“I don’t know how he’d do that.”
A new speaker heard from! Snark, leaning against a pillar at the entrance of the chamber, where she’d obviously been listening for some time. “They force-fed me a pretty fair technical education, and I don’t know a way this could happen all at once, out of nothing.”
“Maybe the trait emerges only if the taste of Rottens is in the air,” Lutha muttered.
“Then I’d have it,” said Leelson. “I’ve tasted Rottens.”
These were mere quibbles. “I don’t know how Bernesohn did it, but I’m damned sure it’s not coincidence. It happened because he’s your son!”
“Dananana,” caroled Leely, waving his hands and plucking at his trousers. “Dananana.”
Oh, marvelous anticlimax! “I need to take him out,” Lutha said furiously. “Is it safe to go out?”
Snark shrugged, her go-to-hell shrug, but her eyes were wary. “Safe as it ever is, but don’t get careless, Lutha. I’ve had a bath at the edge of the water, and you look like you could use one, but keep an eye out.”
Lutha did not reply. She stalked out past Leelson, Leely trotting along at her side, sometimes moistly kissing Lutha’s wounded wrist, sometimes petting her arm. They passed Jiacare Lostre as he returned empty-handed from the sea, and Mitigan, who sat quietly on a rock, his face flushed with sunset, both of them looking like shiny new people. Lutha lusted for water, much water, and for clean air after all those hours of tasting rottenness in the claustrophobic stone chamber. She wanted to wash it away! She wanted to wash Leelson away!
Leely tugged at her hand, leading her over the ridge and down toward the scarlet shine of water and sky. The first line of shaggies seemed a safe distance away. At the shore, Leely peeled his trousers off and waded into the water to do his business. He liked to do that, whenever water was available. He’d been born able to swim. She watched him paddle, sometimes diving, feet in air, taking mouthfuls of water and spurting them like the legendary whale, he all silver and rose like the waters, like the sky. She took off her filthy clothes and waded in far enough that she could dunk all of herself. The water was cleansing, not very salty, but chill. She scrubbed at her body with handfuls of the powdery bottom sand, then waded out and sat like a monument on a pedestal of stone, letting the soft wind dry her while her filthy clothing soaked in the nearest pool.
Leely came up a good way out, clutching a fish, laughing. Not far beyond him, a shaggy lowered its tentacles. Leely took a bite out of the flapping fish, then threw the remainder into the lowered tentacles. Lutha shuddered, again aware of her son’s surpassing strangeness. For years this uncanny presence had shared her days, clear as noon, while she denied and refused to see that he wasn’t just a little boy, not just a child, not just her beloved son. She had been like Saluez, facing the unbearable, rejecting it.
“You’re very beautiful.”
Leelson was standing behind her, staring at her, looking wistful. Leelson never looked wistful!
“You used to say so,” she said, swallowing deeply as she grabbed up the sodden robes and draped them around her shoulders, trying to put revelation and seduction both aside. She didn’t want to talk, not about the two of them, not about Leely, not about anything.
Fastigats paid no attention to that! With them, nothing could remain unsaid, undefined, unfulfilled. “You really think Bernesohn Famber designed … that?” He gestured toward the splashing child. “Why isn’t he intelligent?”
His expression was very much like Limia’s had been. Stubborn. Dismissive. Lutha swallowed again and said stubbornly, “We don’t know that he isn’t.”
It rang false, even to her. Why not say it? Why not get it over with?
“It’s because Bernesohn had the same expectations as your mother, Leelson! He expected you to beget with a woman from Fastiga, not some … outsider! If you’d had a Fastigat woman, Leely would have been all right.” The bitterness boiled to the surface, shaming her. She couldn’t control it. It wasn’t fair. None of it.