The Cold Change

1 | Niah

1

Niah

My mother told me that from the day of my birth, she knew I would never belong to her.

Curled in the fetal position like a scared child she had lay for three days and three nights in my birth. Not mouthing her pain because that's how the mountain people were. Tough, resilient, single faced and true; born to the mountains and the blizzards and the wolves with their silent, staring eyes.

Leina, my mother's orphaned sister and my god-mother said my mother just grit her teeth as she bled; hours of hissing and curling in on herself as if she wanted to burrow like a feral rabbit into the floor beneath her swollen belly.

Have you seen her scared fingers Niah? 

I would nod, guilty, knowing what would come next. You brought her so much pain that she clawed at that rock wall, it was like she was blind to our world Niah, lost in a land known only to her, if I hadn't stopped her, she would have lost her fingers right down to the nailbed.

Leina's words are true. At the rare moments during my childhood where I would let my mother caress my hair, I could feel the rough deformities of her hands against my scalp. Sickening. Scraping at my insides. Only proving to me that I was destined to be feral, even before air filled my lungs. I would never be the calm shallows of my mother.

My coming into the world went on for night and day and new moon, forcing Leina to chase away any curious passers and the Sherman who was rumoured to be claiming both mother and child dead.

Leina recounts my birth story slightly different each time, but there is one part that she remains true to. On the third night, she will say, lowering her voice and meeting my eyes in a purposeful stare, the weather became wild, terrible, big shafts of cold, fingers of ice that ripped at our throats, snow so relentless that the holy mountain was covered in white right down to her skirts.

Freezing so much so, Leina would say, that the ice had formed a layer on the floor of our cave where our bodies did not lie, like a winter lake, Niah, I do not lie. Terrible cold. She would shake her head. Your mother and I, we could not sleep, trees were being felled outside, children down in the village were crying, wolves howling, you could not even see the glow of the moon or the stars. Even the colored goddess of our Great Ariel Sea was ushered away.

Her voice now a whisper she would wait for me to say 'Really Ina?' And she would nod, eyes wide, leaning back, she would wait for the shock to leave my face before she would continue.

And that is the moment you decided to arrive Niah.
Right on that wild, deathly, cursed night. A night so impossible in mid summer that it must have been the devil itself who brought it upon us all. But Niah, my only child, you slipped onto that ice covered floor in nothing but your skin and did not even utter a single cry. And when we swaddled you in cloth, you smiled at us with big wide eyes that did not blink as the snow screamed outside in hideous blood curling cries. You were silent, sleeping through it like a gentle lullaby taking you to sleep. Like it itself, was your own Mother's voice.

Two days later when the storm subsided, we carried you down to the skeleton of our village. It was flattened Niah, trees upon the houses, the deer broken free, two people buried in the snow, their bodies found dead. You imagine, from the Sherpa's barn all the way down to the edge of river, it was all gone, all of it.

I would shake my head, pretend I was still listening because by this stage, I was usually not.

You emerged like a fawn born in autumn instead of spring. A curse and a gift the Sherman himself said. To bring such grief and give such joy, to bring the storm and end it too, to bring both death and life.