CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE – OF BIRTH AND DEATH

Happiness and grief... oh woe is me!

Once, long ago and almost lost to time, before nonsensical conspiracies that had been called religious faiths had been finally outlawed, there had been special and vibrant celebration as one year flowed remorselessly towards the next. But that had been once (from Aurora’s perspective) and yet to come (from Umbaga’s) and had no relevance to either of them. For them, the season rolled on cold but with roaring fires to help fight the worst of the frosts.

Aurora discovered that pregnancy is no picnic. To start with it was accompanied by sickness, not just the sort she barely noticed but the nasty sort that involved retching and weeping. Umbaga had seen it all before and tried to help when he could, but he found that the best way he could help was to vanish on prolonged hunting trips that more than once lasted until well into the next day. It wasn’t because he was being peevish at all the fuss that Aurora was making but rather than the preferred prey of the hunters who needed to provide well for their families had wandered right up to the feet of the blue and purple mountains where it found shelter from the winds that whipped with an icy frenzy through the land. It was the same every year.

When the weather kept Umbaga at home because venturing forth into it would be treacherous indeed, he did his best to help. He’d been through it all before with Juju, and that had been much more difficult. For a start, before Aurora there had been virtually nothing in the way of fire, so it was just as well that Juju’s pregnancy had been during the warmer part of the years.

Then, as the weather shifted gear and the sun shone for a longer part of each day Aurora knew she was shortly going to give birth. If she didn’t, she had concluded to herself, then the child growing inside her would be too big and would never escape the confines of her womb.

It was then that they started discussing names.

Back on Terra the naming of a child had been fifty per cent easier because parents on that much more developed world knew the sex of the child the woman was having, and there was no mistake. They had even arranged it, choosing before fertilisation whether they wanted a boy or a girl.

They even discussed names when the future child was in the early planning stage, along the lines of “I like the name Jack, let’s have a boy...” or “Ella is so sweet a name, we’d best arrange a girl...”, and that’s how things had been done. But here there was nothing in the way of planning, just sexual congress and, with a bit of luck, a baby.

But for Aurora things were even more difficult. She had no idea what was growing to birth inside her. She didn’t even know its species.

She was a human being, a member of the homo sapiens species, but Umbaga quite clearly was Neanderthal. He looked it. And Juju’s DNA had confirmed it, assuming that he and Juju were of the same stock, and bearing in mind their many similarities it was certain that they were..

So was she rearing the foetus of a Neanderthal child in her womb? Or would the baby be homo sapiens? Or maybe some weird intermediate, with characteristics of both?

She wouldn’t know until it was born, and even then it might not be clear. After all, many of the neighbours (and she’d met all of them by the time the cold season was drawing to an end, and she’d got to like each and every one of them), if provided with Terran clothes and cosmetics they might pass easily on her home world without comment being made.

But she still had that additional quandary. What sex would the infant be?

The last few days were a struggle for her. Again, back on Terra there was a great deal of medical expertise and childbirth was made easy in ways that were unimaginable on this world. But the one positive thing was Umbaga. He was a bright and shining light. No man back on Terra would have been so willing and helpful.

He did everything he could to ease her journey towards the day of the birth.

And when that day finally arrived he did what all the men of his settlement did and went to the mushroom field and picked some mushrooms. It was the springtime of the year and the fungi were young and tender, and he took them back to Aurora and made an infusion for her to drink. He’d done the same for Juju three years earlier, but this time the infusion was made hot with water heated by the fire that he never let go out, and he encouraged her to drink it.

She didn’t know what was in it, but her pains were getting to be unbearable and she drunk it anyway. She supposed she would have drunk anything offered her.

And as its chemicals stirred memories and images and mixed them into a crazy mishmash of unreality, her pains subsided and she found herself giggling at just about everything. She giggled at the expression on Umbaga’s face, she giggled at the women who came by to help her, the lovely, sweet, caring Neanderthal women who were her neighbours and, she now decided, her very best friends ever.

“We never thought of name...” she said to Umbaga, and her own voice, to her, seemed to come from a world away. “What name we give child?”

Umbaga looked at her thoughtfully, then smiled.

“Boy or girl?” he asked, and she took another sip of the mushroom infusion, and giggled again.

“We have girl,” announced Aurora, “for if he boy and like Umbaga, then too handsome by far...”

“What’s handsome?” asked Umbaga.

“Sexy!” she giggled, “if boy and like Umbaga, too sexy for words!”

“What’s sexy?” asked Umbaga, genuinely curious.

“Big man, kind man, lovely man,” sighed Aurora.

“And if a girl, like Aurora?” asked Umbaga, and he grinned, “sexy girl,” he murmured.

Aurora wanted to say that was no way to talk about your daughter, but the words wouldn’t come because right there and then her labour proper began, and it was a long and even with the aid of the mushroom drug, painful.

She screamed her pain to the world, screamed loud and long, and eventually two things happened in that cave.

The baby was born and its mother died.

Simple and nasty and lousy as that. And while she lived Aurora never thought of a name for her bundle of joy, not then and not as they, mourning, took her to the Weeping Hillside to lie for a while with Juju until the wilds consumed her and left her bones to be scorched by a season’s sun.

© Peter Rogerson 14.11.16