The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter - Brent Hayward [66]
“So quick,” said the fecund. “Nice work. I do like you, my melancholy friend! Much better than that other silly old cow. I was thinking, you know, I feel I’m emerging from a dense fog. Why was I so attached to that old woman? Though, at first, I must admit, when you were right outside, I swore it was her approaching. Very strange: you smell almost exactly like her. Come closer, kholic, as close as you can, right up to the bars. I won’t bite.”
But Octavia stood her ground. “You look different.”
“Nonsense. I have indigestion. Pregnancies are like that. Reflux, I suppose. I’m only in the first few hours but my hearts have a horrible burning sensation. You know? Or maybe I’m just hungry. Show me that fabulous basket. Do I see rats? My favourite! Lay ’em on me!”
Octavia leaned forward and tossed the rats by the tails, one at a time, through the bars of the portcullis, pulling swiftly back each time though the fecund did not try to strike, not once, or even move toward her. The fecund gobbled the rats whole. Octavia threw the handfuls of kitchen scraps, the bloodcloths and breeches, faster and faster, until the basket was emptied and mercifully light, and she just stood there panting. Her fingers bled from the sharp edges of the rattan and dripped with slimy waste. All the garbage had either been caught in the air by the snapping mouth or had been scooped out of the swamp before it had much of a chance to get wet.
Octavia licked her fingers clean.
Insects in the cell hummed and buzzed and gyrated; she brushed aside the ones that came at her through the bars.
Chewing the last scraps, the fecund watched Octavia. The monster’s sharp teeth had made quick work of the meal. She swallowed, burped. “You’re a cool customer, girl. I’ve been doing a little research on you.”
“Research?”
The fecund showed her teeth. “You’re very fascinating. Would you like to hear what I have to say? No? I can see you don’t want to talk. Very well.
“While I digest, and gestate the little gift I’ve been forced to gestate, how about I tell you a story? Would you like that? To pass the time.”
Octavia nodded, leaning against the damp wood of the door, the empty basket hanging from one hand.
“Well. All right, then, all right. Hold onto your knickers, this one’s going to be creepy.”
She nodded again.
“Long before people like you were tested for melancholy and whatever else officers of the palatinate look for, I think kids with black in their veins were just squashed at birth. Maybe a magistrate stuck a pitchfork in you. I don’t recall. Brutal times, I suppose, but simpler in a way.”
Octavia had been thinking the very same thing.
“Personally,” continued the monster, “I’ve never wanted to be worshipped like a god. That’s too obvious. Though I could have been, of course. I’m a creator, but a humble one.”
“This is not really a story,” said Octavia.
The fecund held up one long finger, for patience. “Naturally, I watched the pantheon descend, as did we all, burning through the sky as they came, thinking at first that they might be huge rocks thrown down to pierce the atmosphere, and that they would burn up upon entry, like other rocks do. I was just a young fecund back then, maybe a bit naïve. I watched the gods swoop down and land in forests and deserts and oceans.
“In those days, I should add, I could come and go as I pleased. There were not many humans around, certainly no city for you to live in. And, of course, you had not yet been chosen, so you were as mortal as you are today. The main difference—” she spat out a rat’s skull, intact, which fell into the water with a plop “—is that you didn’t know what you were missing. Following? Yes? Or am I boring you?”
“I’m following.”
“Expansive territories I had painstakingly established—and which should still be mine today—were visible from the blue heaven you used to call the sky and from which your gods had recently tumbled. Poor girl, I can see by your reaction that you’ve never laid eyes on this celestial field, have you? Cerulean blue on clear days, the colour of wistfulness, of self-assurance. Ah,