The girl struggled along a pathway threading across the lower slope of the cliff up to where the clan lived in caves; she had waited for the pre-dawn sky to lighten before attempting the path, even now the sky gave barely enough illumination and she picked her way carefully, not wishing to stumble, not wanting to alert the Leader to her return. She stopped momentarily, listening, head cocked in the direction of a sound from behind her, from the valley floor, deciding the noise was nothing to fear, animals foraging, probably picking through the remains of the meat the hunter had brought for her while she'd been exiled from the settlement. She listened to the distant cries of other beasts greeting the day casting her eyes in the half-light across the grey shadowed tree crowns where leathery winged creatures raucously cawed and swooped above roosting sites.
She moved forward once more along the path shifting the balance of the child she carried, he slept at last, worn down by the hunger that had him whimpering pitifully in the darkness of the night. She held him close through the night cushioned to her breast knowing he'd find little or nothing to sustain, maybe comfort was all she could offer; now she glanced down at him fearful for his life, the clan found no room for the weak and sickly, allowed no time to attend the ill, sentiment was a sparser commodity than food itself. Several times their Leader had looked at her disapprovingly, questioning with his stance and glare the time she spent nursing the sickly boy instead of working for the group's survival.
'He's your Son.' She thought, 'Don't you care if he lives or dies?'
Clan policy was harsh and only concerned with survival; the weak, the injured, and the elderly had no practical value and were cast-off to perish. The elderly and the injured understood the necessity of the rule and usually removed themselves voluntarily from the caves to end their life amongst the beasts and scavengers on the valley floor - they rarely survived long. For a mother to abandon her sickly child to the wild beasts was quite another matter, few mother's could make the sacrifice willingly; the Leader was the arbiter, his word final, to disobey would cast the mother to share the same fate as her child.
The clan with whom she lived had settled in cliff face caves fronted by a broad flat rock strewn apron, the apron edge plunged one hundred metres down to the plain and the mountain soared dizzyingly above their home, it was safe, defendable against raiding clans and beasts, the only disadvantage was the need to descend into the valley for food and water, a time penalty that stole even a moments respite from the daily toil for survival.
Few rules governed the clan, each new leader choosing his way, imposing by force for a few seasons before a younger, stronger male challenged and took up the mantle; by custom the pretender took possession of the defeated males woman, often choosing a second younger woman to help ward off the cold night air. That had been her fate. She been in the wrong place at the wrong time wandering too far from her family clan looking for early season fruiting berries and finding herself surrounded in a pig hunt, the pig forgotten in the excitement of finding a female without the need to resort to battle. The clan Leader claimed her - the spoils of the hunt were his to despoil.
As she slowly climbed the path, her mind ticked off the annual rains that marked the seasons. 'Five,' she counted, 'not more'. In those seasons she had borne the Leader three children, this one in its second season and unlikely to see a third. She felt old and in the feeling of her weariness she recognised the briefest of glimpses of the smell and the image of her own mother; too many seasons blurred by birthing to recall her mother in detail, yet still she knew her own life, her own span of seasons, did not equal the total of the digits on her hands and on her feet.
She walked on unsure of the reception she'd receive, resigned to a beating at the very least for returning with the child, possibly cast out to fend for herself; a death sentence, there was no survival as an individual. She was no longer afraid - the young hunter had given her hope, so very different from when she had fled the settlement a few days earlier...
- - # - -
She had woken in the night, a pain clutching at her inside like fire and ice and had bitten on her lip so as not to scream out as another spasm of pain cut through her body. Slowly dragging herself from the sleeping skins, pulling the infant with her, taking care not to wake either the child or the Leader who lay grunting in sleep against the ample bodied warmth of his first woman, she stole down the mountain path to the bleeding camp where the women stayed for a few days each month less the shame of their bleeding bring dishonour on the clan - or so the Leader claimed.
The bleeding camp, a hundred metres or so from where the path up to the settlement met the valley floor, was in the lee of a small crescent of rocks enclosing a clearing in which a fire could burn shielded from all but the most inquisitive eyes. She had been terrified when first dragged to the camp by the Leader's woman. She hadn't understood the different way of things in this clan. She thought she was being expelled from the clan, to be left for the beasts to fight over until she found herself thrust with a curse, and the routine beating of a staff across her shoulders, into the company of two other women resting in the shade of the rocks, they were almost kind to her, in spite of her outsider status.
The place scared her, the bleeding camp - not the bleeding, she had long since grown to accept the inevitability of staining with the cycles of the moon; her own staining had begun seasons before she'd been captured by this clan. She remembered a time before her capture, before the birthing of her children, when she could feel changes, sensations in her body in the days before staining commenced and she would seek out the moon in the night sky, check its shape, remind herself this was just the natural cycle of things, it was as natural as the rains that marked each season. Now her life was too demanding to have the luxury of feeling the subtle changes inside of her, she felt subtlety had been swamped by the children that had grown in her body, the long months of growing and the pain of their birth had somehow dulled her capacity to feel within her body, though she felt with her heart, more so for this sick child than her first born; an empathy not just of motherhood but of being on borrowed time, surviving at the whim of others.
What scared her about the bleeding camp was the scavengers, the beasts of the night, she could smell their fetid breathe on the night air, she could hear them marauding nearby, baying over remains, padding around the camp, wise enough to keep out of the flickering light cast by the flames from the fire, rarely hungry enough to venture near. Everyone in the clan knew that occasionally a women never returned from the bleeding camp, it was impossible to know whether they'd been taken by animals or by another tribe, simply knowing they'd disappeared was unsettling enough. She didn't know what she feared most, to be swollen with child, or to bleed and stay some days at the camp terrified the fire would fail and an animal would carry her away. That was before this last season.
During the last season she had been a regular visitor to the camp, each moon cycle brought her and the infant to the camp, an entire season without a child growing inside her. She grew less fearful with each visit, relished the time with her son, rarely entirely alone, nearly always one or two other women who would take charge of the child, give her time to rest, recover her strength, or take her turn at gathering and preparing food. It was curious, she thought, how in the bleeding camp the women shared compassion, such caring between women would be met by a beating at the settlement. She began to look forward to her visits and the short time it allowed for her to be alone with her son away from the disdainful and reproachful glances of the Leaders woman and away from the routine beatings she incurred for imagined failings dreamt up to spite. Then she missed a staining, and another; her heart sunk, she didn't want another child, not yet, not while this one remained so weak.
When she crawled away from the sleeping skins with a pain clawing at her inside, she knew something was different. She had felt the familiarity of change growing within her body, a child growing from seed, but she had never felt pain like this. She reached the sanctuary of the bleeding camp and slumped against the rocks settling the infant alongside her, oblivious to his cry's, pulling an old and dirty sleeping hide around her, her body curled, cramped in pain, a cold prickly heat of perspiration dampening her body as the barely formed foetus aborted. She lay waiting for the pain in her body to subside and her strength to recover, all the while cradling the child, exhausted beyond hearing his plaintive mews, aware she should move to the stream, cleanse the child and her own body, lacking strength to make food, to maintain the fire.
The first night she watched the fire burn low, lacked the energy or even the desire to gather fuel and closed her eyes, waiting for an animal to take her, knowing they were there, watching, waiting, she can smell them on the breeze, hear them brushing through the vegetation. She was surprised to find herself alive next morning, someone had rebuilt the fire, left some fruits within reach. She ate hungrily, brushing away the dirt and insects, too hungry and too tired to be bothered with washing the food or herself. She dozed during the day, the infant clutched to her breast, suckling from time to time, crying when not sleeping.
