Walking the Dust
16: Born To Die
One of the main reasons people have such a hard time understanding what I do is because more often than not, they just can't get their head around the fact that I'm a woman.
Or rather, the fact that I'm a woman and I don't have a husband, kids, goats and a shanty house somewhere up North near my parents' place.
I keep telling them that I will, at some point — and I mean that, I really do, for my father's sake if nothing else — but right now I have a job to do, and getting married would end it forever.
Sure, father went out after Jerod and I were born, but it was his second time around. The first time, he was a young man with no wife, who could just go where he wanted. The second time was... well, he never said why, exactly. I think it was just because he was getting bored staying in Lo-Wil.
But he did say that things had already changed a lot when he went out the second time, and that made it all worth it.
Point being, he drummed it into both of us as soon as we were old enough. Don't get attached. Don't fall in love. Keep moving. Keep writing.
So, yeah, that's what I've done, despite everyone I ever meet wondering where my kids are. I mean, most of the women my age that I meet have children up to eight years old (Kind of freaks me out, if I'm honest).
But only some, and that's what I was going to talk about. See, even if I wanted to have kids right here, right now, it gets kind of complicated.
For a start, there just isn't that much chance I'd get pregnant. I've met women who are married, been trying to have a baby for years, but there just ain't nothing happening.
I've met other women who've been pregnant five, six, seven times... but never made it through. Misbirth after misbirth. People don't even seem to get sad about it, much. It's just the way things are.
According to father, and the old books he made me and Jerod read, there used to be a lot more people around in the world. And a lot more women having babies.
Somehow, the Big Wet changed all that. If a woman has more than two kids in her life, she counts herself blessed. Jerod and I never really thought about it growing up, but as we got older, we realised that not many other people in Lo-Wil had brothers or sisters.
The women with the most kids tend to live longer, too. My mother sure did. I guess it must have something to do with their health overall, but damned if anyone knows what exactly.
Of course, some women blame the men, and say it's their seed that's no good. And for some of them, that might be true. It's not like there's a shortage of men willing to sleep with any woman who'll lay down for them, and if it was all down to us females, you'd expect them to hit the jackpot more than a couple of times. But there's no army of fatherless kids out there, least not that anyone I've met has ever heard of.
On the other hand, most of the caravan Sultans I've met do have some kids, but there's no way all their wives are getting pregnant. So who really knows?
It was a caravan wife once told me something interesting about this. She was twice the age of her Sultan — and the first woman to take him to bed, which I gather is normal with boys in caravans — and told me that there used to be a lot more kids.
This wasn't something she'd seen herself, but what her mother told her. Women of her mother's generation used to drop babies left and right, no problem.
But there was a different problem — they didn't live. Something crazy like nine out of ten babies were born deformed, or sickly, and died before they even made it to five years.
So maybe this is nature's way of trying to find a balance. Given a choice, I think most people would take less births of healthy babies over more births of kids who'll die before they grow up.
I don't know who's reading this. Maybe, by now, things have changed and you live in a world where you can have lots of healthy babies without any problems.
If so, I hope you know how lucky you are. Don't ever take it for granted.
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