Birth: A Novella (12 page)

“I’d never heard married people talk like
that,” he says. “Dominic said it’s the way of ‘Graven, that the
wife is equal to her husband and doesn’t have to obey him or be
submissive.”

“He said that?” I can feel a sappy look of
love coming over my face.

“Yes,” Stefan says. “That’s why he got so
furious when I said he should have– you know. But I think he was
just excusing himself for not—” He watches for my reaction. “—for
not keeping order in his household. I mean, what kind of marriage
can it be if the wife doesn’t obey her husband? ‘Graven or not, it
doesn’t make any sense.”

It’s a genuine question he’s asked, and I
don’t have a real answer.
Our kind of marriage,
I think.
Crypta-love marriage.
I want to stay angry with him but I
can’t. Love is flowing out of me like milk. I ask him a question
instead. “If that’s how you felt, what made you come back?”

“I wasn’t going to,” he says, “until I went
home for Midwinter. And my parents were just bursting with it, what
went on when you and Dominic spent the night.”

It’s my turn to hang my head. “I didn’t want
to stay there,” I say. “I just knew it was a mistake.”

Stefan laughs, relieved to see me suffering
from the same kind of embarrassment. It’s easy to talk again, just
like at that Midsummer dinner when we met. “No, Amalie,” he says,
able to call me by name now. “It was great!”

“What do you mean?”

“The way you yelled at Dominic, right there
in their house! And the things you said! Did you really say you’d
cut his finger off and shove it?” He can’t bring himself to repeat
it exactly.

There’s no point in holding back; I’m the
one who’s been promoting honesty. “More or less, yes. But I only
said it because Katrina was spouting a lot of nonsense about men
beating their wives. Anyway, what’s so great about Dominic and me
fighting?”

Stefan frowns, thinking how to explain. “My
father said he’d been disappointed at first that I broke with
Margrave Aranyi, but after seeing the way his wife behaved, and how
he allowed it, he felt I’d done the right thing. That was when I
began to think maybe I’d been wrong. And then my mother said she
was relieved to know I wouldn’t be living in the same house anymore
with such a harridan.” He smiles impishly. “That’s when I really
thought I’d been stupid.”

Eclipsis has no tradition of adolescent
rebellion. Insulated from Terra’s culture of instant gratification
and easy living, young men and women more often wish to emulate
adults than to revolt against them. But Stefan has discovered what
all young people do at some point: that parents don’t always know
what’s best for their children.

“I knew you loved each other,” Stefan says,
“even though you fought so much. And it made me think about me and
Dominic. I shouldn’t have been so soft, breaking with Dominic just
because he yelled at me. He’s my commanding officer, just like he’s
your husband. We both have to obey him. But that doesn’t mean we
have to be afraid of him. And I may not be ‘Graven, but I am
gifted. So I decided that if you could stand up to him, so could
I.”

It’s different for me,
I want to warn
him. If he stays, I resolve, I must be open with him, not keep a
part of myself cordoned off behind the great lie Dominic has asked
for, that I’ve been only too happy to maintain. Dominic’s companion
deserves my entirety, just as Dominic does.

It’s like the ocean,
I will say.
The sea. On Terra, it’s so warm you can swim in it. You have to
dive under the big waves; if you don’t, if one breaks on you, you
can be knocked unconscious, sucked under, drowned. But if you do it
right you can get on the other side of them, before they break, and
you go up and down with the swells. It’s like being rocked in a
great mother’s arms, a force as immense as the Earth itself, gentle
if it suits her to be, but always with that undercurrent of danger.
It’s fantastic, like nothing else...

Stefan is rapt, watching my face as I think,
caught up along with me in my memories.

I’m already telling him, can conceal this no
longer, the reality of having been born on Terra, having lived my
entire life there. “Sometimes, later at night, when I was lying in
bed, I’d feel it still, rising and falling, floating, looking at
the sky. I’d remember a big wave that almost hit me, the undertow,
the current pulling me sideways, and I would be terrified reliving
it.
How did I ever do something so dangerous?
I would think.
I must have been crazy.
But at the time, when I was in it,
had given myself up to it, it was ecstasy, heaven, the best
experience I’ve ever had.

“Being with Dominic—our communion—is like
that. When our communion is functioning there’s only joy, passion,
affection between us. I’m conscious of Dominic’s dangerous aspects,
just as I know how rough the ocean can be after a storm, but the
communion protects us, prevents any expression of it. It’s like
swimming in an ocean that’s always gentle. Not that its power
doesn’t exist, only that it will not be turned against me. But it
all depends on us having that communion. When things go wrong with
it, or we close ourselves off from it, it’s like trying to swim in
a hurricane—”

“It’s the same for me!” Stefan says. “I’m
never scared of him when I’m with him. I know that part of him
exists, but it doesn’t have to ruin things. We can still– I still—”
He can’t say it, any more than Roger could, but at least he can
think it.
We can still love each other. I still love
him.

He has it, too, the communion of love. For
both of us, the power of our gift has become an equalizer, not
fully realized until now. My shrewish behavior has inspired a sort
of courage in Stefan, a self-confidence that was lacking and that
he will need in order to become an adult, a man, an officer.

“You must try to find your way back to
intimacy,” I say.

Stefan shakes his head. “It’s hard to know
how.”

“No, it isn’t,” I say, taking the chance,
touching his hand with mine, sticky with milk. His hand, warm and
dry and tingling with emotions, rests under my grasping palm, ready
to slip out at the slightest suggestion of hypocrisy.

He looks up at me with his handsome face,
young and fresh and innocent, and it’s all I can do not to devour
him. I’ve been feeling it from the moment he walked into the hall,
the first physical desire I’ve had in months. It’s too soon after
the stretching and the tearing of birth, but I don’t seem to care.
I want to kiss him with open mouth, wrap my arms around him,
pull his head down to suckle where Jana’s lips are draining the
last drops of milk…

The silence wakes Katrina, the flow of words
stopping. She sits up, blinking, stares in disbelief. My hand is on
Stefan’s cheek, not as smooth as it looks.
How long since he
started shaving?
Jana lies burbling in my lap as I lean
forward, spilling out of my open dress. Stefan reaches to cup a
breast, fingering a gummy nipple. I’m ready to explode with
pleasure at the touch of his hand on a sensitive place…

“My lady!” Katrina gasps in shock. She had
never thought to actually have to exercise her office of chaperone.
“‘Gravina! Master Ormonde! What are you doing?”

Oh,
we say, drawing back.
There’s
the answer
. We recognize this sensation easily, having had
months to become familiar with it—it’s Dominic’s desire. In my
husband’s weakness I’ve become his conduit, acting out for him what
he’s unable to perform himself. Even Jana feels it, mouthing
Stefan’s fingers, basking in the love of her third parent.

“What will I tell Margrave Aranyi?” Katrina
is still dithering in fright.

“Nothing,” I say, smiling. “He knows.” To
Stefan I say, judging from Katrina’s reaction, “Maybe it’s safer
for you to go through my bathroom into the Margrave’s bedroom.”

Amalie
. Dominic’s thoughts are in my
mind.
There will be no more melodrama in this house.
As I
will discover when we return to Eclipsia City and can go out for an
evening’s entertainment, it’s the plot of every Eclipsian farce:
the wife, the companion and the ‘Graven bedchamber arrangements.
And tell Stefan to get his butt in here, on the double.

“
You will walk in the corridor like an
honest man. Is that clear, Cadet Ormonde?”
I hear Dominic’s
words to Stefan in a nanosecond of delay. The three-sided communion
is working again.

Stefan stands up, answers Dominic, gives
Jana a quick caress and is gone through the door.

I lift Jana in my arms and kiss her cheek
where Stefan’s fingers rested a moment ago. “Don’t worry,” I tell
Katrina. “I’m myself again.” Not that I wasn’t before; I am most
myself when I am with Dominic, when I am Dominic, when we are one.
But why confuse my friend?

***

In the years ahead, Dominic and I will find our way
to live in the city, just as we found our way to each other, and to
love. Dominic will take his prescribed sabbatical through the
summer. Jana will be eight months old when we return to Eclipsia
City, saying her first words and taking her first steps, keeping me
happily occupied. I won’t be the bored, pregnant wife waiting for
her husband’s notice to give her life meaning. Jana and Isobel and
Katrina and I will form our own little female nucleus within the
cell of the household, going for guarded walks outside, or in the
inner courtyards of ‘Graven Fortress. A forbidden screen-reader and
some bootleg “loaded down” books, obtained with Dominic’s
deliberate ignorance, will feed the one addiction I can’t
shake.

When Dominic comes home in the evenings
there will be no underlying frustrations and resentments to build a
wall of anger between us. We’ll be able to talk: about Assembly
sessions and Military Academy business, books we’ve read, gossip
and current events, everything and nothing. It’s the manifestation
of our mysterious bond of love, what connects us despite all our
differences—we find each other’s company more exhilarating than
anyone else’s.

Secure in my marriage, comfortable in my
life, I will enjoy supper parties and the theater, balls at ‘Graven
Fortress and mid-season festivals at home. Developing assurance
will smooth over the tentative missteps of timidity, and lead to
graciousness. I will behave like ‘Gravina Aranyi because I will
feel like ‘Gravina Aranyi. Like myself.

With Dominic’s undistracted attention and
tutelage making up for the missed spring term, Stefan will return
to the ‘Graven Military Academy as a third-year cadet, enjoying
more freedom along with greater responsibility. As a colonel,
Dominic will be entitled to an aide who can share his quarters in
the officers’ barracks. Allowing for the demands of duty rosters
and rotating schedules, he and Stefan will have a few nights
together during the week, just as Dominic’s seniority and higher
rank will allow him some nights at home with his wife. We can
maintain a semblance of family life until Stefan receives his
commission as a second lieutenant, and can choose to live as a
member of our household.

Berend never will find any suitably
entangled land records for Dominic to straighten out by bestowing
the property on his companion. The task that had burdened our
steward at Midsummer is simply forgotten, as Stefan and Dominic
forget they were ever separated. There is no need to change Stefan
into an independent landowner, just as there is no need to change
me into a lord’s daughter.

At the next Midsummer, it will be Berend’s
wife, Laura, who spends the festival night with Stefan. Her second
child will be born the following spring, a beautiful girl with dark
curly hair and perfect features. If Berend has any doubts of
paternity he will hide them. Children conceived during festival
night are not uncommon, and a man must accept his wife’s child
without prejudice, just as he may have put his own child into
another man’s family. In fact, Berend will dote on this girl almost
as much as on his son, and the little family will be happy once
again. It is not only within gifted couples that the wife knows her
husband’s mind, and how to salve his wounds.

Magali, too, will give birth to a healthy
daughter in the spring, Katrina to hers in the summer. But
Dominic’s little kitchen maid, too young for motherhood, will
produce a premature, deformed thing soon after. Not Dominic’s: she
had the sense to find herself a more suitable lover, closer to her
own age—Dominic’s stable boy. The baby will die, mercifully, an
hour or two out of the womb, but the girl herself will be sickened
from it, and it will take all Naomi’s skill to save her. And Luisa,
Lady Ormonde, worn out from so many pregnancies, will die in her
husband’s arms after presenting him with another son. When we
attend the funeral, Sir Karl, looking old and grim, will accept
Dominic’s embrace without flinching, as if his gift has expired
along with his wife.

Three years later, I will give Dominic a
trueborn son, Valentine-Zoltan as he must be named, a small, quick,
red-haired boy who is as much my child as Jana is Dominic’s. Later,
when the moment is right, I’ll suggest an issue, dear to my heart,
for Dominic to introduce before ‘Graven Assembly: birth control,
freely available, not just for the healer or the gifted. No more
children conceiving before their bodies are ready; no more enduring
ten pregnancies for six live births; no more motherless broods of a
dozen.

For Dominic it’s a practical, essential step
toward conservation of Eclipsis’s precious resources, a way to
relieve the pressure on the virgin forests and the fragile mountain
pastures of an expanding human population.
It’s all right for
you,
some will grouse at Dominic in debate,
with your
trueborn son and daughter, and your natural-born son. But what
about the rest of us?
Dominic, still reeling in shock at my
reversal, my unexpected choice of motherhood a second time, will
not admit that’s it’s personal for him as well.
It’s right for
everyone,
he will say,
for all who want to preserve our
world, not despoil it.