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accept Pona when she goes to Birds Home. She'll be Locked her whole life."
"Really?" Rashid's voice had just shifted from idle curiosity to something
more intense. "Tell me about this Gift."
Neither Steck nor Cappie answered they were too busy glaring at each other.
Finally, Dorr spoke in her half whisper. "The first year of a child's life,
the gods don't take the baby to Birds Home; traveling is hard for infants, and
their mothers can't come along to nurse them. Instead, the gods accept a
symbolic substitute for the child: a Gift of blood and bone that's carried to
Birds Home in place of the actual baby."
"And the doctor's taking such a Gift right now?" Rashid asked. "I really must
see this."
"That isn't a good idea," I piped up, but Rashid was already pushing his way
through the door that separated the waiting room from the much larger surgery
beyond. Cappie rushed after him and I hurried behind... which meant I was just
in time to have Gorallin shout at all three of us.
"What the devil do you think you're doing?"
"Ahh..." said Cappie. She had stiffened at the sight of blood on the doctor's
hands.
Gorallin had many granite-hard rules about practicing medicine, and one of
them was, "Never let parents see the taking of the Gift." When I'd brought in
my son the year before, I waited outside, shuddering in Cappie's arms until it
was all over. It only took ten minutes, and if Waggett had cried or wailed, I
hadn't heard a peep. When Gorallin brought the boy out of surgery, the
incision at the back of his neck was no more than a nick, neatly closed with a
single stitch. Within months, the scar was scarcely visible... and in a few
months more, I had calmed down enough to stop looking at it every night.
However, when we barged in on Pona's Gift-giving, there was no closed
incision, no neat stitch, no baby skin carefully cleaned to hide all trace of
what happened. Pona, six months old and naked, lay belly down on Gorallin's
operating table. A generous wash of blood had spilled down the sides of her
throat, dribbling onto the table's iron surface; and in the middle of the
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bloody cut at the back of her neck, the red-smeared white of bone peeked out.
"Fascinating," Rashid said.
"I don't need an audience," Gorallin roared. She held a scalpel in one
blood-specked hand.
"Sorry," Rashid told her, with no apology in his voice, "but I'm a
Knowledge-Lord. I live to learn new things. How does this work exactly?"
Gorallin glared at him. Like many people that day, she must have been
debating whether she could tell a Spark to go to hell... perhaps trying to
judge how much luck she'd have throwing him bodily from the room. Then she
grimaced with acceptance of the inevitable no one has ever stopped the Sparks
from doing what they want, and it's a waste of time to try. "Just watch," she
muttered, "and if you have stupid questions, save them till after."
She turned back to Pona and began to deposit tiny scraps of baby flesh into a
test tube.
Cappie closed her eyes when Gorallin started scraping out picks of Pona's
bone. I didn't, but I wished I could close my ears.
Scrape-pick.
Scrape-pick.
Scrape-pick.
"The Gift is taken from the spinous process of the sixth cervical vertebra,"
the doctor suddenly announced. I suppose even Gorallin had the sensitivity to
know what the sound was doing to Cappie's nerves. "That's the prominent nub of
bone at the back of your neck."
"Why there?" Rashid asked.
"Because that's what the gods want," Gorallin snapped. "There are alternate
sites if there's a medical reason why the Gift can't be taken from the
standard spot, but I never have to use them."
"And what exactly do you take?" Rashid clearly wanted to lean his face right
down over the doctor's work but was holding himself back.
"Blood and bone," Dorr murmured. When she'd seen that Gorallin wasn't going
to kick us out of the surgery, Dorr had silently entered too. "The gods
require us to give blood and bone as a token of our obedience. It is the only
price they accept."
"Actually," the doctor said, "I take bone and a bit of muscle tissue. Skin
too. The blood comes for free, but I don't go out of my way to get any."
"And who taught you what was needed?" Rashid asked.
"My predecessor... who learned from her predecessor, and so on back to the
first doctor in Tober Cove. She was taught by the gods themselves."
Steck made a disdainful sniff. She had come in with the rest of us, but was
making a show of dismissive boredom. No one paid her any attention.
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"And you seal all the tissues in a test tube," Rashid said, "which you send
off to Birds Home?"
"That's right." Gorallin laid down her scalpel and picked up a fine needle
for stitching the wound closed. Baby Pona didn't move; she lay breathing
quietly, pacified by an anaesthetic the doctor had given before we arrived.
"The gods must think this Gift is very important," Rashid mused, "if you have
to slice into every baby. Don't you worry about doing permanent damage?"
"I know what I'm doing," Gorallin bristled. "Babies heal quickly."
"But suppose a child is sick," Rashid said. "That must happen occasionally.
If a baby is so sick that this surgery would risk its life..."
"Then I tell the parents it's too dangerous to take the Gift," Gorallin
answered. "I'm adoctor, you..." She stopped herself in time. "I don't harm my
patients," she finished grimly.
"You just carve up their necks," Steck said.
"A tiny cut!" Gorallin growled. "And given the alternative..."
"What's the alternative?" Rashid asked quickly.
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