Read Powers for Free Online Page B

the green willows by the river, and my heart went cold.
    The next day Miv went into convulsions several times. We heard that the Mother came to the infirmary and stayed with him all that evening and night. I thought of how she had stood by my bed in the golden light. When we were sitting on our mattress in the evening, I said to Tib and Sallo, “The Mother is as kind as Ennu.”
    Sallo nodded, hugging me, but Tib said, “She knows who hit him.”
    “What difference does that make?”
    Tib made a face.
    I was angry at him. “She
is
our Mother,” I said. “She cares for us all. She’s kind. You don’t know anything about her.”
    I felt I knew her, knew her as the heart knows what it loves. She had touched me with her gentle hand. She had said I was courageous.
    Tib hunched up and shrugged and said nothing. He had been moody and gloomy since Hoby turned away from him. I was still his friend, but he’d always wanted Hoby’s friendship more than mine. He saw my cuts and bruises now with shame and discomfort, and was shy with me. It was Sallo who got him to come over to our nook and sit and talk with us before the women put the lights out.
    “I’m glad she lets Oco stay with Miv,” Sallo said now. “Poor Oco, she’s so scared for him.”
    “Ennumer would like to stay with him too,” Tib said.
    “The Mother is a healer!” I said. “She’ll look after him. Ennumer couldn’t do anything. She’d just howl. Like now.”
    Ennumer was in fact a foolish, noisy young woman, without half as much good sense as six-year-old Oco; but though her mothering had been random, she was truly fond of Oco and Miv, her doll-baby as she called him. Her grief now was real, and loud. “Oh my poor little doll-baby!” she cried out. “I want to see him! I want to hold him!”
    The headwoman came over to her and put her hands on Ennumer’s shoulders.
    “Hush,” she said. “He is in the Mother’s arms.”
    And tear-smeared, scared Ennumer hushed.
    Iemmer had been headwoman of Arcamand for many years, and had great personal authority. She reported to the Mother and the Family, of course, but she never gained advantage for herself by making trouble for other house people, as she might have done. The Mother had proved that she didn’t like tattlers and toadies, by selling a tattler, and by choosing Iemmer as headwoman. Iemmer played fair. She had favorites—among us all, Sallo was her darling—but she didn’t favor anyone, or pick on anyone either.
    To Ennumer, she was an awesome figure, far more immediately powerful than the Mother. Ennumer blubbered a little more, quietly, and let the women around her comfort her.
    Ennumer had been sent to us from Herramand five years ago as a birthday gift to Sotur’s older brother Soter. She was then a pretty girl of fifteen, untrained and illiterate, for the Herra Family, like many others, thought it an unnecessary ostentation or even a risk to educate slaves, particularly girl slaves.
    I knew Ennumer had had babies, two or three of them. Both Sotur’s older brothers often sent for her; she got pregnant; the baby was given to one of the wet-nurses, and presently traded to another House. Miv and Oco had been part of one of those bargains. Babies were almost always sold off or traded. Gammy used to tell us, “I bore six and mothered none. Didn’t look for any baby to mother, after I nursed Altan-dí. And then you two come along to plague me in my old age!”
    Very rarely the mother, not the child, was sold off. That was Hoby’s case. He had been born on the same day as Torm, the son of the Family, and alleging this as a sign or omen, the Father had ordered that he be kept. His mother, a gift-girl, had been sold promptly to prevent the complications of kinship. A mother may believe the child she bore is hers, but property can’t own property; we belong to the Family, the Mother is our mother and the Father is our father. I understood all that.
    I understood why Ennumer was crying, too.