"Jane Yolen - The White Babe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Yolen Jane)

the White Babe, Jenna, Sister Light of the Dark Riding, the Anna.

The Story:
It was an ordinary birth until the very end and then the child hurtled screaming from the womb, the
cord wrapped around her tiny hands. The village midwife echoed the baby’s scream. Although she had
attended many births, and some near miraculous with babes born covered with cauls or twins bound
together with a mantling of skin, the midwife had never heard anything like this. Quickly she made the sign
of the goddess with her right hand, thumb and forefinger curved and touching, and cried out, “Great Alta,
save us.” At the name, the babe was quiet.
The midwife sighed and picked up the child from the birth hide stretched over the hole scraped in the
floor. “She is a girl,” the midwife said, “the Goddess’ own. Blessed be.” She turned to the new mother
and only then realized that she spoke to a corpse.
Well, what was the midwife to do then but cut the cord and tend the living first. The dead mother
would wait for her washing and the mourning her man would make over her, with the patience of eternity.
But so as not to have the haunt follow her down the rest of her days, the midwife spoke a quick prayer
as she went about the first lessons of the newborn:

In the name of the cave,
The dark grave,
And all who swing twixt
Light and light,
Great Alta,
Take this woman
Into your sight.
Wrap her in your hair
And cradled there,
Let her be a babe again,
Forever.

“And that should satisfy her,” the midwife mumbled to herself, knowing that to be a babe again, to be
cradled against the breast of the eternal Alta, was the goal of all life. She had faith the quick prayer would
shrive the poor dead woman at least until the candles could be lit, one for each year of her life and an
extra for her shadow-soul, at the bedfoot. Meanwhile there was the child, blessedly a girl, and blessedly
alive. In these past years of hard living it was not always so. But the man was lucky. He had only to
grieve for one.
Once cleansed of the birthblood, the midwife saw the babe was fair-skinned with a fine covering of
white hair on her head and tiny arms. Her body was unblemished and her pale blue eyes looked as if they
could already see, following the midwife’s finger left and right, up and down. And if that were not miracle
enough, the child’s little hand locked upon the midwife’s finger with a hold that could not be broken, not
even when a suck was made for her using a linen cloth twisted about and dipped in goat’s milk. Even
then she hung on; though she pulled on the makeshift teat with long, rhythmic sighs.
When the child’s father came back from the fields and could be torn from his dead wife’s side long
enough to touch the babe, she was still holding the midwife’s finger.
“She’s a fighter,” said the midwife, offering the bundle to his arms.
He would not take her. It was all he could do to care. The white babe was a poor, mewling exchange
for his lusty redheaded wife. He touched the child’s head gently, where beneath the fragile shield of skin
the pulse beat, and said, “Then if you think her a fighter, give her to the warrior women in the mountains
to foster. I cannot bide her while I grieve her mother. She is the sole cause of my loss. I cannot love
where loss is so great.” He said it quietly and without apparent anger, for he was ever a quiet, gentle
man, but the midwife heard the rock beneath the quiet tone. It was the kind of rock against which a child