Below, I'm sharing the first chapter of this story. You'll get the complete book as soon as I've finished editing and polishing. That should be next Friday, if all goes well.
If you'd like to read the whole thing earlier, I'm going to be soliciting early readers from my Patreon community.
So maybe now's a good time to join us over at Patreon?
Be an early reader and get a bunch of other fun stuff :)
And thank you all for sticking with me, and for your patience! I hope you enjoy this story as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Ok, with no further ado, here is chapter 1 (unedited):
An Uncanny Birth
In the land of Dunai, no one notices a golden sunrise, no more than a fish notices the water it breathes. But all Dunaians—human and inhuman—come to attention at a purple sunrise.
The famed purple sunrise of Dunai comes on the same day every year. In a land with no clocks, time should be a flexible thing, dependent on the changing seasons. But what if there were a place where nature was in perfect harmony? Where the fallen impulses of human nature were tempered by a cycle of order, not chaos? In such a place, a sunrise can be a calendar.
But perhaps you are one of the unfortunates who has never seen a purple sunrise?
Imagine a clear morning in mid-March. There might be a bit of snow still on the ground, but the grass peeking through it is more green than brown, now. The mist rising from the ground leaves your fingers dripping with sticky wetness. Winter’s usual lack of smells, on such a morning, gives way to the first scent of blossoms. Perhaps a hint of lily of the valley, perhaps a whiff of eager lilac. Now look up at the horizon as the sun approaches.
Can you see that azure sky blushing pink at the approach of the sun?
Well, that pale line of pink is quaint compared the fiery purple of the first morning of a Dunai spring. If there were a cosmic peacock that preened on the horizon like a stage, its tail feathers would fade to grey next to that purple. No shimmering aura of any borealis could hope to outshine it.
The purple morning of Dunai is a time fraught with the coming of new life into dead nature, but, as is the way with such days, it is also a time of danger. A time when the monsters at the margins come closer to the center of human life. Vila dance on the outskirts of the wheat fields, their pale headdresses barely concealing their carnivorous grins. Shapeshifting bear-men roar in the hill birch-groves. Wayward children go missing.
Some blame the spirits of the trees for consuming those children, but the wise merely tutt at such nonsense. They know that the earth itself opens up like a gaping mouth along the riverbanks and swamp-fringes, feeding on careless animals and people, gorging itself for the coming harvest.
And the mothers of children born on purple mornings generally do only one thing.
They die in childbirth.
So when a purple morning marked the start of Pelaghia’s labor-pains, you will forgive her if she was not entirely thrilled.
But Pelaghia had no intention of dying in childbirth. Not for what she was certain was a boy. Three girls she had given to Yan—a bristly, gentle giant who loved the person, not merely the vessel, of his wife. It was time for a boy, and everyone knew that boys born on purple mornings became the heroes of tales told for ages afterward. This son, predicted by Pitirim the village idiot (and secret wise man, as only a few knew), was the crown of their hopes. She ached to see those hopes in person, not merely to seed them with the power of her life’s blood.
So she did what no birthing mother should ever do, especially on a purple morning.
She walked into the forest to give birth under the open sky.
Pelaghia was of an old Dunaian family that proudly traced its ancestry to an ancient time when Dunai had a different name. A name few remembered: Vasyllia, a land where gods and men used to live together in concord. A long, long time ago.
The ancient Vasylli had tales about children born on such days. The tale of the foolish Eremei who defeated an army while sitting on top of a stove. The tale of the cunning Mariska who outwitted the great Forest Mother using nothing more than a comb, a handkerchief, and an egg. The tale of Semyon the mad pillar-dweller whose dreams would accidentally move mountains while he slept.
All those tales had one element in common: the mothers of the heroes and heroines had been driven out of their homes, for various reasons, and were forced to give birth in the wild.
Pelaghia thought about manufacturing a proper scandal with Yan, so that he would throw her out of the house in a fit of pique. But Yan only got red in the face—or at least the part of the face that wasn’t covered by curls as black and glistening as bear-hide—from embarrassment, never anger. No, it wouldn’t work. She thought of perhaps starting a rumor with the old spinner-ladies in the common house. Something so shocking that the whole town would rise up and cast her out into the unknown. But even old women in Dunai were so placid that it would take at least a week’s worth of simmering before anyone would so much as shout.
No, there was nothing else for her to do than cast herself out. So she did.
She took a thick wool shawl—the one with the pattern of intertwining acanthus leaves, not the loud pink one with the roses—and a basket with a few hardboiled eggs, some salt, a hunk of bread, and a block of cheese. She slung a blanket around her right shoulder and hung all the towels she could muster on her left arm. Then she waited for a moment when all four girls were busy about the house, and she slipped out like she used to when she was a miscreant of five. Her getaway was stopped short by a contraction like a battering ram, but she pushed the pain downward, breathed into her heels, and hummed the bass solo to a harvest song that began with the words, “Was it my fault that my voice shook when I saw him?”
A silly song for lovelorn girls. Not one of old ones.
The walk into the woods was uneventful. No vila came to spook her, no shifter to eat her. No man, woman, or child so much as hooted at her. And the earth did not open up to swallow her whole. She even breathed freely for a moment or so. Until she realized that would only provoke another contraction. It seemed everything caused a contraction.
She walked for an hour, until the throbbing in her feet was unbearable. Then she sat at the edge of a shady clearing and ate an egg with some bread. In the middle of the third chew she saw something impossible. On the other side of the clearing, inside a sun-dappled stand of birches and alders growing like overgrown weeds, was a hazy pink light, radiating upward.
It was the most absurd thing she had ever seen. Naturally, she got up immediately to see what it was. Well, to say she got up is perhaps putting too light a touch on it. She heaved to her side, pushed up her bottom like a toddler sleeping on its stomach, huffed a few quick breaths, surged upward and immediately grabbed her belly (it had turned into a fire-heated torture device). When that beautiful dance had subsided, she waddled—even she would no longer call it walking—toward the stand of birches and alders.
A wind rumpled the crowns of the just-budding alders and the birch branches hoary with their spring earrings. The sun danced, and in that yellow-green light gnats hovered like dust motes. Under the gnats grew a circle of white flowers with petals edged blood-red. Each flower was a single stalk sprouting petals radially like a colorful hairbrush. Pelaghia knew the shape of those flowers. They were acanthus flowers, mirroring her shawl. Flowers there were in profusion, but no leaves at all, only stalks with petals, arranged in a nearly perfect circle that seemed to glow pink every time the morning rays shone through the trees enough to light up the white-and-red profusion, as though from within.
This was all very strange. Acanthus didn’t grow in Dunai. Her shawl had been an exotic thing, a purchase from a Gruzina merchant at last year’s harvest festival. But here was a fairy circle of acanthus flowers in a color she had never seen, in a place where no flowers should grow, at a time when nothing had bloomed yet. Taken by a strange compulsion, she touched the petals. They felt spongy in her fingers, more like a fine mushroom than a flower petal.
The next contraction was so strong that she didn’t have time to hum. She just screamed and entered the circle of flowers. Or, rather, it seemed that the circle itself moved, and she found herself in the middle, on her hands and knees. That helped a bit, and her scream subsided into a weary groan. “Pull yourself together, woman,” she said. “It’s too early to give up the birth-song! Or are you old already?”
She deepened her awareness, this time directly into her womb. She felt that oneness, that circle compelling itself into completion in her mind. And the song came to her without effort.
“Oh, in the fields of russet gold…the maidens came to gather flax…”
That was an old one. A good one.
The rest of what happened she barely remembered. Or rather, she had a sense, for years afterward, that the experience was so intensely real, so perfectly in the moment, that she had never really been alive before or after that morning. But the experience passed and left only a cloud in the memory. A pink-tinged, lilac-scented cloud, from which the cries of a healthy, pink-limbed boy resounded like the music of all the village choirs of Dunai combined.
Yan and the girls found her, leaning against an old willow tree, only an hour or so after the boy had been born. Already his eyes were open, and he was partaking of his mother’s bounty with a gusto that made her laugh and her entire body glow as though it had an ember of coal burning inside.
In Yan’s hairy bucket-hands, the boy was tiny. But in Yan’s tear-streaked eyes, he was a giant.
“What shall we call him?” Yan asked, his voice breaking comically.
“Andry,” she said, even before she had thought about it.
“Ah,” he breathed out, contented. “A strong name. Good.”
“He’s going to need that strength,” she said, her eyelids like lead weights.
She didn’t see the way Yan’s face clouded over at those words. She was already asleep...
Ok, let me know what you think so far! And if you'd like get an early copy, be sure to check out my patreon page.
~Nicky
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