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“What do you want to tell her?” Phil’s grand black wings are sprawled out behind him on the green woven blankets and brown fur hides laid out to insulate the cottage from the Antarctic’s deathly chill. It’s times like these that Techno becomes acutely aware of his grand age. There is no one else in the world who can be framed in the colours of the earth and have them suit them so. There is no one else he trusts to each him an ancient tongue.
There’s so much Techno wants to say to her. Too much to say through gazes like the last time they met. “I want to tell her…”
Thank you. For raising not only him but multiple wriggling piglets. The feeling of a warm belly, bloated with milk, has not been lost on him the same way their language has. She raised them alone (the sire never in sight, as is customary in their culture), using the skills she’d developed without guidance. Motherhood came naturally to her, as it did to all women of their species.
He saw how the village men looked at her. Lust pooled in their eyes at the water well, dark and cunning. Techno remembered being a child and clinging to her leg as they collected water, but the village brutes clung to her differently. With force and wandering fingers. It was the type of touch she would wriggle away from with a polite smile. As a child, it didn’t concern him. She would decline that touch and embrace him instead—his pure and childish heart believed that it was because he gave better hugs.
But now it troubles him. The treatment his mother receives in the clan. The treatment all sows receive. Their life purpose is to bear children to strengthen and expand the clan. His mother certainly excels at that: he can hardly remember a time in his childhood when he wasn’t surrounded by a dozen other piglets. But he knows what the water well touches mean now. He knows and it sickens him. It probably sickens her, too.
But she never fought back. Never slapped away hands or bit mouths that chased her’s. Techno can’t remember ever seeing her be uncooperative. She put up with the most disgusting treatment to stay with her beloved children. To stay with Techno. It makes his heart ache.
She sacrifices so much for her children. Both now and then, her entire life revolves around them. When Techno was a child, he barely saw his mother without a piglet swaddled in her arms or tied to her back—sometimes both. Raising children is no easy job. Techno can remember how tears would pearl at the corners of her eyes as she tried desperately to hush a weeping piglet in the wee hours. Her palms became creased and stained from the constant preparation of food lest her neighbours surmised she starved her piglets.
One wrong move and the clan explodes with mean-spirited whispers. One foot out of place and she faces exile, forbidden from ever seeing her children again. Techno can’t even begin to imagine the intense frustration she must feel.
But not once in his memories did she ever complain. Not once. Bar those tiny midnight tears, Techno didn’t have a single memory of his mother where she was not smiling. She persevered, knowing that it was wiser to keep in line than follow her heart.
Like a tight fist, Techno’s heart clenches. After the execution and subsequent resurrection, he followed his heart home to her. If she had the opportunity, where would her heart take her? If she was not bound by the confines of culture, would she leave the clan, hoisting her piglets onto her back, and settle elsewhere?
Has his mother ever had dreams? Has she wanted more from life once upon a time? Techno grew up adventurous, forever yearning to know what laid beyond the horizon. He had a hunger for knowledge and exploration—even after crossing through to the overworld, the hunger was not satiated. Was his mother ever like that too?
Did motherhood strip her away from personhood?
Before anything else, she is a mother. When she came of age, her name was stripped from her—replaced with the title of sow. She became nothing more than her children. She loves her children, Techno knows how fiercely she loves them, but it saddens him to know that she’s sacrificed everything for them. His mood only darkens when he realises that the sacrifice may not have been a willing one.
Techno is grateful. So, so grateful. It’s rare to have a mother so devoted, a mother so welcoming and loving. Once grown, piglins rarely return to their birthplace. It would’ve been entirely possible that he showed up to the clan settlement and she rejected him. Instead, she’d remembered the little piglet who was buried beneath the hardened warrior and brought him to the surface with a loving embrace.
He wants to tell her how much that meant to him. To be treated so softly, so tenderly, is rare for a man like Techno. In the overworld, he’s seen as nothing more than the Blade—a weapon of destruction. People are warned to stay away from him lest they are cut.
She’d seen more than the hard exterior: the bloodied shirt, the grimy face and stern jaw. She’d held his face like he was made of glass or was a fragile piglet. There was no fear in her eyes. He didn’t know how much he needed to be vulnerable until he was in her arms again.
How could he say all of this to her? When his body transformed into a form more fitting of the overworld, his vocal cords changed and are now no longer capable of creating the oinks, huffs and grunts that made up Piglin. Trying is fruitless and, oh Gods, how he’s tried. Staring into the mirror late at night, eyes burning and stinging with tears, as his throat clenched around the now-foreign sounds. In a fit of frustration, he’d smashed the mirror. Expressing all of those complex feelings is an impossible feat.
Techno flinches when he feels a hand take his own. His tired eyes find Phil’s. The man’s gaze is apologetic, his mouth is in its usual lopsided smile.
“There’s too much to say.” Techno breathes the words out like a confession, “Telling her everything I want to would take me an eternity.”
“I can imagine. It’s normal to be overwhelmed with feelings, mate, especially after you’ve spent all this time apart.” With his free hand, he reaches over to one of the many books surrounding them. He flips to one page with such precision that Techno suspects he’s planned this. “But maybe I have a word that can encompass everything you feel.”
The book is turned to him. The opened pages display two columns per page: a word in Common, then its equivalent in Piglin. Phil is pointing to one specific Common word. In the dim lighting, Techno struggles to read the small text. The book is passed onto his lap and he bends his back to view it closer.
“Mother.” He reads aloud. A lump has gathered in his throat, as heavy as a rock.
His eyes travel along to its translation. Instantly, his face softens, shoulders and jaw relax, his mind is cleared of any frustration. Just like that, tears are slipping down his cheeks. Techno lowers his head and allows sobs to ripple through his frame. Tears drop onto the open book below, water spreading across the words that caused this very reaction.
Phil clutches his hand tightly. “You love her very much. Maybe you can’t express it now, maybe it will take a lifetime to communicate all that you feel, but for now, I know your mother will be overjoyed to hear you call her this name.”
And he’s right.
The next time Techno visits his mother, Phil is there with him. He’s there to see Techno’s mother abandon her washing and run up to him with clothes pegs hanging from her hair, arms spread wide with an even wider smile on her face. Techno’s arms go around her waist, holding her impossibly close, and, when he says that magic word, he is tenderly holding her face in his hands, running the pads of his thumbs across her wet cheeks.
“Mamma.” He rasps.
And judging by the blissful look of love on his mother’s face, it looks like Techno’s love has not gone unspoken this time.