And we know a human when we see one.
Cherub
Childbirth always means pain, and not just for the mother who must strain to expel both the squalling infant and its parasitic demon rider from her womb. It also torments those of us who must stand around the outer wall of the birthing shed and watch, both eager for our first look at the baby and dreading our first glimpse of the hateful attached thing bearing the face of the corruption in that child’s heart.
It is midday. A peremptory daylight enters the shed in stripes, illuminating the dust in the air, but not the bleakness of these last moments before we discern the nature of the monster who will accompany the child into the land of the living. My beloved wife Faith squats in the center of the room, slick with sweat and tears. Her straw hair clings to her cheeks, and her toes sink into the diarrheic puddle she expelled as the ordeal entered its final stage. She has uttered curses since dawn that prove the common wisdom that women turn savage during birth: oaths of terrible hatred directed against the child inside her and I the man who planted the seed. I believe she would kill me, and it, right now, just to be rid of the pain.
I know I’m right about the rage because of her own personal rider, a hideous idiot monkey-thing riding piggy-back on her soft shoulders, whose spindly leprous arms lead to scaled claws buried knuckle-deep in her temples, leers at me over the top of her head. It is the embodiment of everything that is bad about this mostly good woman I married, and it mocks me with the deep pleasure it takes in her suffering. Its tiny piggish eyes and moron leer, all sharp teeth and pointed tongue, manifest the vindictive cruelty my darling wife is prone to whenever the world requires more of her than she can freely give. Despite the genuine affection she has always shown for me, Faith has also always been capable in heated moments of flinging words that flay all my self-respect away in a single lashing sentence. Even as she strains with the effort of expelling our son, her rider’s face betrays the few secrets Faith bothers to keep, her unspoken resentment of every passing disappointment I’ve ever caused her rippling across its noxious features like pus flowing from a septic wound.
Nor am I any better. My own demon rider, whose petty features betray my cowardice, my pettiness, and my secret selfishness, tightens its grip on my skull and tickles the part of me that cares not for Faith’s pain and wants only for this long, stinking, noisome day to end. I’m certain that Faith can see that and I can only hope that she sees the best of me, the part of me not embodied by my rider, as easily as she can see the worst.
The men of the village form a circle around the wall of the shed, their arms linked in the traditional last gesture of defiance against whatever evil thing comes to join us atop the child about to burst from Faith’s slit. They are silent. Their riders keep up an animated conversation between themselves: not one we can hear, thank the Lord, for if riders spoke aloud their voices would drown out our own. It is not a nice conversation. The riders make faces, they make obscene gestures, they laugh long and hard, they pull their talons from the bore holes in our skulls and nail them in again, in cruel emphasis of their dominion over us. I think they are arguing between themselves. I think they are wagering on the new arrival. I think they are as tired of the wait as we are.
On either side of me, my brothers Noah and Eben hold my arms, counseling strength. They have always been good men, but Noah’s gibbering imp of arrogance and Eben’s stone-faced golem of coldness peer over their respective faces. I am entitled to hate my brothers a little for this, and no doubt my own rider—(that loathsome many-eyed insectile thing, that whispers obscene things to me in the night, that assures my wife of the vile rape fantasies I must sometimes employ to keep me hard during the act of love)—now shares that secret with them, over whatever pretense of a grateful look I can place on my own merely human features.
Then Faith screams, her voice hoarse and breathless. “They’re coming!” The word becomes a bellow as she puts all she has into the final push, expelling a gout of blood and the head of a baby, which for a moment dangles between her spread legs, glistening scarlet. She gasps, takes a sideways crab-step to relieve the horrendous cramps in her knees, and squeezes again. My newborn son lands in the dirt we’re all heir to, the dirt that greets us as we enter the world and embraces us again as we leave. There is of course something on the back on his neck, something as soft and as rounded and as new to the world as he is: the passenger that will define much of what he is, even now grasping him by the neck, cementing its grip on who he will be.
This is the most terrifying moment, for any parent. In my life I have attended births where the first sight of the rider was enough to prove that no joy would ever come from the child, where the rider’s distinct features branded its human mount as thief or rapist or murderer, and the babe for all its apparent innocence was revealed as naught but a seed from which nothing but evil would ever grow. True, even those were usually permitted to live, for even a future murderer might be able to live a worthy life blessed to his kin until the moment he commits his terrible sin, and remains possible to value such a person, even if it will always be impossible to look at them without some inner voice raising that dread question, when? But that is still a shattering thing to see for the first time, on what should be a day of celebration.
And even that would not be the worst. I still have nightmares about that foul morning some five years gone when my neighbor Jeremiah’s son was born and the thing on his back bore the face of something so savage that we could scarcely bare to look at it: an awfulness that we could only compare to riders of legend whose human hosts had not just killed once or twice out of greed or rage, but slaughtered freely, sometimes entire families and sometimes entire populations, in sprees driven only by their sheer love of killing. When Jeremiah took the child from his shrieking wife and headed for the village well, we all knew what he intended to do, and none saw the point in stirring a muscle to stop him. After all, he’d borne his own murderer imp since birth, and the time had now come for him to live up to it.
Now I have to behold my own child, and see whether the sins on his back bring more heartbreak than joy. My brothers release me, and I join my darling Faith, who still strains with the afterbirth. I tell her I love her and I take a deep breath and lifetimes later raise my son from the filthy puddle that is his first introduction to a debased and sinful world.
He is a tiny thing, bearing the correct number of arms and legs and a scrunched-up face indignant about the ordeal just forced on him. He coughs out a mouthful of liquid and then starts to cry, a high-pitched, angry wail that assails me his fury at me for inviting him into a place this filled with pain and fear. I sense that he is strong, and before I allow myself to feel the first stirrings of love for him turn my attention to the creature on his back, which is of course even smaller than him, and so covered with slime and blood that it is at first impossible to determine its true nature. Somebody hands me a wet cloth, so I can clean it enough to see; and as I wipe away the blood and the piss and all the other shiny effluvia of life, I first feel fear, and then puzzlement, and then relief, and then the dawning amazement of a man faced with the kind of miracle no man dares hope for.
From the shadows, Eben asks me what it is.
The tiny creature clinging to the back of my son’s neck is beautiful. It is pure and it is innocent. Its face is as smooth and as unmarked by any of the possible cruelties or follies as the mirrored surface of a lake can be when undisturbed by wind or current. Its eyes are closed, its expression sweet. Its hands are not the sharp, raking claws we all know from our own riders, but hands that could belong to any other baby’s, and they cling to my son’s neck without breaking the skin, their touch more gentle caress than possessive grasp. It is absolute innocence personified: something that exists only in legend, something that no man I know has ever worn, something no parent I’ve ever heard of has ever dared hope for.