sensing and realized there was something else on her mind as well. I kissed her palm and turned fully toward her.

She told me, “The annual fencing trials are tomorrow.”

“Already?” I huffed air. Time is playful when traveling through the wall. It stretches, contracts, curves, the tempo changes. I have met myself twice on the cobblestone roads so far. I didn’t nod or wave. I said nothing, but I peered at myself angrily. I was beautiful, but not as beautiful as I’d always thought before meeting myself twice on the road.

“Don’t go,” she said, “this year. Stay with me.”

“I will look like a coward.”

“You will look like you are above their matters.”

But I wasn’t above their matters. I wasn’t of them, but I wasn’t above them. I never missed the fencing trials. I was the best fencer. I had always been the best fencer. But I’m excluded from the trials because my duty is to sneak beyond the wall. Their argument is that while I am out of sight from the referees, the masters, the other swordsmen, I might be partaking of secret instructions given by savage humans. I argue that no human can fence worth a dead lumpfish, but this argument falls on deaf, though graceful, ears. The human world is a mystery to them, even more than it is a mystery to me.

As such, they fear I have an unfair advantage, and so I am excluded from trials. But not from sparring. I have sparred with them all and beaten them all, probably because they hate me, which causes them to become distracted easily. I have a title where they have none. They have names but no designation, no station. They have jobs where I have duty. They have families where I have lineage. They perpetuate while I save the races.

My Da had said, “Your capabilities will be questioned. The only answer is to refrain from action. To be confident in your capacity.”

“My capacity as quantified by what parameters?” I asked.

“By the parameters of your moral code,” my Da said. “By your capacity to help our people. It’s all that matters.”

I thought then as I thought now. My Da, and his Da, and all the Das before them, were much stronger than I was, more altruistic, filled with greater humility.

Harella stood then and asked me to bed, possibly for love and possibly for sleep, but I wanted neither. She sighed her great sighs and drifted up the staircase alone, her gown flaring around her hips, the light of her beauty carrying her like soaring wings.

I sat in my chair mulling over my matters, full of mull, my mull full of dull, until the dawn broke and I heard, in the distance, the first flutes, trumpets, and squeezeboxes welcoming the fencing masters.

I kept still another minute trying hard to be above such matters, but soon found that I was not only not above them, or even of them, but probably well below them in the strictest sense. I was soon at the back of my closet and halfway dressed in my finest fencing garb.

Harella, two floors above, could hear me buckling my belts and snapping shut my buckles. She sighed so deeply that the frill on my jacket wafted to and fro. I retrieved my sword from above the fireplace, fit it within its sheath, and on horseback rode to the trials just as the bassoons and tubas and harpsichord announced Reedle.

Reedle was the reigning champion of fencing, and had been since I was driven from the trials. His coat was adorned with countless medals that shone not quite as shinily as the shine of his gleaming white teeth and brilliant black eyes. He arrived in a six-horse-drawn carriage. Himself, and his blade, and his epaulets, and his purple sash. He stepped from the carriage to the cheers of our people as I climbed off my horse.

He gave me his finest smile. “Ah, Cruel Thief of Rosy Infants, how are you this day?”

I did my best to smile my finest smile, which wasn’t nearly as fine as his finest smile.

“Fine,” I said.

“Has there been some revoking of the revoking of your privilege to enter our tournament?”

“Not to my knowledge,” I said.

“And yet you wear your fencing finery?”

“My wife waxed the boots and polished the buttons recently, so out of respect for her sweat and efforts I thought I should wear the finery this day, while I sat in the stands and applauded your genius with a sword.”

“Your boots are covered in horse shit,” he told me.

Like all of us, Reedle is full of great grace, but his grace is less than the grace of everyone else.

So Reedle won the tournament in straight matches, as he always did since my expurgation. Each time he vanquished an opponent he would turn to the stands and find my bright buckles and buttons and slash the air as if he were cutting into my heart. I felt each slash through my grins and salutes. I was not confident in my capacity or the pa ram e ters of my moral code.

I made my way down to the dueling field and waited until most of the crowd and carriages had withdrawn from the area. I gave the proper encouraging murmurs and displays of respect and veneration to those who’d lost, shook hands, tapped sword points, and clapped shoulders as the moment called for. When I approached Reedle he turned from me in an ample and obvious showing of contempt, then climbed into his carriage along with his purple sash, sword, and epaulets, and left the games.

My fist tightened on my weapon. My eyes narrowed. I thought to follow. I thought to lunge, lance, riposte, gore, gouge, stab, pierce, plunge, and clean the horse shit from my boots with his finest finery. I was glad that I was not traveling beyond the wall. I did not want to meet myself on the road and look at my face as it might appear at this instant.

I alighted upon my horse’s back and rode toward home.

Harella met me outside in the garden, which she was tending to full bloom. I leaped from the horse and unbuckled my buckles and belts and took off the coat and garb and thought about chucking it all in the mud. Instead I folded it and laid it across the marble garden bench I had crafted for her our first year of marriage. I placed my palm upon its smoothness, shut my eyes, and tried to recall my earlier skills, but could only think of rough human hands and the beating of my own unpredictable heart.

I fed and watered the horse as my wife touched me upon the shoulder.

“You must get Livia’s child back,” Harella said.

“What’s happened?”

She tucked her chin in and gave me a look that was both wise and harsh, much more harsh than wise, I thought. “I saw her strike the child this afternoon.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Only if I was dreaming, and I assure you I was awake.”

“We do not do — ”

“Oh, stop with the ‘things we do because we must do them’ nonsense. Livia is a mother whose child was stolen. She’s capable of anything. You must know that’s the truth.”

I knew it was the truth.

“Travel again, and return her own flesh to her.”

“I can’t do that. No one must ask, not even her.”

“She’s not asking,” my wife said. “I am.”

“It’s not something you can ask. It’s not something I can do.”

“You swap children. That is your calling. That is what you do. So simply go back and do it again. Swap again.”

“That isn’t what we do.”

“Perhaps you should have considered it more often, instead of blindly performing your duty. Exercising your imperatives. Go get her child or a baby’s blood will be on your hands. Can you stand that? Sniff your fists. Do you smell blood yet?”

I did.

Traveling across the wall now, the wall had become a wall of people, huddled in the town square, gathered to watch a hanging.

I drew my slouch hat lower across my brow.

A woman was brought out in the center of the square, riding in the back of a hay cart drawn by two mules. The crowd threw rotted fruit and vegetables and eggs at her while shouting vile and varied insults.

She was matronly, heavyset, soft of features but with a righteous tilt of her chin, a dark gleam in her eye that made me take note. They hadn’t tortured her the way they do with some. She wasn’t marred at all, except for the eggshells, which meant she had signed a confession without any coercion. She looked as wholesome as humans can, with her hair still set under a milking cap, still wearing an apron.

I saw motherhood in her, nursing, bandaging, healing, life-giving and life-saving. The town crier unfurled his parchment scroll and read off a list of her crimes. They seemed to focus, more or less, around the fact that she had helped other women during difficult pregnancies, healed the sick with herbs and poultices, and once shouted down the queen’s taxman who was kicking urchins in an alley.

When they sought to drop the red velvet bag over her head she stiffly refused. She had courage and sought to garner a touch of vengeance upon the crowd by showing them her dead and awful face rather than merely her complacent corpse. The hangman adjusted the knot, and the minister said a lengthy and not altogether appropriate prayer, and the dancers came out and performed their ritual dance, throwing their flowers and veils, and the choir sang two lackluster hymns, and the queen’s guard performed a well-choreographed military promenade, then fired the requisite thirty-seven shots at the sky, and the fainters fainted, and the swooners swooned, and panters panted. More than one man drooled. There was a good deal of spitting.

At last the woman was asked to say her last words, but she simply shook her head. Her eyes searched the square, perhaps for family or friends, lovers, a kind expression, a forlorn face. I raised the brim of my hat. Her gaze found mine. She gave me a slight nod and I returned the gesture.

At the moment of death, her grace met my grace. They would carry on together elsewhere, wherever else there is to go afterward.

I returned to the house where I had swapped away Livia’s child. I climbed down the chimney and peered about the place, moving through room after empty room. There was no activity. In the bedchambers, no snarls or mewls or murder or love-making, no action. In the den, no practicing of the tuba. On the fire, no stew.

Out the front door I skirted and moved about the stables. In the pigpen, the hogs rolled about happily in the mud. Sadly, they all had their heads. My stomach tumbled. Again I wondered, how could oregano possibly be a malfeasance upon one’s innards?

A well-trod path led into the woods. I followed for a quarter mile until I heard laughter and music. The pan pipes, the piccolo, the drumming, the triangle. I hid in the brush and looked upon a clearing full of revelers.

Several farming families shared food and wine and played and danced together. It seemed to be one of those farmer celebrations. They were always feasting and frolicking for some agrarian reason or another. A bountiful harvest or the end of a drought or the girth of the maypole. There was always something to excite and extol.

Liva’s child of light stood out among them, breathtaking, exquisite, lithesome, and diaphanous amidst the craggy faces and plodding feet of human neighbors.

She was now a nearly grown woman. Time had become mischievous again, and had stretched and sped while I’d been home buckled in my buckles. I guessed seventeen years had unfurled and whirled past. She was blithe with laughter, which bubbled from her and buoyed the mood of the world.

I heard her parents calling to her. Her name was Eva.

Young men lined up for a chance to cavort with her. The music rolled on, the bards and minstrels singing songs named for her. She jigged and jagged and swung in the heavy arms of the farmer men, who whispered in her ear. One proposal after another, no doubt. She held them tightly and planted kisses on their hairy faces, and it was enough for them for the time being, for a while. Eventually she would choose one of them, and the rest would love her from afar and watch while she raised a passel of golden children who would blaze like sunlight.

This world needed her. This world full of hangings. This world could use all the happiness and fairness it could possibly wrangle. They needed our blood as much as we needed theirs.

It was wrong to think I could change the course of my duty. Or steal back a girl who was obviously so happy here. You can’t unswap.

I turned to go, and Eva sang a note that only my ears could hear. It was directed at me, I realized. I could hide from the humans but not from her. She called to me, to feast and prance with her.

Sometimes our kind forgot they were not human and went on to lead the average lives they must lead. But Eva clearly had not forgotten. She recognized me from when she was a baby.

Despite Livia’s pain, it wasn’t fair that I ask Eva to return beyond the wall and give up her parents and siblings and inamoratos. I had known better than to come here again. It wasn’t the way to fulfill my obligations. Livia would have to learn to accept her human child. She would have to do as she must do. She would have to love as humanity loved. If not, then I supposed Harella and I could raise the swapling.

How much more just could justice be than for me to be Da to a blunt awkward-footed common beastly girl?

For the return trip I had to journey to the human town of Limwelt, where another hanging was occurring in another square. This time there were five women and two goats being hanged. The women were all quite beautiful by human standards, still wearing corsets and flimsy short skirts that showed ample amounts of muscular leg. I moved among the crowd, watching eager faces as the charges were read.

Apparently the women were being executed for entrenching many impure thoughts into the minds of several pubescent boys. The crowd jeered and shook fists. The two goats appeared complacent and content with chewing their last mouthfuls of curd. Then the goats’ crimes were read off. They were very similar to the women’s crimes. I turned and met the eye of a goat and its grace met my grace. I lifted my hand in farewell. The goat chewed. I spun toward a wall of miscreant, drunken revelers crying for death. The hangman pulled a lever and the crowd gasped in shock and joy, and I was beyond the wall and home again.

Harella was in the garden, fiery and glowing with sweat streaming upon her lovely face. I spread my arms to hug my wife and she barked, “Where’s the child? What took you so long? Where’s Livia’s girl?”

“I couldn’t steal her away,” I admitted.

“What?”

“She was too happy. She’s a child of light in a grossly dark world.”

Harella said nothing, and the volume of the nothing rang in my ears until I had to raise my palms and press them to the sides of my head to drown out the silence.

“What’s happened?” I asked.

“She never took to the human child. She … was abusive.”

“Abusive?”

“Yes. With the lash.”

“The lash?”

“And her elbows. And sometimes her feet, I suspect.”

“Elbows? And — ”

“Stop repeating what it is I tell you.”

I swallowed. My hands were fists. My fists were red.

“We … we are not abusive to children,” I said, “not even swapling children, no matter how upset it might make us when we do the thing we must do.”

“You sound so naive, my love.” She looked at me with eyes that were full of sorrow. A sadness not for abused rosy infants, but for the cruel thieves of such.

“I must see the human girl,” I said. “I must visit them. Has she named it yet?”

“Of course. Its name is Grot.”

“Grot?” The word was sour on the tongue. “That’s quite unpleasant.”

“Exactly the purpose of such a name. Livia called the girl that as a curse. And it’s what she is. Cursed. She lives alone in the caves down by the beach.”

“But — ”

“She’s seventeen. History has a memory here, too. Don’t you know how long it is you’ve been gone? Aren’t you aware?”

I wasn’t. This was the first occurrence of time becoming merry with me on this side of the wall. I wondered whether if I looked around too quickly I would see myself glaring and performing evil gestures in my direction.

“The caves?” I repeated. It seemed I could not quit this repetition. My whole life was comprised of recurrence now, like an echo of an echo. Doing the same thing over and again in order to somehow undo it. “Our people allow her to live alone in the caves?”

“They want her there. If she didn’t live there by choice, the elders might have forced her there.”

“That’s not the thing — ”

“Stop saying that!”

“Where is Livia?”

“She’s left. She’s gone. No one knows where. Personally I suspect she has become a siren. It seems to fit with her character, all the crying and lying about on sandbars. All the remoteness, the standing and looking indifferent in the shallows. When the architect goes on journeys to other lands to study foreign buildings, she can swim alongside his vessel and sing to him.”

The grief in her eyes, the heartache for me, was almost more than I could bear. I turned away and saw myself glaring at me. There I was. Myself raised his fist. Myself shook it at me. Myself made stabbing motions as if he wanted to gut me.

I knew of human mothers who brutalized the swapling children in the desperate hope that their own offspring would be returned, but I had never heard of one of our people ever harming a human charge. There was a reason Livia hated humanity. Her great-grandmother had been swapped by my great-Da. Livia had human blood in her, and fell back into savage ways.

“It had to be done,” I said weakly. My wife was right. I was naive. I repeated old sentences, commands, and biddings too often. Strange and morbid happenings.

Harella hissed. “And so we defile and thin our blood to save them.”

“We thicken our blood. It’s not just for them. It’s for us as well. It’s a necessity.”

“So the elders say. So you say.”

“Because it’s the truth. New blood is needed to avoid dissolution from inbreeding. Consanguinity.”

She tucked her chin in. “What’s that?”

“It has to do with chromosomes,” I explained. “Genetic variation, deleterious alleles.”

“What are they?”

“Human words that haven’t been invented yet, but which are still very important.”

“Auh! You and your talk of curved time and parallel futures and meeting yourself on the road. I think you and your Das have done what you have simply because you’ve all been crazy.”

“A handful of my family have been crazy,” I admitted. “But only a handful. A mere pocketful.” I tried once again to make her understand. “Our people are long-lived, but there are few of us.”

“There are too many already, and far more of the humans, and so we tilt the odds and rush toward our own destruction.”

She was right, in her way. We were losing our grace. She was proof of that. So was I. Only someone who was thick with humanity could be called a Cruel Thief of Rosy Infants. It was why I could fence so well. The secret instructions of barbaric humanity were in my blood. My Da had more temperance and dignity than me. And his Da more than him.

“What must I do?” I asked.

Myself leered. Myself continued to gesture obscenely. Myself fled. I took a step after him and stopped. My wife stared at me strangely.

“Go visit Grot,” she said. “The girl’s fate is not her fault. It’s yours. Go explain, if you can. Perhaps it will ease her burden.”

I wasn’t the only naive one. Harella was idealistic and irrational if she thought you could ever explain people’s fate to them. How could I have understood or truly believed the word of my Da before standing in this spot where I now stood, watching myself rush up the road waving his arms in outrage?

I trudged across the city and saw that Livia’s architect had indeed built spiring towers higher than the highest ones that had towered across the city before. What Livia must have thought when looking up at those immense, soaring strongholds.

I scampered down the bluff precipices and over the white sands, on to the caves where colossal black grottos and fissures in the cliff walls beckoned.

“Hello?” I called. “Hello? Is there a Grot in current residence?”

I continued on into the twisting tunnels and cavities. It was far too dark for human eyes to see, but I managed to maneuver well enough down the various shafts, following footprints in the dust. In the distance I saw the flicker of flames.

I called again. “Hello? Greetings?”

“Finally,” a voice like a moan, a breathless groan, echoed from the deep stone interior.

Approaching the light, I found myself in a cavern, more a burrow really, with a ring of stones in the center where a fire burned. Meager belongings sat clustered on the thick stalagmites being used as tabletops. Some clothing, bits of leather, pots. Hanging from the walls were nets, ropes, and spears for fishing.

Many more tunnels connected to this hub, opening farther into the cave system. The ceiling was high with chimneystack channels.

I thought of Livia’s majestic home on the bluff. I heard her clearly in my mind saying how she hoped the baby would smother itself on her breast. My hands clenched and unclenched as if I were holding on to something and trying hard not to let go.

“Grot?” I called.

The unpleasant name meant to hurt the girl also hurt me in saying it. The elders had been nits, witless nits, not to step in and do something at the first signs of the lash and the elbows. I turned and turned again. I spoke the name. The echoes of heavy breathing filled the burrow. I turned some more, looking for myself and perhaps seeking forgiveness for my mistakes.

I turned and Grot was there in all her malignant resilience.

She’d taken on many aspects of my kind. The angle of the chin, the radiant eye, the fiery expression. But none of the beauty. What had once been plain and blunt was now ugly with scars and welts. The nose, bent. The hair, missing in spots, perhaps torn out. The teeth, chipped. Her back, curved. The arms, well muscled but creaky from old fractures.

Livia, Livia, where did your grace go? I wanted to follow her into the sea and drag her up from the depths.

I put my fingers in my mouth and thought, Da, you never told me what to do when something like this happens. Your instructions were incomplete. I remain less than confident in my capacity. My parameters persist in their unquantification.

I took my fingers from my mouth and parted my lips to speak, to introduce myself and tell her about her true parents, to explain, at least to the extent that I knew, exactly who I was and why we were both here. She slid a curved short blade from the back of her skirts and cut a rope tied to a steel piton hammered into the cave wall. A sound like a hunting bird descending fell from high above, and an iron cage dropped directly atop me.

It was good thick metal, forged properly with hate. Spikes pointed at me like open scissors. Dependably harmful measures.

I was trapped again.

“You,” she said. “Cruel Thief. I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Yes.”

“At last you’ve come.”

“I’ve been away.”

She moved to the bars and presented herself with the pride of ugliness. “And what have you come to do? What is it you wish to say to me?”

The questions were too large. They were larger than I could fully carry.

“I don’t really know,” I said.

“Did you wish to tell me about my birth? About my mother? About your duty to exchange the swaplings?”

I nodded. There was little else to do. I flexed my hands and remembered her pinching and gnawing at my index finger, laughing with a laughter no different from Eva’s laughter, which shone upon a gloomy land.

“So tell me,” she demanded.

“I have nothing to tell you.”

“Can you at least say my true name? The name I was born with before you stole me away?”

“I’m not certain I know what it is,” I admitted. “I never heard your parents say it. But perhaps … perhaps it was Eva.”

She mouthed the word, and the tip of a black tongue jutted and flicked itself. “Eva. No, that is not my name. Eva is not my name.”

“Probably not.”

“So tell me why you would hand me over to … my mother.”

“Because you were a swapling. By definition, that is what’s done with swaplings. They are swapped.”

She twined closer so the firelight would blaze across the ruin of her face. She said nothing. I took a breath and turned away in my little cage.

“Occasionally there are,” I said, “unhappy occurrences.”

“Is that all I am, an occurrence?”

“An unhappy one. In the greater design of fate, I suppose.”

It made her smile. It was an ugly smile but a smile nonetheless. I welcomed it.

“Do you know what I’m going to do to you?” she asked. She retrieved a whip from her wall of tools and weapons. She snapped it at my chest, but the bars were too small to allow the lash passage. “I’m going to beat you one thousand eight hundred and sixteen times. That’s how often I was whipped by Livia.”

“You’ll have to lift the cage to do that.”

“I can hurt you.”

“I know.”

“I will hurt you. I will boil you. I will burn you.”

“You won’t be the first, Grot.”

“I’ll be the worst.”

“Yes, perhaps you will be.”

She let loose with a cry of frustration and snapped the whip again. The lash struck the bars and fell away once, twice, again and again, her rage feeding on itself. In her rage the end of the whip actually struck her across the cheek twice, but she didn’t even notice. The cage rang loudly. Even the sound of iron was enough to bring me pain, but I forced myself to keep from wincing and showing weakness. I thought of Livia hurting this girl day by day and my anger grew. I imagined Grot out on the water in a small boat, hunting her mother with nets and spears. Diving morning after morning, hoping to find the right siren to kill.

The ringing of the iron continued for a long time. Then a voice like the fairest song came from the cavern entrance.

“Sister.”

Grot seemed to know the voice although she had never heard it before. She didn’t turn to face it, but the muscles of her body locked and her hands tightened around the lash and the curved iron blade. “You return.”

“I saw him watching me in the field today, while I was with my human family. I noted his eyes were sad and bemused, and I decided to follow. I tracked him to Limwelt, through the crowd at the hanging, and then beyond to this land. The moment I breathed the air here I remembered my life from before, when I was a baby. I remembered the swapping, and I could guess why he had come to watch me with such pain in his expression.”

“If you could guess that much, then you must have guessed the rest. You must know what hate I hold in my heart.”

“I suspect.”

“And still you sought me out?”

“I had to once I realized what had happened to you.”

Grot wheeled, her weapons ready. She glared at Eva, the red welts swelling. “We are not sisters. We’re closer than that. You are what I should have been. What I would have been except for him.”

“I’m as much to blame as he is. I was aware, even then, when we were newborn and traded away.”

Grot nodded, her heavy scarred face pooled with shadow and hate. “So be it, then, you are to blame. As much as he. For an unfair trade.”

“A necessary one,” I said, but they both ignored me.

Grot’s powerful forearms flexed as she tightened her grasp on the blade. She approached Eva, hunkering low, almost crawling across the cave floor as a mewl escaped her. Inch by inch she covered the distance between her and her sister, her other self. Time seemed to grow playful again. It stopped and started and rushed past. I grabbed hold of the iron bars in frustration and screamed in agony.

“You coveted my life,” Grot said, proffering the knife. “You may have what remains of it.”

“I didn’t covet your life, sister,” Eva said, refusing the profferage. Instead she placed a hand to Grot’s cheek and softly stroked. “I didn’t steal it. We grew to follow our own courses. You were denounced and maltreated.”

“Kill me.”

“I’m not here for that,” Eva told her, the smile to light the world tugging at her lips. “I’ve come to bring you back home again.”

Grot looked up, but gazing upon Eva’s beauty only hurt her worse. She averted her eyes and raised her free hand to cover her eyes. “What’s this you say?”

“You’re coming back with me to the other side of the wall. You’re going to meet our mother and father and siblings. We have three brothers and two sisters. We’ll teach you.”

“Teach me what?”

“Happiness. Friendship. Love. Family.”

“I cannot learn that. I cannot even hear that,” Grot said, tears sluicing from her eyes.

I nearly said it was impossible, that only my family could go traveling. But here was evidence to the contrary. Clearly Eva had the ability as well. For all I knew all of our people did, and the elders in their wisdom decided long ago to damn only one family to being cruel thieves.

“You will learn it. I will help you. We all will. Now come. Take my hand.”

“Is that what you have to offer?”

“It is my first offering.”

Grot stared at the blade for another moment, and I wondered what would happen next. Might she lunge? Might she dismember? Might she reverse the angle of the knife point and self-disembowel? The moment was ugly, the expectation too dreadful. The moment after the moment was full of relief as the knife fell from her fist unused, and she reached, inch by inch covering the distance, until she and Eva clasped hands.

Then I watched them leave, walking down the length of the tunnel together, listening to the echoes off the cave walls as their voices took on sisterly whispers. I heard tittering and giggling. I heard joy.

Neither thought of me still trapped in the iron cage, and I couldn’t blame them for that. Too much of their lives had already been stamped by my thumbprints. I wished them well on this new odyssey and supposed, in some fashion, I would see them again beyond the wall.

I got to my knees and began to dig. It would take at least two days, maybe three or four, to be free again. Perhaps the earth would scrub away my sins the same way my Da hoped the river would wash away his. Harella was used to my travels and the twisting of time and probably wouldn’t come looking for me carrying a pot of hog’s head stew to ease my hunger. Myself wouldn’t show with a shovel and a compulsion to assist. Myself was waiting for me somewhere farther down the path. I was alone except for the dark secrets of my blood and duty, digging, digging, scrubbing, in preparation for freedom and, with less grace than melancholy, much more damage.