Wildfire (36 page)

 
  

 

  
I wrapped Tobe’s body in my cloak and climbed into the cart. Mai said, “How is he?”

 

  
“Asleep. Let me keep him awhile, he’s quiet.” I settled myself across from Mai, with Tobe next to me, beyond her reach.

 

  
Mai wheezed through many more throes, until she no longer had the strength to squat, but lay propped up against a heap of sacks with her legs akimbo. Her waters gushed forth at last. Midwife praised her and said it was almost time. She oiled her hands and slipped two fingers into Mai’s cleft. She glanced at me, and I was dismayed to see her afraid. I crawled over to help, but she shook her head.

 

  
“Mai! Mai, look at me!” Midwife said, for Mai’s eyes had strayed to Tobe. “Your passage is open at last, but Mouse has turned crosswise again. Since he won’t come headfirst, I’m going to see if I can catch him by the feet. Have you ever had a babe feet first, Mai?” While she was talking she slid her whole hand into Mai’s quim, all the way in up to the wrist. Her other hand was on Mai’s belly, nudging Mouse’s buttocks. “Listen, Mai—never fear, I’ve caught them headfirst, feet first, bum first, and backward.”

 

  
Mai’s face drew up tight as a purse and turned red. Midwife said, “Are you pushing? Don’t push! You mustn’t push.”

 

  
Mai ground her teeth and wept and her legs tensed and trembled as Midwife fished inside her, but she made no outcry. She held on to Sunup and me and I saw the others grimacing and realized that my face too wore the mask of pain, all of us caught up in Mai’s agony. Midwife brought forth two tiny feet from Mai’s cleft, holding the ankles delicately between her fingers. The wrinkled soles faced upward, and the toes looked like a row of pearls. The legs came out to the calf, pale as gray clay against the red engorged lips of Mai’s cleft.

 

  
“Is he alive?” Mai asked.

 

  
The midwife grinned at her. Now that Mouse was on his way to being born, she seemed elated. “That he is.”

 

  
With each throe Mouse came farther out, and retreated a little afterward, as if he wanted to climb back inside. When the babe’s buttocks emerged, Midwife took him by the hips and he slithered out to the nape of his neck. She draped his limp body on her forearm, and at the next throe she commanded Mai to push and not stop pushing, and Mai squinched up her face and strained until veins stood out on her forehead and cords on her neck. Mouse’s head was still inside and I feared he was stuck. Midwife slipped a finger into his mouth, and tucked his chin down so his head could come out, and at last he was born.

 

  
Mouse lay still and I feared he was dead, though the twisted bluish cord that bound him to his mother was pulsing. Midwife cleaned his nose and mouth and blew on his eyelids. He took a shuddering breath that so surprised him that he whimpered and waved his arms and legs and curled his fingers and toes. His gray skin became suffused with pink and he opened his eyes.

 

  
Mai had slumped back against the wall of the cart. She reached for Tobe, saying, “Let me see him.”

 

  
“Let him sleep,” I said, and Midwife gave me a sharp look. She put Mouse into Mai’s arms instead, saying it would do them both good if he would suckle. But Mouse didn’t know how, and Mai seemed too weary to help him.

 

  
Sunup leaned down and took one of Mouse’s tiny hands between her fingers, and marveled at his face, wrinkled like an apple stored all winter, and his many small perfections. He cried,
Mnaah? Mnaah? Mnaah?
as if amazed. “Oh, you are born!” Sunup said.

 
  

 

  
Mouse’s companion, the bloodknot that ties the unborn to the mother’s womb, had yet to be born. Midwife and I knew that, though Sunup didn’t.
Mai’s afterpains should have pushed it out, but her throes had stopped. And now her blood began to flow in a pulsing red stream, soaking the sacks under her.

 

  
“You mustn’t give up, Mai,” Midwife said. “It’s almost over—nearly done.”

 

  
“I’m done for,” Mai said hoarsely.

 

  
Midwife hauled on her arms. “You’re not dead yet! Get up and help. Get up! I want you to squat and push. Come now, one last push.”

 

  
Mai strove to pull herself up, clutching my shoulder, the midwife, the cart. She leaned on me and I bore her up as best I could. Blood splashed onto her legs, our skirts. So much blood. Mai’s lips turned as white as her pinched nostrils. She was too weak to push. She swore she couldn’t do it. Sunup held Mouse, who was still attached to Mai by the cord. She asked in a small voice what was wrong, and got no answer.

 

  
Midwife had been patient and steady throughout the birthing, and now her urgency was frightening. She shook black powder from a pouch into her hand, and made Mai lick it up. It was blackbeard, the blight on the rye that makes grains swollen and poisonous: a boon to midwives, but as dangerous as it is potent. It belongs to Frenzy, and can bring madness.

 

  
The blackbeard caused throes as fierce as any Mai had yet endured, and soon Mouse’s companion was expelled in a torrent of piss and blood and clots. Midwife turned the bloodknot over, making certain all the meat of it was there in the tattered caul, lest any part remain in Mai’s womb and make her bleed. It was all there. The flow of blood became a trickle, an ooze.

 

  
Midwife tied the cord and cut it. And then, to my amazement, she began to sob, holding Mouse in her lap and rocking, rocking. And I saw she had set aside a great burden. I saw her once again as Coralbell, a tired, frightened, glad woman. As Midwife, priestess of Desire, she had sustained Mai all during the long travail with her conviction that Mai could birth this child. She’d claimed the shade of her grandmother had told her so, and I’d believed her, even when Mouse turned and turned and turned again, refusing to be born. But she’d never said Mai would survive the birthing.

 
  

 

  
And Mai was still in danger. The pangs given by the blackbeard assailed her, and she writhed and screamed as she had not done during her long travail, for she was not in her proper mind. She weakened. Her skin became pale and mottled, and her lips turned blue. Cold sweat, stumbling heartbeat.

 

  
Here at last was something I could do for her. I wrapped us both in blankets, and put my left hand over her heart, her hearthfire, and called upon my own hearthfire to warm her. I was afraid I might not have anything to
give, for I burned low from exhaustion. But the fire that blazed up in answer to my call wasn’t mine. It came from beyond me, it came through me, a gift of the Hearthkeeper.

 
  

 

  
After Mai’s frenzy from the blackbeard ebbed, and she knew us again, I put Tobe in her arms so she could say her farewells. I told her the Queen of the Dead herself had taken Tobe from me to end his suffering, and surely his death journey would be swift and easy. A young child hasn’t time to acquire a burden of many regrets, and Tobe’s must have weighed no more than a dandelion seed.

 

  
Mai said the Queen of the Dead had taken the wrong child. She wouldn’t let Mouse to her breast again. She said he’d poisoned Tobe with his jealousy, and never would she suckle him. She told Coralbell to leave him on the hillside to be killed by stray dogs, for it was quicker than starvation and more merciful than he deserved. A parent, by rights, may decide whether a child is worth the trouble to raise, first the mother, then the father. Still, we tried to convince her to keep Mouse. It would give her reason to live, Coralbell said. He was not to blame, I said. It was the gods who took Tobe.

 

  
Sunup wept and wailed for Tobe, and she didn’t cease until I asked her help to ready him for the pyre. We washed him; she smoothed his black stand-uppish hair. Mai said nothing more. Hers was a parched grief, quiet and ominous. She held Tobe till midafternoon, and at last relinquished him, and I carried him to the fire that would free his shade of all confinement.

 

  
Mai turned her face to the wall of the cart and showed us the marble slab of her back, and was silent.

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

  
  
  
CHAPTER 14
  

  
Lynx
  
  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  
T
he plain below me looked like cloth, bleached with snow, spread smooth with a light hand that left a few rises and hollows, a few wrinkles. An embroidery of hedges marked off square fields and forests gray as smoke. A broad black river edged with ice meandered southward. In one of the river’s coils, two armies had met to do battle, and the snow was speckled with small figures of men and horses.

 

  
I urged Frost downhill, toward the battlefield. Mouse was snug and warm against my belly in a sling made from a bloodstained sack. His small fists were clenched beside his face; he had perfect tiny shiny fish-scale fingernails. I was glad he was asleep at last. He’d cried all the way here, such distressing cries I’d longed to stop up my ears against them.

 

  
I had found the army’s new camp, and a goat tethered to a cart there, bleating because she hadn’t been milked. So Mouse had enough milk to content him for a while. But I was still in search of a sheath named Thistle, from the clan of Growan, who’d borne a child the tennight before last. The midwife thought she’d be willing to suckle Mouse. Surely Mai would change her mind and keep the boy after her grief eased.

 

  
Most of the tents were empty. I found one of Divine Xyster’s servants tending a few wounded men in the priests’ pavilion. He told me the warriors had already marched on Malleus to take possession of their prize, leaving bagboys behind to guard their belongings, and most of the varlets had run down to the field to plunder. I asked the man if he’d seen Sire Galan, or heard news of him. “Not a word,” he said.

 

  
We’d won the battle. We’d won the war.

 
  

 

  
Sheaths were on the field, gleaning. This is what they do, Galan had told me once. This is what they are. I knew many of these women, counted them as friends, but I hadn’t known them like this, with daggers in their hands, crouching by fallen foot soldiers to cut apart their clothes, looking for coins, for anything that glittered, even golden threads. Killing wounded enemies.
Giving them mercy, it was called. I daresay some sheaths, none too particular, did the same to our own soldiers. Many of the bodies had been robbed already. A sheath had to be thorough, like the gleaners allowed into fields after harvest, poor old women who war with mice over scattered grains.

 

  
I’d been on a battlefield once before in the Marchfield, after the mortal tourney and the riot that followed it, and seen dead men, dead women too, and I’d done what I could for the wounded. Those struck down that day would have fit in a little corner of this field. This couldn’t be understood; it was too much to believe.

 

  
I turned away from a man groaning on the ground, calling for water. Water would have done him no good, it would have spilled out again through the gash in his belly. I didn’t try to help him. Or anyone. It wasn’t that I was afraid; I was numb. I was far away from them, far from the wounded and dying. Far from these sheaths, far from myself. I felt closer, perhaps, to the dead. Why grieve, why struggle, when life is short and death is overlong? To be so far away made the suffering distant and bearable. Yet I hated that it could be borne.

 
  

 

  
I took the bearclaw from my saddlebag and pulled it on my hand, and kept the claws hidden between my fingers. I searched, but there were too many, some lying one atop the other. In reeds by the river I saw a man sprawled on ice with his head under the water. He wore a hauberk with enameled rings. It wasn’t Sire Galan’s armor, but very like it. I hauled him out and took his helmet off: Sire Erial. He’d been overlooked by the gangs of drudges who were gathering up the slain cataphracts and armigers. Our dead warriors would ride through Malleus in wagons, so their shades could savor the triumph before departing; the enemy dead were borne to the pyres on the edge of the battlefield. Priests oversaw the work, making sure that the armor of each slain foe went to the man who had killed him. One of a jack’s duties, even in the confusion of battle, was to tie his master’s banner to a downed man for the tallies later.

 

  
Groves and orchards resounded with the rhythmic thunk of axes against wood, trees coming down to feed the fires.

 

  
I hailed a sheath from the clan of Growan, calling her by name. She was kneeling by a dead man, and she turned to me with a snarl, with blood on her knife, ready to fight if she had to. Seeing it was me, her face changed, and she got up and came over. She didn’t know where Thistle was. “Oh, is that Mai’s boy?” she said. “Did Mai die, is that why you need a wet nurse? Praise the gods she’s alive! Look at him, such a fine boy; he’ll grow up to trouble a doxy’s hard heart someday.”

 

  
Another woman came over; I knew her as a sutler who sold pickles and ale. She cooed at Mouse and fondled him until he woke up and cried; then she praised him for being loud. A boy child should be loud. But she didn’t know where Thistle was either. As for Sire Galan, she’d heard he had the shiver-and-shake, and hadn’t fought at all—what a pity! The sutler showed the sheath her loot and they began to barter, every great battle being the occasion for a bustling market afterward.

 

  
Whores had their own way of getting plunder, by earning it. One harlot knelt over a dead horse with her kirtle tucked up and a soldier kneeling behind her, his buttocks bunching while hers jiggled. Her pander stood nearby, keeping the line of men orderly.

 

  
I saw another whore lying on the ground in a bloody skirt, strangled. The mud soldiers’ blood was up, yet the conciliators had agreed Malleus would not be sacked. A mudman would get no reward for the long march and the battle won but what he could take on this field.