Walah

The wooden boards creaked loudly under the feet of the large man, burdened by the sack of grain. The weasel that guarded the barn was on a beam, eating a recent catch and completely unaware of what we were doing.

Magnerich set the sack on the ground and opened the hem. I reached in with my wrinkled hand and examined the kernels I had removed, splitting them with my nails. Once satisfied, I threw them back in.

"I think that's enough. Take it to Lovise so she and the girls can grind it," I said.

"Now, elder Walah."

The man stepped out, followed by me, and I closed the barn door. Magnerich balanced the sack on one of his powerful shoulders, and with his other hand he supported me as I descended the few steps of the ladder, which the man then placed back on the raised platform.

When I was young I could have leapt down that low drop, but right now without his help I would have felt too unsteady to get down.

Magnerich went to deliver the grain to Lovise while I headed the opposite way, toward Notburga's house. I still remembered her when she arrived, practically a scared little girl who was afraid of getting married. Now she was a big woman, as large as the barrels in which her beer was stored, who since her husband died had supported a family of five children, the eldest of whom was about to get married.

Thinking about the passing of time made me feel the weight of the years on my shoulders. When my son asked me to make things work for his wife I had agreed, but the truth was that I was too old to take on that kind of responsibility. Of all the moments my son and his wife will have had to conceive, this was the wrong one.

I heard a voice calling me, and saw a woman approaching me very quickly. When she got closer I recognized Odilia, a cousin of Heike who had married into our lineage and followed her. She was out of breath and it took her a few seconds to catch her breath, as if she had run all the way here.

"What is it? What happened?" I asked her.

"He-Heike, she … she's about to have the baby!" she exclaimed, completely out of breath.

"And the elder Trudis?"

"My cousin… asked specifically for you."

I let out a tired sigh, mentally preparing myself for what was to come.

I instructed the woman to finish the last preparations and I headed as fast as my legs would allow me to my son's hut.

In front of the door, I found my grandson Berth sitting on the ground, clinging to Hundo for comfort. The dog was licking the side of his face, trying to calm his frightened little master as best he could.

"Grandma, mommy is sick!" he exclaimed.

"Don't worry, it's absolutely normal," I tried to console him.

"Hunfrid's mother was sick and she died!" he whispered, deeply distressed.

I shivered at the memory. It had been a terrible birth, with plenty of blood spilled, and both mother and child had died. The woman had asked to see her children one last time, but when they arrived she had already passed out from the bleeding, and had died a few minutes later.

I pushed back that memory and gathered all the confidence I could on my face.

"Your mother is strong, I will make sure everything goes well," I told him, entering the hut.

The first room was furnished with a table with some chairs, a loom on which a wool blanket was being woven, a partially buried oven for cooking and a straw mattress near the wool curtain that separated it from the only other room in the house. A few animal skins decorated the walls and the floor and from the ceiling beams hung tufts of assorted drying herbs.

Even though I had lived in this house for almost thirty years as its owner, and had long since become accustomed to both it and the life it accompanied, the sight of that bare house associated with someone important within the community still left a strange effect on me.

I took long strides—or at least long ones for me—to the other side of the room and pulled the curtain aside. On the other side, Heike was lying in bed, supported by Grizel, who was handing her a drink. Her face was a little red, and her hair was wet with sweat and hanging limply, but she exclaimed in relief when she saw me, and greeted me with a smile.

"I am sorry to have disturbed you while you were in the middle of the preparations" she spoke, her voice calm, but a little strained.

"I'm too old to be running around giving orders anyway" I replied, relieved that she seemed to be doing well enough.

The girl stepped aside, bringing me a stool to sit on. Despite the situation, I felt immensely relieved when I could finally sit down, even if it was just a stool with a blanket on it.

I put my hand on my daughter-in-law's belly and felt a shiver go from my hand to the rest of my arm, as if I had received a shock.

"Is everything okay?" Heike asked, alarmed.

"Yes, of course " I replied, opening and closing my hand.

I laid her back on her belly and felt the baby move, starting to get into position. Things seemed to be going reasonably well and it didn’t look like a complicated birth was coming, yet I could feel a certain tension, as if the air itself was waiting.

“Elder Walah, are you okay?” Grizel asked.

“I’m just tired. I’ve been pacing all day” I apologized.

“Do you want to go and rest?” she asked, worried.

“Just wait a moment,” I said.

I leaned down to her lower body and peered under the blanket. The dilation was still early, but it was progressing well.

“Everything seems fine to me. It will probably take less time than it did when Berth was born, but it will still take a few hours.”

“Good,” Heike sighed, relieved.

"Tell me... why did Odilia call me so urgently? When I saw her so breathless I thought something serious was happening" I asked, even though I already knew what she would say.

"Oh, I'm sorry. I... I don't know what to say. Suddenly I felt the urgent need for you to be here. I acted like an inexperienced girl, I'm so sorry" she said, sincerely mortified.

I nodded.

"Can I entrust her to you for an hour? I really need to rest" I asked the girl.

"Of course, you can count on me" she replied, slightly nervous.

"Good, then I'll go to the other room".

I stood up with difficulty, feeling my joints protesting from the strain I was subjecting them to just after finally letting them rest. I went to the other room and sat on Berth's pallet, but I didn't rest.

A few days earlier Hildiric had told me about the nightmares he was having at night, saying he didn't understand why he was having them, and asking me for a way to make them go away. I had prepared him a herbal tea to calm him down, and given Heike the recipe to prepare it, but even then I had a doubt, that was growing steadily stronger. I had dreams too, although not like my son. Dreams from the past, memories from before arriving in the clan and marrying Aelberth. It certainly wasn't the first time I had dreamed them and since my husband died they had happened more frequently, but at that moment I thought that it couldn't be a coincidence and my conviction had grown stronger as the days went by.

My mind went back to my youth, when I was just a curious girl who made boys go crazy with a blink of an eye. There were many things I did that my mother didn't like and this, before I ran away, was probably the thing she liked the least.

Maybe, given what I was about to do, she wasn't entirely wrong.

I had studied the mysteries of the ancients, reality and fate. The kind of secrets whispered in the dark, transmitted through fragments of books whose languages ​​they were originally written in had long been forgotten.

After some hesitation I began to trace signs on the dirt floor, trying to remember the ancient script as much as possible. Ironically, some here might find them familiar, even though everyone was completely illiterate.

Fate was a web of destinies, a web more complex and dense than even the finest fabrics, generally unknowable to humans. But there were moments, events, in which countless threads were intertwined, and at that point the barrier separating it from the conscious world thins. I felt it, my son felt it, and his wife felt it too when she called me.

I completed the formula, but had another wave of hesitation. I had been taught that the ritual was part of the plot of fate, and that it would be the plot that would compel me to do it, but there were enormous risks in treating it lightly. The human mind was not designed to peer into fate, and to delve too deeply could cause a person to lose their mind, and then there was no way to turn it back.

And wasn’t it too much pride, too much arrogance, to think that this kind of event was the birth of my grandson? To imagine that my blood could generate that kind of person?

I took a knife and made a cut that made me flinch slightly, then, deciding that I had to try, I let my blood drip into the marks left on the floor.

When Grizel came to call me, I was still in that position, sitting there, staring straight ahead.

And my face was covered in tears.