Born to Carry On: Tallit Ossaring, by Sophonisba [family challenge]
-title- Born to Carry On: Tallit Ossaring
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-warnings- Pre-industrial takes on age of consent and infant mortality. Not for those with hot buttons on either one. M/f sexual contact.
-timeframe- Preseries; set after an earlier story of mine, "Forever Young."
-spoilers- ...let us say through the end of the second season, to be safe (I don't think a name, devoid of context, should count as a spoiler).
-characters- Teyla, Halling, Charin, Jinto, Tagan, Sora, Kanaan, OCs
-disclaimer- SGA, of course, is not mine. The attitudes of the Athosians should not be taken as ones shared by the author. The Responsibility was inspired by that in Diane Duane's Tale of the Five; I considered renaming it, but could not think of a better way to phrase it, and while I think it makes a great deal of sense applied to Pegasus, I did not wish to obscure my sources. The Athosian's pre-Trev-Xenios attitudes towards foreigners were inspired by a story by miriel whose title I have forgotten and whose plot I cannot; Geron's alk story was inspired by this and by Arlo Guthrie's When Mooses Go Walking (sic), which I heard him recite on NPR the other day. The title of this work is drawn from a song called "And When I Die" by Laura Nyro, excellently sung by Peter, Paul, and Mary.
-word count- 4950
-summary- "You have been saying," Teyla said firmly if a little bluntly, "that you would like to be a father now, when the peak of your energy is upon you. I, in my turn, would prefer to fulfill my Responsibility as soon as may be, that it not hang over my head."
Born To Carry On:
Tallit Ossaring
Athos had made sixteen full turns around Serios its sun (as the Ring-speech they then spoke would have it; in the old language of Athos, "sèrios" simply meant "sun") when Teyla Emmagan's flows stabilized; a little early, perhaps, as many young women across the worlds did not settle down until well into their fourteenth of the standard unit of age-reckoning known as an anns.
"It's a bit of an odd length, really," Orin Orin's son said, looking Teyla thoughtfully up and down. "Between three hundred and fifty and three hundred and seventy days, depending on what world you are on, unless it's somewhere outright weird like that place with the quick days -- "
"Amara," Teyla informed him, with great condescension for such a lack in learning.
"Well, anyway, my point was, it's a weird length to pick for standard, but everyone does."
"Because the Ancestors said so," Halling Irrylar shrugged, careful not to dislodge the straps of the recently named Jinto's carry-pack. He set the basket of leaf-dumplings next to the Emmagans and their foster-brother, letting them all see his son's sleeping face as he bent slightly forward, and rolled his eyes. "You should not question the Ancestors."
"Why not?" Toran Emmagan asked.
Halling threw up his hands and stomped off to where Geron Ossaring and the other still-growing young men were setting up a game of slap-ball. The stomping woke Jinto, who made his displeasure vocally known; Geron patted him on the head and helped Halling out of the carry-pack, jouncing it and Jinto while Halling hastily collected his sister and pressed her nephew on her for the duration of the game.
"And furthermore," Orin went on when his audience turned back to him, "wherever they came from, thirteen of them is awfully young to count as a woman. Especially with you still all elbows and knees like that."
"We held a manhood ceremony for you last year," Teyla pointed out. "You did not protest then that your people would not have counted you a man for two more annu yet."
"Yes, but I was ready," Orin protested.
Teyla shoved him.
Orin shoved back.
"Are you not more than a little old for such actions?" Charin Emmagan, who had been wed into Emmagan too late to properly be Teyla and Toran's grandmother, said reprovingly. "One of you is an adult and the other about to be; your playtime should be between your duties and responsibilities rather than instead of, and certainly not taken up by such pettiness."
Teyla and Orin chorused that they were sorry.
Charin sighed.
"And this is why I thought you were not ready," Orin said when she had left.
Teyla, determined not to react, rolled her eyes.
"You're going to have to hunt, and do all those women's prayers, and cook actual tuttle-root soup instead of something to feed to the hounds you don't keep, and probably look after Toran -- "
"I can look after myself," Toran said. "Teyla is going to have to go trade by herself, and not wander off to do something else when they're making leather, and someday fulfill her Responsibility if she can ever get someone to look twice at her."
Orin snorted.
"I was thinking of getting that out of the way first thing," Teyla said thoughtfully, eyes wandering to the young men playing slap-ball.
Her foster-brother and cousin both began laughing at that.
*
For her recital piece, Teyla had chosen the part of the tale of Trev of the Hospitality and Cally Withered-Arm where, having cut the Wraith beacon from her and then brought her back to Athos with him in defiance of the ancient custom of inhospitality to aliens, Trev chose to forsake Norriten his House and marry their two fortunes together rather than permit his people to kill a woman whom he had offered guest-friendship. She had practiced for ages, careful to match the tonal values of the high chant rather than substitute the simpler ones of Ring-speech and then to infuse them with meaning, and after her womanhood ceremony several people had congratulated her on the expressiveness and portrayal of her reading -- including old Shirrin Norriten, who in marked contrast to her ancestors held the modern custom of treating chance-met strangers as guests (if not allies) as much a revelation of the Ancestors as any of the prophecies, and Kayhar Treyidaze, who said that she at least had done his House's founders justice.
The celebration meal afterwards, if not overly elaborate, was filling and plentiful (treehopper stew, liberally admixed with herbs and roots), and enough people were milling around through the camp that, when Teyla followed Geron Ossaring to the slit trench, pretended to suddenly notice him as he came out again, and drew him away to the edge of the trees, it was hardly remarkable.
"What is it, then?" Geron asked, looking down on her from the lordly height of a man just entering his last growth spurt.
"You have been saying," Teyla said firmly if a little bluntly, "that you would like to be a father now, when the peak of your energy is upon you. I, in my turn, would prefer to fulfill my Responsibility as soon as may be, that it not hang over my head."
Geron hummed for a moment in thought. "It is true," he said, "that I have desired a child for Ossaring. Especially now that I have been watching young Halling with his baby and thought, 'I want one.'"
"Which is," Teyla concurred, "quite agreeable to me."
He slowly looked her over from head to toe, seeming to pause over every elbow and knee, so that when his eyes at last met hers she felt every inch of the alk-calf her younger kinsmen compared her to.
"There remains," Geron said, gently, questioning, "the issue of compatibility...?"
He reached for her slowly, carefully, taking her by the shoulder and drawing her in; Teyla, impatient, stepped up to him, and quivered as he nuzzled her ear. His hand slowly moved down from her shoulder, cupping a breast and gently rubbing a little circle with his thumb before sliding down and along her side, ending up splayed over one buttock and squeezing lightly. For a moment, as he lifted his face, it seemed nearly worried before he broke into a relieved smile, matching something of Teyla's mood.
She pushed back into his hand and he withdrew it, amusedly chiding "Peace, peace! It will be time for that soon enough."
"I will come to you in ten days, then?"
"You are eager to get your Responsibility filled," Geron laughed, looking on her from the perch not only of his extra spans but his greater age. "Certainly, then."
Teyla might, under other circumstances, have been offended, but she knew Geron to be a kindly man and gentle (and, she had just discovered, one who knew more than one way to use his hands), and stretched to grasp his shoulders as their foreheads met in formal leavetaking.
*
Teyla was dutifully, gratefully conscious of the Ancestors' favor. Firstly, Geron Ossaring had agreed to her offer, eager to have a child of his own. Secondly, he had got her with child before she could have another flow, which was properly expeditious even if it had put an end to the trying; which, thirdly, if not the overwhelming rapture the poets sang of in Ring-speech songs, had been really quite pleasant indeed, and she would be happy at some point in the future to repeat the experience with someone she likewise trusted without ulterior intentions on her part.
Fourthly, despite the dubious reactions of both Charin and her father, the pregnancy was going very well indeed. She felt different, certainly, and very well, perhaps it was true that she was slightly more ready to be swayed by emotion than she had been, and there had been one or two days when leftover soup had made her a little queasy, but Charin had pointed out that leftover soup was made from food that was just going off and Shirrin Norriten, who always gave advice whether anyone wanted it or not, had declared that the Ancestors had made it so that a pregant woman's stomach would reject anything that might otherwise poison the fragile unborn, as if laying a very mild version of the shellfish-sickness on them. Teyla, who had never had the shellfish-sickness after eating anything, found herself perhaps a little resentful of that, even if it did mean that she was perfectly fine as long as she avoided leftover soup, particularly the spicier kinds.
Tagan, after a season of unnerving nearly all his opponents at bantoi practice and spending most of his time at home meditating, finally spoke to Teyla while they were packing up their tent to move camp.
"You know," he began, "our bloodline has our gifts."
"You can feel the Wraith coming," Teyla agreed. "People are glad of it."
"You felt it too, at that time," her father said with heavy significance.
Teyla blinked. "That was the Wraith? I would have thought they would feel... worse, like a swamp or a terrible noise or something."
"That was the Wraith," Tagan agreed. "I shall tell you more about the senses the next trip you take with me. Your mother's grandmother could feel them too, for that matter."
"And so perhaps this coming child will?" She began unfastening the ties of the tent wall. "If so, I will teach it the skills that you will have taught to me, and complete my duties to Ossaring."
"Teyla-fruit," Tagan said helplessly. "In addition to our gifts, there are... prices. Often, our infants are born... wrong."
"Wrong?" Teyla stared at him.
"Your grandparents decided to marry Charin rather than let her marry your grandfather my uncle, Kina's father, because she'd had Kina and her sisters without any problems. My aunts had some trouble fulfilling their Responsibilities. The two infants your mother bore before and after you... could not live. I do not know whether you remember her lastborn: he did not live out of infancy, and your mother... "
"Mother was very ill," Teyla remembered. "For a whole year."
"And you may be a woman now," Tagan said, "but you are still young, and things go wrong so easily when a pregnant woman is young."
"But they very well may not," his daughter reassured him. "And I wanted this now, so that I should have it over and finished when next I see Sora again."
"Teyla..." he shook his head. "Unless another woman chooses to bear an infant soon, you will need to stay on hand to nurse Geron's. Perhaps for years."
"You can start weaning an infant as its first year ends," Teyla argued. "The story says -- "
"Those were in times of danger," Charin pointed out, bustling over to help them with the roof. "One should wait a year and a season, and let the infant reach for food at its own pace as the anns and its nameday draw nearer, so that the baby will have helped wean itself when it reaches the half of its third year."
Teyla, anxious lest they draw the attention of the other old women, excused herself to the slit trench as soon as she decently could.
Later, at the new camp, after the unborn had quickened within her, Charin brought Teyla and Astrylla Norriten out to the box traps. The young women looked at each other, puzzled; Astrylla, too, was now pregnant, if only just, the unborn not yet well rooted within her.
"It may come," Charin warned them, "that after all your pains, what you bring into the world will need the House's judgment. The judgment, you know, should be given by a quorum of the House; it is not well to anticipate them, unless the newborn is clearly in and will remain in pain." She made a quick, irritated noise as she saw the ground-skitterer one of the box traps had not caught cleanly, and hastily apologized as she drew her belt knife and let it out of its pain. "Like that," she explained before apologizing properly, Teyla and Astrylla joining her in the prayers.
"But if you must, or if the onus falls to you, it is well that you should know the trick of it," she went on, skillfully removing and restraining a coney from a trap that had worked properly without being bitten or scratched. Charin apologized to the coney, then, for using it as a demonstration, and promised it that it would nevertheless serve the Athosians with honor. She lifted it over Teyla's head from behind, her arms closed on it aroung the younger Emmagan.
"You first," Charin explained. "Hands over."
Teyla laid her growing hands over Charin's wrinkled ones, finger to finger and thumb to thumb, as she had done for her fingers to learn the motions of cutting and curing and weaving. Without being prompted, she bent a knee up to help support the coney.
"Good girl," her nearly-grandmother approved, shifting their hands up slightly. "Like this."
Together, their thumbs moved and snapped.
And after all that, fifthly, although it took the best part of a morning that was not the most comfortable one Teyla had ever spent, she bore a perfectly healthy infant, one that Geron and his family only needed cursorily inspect before they laid her on Teyla's breast.
(Sixthly, after the struggle of getting it out, she had the pleasure of watching Geron's face as he held her afterbirth while it finished draining into the infant already nuzzling at her breast.)
*
Having to continually duck into Geron's tent to feed the infant, which had been so red when she was born that Teyla had decided to nickname her "little pome," was rather tiring. Halling and Anteia's persistent advice on how they had survived as much with their son soon grew yet more tiresome; Geron himself said, during a meal while Teyla was there, that he did not much care for helpful advice from a man several annu his junior.
Even when Geron's sister Dorrit invited Teyla to spend the night, for ease in the middle-night feeding, she felt worn thin and kept losing her place in the chants she was copying out.
On the other hand, if she took too long to get up, Geron would pick the infant up out of her alk-horn cradle, bring her directly to Teyla's bedroll, and take her back when she unlatched, although Teyla still had to be sure to offer her both teats -- Geron would have been perfectly happy to let the little pome fill herself at one, for efficiency.
"Sup, sup," he crooned afterwards, rocking the infant in the cradle made from the broad palmate horn of an alk. "Sup, little alk-calf, smart like an alk. They tried to harness alk to war-carts, you know, little alk-calf, back in the days when people lived in cities and rode out in their war-carts, and thought that nobody could stand before big big alk. But alk are smart, little alk, little calf, smart smart; when they saw the army arrayed before them, with spears leaning out pointy-pointy and pointy-pointy paltoi in enkeias, ready to be thrown across across across, they didn't run at the enemy, they just ran, away-away-away, big big alk on long skinny legs, and never mind anyone or anything that might be tied on behind, bouncing through the fields and banging into the trees, until they were all broken off and the alk hid quiet quiet quiet, like you, little calf, quiet quiet quiet, and the wars and the cities all went away, but big big alk go walking."
Teyla fell asleep and dreamed of riding on the back of a big big alk, loping along on its long skinny legs, wide flat antlers sweeping from side to side as it tore off tree leaves; and of clinging to its back as a culling beam stabbed down and the alk ran, away-away-away.
*
Then Astrylla's infant was born dead. (Anteia Irrylar said that it had been so twisted up it was a wonder it had carried near to term.) Teyla, wishing that she was inspired by pure fellow-feeling, went around to see the older woman.
"Eat your nourishing birth-loaf," Astrylla's mother was encouraging as Teyla clapped outside the tent.
"My infant got little enough good of it," Astrylla said bitterly. "Why should I?"
"Because you have lost blood and strength you could ill afford to lose," her grandmother Shirrin said bluntly. "Come in, girl. You, my girl, eat."
Teyla obediently came in in time to see Shirrin feeding her eighteen-annu-old granddaughter as though Astrylla were a sixth that age.
"I do not suppose you had the sense to bring yours?" Shirrin demanded, and Teyla hastily lifted the sleepy infant out of her apron and came over.
Shirrin took the infant and held her at Astrylla's teat, keeping her steady as the younger woman jerked.
The infant burrowed into the teat, nuzzled the nipple, and then jerked back with an outraged whimper.
"Su-su-su, little pome," Teyla hushed. "You can taste the difference, can't you?"
"What," Astrylla demanded, "do you think you are -- "
"Young Teyla has been itching to travel with her father again. You intended to stay here before, and you have not thought of leaving since. Even had things gone well," Shirrin thumped the bantos she used as a walking stick in emphasis, "she or young Geron might have asked you to help with matters. As it is... "
As it was, the infant had decided that strange-tasting supper was better than no supper, and latched on firmly.
"It is not as if I lost something I had to lose," Astrylla said fretfully a moment later. "I just... there were all the possibilities, there were all the maybes, and now all of them have been cut off and away."
"But then you did have something," Teyla said, putting her own hands under the infant.
Shirrin, possibly relieved, sat down again.
"You had a dream, and you lost it," the youngest woman in the tent went on, fumbling. "It is permitted to mourn when you lose a dream. You just..."
"You cannot do nothing but mourn," Shirrin took up the slack, "or nothing will ever get done."
In a few moments, Astrylla brought her arm up to support the infant, and took up an eating skewer to poke at her birth-loaf with the other. Her mother drew in a deep breath, and began to cut up the loaf for her grieving daughter.
*
Teyla had vaguely thought that, having found a wet-nurse for the infant and planned trips through the Ring, she would let her milk quietly dry up.
In practice, Tagan and Charin and Shirrin all insisted that she keep in milk to help Astrylla anyway. Moreover, excess milk could be used to flavor cooking, or as a drink for the old and otherwise toothless, or in trade -- the Athosians were not the only people among the thousand worlds who could drink milk all their lives long, and there were several on many worlds who would gladly barter for an evening's wet-nursing.
(Teyla's customers for that last ranged from the Sharigan noblewoman who gave her a golden hairpin set with jet and amber for the chance to, as it later eventuated, set about intriguing a plot against the Marble Throne without her baby to worry about and thus wind up getting at least one member of half the Sharigan High Houses flayed for the Throne and fed to the swine, to the ragged vagabond with a blade like an overgrown one-sided glaive and a baby-cart full of hidden knives, who for the chance to feed his son traded his goodwill, whatever that might be worth, and the chance to relieve the dull ache in her teats.)
"I had thought," she confessed to Sora when next they visited the Genii, "that I would feel changed and... more, somehow, after all of it. But it just seems to be one thing after another."
"They're always the opposites of mountains," Sora shrugged, turning her flat-brimmed hat over and over in her hands as the wind swept the long grass the two young women sat in. "They seem large when you're far away, and then you come to them and they're little things."
Her eyes looked out at the wind in the grass from eyepits like bruises in a face that seemed paler and hollower than when last Teyla had seen it, in the autumn of her world.
Bits and pieces of things Teyla had seen in her travels and a comment someone had made to her father on Dar Acklon fell together into an unpleasant whole.
"Sora," Teyla demanded, rolling her shoulders to ease the discomfort in her vest-straps. "Did someone lie down with you?"
"Teyla!" Sora's head jerked around to stare into her friend's eyes. "I've told you before, Genii girls don't do that sort of thing, don't bring it up in public or they'll think badly of you -- "
"Sora," Teyla repeated firmly. "I did not ask, 'did you think all about it and then choose to lie down with someone?' I asked 'did someone take it into their head to lie down with you?'"
"Wha-- oh." Sora laughed, a burst of sudden, surprised laughter, shaking her copper curls and setting them dancing in the breeze. "No, no, nothing like that. I just... I spent the winter studying. It wasn't all that fun and I didn't get out very much, and I was ill off and on for a lot of it." She patted Teyla's hand, her smile just reaching her worried eyes. "Nothing bad happened to me -- there were a number of minor unpleasantnesses that added up, is all, and if you'd seen yourself your first trip through the Ring afterwards there probably wasn't much to choose between us, not from what you've been saying."
Teyla stared into lighter eyes, relaxed when she saw no more there than what had been said or hinted at. "So. Your ceremonial betrothal -- is it to be made real, or...?"
"It's in abeyance," Sora shrugged.
"In what?"
"Our fathers decided to wait for some annu and then decide whether the betrothal's on or off." The redhead lifted a hand to one side of her mouth, continuing in a piercing whisper clear enough to be heard across a tent, "They both think they might be able to get a better match, but neither one wants to risk having to settle for a worse one."
Teyla wasn't sure whether she found this risible or depressing, and was afraid her face made as much clear.
Sora, on the other hand, was tying her hat back under her chin. "Now, Mistress Trader," she said, suddenly lunging at Teyla with a wide smile and pushing her back into the long grass, "tell me more about this Geron! Are you still walking out, or --?"
"That was trade." Teyla rolled her eyes before giving in and providing Sora the details she wanted.
*
When consulted under threats of direst secrecy, Tagan reassured his daughter that she was probably correct to take Sora at her word.
"I've seen the aftermath of that," he said quietly, vision far from that place, "and it looks different; your friend has, I think, lost some of her innocence, but not that sort of it."
Speculating about what might be the case, then, kept Teyla busy all the way back to the camp. Astrylla was the first to notice and wave to the trading party, careful to keep her other hand holding her charge upright as the infant grabbed for one of the cut lengths of tuttle root on the trencher on Astrylla's knee, snatched it up to her mouth, and began to chomp at it ferociously, working slivers of firm root off.
By the time Geron took notice of the trading party, however, they had all seen the rapt, somewhat possessive look on his face as he watched Astrylla and the infant. Kayhar Treyidaze yapped like a pup in approbation, and Geron stomped off, a dull flush rising in his cheeks.
"Halling says," Orin announced, melting out of the camp, "that there is nothing like watching a woman nurse your child to make a man feel proud."
"Halling says," Toran declared, following him, "that there's something about a woman nursing that speaks to a man, even if it isn't his child yet."
"Halling says," Toran's friend Kanaan piped up, "that Astrylla's got a figure even if Teyla's growing one."
"Halling," Tagan Emmagan said thoughtfully, "appears to be saying more than enough."
"He comes by that honestly," Halling's mother Lasanna said, stretching up to pull a hide's lashings over the drying rack. Tagan's eyes followed her torso.
"So," Teyla said later, as she helped carry the infant's things back to Geron and Dorrit's tent. "I think that Geron likes you."
"I... perhaps?" Astrylla said.
"A year to mourn in friendship and two years to mourn in family," Teyla said, "before it is time to eat pomes with plums and drink blue-rose tea and live again. I do not know where dreams fall within that, but..."
"But the spring is passing and the summer upon us," Astrylla agreed, "and I am grown ripe in my own skin."
Then the infant narrowed her eyes in a familiar way, and Teyla hastily uncovered the waste pot so that Astrylla could hold her over it.
The infant, her business done, turned her head to attempt to find something within her narrow focus, and then demanded imperiously "ma!"
"Can you do it this time?" Astrylla asked. "I will take that."
With some difficulty, the women transferred their burdens. Teyla had just unlaced her vest and put the infant to the teat when something came flying at them and was hastily blocked by Astrylla.
"Did you catch Jinto's hard-cooked flatbread?" Halling asked, hurrying towards them with his son on his shoulders.
"It landed in the waste pot," Astrylla said dryly. "He will not want it back now."
"He might," Halling said wryly. "I don't."
The two women grinned back at him in a moment of fellow-feeling before he turned and went back to his tent, Jinto demanding "bread, Tada, bread!" all the way.
*
And so it was that, two years and a season and a moon-go-round from Teyla's womanhood ceremony, which lacks the sixth part of an anns of being two annu, the Athosians gathered in the center of their new camp to hear Tagan exhort them in three languages: in the Ring-speech that was their common tongue, in the language of the Ancestors that they preserved in prayers and praising, and in the Athoio their ancestors had spoken when first they made camps of their towns and a tent-town of their gathering.
"Athosians, sons and daughters of the Mirinoi, sprung of princes and champions, behold one who has survived an anns of infancy and now is infused with a human soul, beginning not only to speak but to talk, a girl-child ready to be named and claimed!"
Tagan turned around slowly in a circle, letting them all see the baby, before repeating in each language "What name is the child given?"
"Tallit Ossaring," Geron said firmly when he had done, and then "Daughter of Geron Ossaring" in all three languages.
"Behold, then," Tagan reiterated to the assembly of their people, holding Tallit aloft, "Tallit, daughter of Geron, born into the House of Ossaring, borne by Teyla Emmagan in fulfillment of her Responsibility, which here is decreed settled; Tallit, likewise human and a daughter to the race and stock of the Mirinoi, of you and one of you!" He cradled her against his chest and asked, in Ring-speech, "Is this agreed and witnessed?"
"Yes!" everyone answered, right down to Jinto, who could not quite manage the ending sound.
"Is this agreed and witnessed?" Tagan asked in the received pronunciation of the Tongue of the Ancestors.
"It is!" everyone with enough knowledge answered.
"Is this agreed and witnessed?" Tagan asked in Athoio.
"Gladly!" answered the adults, the near-adults studying the texts, and Randor Cordallen, whose older sister was likewise studying for her womanhood ceremony.
Tagan handed Tallit to her father and clapped his hands three times, and everyone wandered or rushed as they preferred to the naming feast, which featured not only a whole roast gelaby but a great pot of what, under Charin's patient tutelage, Teyla had at last learned to persuade to be tuttle-root soup rather than tuttle-roots and other vegetables swimming in watery broth. People came up to Geron and exclaimed over how much more alert Tallit's eyes were and how well-behaved she was, or merely congratulated him on his fine daughter. Astrylla Norriten, after standing by them for a while, went to get them a bowl of food, the finely carved silverwood comb Geron had given as a love-gift glinting in her hair.
"Congratulations, Geron," Teyla said, coming up to him after she had finished her first helping of gelaby and extending a brown finger for Tallit to grasp in her small, tawny ones. "She is beautiful, is she not?"
"She is," Geron said proudly, looking down at his daughter's soft brown hair and wide round eyes. "You do good work, Teyla."
nota bene: In case it isn't clear, an anns (plural: annu) is meant to be a measure of time within an hour of our Earth's period of revolution around the Sun.
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-warnings- Pre-industrial takes on age of consent and infant mortality. Not for those with hot buttons on either one. M/f sexual contact.
-timeframe- Preseries; set after an earlier story of mine, "Forever Young."
-spoilers- ...let us say through the end of the second season, to be safe (I don't think a name, devoid of context, should count as a spoiler).
-characters- Teyla, Halling, Charin, Jinto, Tagan, Sora, Kanaan, OCs
-disclaimer- SGA, of course, is not mine. The attitudes of the Athosians should not be taken as ones shared by the author. The Responsibility was inspired by that in Diane Duane's Tale of the Five; I considered renaming it, but could not think of a better way to phrase it, and while I think it makes a great deal of sense applied to Pegasus, I did not wish to obscure my sources. The Athosian's pre-Trev-Xenios attitudes towards foreigners were inspired by a story by miriel whose title I have forgotten and whose plot I cannot; Geron's alk story was inspired by this and by Arlo Guthrie's When Mooses Go Walking (sic), which I heard him recite on NPR the other day. The title of this work is drawn from a song called "And When I Die" by Laura Nyro, excellently sung by Peter, Paul, and Mary.
-word count- 4950
-summary- "You have been saying," Teyla said firmly if a little bluntly, "that you would like to be a father now, when the peak of your energy is upon you. I, in my turn, would prefer to fulfill my Responsibility as soon as may be, that it not hang over my head."
Born To Carry On:
Tallit Ossaring
Athos had made sixteen full turns around Serios its sun (as the Ring-speech they then spoke would have it; in the old language of Athos, "sèrios" simply meant "sun") when Teyla Emmagan's flows stabilized; a little early, perhaps, as many young women across the worlds did not settle down until well into their fourteenth of the standard unit of age-reckoning known as an anns.
"It's a bit of an odd length, really," Orin Orin's son said, looking Teyla thoughtfully up and down. "Between three hundred and fifty and three hundred and seventy days, depending on what world you are on, unless it's somewhere outright weird like that place with the quick days -- "
"Amara," Teyla informed him, with great condescension for such a lack in learning.
"Well, anyway, my point was, it's a weird length to pick for standard, but everyone does."
"Because the Ancestors said so," Halling Irrylar shrugged, careful not to dislodge the straps of the recently named Jinto's carry-pack. He set the basket of leaf-dumplings next to the Emmagans and their foster-brother, letting them all see his son's sleeping face as he bent slightly forward, and rolled his eyes. "You should not question the Ancestors."
"Why not?" Toran Emmagan asked.
Halling threw up his hands and stomped off to where Geron Ossaring and the other still-growing young men were setting up a game of slap-ball. The stomping woke Jinto, who made his displeasure vocally known; Geron patted him on the head and helped Halling out of the carry-pack, jouncing it and Jinto while Halling hastily collected his sister and pressed her nephew on her for the duration of the game.
"And furthermore," Orin went on when his audience turned back to him, "wherever they came from, thirteen of them is awfully young to count as a woman. Especially with you still all elbows and knees like that."
"We held a manhood ceremony for you last year," Teyla pointed out. "You did not protest then that your people would not have counted you a man for two more annu yet."
"Yes, but I was ready," Orin protested.
Teyla shoved him.
Orin shoved back.
"Are you not more than a little old for such actions?" Charin Emmagan, who had been wed into Emmagan too late to properly be Teyla and Toran's grandmother, said reprovingly. "One of you is an adult and the other about to be; your playtime should be between your duties and responsibilities rather than instead of, and certainly not taken up by such pettiness."
Teyla and Orin chorused that they were sorry.
Charin sighed.
"And this is why I thought you were not ready," Orin said when she had left.
Teyla, determined not to react, rolled her eyes.
"You're going to have to hunt, and do all those women's prayers, and cook actual tuttle-root soup instead of something to feed to the hounds you don't keep, and probably look after Toran -- "
"I can look after myself," Toran said. "Teyla is going to have to go trade by herself, and not wander off to do something else when they're making leather, and someday fulfill her Responsibility if she can ever get someone to look twice at her."
Orin snorted.
"I was thinking of getting that out of the way first thing," Teyla said thoughtfully, eyes wandering to the young men playing slap-ball.
Her foster-brother and cousin both began laughing at that.
*
For her recital piece, Teyla had chosen the part of the tale of Trev of the Hospitality and Cally Withered-Arm where, having cut the Wraith beacon from her and then brought her back to Athos with him in defiance of the ancient custom of inhospitality to aliens, Trev chose to forsake Norriten his House and marry their two fortunes together rather than permit his people to kill a woman whom he had offered guest-friendship. She had practiced for ages, careful to match the tonal values of the high chant rather than substitute the simpler ones of Ring-speech and then to infuse them with meaning, and after her womanhood ceremony several people had congratulated her on the expressiveness and portrayal of her reading -- including old Shirrin Norriten, who in marked contrast to her ancestors held the modern custom of treating chance-met strangers as guests (if not allies) as much a revelation of the Ancestors as any of the prophecies, and Kayhar Treyidaze, who said that she at least had done his House's founders justice.
The celebration meal afterwards, if not overly elaborate, was filling and plentiful (treehopper stew, liberally admixed with herbs and roots), and enough people were milling around through the camp that, when Teyla followed Geron Ossaring to the slit trench, pretended to suddenly notice him as he came out again, and drew him away to the edge of the trees, it was hardly remarkable.
"What is it, then?" Geron asked, looking down on her from the lordly height of a man just entering his last growth spurt.
"You have been saying," Teyla said firmly if a little bluntly, "that you would like to be a father now, when the peak of your energy is upon you. I, in my turn, would prefer to fulfill my Responsibility as soon as may be, that it not hang over my head."
Geron hummed for a moment in thought. "It is true," he said, "that I have desired a child for Ossaring. Especially now that I have been watching young Halling with his baby and thought, 'I want one.'"
"Which is," Teyla concurred, "quite agreeable to me."
He slowly looked her over from head to toe, seeming to pause over every elbow and knee, so that when his eyes at last met hers she felt every inch of the alk-calf her younger kinsmen compared her to.
"There remains," Geron said, gently, questioning, "the issue of compatibility...?"
He reached for her slowly, carefully, taking her by the shoulder and drawing her in; Teyla, impatient, stepped up to him, and quivered as he nuzzled her ear. His hand slowly moved down from her shoulder, cupping a breast and gently rubbing a little circle with his thumb before sliding down and along her side, ending up splayed over one buttock and squeezing lightly. For a moment, as he lifted his face, it seemed nearly worried before he broke into a relieved smile, matching something of Teyla's mood.
She pushed back into his hand and he withdrew it, amusedly chiding "Peace, peace! It will be time for that soon enough."
"I will come to you in ten days, then?"
"You are eager to get your Responsibility filled," Geron laughed, looking on her from the perch not only of his extra spans but his greater age. "Certainly, then."
Teyla might, under other circumstances, have been offended, but she knew Geron to be a kindly man and gentle (and, she had just discovered, one who knew more than one way to use his hands), and stretched to grasp his shoulders as their foreheads met in formal leavetaking.
*
Teyla was dutifully, gratefully conscious of the Ancestors' favor. Firstly, Geron Ossaring had agreed to her offer, eager to have a child of his own. Secondly, he had got her with child before she could have another flow, which was properly expeditious even if it had put an end to the trying; which, thirdly, if not the overwhelming rapture the poets sang of in Ring-speech songs, had been really quite pleasant indeed, and she would be happy at some point in the future to repeat the experience with someone she likewise trusted without ulterior intentions on her part.
Fourthly, despite the dubious reactions of both Charin and her father, the pregnancy was going very well indeed. She felt different, certainly, and very well, perhaps it was true that she was slightly more ready to be swayed by emotion than she had been, and there had been one or two days when leftover soup had made her a little queasy, but Charin had pointed out that leftover soup was made from food that was just going off and Shirrin Norriten, who always gave advice whether anyone wanted it or not, had declared that the Ancestors had made it so that a pregant woman's stomach would reject anything that might otherwise poison the fragile unborn, as if laying a very mild version of the shellfish-sickness on them. Teyla, who had never had the shellfish-sickness after eating anything, found herself perhaps a little resentful of that, even if it did mean that she was perfectly fine as long as she avoided leftover soup, particularly the spicier kinds.
Tagan, after a season of unnerving nearly all his opponents at bantoi practice and spending most of his time at home meditating, finally spoke to Teyla while they were packing up their tent to move camp.
"You know," he began, "our bloodline has our gifts."
"You can feel the Wraith coming," Teyla agreed. "People are glad of it."
"You felt it too, at that time," her father said with heavy significance.
Teyla blinked. "That was the Wraith? I would have thought they would feel... worse, like a swamp or a terrible noise or something."
"That was the Wraith," Tagan agreed. "I shall tell you more about the senses the next trip you take with me. Your mother's grandmother could feel them too, for that matter."
"And so perhaps this coming child will?" She began unfastening the ties of the tent wall. "If so, I will teach it the skills that you will have taught to me, and complete my duties to Ossaring."
"Teyla-fruit," Tagan said helplessly. "In addition to our gifts, there are... prices. Often, our infants are born... wrong."
"Wrong?" Teyla stared at him.
"Your grandparents decided to marry Charin rather than let her marry your grandfather my uncle, Kina's father, because she'd had Kina and her sisters without any problems. My aunts had some trouble fulfilling their Responsibilities. The two infants your mother bore before and after you... could not live. I do not know whether you remember her lastborn: he did not live out of infancy, and your mother... "
"Mother was very ill," Teyla remembered. "For a whole year."
"And you may be a woman now," Tagan said, "but you are still young, and things go wrong so easily when a pregnant woman is young."
"But they very well may not," his daughter reassured him. "And I wanted this now, so that I should have it over and finished when next I see Sora again."
"Teyla..." he shook his head. "Unless another woman chooses to bear an infant soon, you will need to stay on hand to nurse Geron's. Perhaps for years."
"You can start weaning an infant as its first year ends," Teyla argued. "The story says -- "
"Those were in times of danger," Charin pointed out, bustling over to help them with the roof. "One should wait a year and a season, and let the infant reach for food at its own pace as the anns and its nameday draw nearer, so that the baby will have helped wean itself when it reaches the half of its third year."
Teyla, anxious lest they draw the attention of the other old women, excused herself to the slit trench as soon as she decently could.
Later, at the new camp, after the unborn had quickened within her, Charin brought Teyla and Astrylla Norriten out to the box traps. The young women looked at each other, puzzled; Astrylla, too, was now pregnant, if only just, the unborn not yet well rooted within her.
"It may come," Charin warned them, "that after all your pains, what you bring into the world will need the House's judgment. The judgment, you know, should be given by a quorum of the House; it is not well to anticipate them, unless the newborn is clearly in and will remain in pain." She made a quick, irritated noise as she saw the ground-skitterer one of the box traps had not caught cleanly, and hastily apologized as she drew her belt knife and let it out of its pain. "Like that," she explained before apologizing properly, Teyla and Astrylla joining her in the prayers.
"But if you must, or if the onus falls to you, it is well that you should know the trick of it," she went on, skillfully removing and restraining a coney from a trap that had worked properly without being bitten or scratched. Charin apologized to the coney, then, for using it as a demonstration, and promised it that it would nevertheless serve the Athosians with honor. She lifted it over Teyla's head from behind, her arms closed on it aroung the younger Emmagan.
"You first," Charin explained. "Hands over."
Teyla laid her growing hands over Charin's wrinkled ones, finger to finger and thumb to thumb, as she had done for her fingers to learn the motions of cutting and curing and weaving. Without being prompted, she bent a knee up to help support the coney.
"Good girl," her nearly-grandmother approved, shifting their hands up slightly. "Like this."
Together, their thumbs moved and snapped.
And after all that, fifthly, although it took the best part of a morning that was not the most comfortable one Teyla had ever spent, she bore a perfectly healthy infant, one that Geron and his family only needed cursorily inspect before they laid her on Teyla's breast.
(Sixthly, after the struggle of getting it out, she had the pleasure of watching Geron's face as he held her afterbirth while it finished draining into the infant already nuzzling at her breast.)
*
Having to continually duck into Geron's tent to feed the infant, which had been so red when she was born that Teyla had decided to nickname her "little pome," was rather tiring. Halling and Anteia's persistent advice on how they had survived as much with their son soon grew yet more tiresome; Geron himself said, during a meal while Teyla was there, that he did not much care for helpful advice from a man several annu his junior.
Even when Geron's sister Dorrit invited Teyla to spend the night, for ease in the middle-night feeding, she felt worn thin and kept losing her place in the chants she was copying out.
On the other hand, if she took too long to get up, Geron would pick the infant up out of her alk-horn cradle, bring her directly to Teyla's bedroll, and take her back when she unlatched, although Teyla still had to be sure to offer her both teats -- Geron would have been perfectly happy to let the little pome fill herself at one, for efficiency.
"Sup, sup," he crooned afterwards, rocking the infant in the cradle made from the broad palmate horn of an alk. "Sup, little alk-calf, smart like an alk. They tried to harness alk to war-carts, you know, little alk-calf, back in the days when people lived in cities and rode out in their war-carts, and thought that nobody could stand before big big alk. But alk are smart, little alk, little calf, smart smart; when they saw the army arrayed before them, with spears leaning out pointy-pointy and pointy-pointy paltoi in enkeias, ready to be thrown across across across, they didn't run at the enemy, they just ran, away-away-away, big big alk on long skinny legs, and never mind anyone or anything that might be tied on behind, bouncing through the fields and banging into the trees, until they were all broken off and the alk hid quiet quiet quiet, like you, little calf, quiet quiet quiet, and the wars and the cities all went away, but big big alk go walking."
Teyla fell asleep and dreamed of riding on the back of a big big alk, loping along on its long skinny legs, wide flat antlers sweeping from side to side as it tore off tree leaves; and of clinging to its back as a culling beam stabbed down and the alk ran, away-away-away.
*
Then Astrylla's infant was born dead. (Anteia Irrylar said that it had been so twisted up it was a wonder it had carried near to term.) Teyla, wishing that she was inspired by pure fellow-feeling, went around to see the older woman.
"Eat your nourishing birth-loaf," Astrylla's mother was encouraging as Teyla clapped outside the tent.
"My infant got little enough good of it," Astrylla said bitterly. "Why should I?"
"Because you have lost blood and strength you could ill afford to lose," her grandmother Shirrin said bluntly. "Come in, girl. You, my girl, eat."
Teyla obediently came in in time to see Shirrin feeding her eighteen-annu-old granddaughter as though Astrylla were a sixth that age.
"I do not suppose you had the sense to bring yours?" Shirrin demanded, and Teyla hastily lifted the sleepy infant out of her apron and came over.
Shirrin took the infant and held her at Astrylla's teat, keeping her steady as the younger woman jerked.
The infant burrowed into the teat, nuzzled the nipple, and then jerked back with an outraged whimper.
"Su-su-su, little pome," Teyla hushed. "You can taste the difference, can't you?"
"What," Astrylla demanded, "do you think you are -- "
"Young Teyla has been itching to travel with her father again. You intended to stay here before, and you have not thought of leaving since. Even had things gone well," Shirrin thumped the bantos she used as a walking stick in emphasis, "she or young Geron might have asked you to help with matters. As it is... "
As it was, the infant had decided that strange-tasting supper was better than no supper, and latched on firmly.
"It is not as if I lost something I had to lose," Astrylla said fretfully a moment later. "I just... there were all the possibilities, there were all the maybes, and now all of them have been cut off and away."
"But then you did have something," Teyla said, putting her own hands under the infant.
Shirrin, possibly relieved, sat down again.
"You had a dream, and you lost it," the youngest woman in the tent went on, fumbling. "It is permitted to mourn when you lose a dream. You just..."
"You cannot do nothing but mourn," Shirrin took up the slack, "or nothing will ever get done."
In a few moments, Astrylla brought her arm up to support the infant, and took up an eating skewer to poke at her birth-loaf with the other. Her mother drew in a deep breath, and began to cut up the loaf for her grieving daughter.
*
Teyla had vaguely thought that, having found a wet-nurse for the infant and planned trips through the Ring, she would let her milk quietly dry up.
In practice, Tagan and Charin and Shirrin all insisted that she keep in milk to help Astrylla anyway. Moreover, excess milk could be used to flavor cooking, or as a drink for the old and otherwise toothless, or in trade -- the Athosians were not the only people among the thousand worlds who could drink milk all their lives long, and there were several on many worlds who would gladly barter for an evening's wet-nursing.
(Teyla's customers for that last ranged from the Sharigan noblewoman who gave her a golden hairpin set with jet and amber for the chance to, as it later eventuated, set about intriguing a plot against the Marble Throne without her baby to worry about and thus wind up getting at least one member of half the Sharigan High Houses flayed for the Throne and fed to the swine, to the ragged vagabond with a blade like an overgrown one-sided glaive and a baby-cart full of hidden knives, who for the chance to feed his son traded his goodwill, whatever that might be worth, and the chance to relieve the dull ache in her teats.)
"I had thought," she confessed to Sora when next they visited the Genii, "that I would feel changed and... more, somehow, after all of it. But it just seems to be one thing after another."
"They're always the opposites of mountains," Sora shrugged, turning her flat-brimmed hat over and over in her hands as the wind swept the long grass the two young women sat in. "They seem large when you're far away, and then you come to them and they're little things."
Her eyes looked out at the wind in the grass from eyepits like bruises in a face that seemed paler and hollower than when last Teyla had seen it, in the autumn of her world.
Bits and pieces of things Teyla had seen in her travels and a comment someone had made to her father on Dar Acklon fell together into an unpleasant whole.
"Sora," Teyla demanded, rolling her shoulders to ease the discomfort in her vest-straps. "Did someone lie down with you?"
"Teyla!" Sora's head jerked around to stare into her friend's eyes. "I've told you before, Genii girls don't do that sort of thing, don't bring it up in public or they'll think badly of you -- "
"Sora," Teyla repeated firmly. "I did not ask, 'did you think all about it and then choose to lie down with someone?' I asked 'did someone take it into their head to lie down with you?'"
"Wha-- oh." Sora laughed, a burst of sudden, surprised laughter, shaking her copper curls and setting them dancing in the breeze. "No, no, nothing like that. I just... I spent the winter studying. It wasn't all that fun and I didn't get out very much, and I was ill off and on for a lot of it." She patted Teyla's hand, her smile just reaching her worried eyes. "Nothing bad happened to me -- there were a number of minor unpleasantnesses that added up, is all, and if you'd seen yourself your first trip through the Ring afterwards there probably wasn't much to choose between us, not from what you've been saying."
Teyla stared into lighter eyes, relaxed when she saw no more there than what had been said or hinted at. "So. Your ceremonial betrothal -- is it to be made real, or...?"
"It's in abeyance," Sora shrugged.
"In what?"
"Our fathers decided to wait for some annu and then decide whether the betrothal's on or off." The redhead lifted a hand to one side of her mouth, continuing in a piercing whisper clear enough to be heard across a tent, "They both think they might be able to get a better match, but neither one wants to risk having to settle for a worse one."
Teyla wasn't sure whether she found this risible or depressing, and was afraid her face made as much clear.
Sora, on the other hand, was tying her hat back under her chin. "Now, Mistress Trader," she said, suddenly lunging at Teyla with a wide smile and pushing her back into the long grass, "tell me more about this Geron! Are you still walking out, or --?"
"That was trade." Teyla rolled her eyes before giving in and providing Sora the details she wanted.
*
When consulted under threats of direst secrecy, Tagan reassured his daughter that she was probably correct to take Sora at her word.
"I've seen the aftermath of that," he said quietly, vision far from that place, "and it looks different; your friend has, I think, lost some of her innocence, but not that sort of it."
Speculating about what might be the case, then, kept Teyla busy all the way back to the camp. Astrylla was the first to notice and wave to the trading party, careful to keep her other hand holding her charge upright as the infant grabbed for one of the cut lengths of tuttle root on the trencher on Astrylla's knee, snatched it up to her mouth, and began to chomp at it ferociously, working slivers of firm root off.
By the time Geron took notice of the trading party, however, they had all seen the rapt, somewhat possessive look on his face as he watched Astrylla and the infant. Kayhar Treyidaze yapped like a pup in approbation, and Geron stomped off, a dull flush rising in his cheeks.
"Halling says," Orin announced, melting out of the camp, "that there is nothing like watching a woman nurse your child to make a man feel proud."
"Halling says," Toran declared, following him, "that there's something about a woman nursing that speaks to a man, even if it isn't his child yet."
"Halling says," Toran's friend Kanaan piped up, "that Astrylla's got a figure even if Teyla's growing one."
"Halling," Tagan Emmagan said thoughtfully, "appears to be saying more than enough."
"He comes by that honestly," Halling's mother Lasanna said, stretching up to pull a hide's lashings over the drying rack. Tagan's eyes followed her torso.
"So," Teyla said later, as she helped carry the infant's things back to Geron and Dorrit's tent. "I think that Geron likes you."
"I... perhaps?" Astrylla said.
"A year to mourn in friendship and two years to mourn in family," Teyla said, "before it is time to eat pomes with plums and drink blue-rose tea and live again. I do not know where dreams fall within that, but..."
"But the spring is passing and the summer upon us," Astrylla agreed, "and I am grown ripe in my own skin."
Then the infant narrowed her eyes in a familiar way, and Teyla hastily uncovered the waste pot so that Astrylla could hold her over it.
The infant, her business done, turned her head to attempt to find something within her narrow focus, and then demanded imperiously "ma!"
"Can you do it this time?" Astrylla asked. "I will take that."
With some difficulty, the women transferred their burdens. Teyla had just unlaced her vest and put the infant to the teat when something came flying at them and was hastily blocked by Astrylla.
"Did you catch Jinto's hard-cooked flatbread?" Halling asked, hurrying towards them with his son on his shoulders.
"It landed in the waste pot," Astrylla said dryly. "He will not want it back now."
"He might," Halling said wryly. "I don't."
The two women grinned back at him in a moment of fellow-feeling before he turned and went back to his tent, Jinto demanding "bread, Tada, bread!" all the way.
*
And so it was that, two years and a season and a moon-go-round from Teyla's womanhood ceremony, which lacks the sixth part of an anns of being two annu, the Athosians gathered in the center of their new camp to hear Tagan exhort them in three languages: in the Ring-speech that was their common tongue, in the language of the Ancestors that they preserved in prayers and praising, and in the Athoio their ancestors had spoken when first they made camps of their towns and a tent-town of their gathering.
"Athosians, sons and daughters of the Mirinoi, sprung of princes and champions, behold one who has survived an anns of infancy and now is infused with a human soul, beginning not only to speak but to talk, a girl-child ready to be named and claimed!"
Tagan turned around slowly in a circle, letting them all see the baby, before repeating in each language "What name is the child given?"
"Tallit Ossaring," Geron said firmly when he had done, and then "Daughter of Geron Ossaring" in all three languages.
"Behold, then," Tagan reiterated to the assembly of their people, holding Tallit aloft, "Tallit, daughter of Geron, born into the House of Ossaring, borne by Teyla Emmagan in fulfillment of her Responsibility, which here is decreed settled; Tallit, likewise human and a daughter to the race and stock of the Mirinoi, of you and one of you!" He cradled her against his chest and asked, in Ring-speech, "Is this agreed and witnessed?"
"Yes!" everyone answered, right down to Jinto, who could not quite manage the ending sound.
"Is this agreed and witnessed?" Tagan asked in the received pronunciation of the Tongue of the Ancestors.
"It is!" everyone with enough knowledge answered.
"Is this agreed and witnessed?" Tagan asked in Athoio.
"Gladly!" answered the adults, the near-adults studying the texts, and Randor Cordallen, whose older sister was likewise studying for her womanhood ceremony.
Tagan handed Tallit to her father and clapped his hands three times, and everyone wandered or rushed as they preferred to the naming feast, which featured not only a whole roast gelaby but a great pot of what, under Charin's patient tutelage, Teyla had at last learned to persuade to be tuttle-root soup rather than tuttle-roots and other vegetables swimming in watery broth. People came up to Geron and exclaimed over how much more alert Tallit's eyes were and how well-behaved she was, or merely congratulated him on his fine daughter. Astrylla Norriten, after standing by them for a while, went to get them a bowl of food, the finely carved silverwood comb Geron had given as a love-gift glinting in her hair.
"Congratulations, Geron," Teyla said, coming up to him after she had finished her first helping of gelaby and extending a brown finger for Tallit to grasp in her small, tawny ones. "She is beautiful, is she not?"
"She is," Geron said proudly, looking down at his daughter's soft brown hair and wide round eyes. "You do good work, Teyla."
nota bene: In case it isn't clear, an anns (plural: annu) is meant to be a measure of time within an hour of our Earth's period of revolution around the Sun.