Her Husband's Hands and Other Stories Read online

  When he left the hut some time later, he wasn’t surprised to find the entire population of the village gathered at a respectful distance. Every Trivid was there: every mated adult, every child. They all carried the human’s totems, and they all faced Barath with the incurious calm of creatures who already knew everything that had happened inside. A few made sounds Barath took to be questions, or possibly invitations. He stared back, expecting them to attack en masse, not caring much whether they did or not. Then one—a ridgeback, who Barath supposed to be the same individual who’d represented them before—stepped away from the crowd, approached Barath, and placed a single gentle hand atop Barath’s head.

  It took Barath a heartbeat to understand that the Trivid was offering welcome.

  Of course.

  As a people, they were so bereft that their greatest dream was the chance to replace one dying monster with another.

  The Trivid approached again, and once again placed its hand on Barath’s head.

  Barath growled the last coherent words he’d ever speak to another sentient being. “I won’t be your next bloody human.”

  The Trivids cocked their heads, trying to understand.

  But by then Barath was leaving the village, on the first step of a journey that he knew he’d never live to complete.

  Maybe if he pushed himself to the limits of his strength he’d at least be able to travel beyond their ability to carry him back.

  The bones of our most recent human sit in an honored place. They are massive things, sculpted in proportions nothing like our own, sitting in a mound of scales we peeled from his form after he breathed his last. He died four days from our village, falling apart as he lumbered away from our offers of hospitality, cursing us, snarling at us, and throwing stones every time we tried to draw near. He was not like our other humans: neither the ancient one who lived with us for so many generations, or the black-eyed lover who so often shared his bed. This human was a giant thing with tusks and scales and claws, who walked on all four limbs instead of the two our previous humans preferred. This human looked so little like the other two, who in turn looked so little like each other, that it’s difficult to see how they could all be creatures born of the same world. And unlike the other two, this human never told us of his crime—though the crimes committed by the other two, which they described to us often, were so beyond imagining to us that the offenses committed by the giant tusked thing must have been just as terrible, just as great.

  It is a powerful thing, indeed, to have the bones of three such humans among us, in this place which has known no such wonders . . . so powerful a thing that skeptics among us sometimes wonder if all three of these creatures were indeed of the same species. After all, they looked nothing alike. How could all three be human?

  But we see no point in such doubts. We have heard what humans are.

  And we know a human when we see one.

  Cherub

  Childbirth always means pain, and not just for the mother who must strain to expel both the squalling infant and its parasitic demon rider from her womb. It also torments those of us who must stand around the outer wall of the birthing shed and watch, both eager for our first look at the baby and dreading our first glimpse of the hateful attached thing bearing the face of the corruption in that child’s heart.

  It is midday. A peremptory daylight enters the shed in stripes, illuminating the dust in the air, but not the bleakness of these last moments before we discern the nature of the monster who will accompany the child into the land of the living. My beloved wife Faith squats in the center of the room, slick with sweat and tears. Her straw hair clings to her cheeks, and her toes sink into the diarrheic puddle she expelled as the ordeal entered its final stage. She has uttered curses since dawn that prove the common wisdom that women turn savage during birth: oaths of terrible hatred directed against the child inside her and I the man who planted the seed. I believe she would kill me, and it, right now, just to be rid of the pain.

  I know I’m right about the rage because of her own personal rider, a hideous idiot monkey-thing riding piggy-back on her soft shoulders, whose spindly leprous arms lead to scaled claws buried knuckle-deep in her temples, leers at me over the top of her head. It is the embodiment of everything that is bad about this mostly good woman I married, and it mocks me with the deep pleasure it takes in her suffering. Its tiny piggish eyes and moron leer, all sharp teeth and pointed tongue, manifest the vindictive cruelty my darling wife is prone to whenever the world requires more of her than she can freely give. Despite the genuine affection she has always shown for me, Faith has also always been capable in heated moments of flinging words that flay all my self-respect away in a single lashing sentence. Even as she strains with the effort of expelling our son, her rider’s face betrays the few secrets Faith bothers to keep, her unspoken resentment of every passing disappointment I’ve ever caused her rippling across its noxious features like pus flowing from a septic wound.

  Nor am I any better. My own demon rider, whose petty features betray my cowardice, my pettiness, and my secret selfishness, tightens its grip on my skull and tickles the part of me that cares not for Faith’s pain and wants only for this long, stinking, noisome day to end. I’m certain that Faith can see that and I can only hope that she sees the best of me, the part of me not embodied by my rider, as easily as she can see the worst.

  The men of the village form a circle around the wall of the shed, their arms linked in the traditional last gesture of defiance against whatever evil thing comes to join us atop the child about to burst from Faith’s slit. They are silent. Their riders keep up an animated conversation between themselves: not one we can hear, thank the Lord, for if riders spoke aloud their voices would drown out our own. It is not a nice conversation. The riders make faces, they make obscene gestures, they laugh long and hard, they pull their talons from the bore holes in our skulls and nail them in again, in cruel emphasis of their dominion over us. I think they are arguing between themselves. I think they are wagering on the new arrival. I think they are as tired of the wait as we are.

  On either side of me, my brothers Noah and Eben hold my arms, counseling strength. They have always been good men, but Noah’s gibbering imp of arrogance and Eben’s stone-faced golem of coldness peer over their respective faces. I am entitled to hate my brothers a little for this, and no doubt my own rider—(that loathsome many-eyed insectile thing, that whispers obscene things to me in the night, that assures my wife of the vile rape fantasies I must sometimes employ to keep me hard during the act of love)—now shares that secret with them, over whatever pretense of a grateful look I can place on my own merely human features.

  Then Faith screams, her voice hoarse and breathless. “They’re coming!” The word becomes a bellow as she puts all she has into the final push, expelling a gout of blood and the head of a baby, which for a moment dangles between her spread legs, glistening scarlet. She gasps, takes a sideways crab-step to relieve the horrendous cramps in her knees, and squeezes again. My newborn son lands in the dirt we’re all heir to, the dirt that greets us as we enter the world and embraces us again as we leave. There is of course something on the back on his neck, something as soft and as rounded and as new to the world as he is: the passenger that will define much of what he is, even now grasping him by the neck, cementing its grip on who he will be.

  This is the most terrifying moment, for any parent. In my life I have attended births where the first sight of the rider was enough to prove that no joy would ever come from the child, where the rider’s distinct features branded its human mount as thief or rapist or murderer, and the babe for all its apparent innocence was revealed as naught but a seed from which nothing but evil would ever grow. True, even those were usually permitted to live, for even a future murderer might be able to live a worthy life blessed to his kin until the moment he commits his terrible sin, and remains possible to value such a person, even if it will always be impossible to look at them without some inner voic
e raising that dread question, when? But that is still a shattering thing to see for the first time, on what should be a day of celebration.

  And even that would not be the worst. I still have nightmares about that foul morning some five years gone when my neighbor Jeremiah’s son was born and the thing on his back bore the face of something so savage that we could scarcely bare to look at it: an awfulness that we could only compare to riders of legend whose human hosts had not just killed once or twice out of greed or rage, but slaughtered freely, sometimes entire families and sometimes entire populations, in sprees driven only by their sheer love of killing. When Jeremiah took the child from his shrieking wife and headed for the village well, we all knew what he intended to do, and none saw the point in stirring a muscle to stop him. After all, he’d borne his own murderer imp since birth, and the time had now come for him to live up to it.

  Now I have to behold my own child, and see whether the sins on his back bring more heartbreak than joy. My brothers release me, and I join my darling Faith, who still strains with the afterbirth. I tell her I love her and I take a deep breath and lifetimes later raise my son from the filthy puddle that is his first introduction to a debased and sinful world.

  He is a tiny thing, bearing the correct number of arms and legs and a scrunched-up face indignant about the ordeal just forced on him. He coughs out a mouthful of liquid and then starts to cry, a high-pitched, angry wail that assails me his fury at me for inviting him into a place this filled with pain and fear. I sense that he is strong, and before I allow myself to feel the first stirrings of love for him turn my attention to the creature on his back, which is of course even smaller than him, and so covered with slime and blood that it is at first impossible to determine its true nature. Somebody hands me a wet cloth, so I can clean it enough to see; and as I wipe away the blood and the piss and all the other shiny effluvia of life, I first feel fear, and then puzzlement, and then relief, and then the dawning amazement of a man faced with the kind of miracle no man dares hope for.

  From the shadows, Eben asks me what it is.

  The tiny creature clinging to the back of my son’s neck is beautiful. It is pure and it is innocent. Its face is as smooth and as unmarked by any of the possible cruelties or follies as the mirrored surface of a lake can be when undisturbed by wind or current. Its eyes are closed, its expression sweet. Its hands are not the sharp, raking claws we all know from our own riders, but hands that could belong to any other baby’s, and they cling to my son’s neck without breaking the skin, their touch more gentle caress than possessive grasp. It is absolute innocence personified: something that exists only in legend, something that no man I know has ever worn, something no parent I’ve ever heard of has ever dared hope for.

  “It’s a cherub,” I say.

  Fifteen years later, I am at home tending to my infant daughter, when Eben rushes in with the bad news. My son Job has been beaten and robbed again.

  I wish I could say this was a shock. It is not the first time, or the tenth, that others have seen my son’s innocence as weakness, and done whatever they wanted to him, whether robbery, bullying, or—on one terrible occasion—rape. His back is a relief map of scars, his face a history of all the brutal things other boys have done to the one perfect boy who will not defend himself for any reason. Many of these are also visible on the back of his rider; not just because our riders tend to take on the same ravages time inflicts on us, but because more than one boy ridden by something foul and angry has attempted to peel my son’s harmless rider away, with fingernails and sticks and even knives, in the apparent belief that the boy envied and despised by all should not even be left that which marks him as what he is.

  I know it is my duty to go with Eben, to tend to the son cursed by a birth that failed to sufficiently damn him. I should, but I feel a great weariness, the kind that only comes after years and years of watching someone you care for live through one torment after another. I am tired of hearing that the other boys have beaten him. I am tired of hearing that strangers have robbed him. I am tired of hearing him lashed with the kind of horrible words that leave barbs in the skin and continue to fester even after the surface wounds have healed.

  It is not that I don’t know of other children who have been almost as brutally treated; there is a man in my village, Jared, ridden by a thing of perverted carnality, whose fifteen-year-old daughter Ruth avoids all eyes as she carries his latest rape-spawn to term. Everyone knows what Jared does to her at night. But she at least bears the imp of a future patricide on her back. She deserves what she gets and he deserves what she will do. A case can be made that Jared is only doing what he has to do, to punish her in advance for the inevitable moment when she will destroy him. But what of Job, who has never sinned, and never will sin? Who, it seems, may even be incapable of sin? How does he deserve what they do to him? How will his scales ever be righted?

  I glance down at my new infant daughter Miriam, who is round-faced and beautiful and (I know from the hateful second face grinning at me over the smooth curve of her head) a brat, a user, a castrating bitch who will someday brandish her sex like a weapon to manipulate men who will give up their dignity and their principles for a mere moment of her favor. When she is old enough to know what her eldest brother is, she will doubtless manipulate him as well, showing him moments of kindness in between vivid demonstrations that she feels nothing for him but contempt. I feel no fear about her ability to make her way in the world. If anything, I take comfort in fearing for the world’s capacity to survive her attentions.

  Faith enters from the other room leading our other son, the dull-eyed seven-year-old Paul, who is not feeble-minded as he would like us to believe but (we know from the features of the creature on his back) has an utter contempt for anyone but himself and a low and animal cunning that leads him to pretend dependence on others in order to get them to do things for him. It was difficult to remain patient with him when he resisted toilet training as a means of remaining a coddled, indulged infant; it will be even more difficult to endure the selfish, spoiled, half-formed being he will be as an adult. I know that my rider’s face clarifies the depth of my growing disgust for him, so I turn to Faith, who has aged thirty years in the past fifteen, and tell her that I need to go to Job.

  Even as she takes Miriam to me and coos to her, the rider on her back flashes the mien of any mother who sometimes hates her own children, for making her worry about them, for making her spend time on them, for making her subsume everything she is to them. Paul, jealous of any attention spent on any human being other than himself, starts to tug at her sleeve. Faith reassures him, her sweetness never wavering even as her rider underlines how much she’d like to kill him.

  I tell Eben to take me to my eldest son.

  The two of us trudge through the streets of our village, which are cold and ankle-deep in slush from recent snowfalls. I do not look at the familiar faces of my neighbors, or at the faces of those who ride them. I do not look at the liars or the thieves or the bullies or the connivers or the bigots or the hypocrites or the self-satisfied stupid. I do not look at the adulterous or the violent or the ones who show compassion but exult when others feel pain. I do not look at the boy who kicks dogs or the girl who twists her little sister’s hair when their parents aren’t looking. I do not look at the other boy, the surprisingly gentle one who everybody knows will kill somebody someday, and who once tearfully confessed in my hearing that he wishes he didn’t know, because the knowledge leaves him unable to look at any other person, even the girl he likes, without wondering if that’s his future victim. And when I pass the glass window of Judah’s bakery I do not look at my reflection in the glass. I never look at my reflection in glass.

  It is not that long a walk, overall. It is only an eternity.

  In less than ten minutes we arrive at the crossroads on the edge of the village, where a small crowd has gathered around my bleeding son. There are wagons, some drawn by oxen and some by horses, left untethered in the
grass, as their owners hopped down to bear witness. Two local girls who have always been kind and even loving to Job, despite what I know about their true natures from the savage crones clinging to their respective backs, tend to his wounds, cleaning the gash in his forehead and staunching the copious flow of blood from his nose. He whispers something to one of them, and she blushes. Then he sees me and his wounded but still beautiful features brighten at the sight.

  As always, it takes my breath away, to see nothing hiding behind that love but more love; it is not something I’m used to.

  This is the beautiful and the terrible thing about my boy Job. He is always as he seems. When he smiles, there is nothing behind that smile but warmth. When he offers to lend a hand, there is nothing behind that generosity but an eagerness to help. When he is hurt by others and later professes forgiveness, it is true forgiveness and not the kind of grumbling, suppressed resentment that amounts to vengeance, biding its time, but the absolute inability to pollute himself with grudges of any kind, even when he has been wronged so grievously that he could be forgiven for seething with hatred. He puts me, puts all of us, to shame. Maybe that’s why he’s so hated. People may think they despise those not as virtuous as themselves, but there’s no end to the reservoirs of wrath we bear for those we know to be better.

  He tells me what happened. There was a gang of them. They came upon him as he returned from the next town with the goods I sent him to get, and swarmed him like rats, ripping his clothes, kicking his ribs, stealing his money and taking his goods. In the end, they took turns pissing on him.