Book One – Chapter 19

With the shift to the waters, birthing had become a conscious and collective thing. What had a been a secret and solitary ordeal became a communal rite, exposed and exalted as a shared experience amongst all females. By now, they had a head female with several subordinates. These attendants oversaw each pregnancy, long before the birth itself. As savage as it may be, they instructed one another in the process. From that crude violence, they wove a system. They built order from it. And with that order, refined over the years, came survival: the deaths fell away, first the drownings, then even the deaths of childbirth.

From an economic view, this was more than sufficient. From Tria’s perspective, it was progress. From Yu’s, it was obscene. From any other, it was unnerving. It was a stark reminder of how grotesquely alien humans were; how swiftly one generation dissolved into the next, how fast they reshaped themselves, how rapidly habit hardened into ritual, and ritual ossified into rule. It was all the more disquieting if you had lived with borman, whose – again using the word as the most of abstract placeholders – culture did not seem to go anywhere but backwards. They were a peoples that rotted in place. Their only tradition was decline.

So in core, be it drowning or broken bones, Tria let the humans learn through suffering. Injuries were left to run their course. She intervened only in rare cases, mainly with the very young or those in whom she suspected a trace of tairan blood. Otherwise, her wing extended only as far as culling the deranged, or, if they were left to survive into adulthood, ensuring they would not breed. Before her final refusal to uphold the Reparation Treaty, the castration of males and the sterilisation of females had been routine for those sold or given to bormen.