Growing into the Job, Post 613: Bloodline, Late Neolithic, BCE (Patreon)

Long before there was a Far Horizons, long before New Corinth, long before there were kingdoms or cities and the forests still reached from sea to sea in what is now Northern Europe…

It is what we call winter. A small settlement beside a frozen river, perhaps thirty people, is starving. Children are sick. Hunters haven’t returned. The elders debate and the women prepare what little food they have found today. Nobody is in charge. Except, quietly, there is her. Her gifts are not hidden because no one has yet invented a theology that condemns them. It is a world before persecution of her kind, but now her name is gone. Winter kept no records, and fire remembered no songs. Only daughters remained.

She walks onto the frozen pond. She kneels, she places one hand against the ice, listening, feeling. She tells them: “Fish.” Nobody questions it. They cut through the ice. The fish, though few, are there.

Later she mixes herbs, a fever breaks, and a baby survives. A bush brings berries, in the dead cold. An old hunter kisses her hand when she says the elk will come early. She knows his son and the men he took with him to track the mammoth, the first they’d seen in months, have not returned.

Whenever winter grew cruel, her body answered. In times of need and famine like this, her breasts swell. She nurses children that are not her own, at times the men too. 

No one calls her goddess. Certainly no one calls her witch. She’s simply the woman who knows, the woman who provides. A red woman, daughter of a woman with similar talents and one who will some day have a daughter with gifts as well.  At this point in history society trusted women like this. Millenia later society burned them.

A spear never leaves her. Not because she’s a warrior, or even really a hunter. She protects herself, though, exerts her will when necessary. Later, women of the bloodline will rely on wit, politics, influence. Biochemistry. Her daughters would inherit different weapons: some corsets, some books.

The hunting party still hasn't returned. A blizzard comes, one which will last until the next moon. The tribe, nomadic, knows it must leave and prepares to abandon them. She refuses. She walks into the storm alone. Three days later she returns leading the hunters and carrying the tusks across her broad shoulders. Nobody asks how she found the men, or how she fell the Mammoth. Nobody wants to know.

As the others prepare the meat which will allow the tribe to survive the winter, she takes the hunter - the son of the man who once again kissed her hand - into the woods. There is a stream there that never freezes, a glade she can warm. Her gifts are stronger there, and she can show him things she knows bring him awe... 

…

Later, having nursed him on the bank in her arms, loving him, and returning him exhausted to his tent, she stands beside the frozen pond to watch the children play. One little girl imitates her with a stick held like a spear. The red woman smiles, a grandmother notices.

The old woman says quietly: “They will all follow you someday.”

The red woman answers. “No,” she says, “They will follow her.”

And rests a hand on her belly...

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Thanks to IllustriousAngels for the source imagery. Check out their stuff. It's great.