In the many years she had been away, everyone she’d known in Lapvona had died. New people filled the village and nobody recognized her. They only saw a nude, wiry woman with heavy bosoms, her hair matted and full of leaves and twigs, her skin covered in dirt. They assumed she was a refugee from a village ransacked by bandits.
‘How old are you?’ a young man asked her.
It hurt her throat to answer, she hadn’t talked in so long. ‘I don’t know.’
To Ina’s surprise, the people of Lapvona didn’t reject her. On the contrary, they treated her as an elder, and many villagers volunteered food and clothing. Ina accepted their hospitality and found herself soon well employed as the village wet nurse. She moved into a foxhunter’s cabin in the woods. People saw her arrival as prophetic. There had been a blight on the farms in recent years, and from the resulting malnutrition, the mothers could not produce milk to feed their babes. It was as though Ina’s bosoms had heard their cries. Many babies would have died that year had it not been for her milk. In the years that followed, she was very useful to the women, and in turn, the women became more useful to the men. A child could nurse on Ina while its mother worked in the field. Sometimes Ina resented this turn in her life and missed the freedom of her cave. At other times, she felt that her milk gave her life meaning, made her human again, and she enjoyed the villagers’ dependency on her gift, remembering the past generation that had abandoned her in her grief and suffering. She felt, in some small way, that she had recovered a sense of family. ‘Maybe some of me will get into these babes,’ she thought. ‘And so they will all be mine.’
Ina bounced the babes on her knees, fed two at a time in the gentle light through the trees. Nursing continued to have a miraculous effect: for a few minutes after her milk was drained, she regained her eyesight, and could see beyond shapes and colors to every cobweb and scuff of dirt. She used the minutes of vision to go outside and watch the wind in the trees and the birds fly overhead and the bright green moss and wild lettuce, everything. Sometimes, she would close the babes in the cabin and wander through the woods, looking for glimpses of herself in puddles or on a flat rock that she urinated on, anything to tell her what she looked like on the outside. She did this over and over with the babes, her breasts filling soon after they were emptied—she closed the babes inside; she went out. She picked herbs and listened to the lessons of the birds in how to identify the medicinal qualities of each flower and grass and shrub and fruit. She experimented on babies who had colic or rashes or fever or lameness. She also practiced eating certain plants—calendula and comfrey, catnip, fennel—to see how the infusions into her milk could affect the babes’ moods. She developed a tincture for herself that enhanced her vision. It was Euphrasia and mint. She ate valerian to keep the babes asleep longer.
The mothers brought her food and clothing, spoke kindly, offered her puppies from their litters, kittens, flowers. They thought her milk would be more nutritious if she was happy. Ina could have made friends with these women, but she was only comfortable with the babes. She had been hurt too badly to trust anyone grown up. She didn’t like to go to town. The plot of land on which her family’s house had once stood had been split up and taken over, replotted. The old mulberry tree had burned and died and been cut down to a stump and was now used as a place to ax firewood. The village reminded Ina too much of what she’d lost, and there was no herb that could heal her loneliness. When she asked the birds what to do, they answered that they didn’t know anything about love, that love was a distinctly human defect which God had created to counterbalance the power of human greed.
Years passed like this—babes born and brought to her with varying regularity according to the success of the harvests. Another ten years gone. And then ten more. Lapvona grew. The northerners had mixed with the Lapvonians. More cottages were built, with their small croft gardens, but otherwise every last bit of land was growing something to be exported for the lord’s profit—wheat, barley, oats, pulses, fruit, root vegetables, nuts, and rapeseed. The manor on the mountain doubled, then tripled in size. Guards protected the roads leading up there. No longer were travelers permitted to pass through. Only the guards were allowed to leave the province to haul the harvest and honey to the sea, where they were sold for a great fortune. A few more decades passed. The lord died and his son, Villiam, took over.
Now Ina was as old as a person could be, a wrinkle of waxy skin and a nest of white, brittle hair. Marek continued to visit her. Ina felt sorry for him, for his twisted body and strange mind. She felt somewhat responsible for his malformation, as she had been the one to counsel Agata when she was pregnant and wanted to destroy the baby. Ina had tried to abort the baby herself, even, a hand up the girl’s sheath, clawing at the tiny thing inside, but the baby had persisted. Ina thought maybe Marek was something like her, attuned to a different nature. So as a babe, and long after, he was allowed into her cabin to nurse. He had been the last babe to taste her milk. Now there was no milk left, and Marek was grown, but he still came to suck. Ina could smell his manhood stink up from his loins when they lay on the small bed, but it didn’t trouble her. The time they spent together was peaceful for both of them. With Marek sucking her nipple, they drifted off into a realm of quietude, like being adrift on the sea, although neither had ever seen the sea. Marek did some chores around the house in exchange for time at Ina’s breasts. His sucking did not restore her vision, but by now Ina was tired of looking at things anyway. She had seen it all.