Etruscans by Morgan Llywelyn Page B

being of flesh and blood who would obey their dictates.
    If Vesi had given birth at home, midwives and purtani would have been with her constantly, caring for flesh and spirit. Protective symbols would be painted on her belly and on the special birthing stool handed down from mother to daughter. Priests would chant and burn
incense whose sweet smoke dulled the pain. Silver bells would ring to ward off evil spirits, while elsewhere in the spura young goats were sacrificed to lure them to other prey.
    Instead she was alone in a crude hut in the forest with only her mother and a primitive Teumetian—and the combined wisdom of a hundred generations of Rasne.
    As Pepan watched, Repana worked over her daughter. Wulv had been awakened by the girl’s shrieks but was forbidden to enter the hut. “You would just get in my way!” Repana shouted at him.
    Hurt, the woodsman sat on the ground outside and sulked. From time to time he flexed his callused hands with their dirt-rimmed fingernails and stared at them, unable to comprehend their uselessness in the current situation.
    Pepan understood the impotence Wulv felt. All he could do now was defend the little family against the Otherworld predators already swarming toward the site.
    The atmosphere had grown thick with demonic shapes. Siu hissed and growled, writhing obscenely as they advanced. Instead of bodies, in the Otherworld they displayed grotesque manifestations of their favorite vices. Some appeared as gaping mouths with slimy tongues and endlessly working jaws. Others were little more than oversized genital organs, throbbing with lusts that could never be eased.
    Hia were different. Many had never been embodied but existed as pure, crackling energy. Hia who had been corrupted by siu gave off a distinct smell of decay. They tended to stay close to their corrupters, basking in the sulfurous glow of concentrated evil.
    As this hideous assemblage gathered, Pepan braced himself. He still did not know enough about the Otherworld to know how to fight them but was trusting to instinct. And the ancestors. But they seemed to be drawing back, pulling away.
    From within the hovering cloud came the voice of the
Prophet. The child is not without resources of its own, she said. Watch … and learn.
    When labor began, the infant had ceased to emit its characteristic tonal signal. For a time it was silent, all its energies focused on the convulsive struggle to escape the womb. The birthing was swift, but no sooner had the child emerged from Vesi’s body than it sent out a new signal, a layered, complex chord of ineffable sweetness that rose and fell with its lusty cries.
    The sound rang like a chime through the Otherworld.
    The rapacious horde halted abruptly. A few—the older, more experienced—even turned back. The others milled around in confusion, snarling and snapping at one another but advancing no farther.
    Pepan asked, What happened? I do not understand.
    A small part of each of us is now in that child, replied the voice of the Prophet, making him more powerful than any single member of our race has ever been. Demons and those they influence are destructive rather than creative. A lack of creativity means a lack of imagination. Without imagination they cannot encompass a new idea—and this child represents a new idea. He frightens them.
    Abruptly, the sound the child was making changed, becoming a deep growl that provided a startling counterpoint to the original sweetness of tone. The effect was disturbing; one by one the gathered hia and siu turned and melted back into the Otherworld.
    What’s wrong? Pepan asked the ancestors.
    Demon-song , his father replied. You did not tell us the infant was siu- spawn. Although there was no inflection in his voice, Pepan could sense his anger. We have gifted the offspring of a demon. My son, do you know what you have done?
    Will you take back your gifts because of it? Pepan countered.
    The cloud roiled again. At