“Have you spoken with Mother Karma?”
Mother Karma?
The frown that crossed Ectris’ face elicited an almost-immediately response from Joseph, who gestured him away from the cows and toward his home, which lay no more than a few dozen feet away. “I’m guessing by your response that you’ve never heard of her.”
“That name sounds familiar, but…”
“What?” Joseph asked, frowning when Ectris trailed off.
“I’ve never heard of her, Joseph.”
“I’m surprised. She lives right up the road from you.”
“Around the hill?”
“Well, yes. She’s lived there for the past twenty years now.”
“How old is she?”
“I’m guessing around your age, if not a bit younger.”
“That would mean she was thirty.”
“Which means she’s perfectly capable of helping you raise your child.” Joseph paused at the door. Fingers spread, palm against the doorknob, he appeared as though he would step through the threshold and leave him out in the fine rain, but when the farmer didn’t, Ectris offered a sigh in response. “She’s been helping the women here raise their babies her entire life, Ectris. The least you could do is talk to her.”
“You’re right,” Ectris said, straightening his posture and turning to walk up the road. “I’ll go speak to her now.”
“Just as a forewarning, though… she is a bit… well, odd, I guess you could say. She’s been that way since Bartholomus died.”
“You mean—”
“The woodcutter? Yeah. I mean him.”
Barhtolomus,
Ectris thought, sighing, thoughts of the man whom had once trained him in the art of woodcutting flooding his mind and skittering away at the corners of his conscience.
Though he had not the slightest idea how to deal with a woman of Karma’s degree, much less a widow whom had lost her husband to a horrible woodcutting accident when a tree had fallen and crushed her husband to death, he had an infant child at home to consider, one whom needed an experienced woman help him grow up just as much as he needed breath for life itself.
With one last nod, Ectris turned and began to make his way up the road.
At the front door of the house Joseph had specifically requested him to visit, Ectris slid his hands into his pockets and tried his hardest to maintain an even control of his breathing. Thoughts racing through his mind, his heartbeat uneven within his ribcage, he turned his attention up and at the door before reaching forward to knock.
Halfway there, a thought occurred to him.
Would she really help him?
Though he knew from testimony alone that Mother Karma was kind beyond compare, he knew nothing of her opinion on children that could possibly be considered something more than human. He knew nothing of the baby’s lineage, of its mother or even the father-like figure that had brought him to his doorstep. In that regard, he considered himself more than generous in taking such a creature in, but to think that the one woman that could help him might consider the infant nothing more than a monster chilled him to no end.
“If she doesn’t help,” he whispered beneath his breath, “then there’s nothing I can do about it.”
With or without the midwife, he would raise the baby on his own, even if that meant hand-feeding him for the next year-and-a-half.
Reaching forward, Ectris curled his fingers into a fist, took one last deep breath, then knocked on the door.
“Karma?” he asked.
At the corner of his vision, he caught the slightest movement near the window. It took but a moment for him to realize that the curtains had shifted and a figure had just peered out.
Here goes nothing.
Behind the door, the sound of several locks, bolts and chains clicking and scraping across wood resounded from within the house and entered his ears. A short moment later, the door opened to reveal a woman in her mid-thirties—tall, wispy and bearing a frost of white in her hair despite her youthful appearance. “Hello?” she asked, her voice so clear it sounded much like a bird’s song.
“Hello ma’am,” Ectris said, steadying his hands at his side. “A friend of mine said that I should come and ask for your help.”
“What might you need?”
“A child… he’s without his mother and I have no idea how to care for him.”
“You’re calling on me as a midwife then,” Karma said, stating her words rather than asking them. She pushed her hand aside to hold the door open and examined him with a pair of eyes Ectris compared to something like a predatory bird’s before a smile graced her face and revealed fine, if somewhat-aged dimples. “Give me a moment to gather my things. I’ll see to the child this instant.”
When the door closed, Ectris took a deep breath.
The hardest part was out of the way.
“You say this child was delivered to you?” Karma asked, securing the pack of tools and supplies at her side before turning her attention up to Ectris.
“I did.”
“By what?”
“I… don’t know,” Ectris said. “That’s the thing that bothers me.”
“You think this child may be something other than human?”
“I have no idea.”
“No matter,” the midwife said, straightening her posture and turning her head to the sky as a few drops of rain began to fall from the clouds above them. “How ironic.”
It seemed a perfect time for it to rain when Ectrus was delivering to his child the service of a caretaker that might possibly see him as something more than what he felt the baby to truly be.
Don’t think about it,
he thought.
It doesn’t matter right now.
Whether Karma approved of the child or not, he was going to seek the best treatment possible, no matter the outcome or potential consequence.
“It’s here,” Ectris said, “right around the hill.”
“Ah,” Karma replied. “Close.”
Ectris nodded.
It would, he realized, take no more than a simple walk up the road to summon the woman who would have the answers to all his questions.
“He’s quite small,” Karma said, taking the child into her hands and examining the shock of lengthening, raven-black hair atop his head. “You say he’s only just been born?”
“He’s a month old,” Ectris said, nervous at the fact that the unease seemed to grow increasingly strong as the midwife continued to examine the baby. “Do you need anything?”
“Light would help.”
Ectris set about the room gathering as many candles as he could, positioning them on both the table Karma stood before and at the corners of the room before striking a piece of flint and rock together to bring light to the room. Throughout the process, the midwife continued to look over the baby—first staring into its eyes, opening his mouth, then examining his skin, which over the weeks had gained some semblance of color to his small, frail body.
“His ears,” Karma said.
Ectris raised his eyes from his work on lighting the candles. “What?” he asked.
“His ears are malformed.”
Stepping forward, Ectris brushed up alongside his companion and peered down at the baby’s face.
As the midwife had said, the child’s ears appeared to be curved at the tips and bore several strange, unwarranted bumps and dips throughout them. It looked, to Ectris, like an uneasy hand had dragged a knife across the surface of a wax candle, but had strayed and faltered one too many times and permanently scarred its pristine, perfect surface. “What does it mean?” he asked, both mystified and uneasy at the knowledge that his preconceived thoughts were slowly but surely coming true.
“Given his eyes,” Karma said, “and the fact that his ears look the way they do, I would have to say that you are dealing with what can only be a Halfling, Mr. Karussa.”
A Halfling?
Ectris thought.
But how?
Stunned and unsure of not only himself, but the woman in his midst, Ectris reached forward to take the baby from Karma’s grasp, then steadied the infant against his chest. In response, Odin let out a slight hiccup the moment his adoptive father’s hand strayed to his back.
“How am I going to raise a child like this?” Ectris asked, turning his head to stare into his baby’s blood-red eyes. “What will the people think?”
“He will be different,” she said, “and he will be mistreated, possibly even neglected by those who would see him better off without their sons and daughters, but grow his hair long and you can hide the thing that sets him apart so much from the others.”
“But what about his eyes?” Ectris asked. “How will I hide them?”
“They will think him part albino. Nothing more.”
“An albino doesn’t have black hair.”
“Maybe he’s special,” Karma said, parting her hand through the baby’s black locks. “Actually… I lie. He
is
special.”
Ectris smiled.
The baby turned his head to stare him directly in the eyes and offered a slight laugh that seemed to warm his heart all the more.
“It’s been long since I’ve nursed a child,” the midwife said, “but for him, and you, I’ll do it.”
“Are you capable?” Ectris asked.
Karma nodded. “Yes,” she said. “I am.”
She came once every day to feed Odin personally from her breast and eventually fell into a rhythm that Ectris found both calming and settling. He would, as she fed his son, sit in the corner of the room and watch the art of infant care as though he himself were a student of medicine. Sometimes he read, others he watched, but throughout the entire process over the next several weeks he found himself growing fonder of the child more than he could have ever possibly imagined.
One night, while Odin slept soundly within the cradle Joseph had personally made for him, Ectris stood next to Karma looking down at the baby and tried to imagine what life would be like in the coming years as a father to a child that was not his own.
“Karma,” he said, turning his eyes up to look the woman straight in the eyes.
“Yes?” she asked.
“You don’t know how much it means to know that you’re doing this for me.”
“I try to help every child I can,” the midwife said, gesturing Ectris from the room and into the hall, where she led him into the kitchen and poured glasses of tea for the two of them. “It’s in my blood.”
“Your compassion knows no bounds.”
“It doesn’t, to be quite honest.” With a slight smile, the woman lifted her tea to her lips and took a long, mighty tip. Shortly thereafter, she set the cup at the end of the counter and braced her hands against it, looking him straight in the eyes in a way that he found calculating and almost unnerving.
She can see right through me,
he thought, nodding, sipping his own tea before he, too, set it down.
She knows what’s bothering me.
“I guess there’s no point in dodging around the specifics,” Ectris laughed, seating himself at the table in the area sectioned off as the dining room before looking up at the midwife.
“I can tell you’re uneasy with this.”
“I never thought I’d be a father.”
“You’ve not a woman in your life?”
“Not for a while, no.”
“Tell me how he came to you,” Karma said.
Ectris explained in short, brief detail how no more than a month ago he had opened the door in the dead of a stormy night and found a shadowed figure cradling to his chest the baby that now slept in the other room. A knife at his belt, his heart pounding in his chest, he told of how he’d threatened to disarm the creature were it not to leave his property and found, shortly thereafter, that the being, whatever it was, would not leave. It was then—in pure, meticulous detail—that he explained the moment their hands touched: when, beneath his fingers, he felt the porcelain-smooth flesh of an individual he knew nothing of and took into his arms the very child he now considered his son.
When he finished his tale, Karma’s eyes softened, almost as if she were ready to let loose a few anxious tears of her own. “Well?” he asked.
“It’s quite the tale,” the woman said, “especially considering the fact that this figure chose not to reveal its face.”
“It’s his child,” Ectris sighed. “Not mine.”
“He is as much yours as it was his.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“Do you believe that the child is
not
yours?”
“I… don’t know,” he said, tilting his head down to look at his hands. “I don’t feel like I’m supposed to be doing this.”
“Why is that?”
“Because it seems as though I’m in the wrong place in my life.”
“Maybe this is the doorway to the right one,” Karma shrugged, lacing her fingers on the table before her. “I can’t say anything more than that, but I do believe you were given this child for a reason.”
“You do?”
“I do,” she smiled. “Things happen for specific reasons, Ectris. That baby was born because its mother died in childbirth; you were given that baby because someone believed you could take care of him; you went to a friend because he was able to give you milk; and you came to me because you needed someone to take care of your child. Life, and events, run in circles. Have you ever heard the saying?”