Tak

Childhood's End - Part 1

     "It's as if I had two childhoods," Thomas said thoughtfully. "My real childhood, growing up in Andor in Ilandia, and this other childhood as the son of a peasant farmer. The scary thing is that both sets of memories seem equally real to me now. If I'm not careful, I find myself thinking that I really am Tak, that those memories are the real ones. Sometimes it really worries me."

     Lirenna reached out and squeezed his hand. "I won't let you forget who you really are," she promised. She was fascinated by the story of Tak's childhood, though. "What happened next?" she prompted.

     "At the moment, my memories of his life seem to be complete until he reached the age of twelve or so. That was when his family was wiped out by a sholog raid. When I think about them, I get a very real feeling of grief, as if it was my own family that was massacred, whereas in fact they died thousands of years before I was born. If they'd all lived to a ripe old age and died in their beds, it would be all the same to me now. That's what I keep telling myself, but it doesn't seem to help. Just thinking about it now, I can feel myself growing close to tears."

     Lirenna squeezed his hand tighter. "If you'd rather not talk about it..."

     "No, I want to talk. I want you to understand what kind of a guy this was, and I think it might help me to understand it better myself." He ran a hand through his hair and sighed heavily.

     He looked down at his scribbled notes. "A few weeks after our trip to the market came a time of great sadness for us, them! A sickness swept through the borderlands, and although the rest of us recovered easily, little baby Balfin was carried away..."

☆☆☆

     The sickness affected all of them. Laira first, then each of the others in rapid succession. Tak was confined to his bed for two days with a high fever, and as he drifted in and out of consciousness he became aware of a great grief afflicting his parents, who were as yet showing only the initial flu like symptoms. It wasn't until he was on the mend that he realised the baby had died, and by then he and his sister were too busy caring for their parents to have much time for grief themselves.

     Tak's mother and father had always been so strong and capable, and to see them suddenly laid low with the sickness, delirious and feverish, came as a great shock to him. Laira, still flushed and sweaty with the aftermath of the disease, did most of the work. Changing their bedding and forcing dribbles of water between their lips. Cleaning up their vomit and diarrhoea. Tak, meanwhile, was given the task of wiping down their bodies to keep them cool.

     "Talk to them," Laira told him. "They've lost one of their children and the grief is making their condition worse. Make sure they know they still have two children to take care of. Give them a reason to get better."

     She looked none too good herself, although little baby Balfin's death still didn't seem real to Tak. He supposed the full force of the tragedy would come later, but as the weeks and the months went by he was ashamed to find that he continued to feel nothing at all. The other members of his family, once they were all fully recovered, had moments of sadness when they would hold each other and shed a few tears, but Tak felt only relief that they no longer had the extra workload of looking after a baby, which meant he no longer had a share of the other's work to do as well as his own. Of course, he'd never had a real part of looking after the baby. He'd held it a few times, been dribbled and peed on, but that was all. No great hole had suddenly appeared in his life, as it had in the others. For him, life simply returned to normal and that was all.