Description
Abiku, whose name means Born to die, was named before anyone believed he would need the name long. The abiku is the child who comes and goes and comes again, born to the same mother a third time and a fourth, and they marked him at birth so they would know him when he came back around. He did not come back around. He stayed. The mark is still on him, and no one in the village has ever managed to look at it easily.
They kept the rites over him for years. Songs to hold him here, small things buried, a bowl left out at night. He grew up inside a ceremony built to keep him from leaving, and he understood early that this is not the same as being wanted. He could not train with the spears, so he went to the healers, and his hands turned out to be good ones, patient with pain and steady on a wound. He learned every remedy they had. He watched the training ground the entire time, over the rim of the mortar.
Now he raises walls. They come up out of nothing, and a blow that would open a man breaks against them and dies there, and behind them the wounded and the old and the small go on breathing. It costs him. The body that was never meant to last this long pays for every wall he raises, and he raises them anyway, and he has never mentioned the price to anyone. All those years they sang over him to keep him from crossing over. He has made himself into the thing that stands in the doorway. Now nobody crosses without coming through him.
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