Birth: A Novella (10 page)

My maid, having left husband and farm only
after hearing the news of the birth, is almost helpless through her
tears. When she sees how weak I am she focuses, and in a short time
I’m clean and wearing a nightgown, lying in my own bed in the
‘Gravina’s bedroom with Dominic and the baby beside me. We will
stay here for the next few days while an army of scrubwomen and
laundresses makes the Margrave’s bedroom inhabitable by something
other than hyenas and vultures and dung beetles.

Oh
, the witch says, breaking in on my
thoughts,
you’d think you’d never smelled your own waste before.
It’s the sure way to heal from mortal wounds, to sleep undisturbed
for a night and a day.

To be fair, her medical advice has always
been as reliable as any Terran doctor’s, and far more
practical.

***

Late in the morning after Midwinter night, after I
had written my invitation to Lord Roger and Tariq, Dominic gave me
his gift. It was wrapped in a piece of silk, and I could tell what
it was by the shape and the weight, something I had handled many
times at Aranyi. A book. I opened it, unfolding the layers of silk
like uncovering a prism or a jewel, revealing the leather binding.
The title is stamped in gold on the front and on the spine.
The
Last of the Wine
, it says.
By Mary Renault
.

It is a Terran novel, centuries old like all
of them. Terrans lost the attention span for novels when they took
up screens: movies, then television, computers, and finally
holograms, except for addicts like me who want to dive into a deep
ocean of narrative, to be submerged in a story, to resurface only
under protest. The texts still exist, preserved in the digital
archives—
War and Peace, Persuasion, Tom Jones
, along with
lighter, more ephemeral stuff—all accessible if you know what
you’re looking for. If you don’t—

“How did you get it?” I asked in awe.

Dominic smirked, embarrassed. “I got someone
in that dreary place you used to work to ‘load it down.’ Then I
found a printing house that could convert from electronic form to
paper, and compensated them for the single run and the
binding.”

“Did you read it?”

“Of course,” he said. “I wanted to see what
you liked so much.” He paid me the compliment of criticizing the
story, to show that he had given it real attention, thought about
it. “But I didn’t understand: why did Lysis have to give up his
companion when he married? And I certainly hope,” he added,
attempting to look severe, “that should I die, you’ll wait a decent
interval before marrying Stefan.”

He had referred to Stefan as if they were
still lovers. In his mind, I think, they were. Everything that had
driven us apart in the city had become increasingly unreal here at
Aranyi.

“You saved us all,” he said, knowing my
thoughts. “When you asked to go home.”

I was gratified to discover that he had felt
it too, the need to get away from the toxic environment of the city
and ‘Graven Fortress—

“No,” he said, “when you
said
it.
When you said ‘home.’ At first I misunderstood.”

I remembered that morning at breakfast. His
face had shown it all. He had thought I had meant to leave him
forever, go back to the Terran Sector or even, the gods help me,
Terra. And then, when he realized I meant
Aranyi
—

Then I knew
, he said, kissing me and
starting the true communion at last,
I knew I had not lost
everything, as I had feared.

A
week later I stand in the
great hall, holding my daughter on her naming day. Dominic sits in
a large chair beside me. I should be seated, he should stand to
present his child to the world, but it takes more than a week to
come back from death, even for Dominic. His beautiful voice has
returned, deep and musical, and when he proclaims that his wife has
given birth to his “trueborn daughter, Jana-Eleonora
Herzog-Aranyi,” everybody hears and applauds, shouting good wishes.
I walk through the hall, showing Jana off, accepting the
congratulations of our tenants and neighbors.

As Naomi has already remarked, it doesn’t
require this ceremony to prove that Jana is Dominic’s daughter.
Apart from her baby-blue eyes, her face is like Dominic’s in every
other feature. I wonder if there is any part of me in her. She
cries, loud and demanding; I open my dress, feel her soft lips
suckling at my breast, and I
know
her as mine. Her gift is
not active yet; she might, possibly, not have inherited a gift at
all, despite the inner eyelids. But my gift allows a kind of
communion with her, an awareness of who she is, an individual, more
than just the product of her father’s and my love for each other,
wonderful as that is. Like Dominic she is imperious, brave and
honorable, but there is enough of my sharpness and willfulness in
her for us to form an organic, unbreakable connection.

I walk back to stand beside Dominic, who
reaches up for his daughter. Jana nestles happily in her father’s
arms; she has known her papa from the beginning, just as surely as
she knows her mama’s touch and voice. Roger and Tariq join us to
take their leave. They look down at Dominic and an emotion passes
among the three of them. The constraint that has been with us at
the beginning of my labor is gone, removed forever by our shared
ordeal.

“You have a beautiful daughter,” Roger says.
“I envy you.”

Dominic looks up at Roger and smiles. I have
to turn away in confusion; for a moment my husband looks exactly
like the young man who brought me back from death, breaking my fall
off the last ledge of life. “You have your own, my lord, just as
beautiful.” Dominic lies dutifully, giving the required if
unbelievable reply from a new father. “I hope I may be godparent to
the next.”

“I would be honored, Dominic,” Roger says.
“And it is Roger to you. Just Roger.”

Tariq touches the baby’s thick dark hair.
“She’s very like you, Father,” he says. I have never heard him call
Dominic anything other than “sir” or “my lord.”

Dominic reaches for Tariq’s hand, responding
as much to what is unsaid. He looks into his adopted son’s eyes,
saying simply, “Thank you, son,” holding the look and the hand
longer than necessary, but for once Tariq doesn’t resist. They
smile into each other’s eyes with something approaching
respect.

Dominic breaks the spell first. “Look after
him,” he says, nodding in Roger’s direction.

“I will, sir,” Tariq says, the word now
merely the customary, affectionate address of son to father.

As Roger and Tariq walk toward the door I
trail after them, not wanting Dominic to hear me. If what I say or
do is improper, it will be between me and these two young men, no
one else. “Thank you both for my husband’s life,” I say. “I can
never hope to repay you, but I swear that Aranyi is yours, Margrave
Aranyi and I are at your service for as long as we live or can be
of use.”

Roger shakes his head. As Dominic could have
predicted, he’s uneasy talking to a woman about matters of life and
death, debts of honor. “There is nothing to repay,” he says in his
light but resonant voice. “No honorable man could stand back, see
someone give up his life for the mother of his child, and do
nothing. I value Aranyi’s alliance, but I prefer that you grant it
freely, out of sharing my vision of what Eclipsis’s future should
be, not out of a sense of obligation.”

I find myself thinking, not of Roger’s
measured, politic words, but of him and Dominic, during their match
in the tournament, and here at Aranyi, in the barn. My foolish,
wifely stratagem had been in some way an attempt to equalize things
between them, to give Dominic a victory over this young man he had
desired for so long, and to make up for the humiliation I had
inflicted on him with my impulsive act of “protection” at the
tournament. All I have accomplished is another defeat, putting
Dominic forever in the debt of his overlord.

Childbirth has disordered my shielding
abilities, and Tariq is glaring at me. He’s the more gifted of the
two young men; my every nuance of thought is open to him if he
cares. And he cares very much about Roger. He is not only companion
to Roger, but a royal bodyguard, sworn to defend the Viceroy unto
death. Any danger to his lord, of weapon, word or thought, is for
him to deflect. If Dominic is in some way still a threat to Roger,
and if I am in league with my husband, he will not relax his
vigilance on account of my sex or recent motherhood.

Roger also knows how my mind has wandered,
but he has no resentment. He restrains his companion with the
lover’s intuitive mental touch. “That was probably not meant to
be,” he says of the brief affair I had hoped to instigate. “But you
weren’t wrong to wish for it. Dominic is my friend—I’m certain of
it now. And I hope you will be, too. Dominic is fortunate in his
wife. May I be half as lucky when I marry.”

I look to see how Tariq is taking this
unexpected benevolence, and sense only love, his devotion to Roger
and his developing affection for his adoptive father. “Dominic is
fortunate in his son as well,” I say. “We can choose wisely
sometimes.”

“We can indeed,” Roger says. They move to
go, Tariq leading the way to Roger’s waiting entourage of
guards.

I turn back to where I left Dominic sitting,
but he’s standing close behind me, shaky but upright, still
cradling Jana in his arms, concealing his eavesdropping by a simple
mental shield. “That was a very touching scene,” he says with
something of his old sarcastic manner.

“Yes, it was,” I say, deciding to brazen it
out. “Lord Roger is a generous man.”

“More than you know,” Dominic says. “He made
me a full colonel, jumped me two grades in rank.” He points to the
collar of his dress uniform, a small iron badge in the shape of a
chevron. “On one condition: that I stay at Aranyi until
autumn.”

I don’t know whether to say I’m glad or
sorry.

Dominic’s face softens.
Be very glad
,
he says.
It means we’ll be together all that time, at
home.

***

When Roger and Tariq showed up a day or two after the
Midwinter festival had wound down, Dominic and I were unprepared
but grateful for the company. They had brought their own guards and
body servants, so our small household wasn’t overworked, and they
soon settled in, becoming, as I had hoped, a buffer between Dominic
and me in our troubled relationship. Seeing Dominic and Roger
together made me aware, more than from watching a fencing match,
that Roger was an adult, that Dominic’s memories of his desire for
the adolescent were just that—memories.

On his side, Roger seemed unlike himself,
playing the tease, smiling invitingly at Dominic one moment, acting
cold and formal the next. He was testing things, I think, toying as
much with himself as with Dominic, to see if he was ready to grant
the favor now that he could not when younger. To me he was polite,
almost sweet. Pregnant and uncomfortable, not on the best of terms
with my husband, I was an object of sympathy, much as I had been
over a year ago, rushing into something far more complicated than I
had anticipated—the
crypta
test before ‘Graven Assembly.

“‘Gravina Aranyi,” Roger would say, “let me
help you.” To stand, to sit, to fetch something or call someone. It
was through those encounters, the offering of his hand, the
converging of our telepathic auras, that he learned what he had
already guessed, that I intended him for Dominic as a peace
offering. Roger’s eyes narrowed when he picked it up the first
time. He could not be pleased at such a cavalier disposal of his
body and integrity, but he came, eventually, to see it as not so
different from his own feelings.

When he learned that I was doing this, in
part, as fulfillment of the wife’s duty to choose a companion for
her husband, he laughed.
You know I can’t become Margrave
Aranyi’s companion,
he thought to me.
I am pledged to my own
dear companion, and there is my position as the acting Viceroy. And
what of Stefan Ormonde?

I know
, I said.
Only until I am
safely through this birth and my husband can convince Stefan to
return.

Roger noticed the girl whom Dominic had been
with at Midwinter. She was very much in evidence these days, blithe
and chattering and laughing, obedient to Dominic’s order not to
wear my dress at Aranyi, but full of her own importance, having
lost her virginity to the master, hoping she had conceived—thank
the gods that did not happen. She knew not to boast of that night,
but she began to wear her hair like a woman’s, coiled over her neck
and held in place with combs, and she went willingly each morning
to help her mother in the kitchen instead of having to be called
indoors from playing with the other children, as she used to. She
had become an adult, she felt, and would behave like one.

“So that’s how it is,” Roger said. He
understood that I preferred a worthy substitute; a lord, not a
kitchen maid. And in any event a man was more a counterpart to
Stefan than to me.

When Dominic proposed the ride, the day I
went into labor, Roger accepted, telling Tariq the truth. There
could be no lies between so gifted a couple. But when Dominic
suggested resting the horses in the barn, Roger had almost changed
his mind again, until Dominic took his hand and the communion
flowed between them, and love so long bottled up, wine turned to
vinegar, was let out and allowed to breathe.

Perhaps it was best, as things turned out,
that my contractions interrupted, that the fulfillment was less
than perfect on both sides. Through my communion with Dominic, I
know that he and Roger are free now to be friends, lovers only in
the sense of caring for each other, offering respect and mutual
support. Dominic will serve Roger, lord to overlord, through duty
and affection both, and Roger knows he can count on Dominic to
uphold his rule, here in Aranyi and in ‘Graven Assembly. If Roger
has lost a sexual partner, he has gained something more valuable: a
powerful ally whose backing will be certain in any crisis.