Hey everybody~ nothing exciting to report!
Chapter 9: Matches
A crisp, squelching, cry rattled thinly from the room within dragging, jerking, both of them from their stupor.
Abruptly they were not enemies.
Abruptly they were both pale and tense. Yugi fussed with her hair and held her breath as if they'd dived under the surface of the river. Atemu's hands sat raised but idle no longer on his sword or on his lap as they so often found their homes.
The cry squealed within a second time like a bugle horn.
A band of tension released its spell over them.
Yugi mumbled, hand cuffing her lips, as she shook her head and seemed to tear up.
"What? What on earth is that for?" Atemu hissed, demanding, immediately startled as he yanked at the woman's vulnerable wrist trying to hear her whisper under the cawing baby-bird shriek.
"No-nothing! Nothing," Yugi startled then soothed, brushing herself especially about the glassing eyes, batting Atemu back gently. "Hush, it's alright, it's just my ramble. I've been worried about the damn tiny creature."
"What else?" Atemu demanded, childish now in a way. "Is that cacophony a good sound?"
"Crying's good," Yugi nodded, wiping her eye properly as Atemu left her alone. She sniffed. "It sounds like a girl with that pitch."
"Anything will do." He announced, hands taking to grasping the edge of the bench as he cocked his head back towards the room, waiting impatiently. Atemu's insides began to fill, gushing, at the tiny distressed sounds with something new and sharply, bitterly, cold. It was a tenuous moment before he connected the anxiety of it to any kind of love. An all consuming love for something he couldn't even see…
He pressed his lips together.
There was a chaos within, more fussing, more crying. A stumble came over something wooden, a piece of the luxurious furniture clattered, Anzu gave a horrid sound and the Frenchmen seemed to be arguing. Yet the crying of the babe had not stopped.
One of the physicians came clapping over the tiles in his boots, trying to look tall and trim and very clean despite the hours spent sweating in the unaccustomed heat of the chamber which had utterly devastated the crevices of his aging face.
Yugi stood, hands clumsily back over her mouth, struck by something and Atemu was rather instantly on his feet in the same panic beckoning the silly top-heavy man closer.
Taking careful, chubby, steps the old European came near enough to offer the primped stack of stiff linen to the Sultan.
There was a snatch, a re-arrangement, and grabbing his shoulder Yugi came about Atemu's side attempting to assist in the rushed transition by cradling the tiny covered head and neck with her hand and a hushing pair of lips. Atemu let her help, working the bundle into the grove of his cradling elbow and darting round to his opposite side Yugi craned up onto her toes to look down into the tiny face Atemu tried to un-obscure by pulling aside the linen.
Yugi gasped, bit her nail stupidly, gave a little sound and rushed with something Atemu's shoulders scrunched before losing all their tension. He leant a little more into the direction of the witch, amazed, trying to better the picture of the tiny, almost white, child. Yugi dropped from her tiptoes, laughing through a broken swoon of relief, hands still on Atemu as the tilt of the King's arms round the bundle won them both a good look.
"Tis a boy we believe your Highness," simpered the Frenchman.
"Yes, yes," Atemu grunted tartly. He didn't like the self-satisfied sound of the man; it distracted from the portrait of the perfect little face.
"Oh he's tiny," Yugi fluttered, vaguely adoring but lingeringly cautious as her fingertips moved across Atemu's cradling forearm too hesitant to touch the child with the father present.
"Should he be quite so small?" Atemu whispered, stunned.
"Well Sir-"
"Shh," Atemu snapped curtly at the European.
"N-no, not so much," Yugi picked up the answer to the question which Atemu had quite mindlessly directed to her. The witch's hand ran down Atemu's forearm using it as a poor substitute for how she wanted to touch the boy the king was coveting. It was anxious but only just so.
"Then what's to be done?" Atemu pried.
"Feed him, get him fatter," Yugi nodded decisively. "The climate's good here. Gods help he won't be sickly and we'll make it past the worst."
"Good, good," he mumbled, smiling almost.
The withered, tutting, Frenchman hummed evidently not quite agreeing.
"Ah, Sire," he started gently just inclining his finger.
"What?"
Against him Yugi's warm weight and keen eyes still fussed on the child like a wife utterly ignoring the men's business to leave it to Atemu to clean up. Atemu could feel her face below his chin arching over the babe, feel her little hand on his wanting to pet the child but unwilling to without his permission despite how she seemed to burst with longing to.
"Her Majesty is still, I fear, in rather dire straits." He cautioned. "There was some bleeding getting him out but all will be well. It should cease."
"Scoot then," Atemu grunted eyes burning, "to her. Fix it. If anything happens to my wife it'll be your head."
"Ah, but, the child Sire ought, uh-"
"Oh shh and leave him here," Yugi snapped cocking her jaw. "Tis one babe, I've seen droves of them, off with you. Do something useful."
Atemu snorted, pleased, as almost insulted the man scampered like a tipsy top back to the frantic bedchamber where men and midwives were still gasping tumultuously. It was strange how the tiny thing made them so vicious towards the same direction. As the shadow of the man disappeared Yugi let escape another, tiny, brokenly happy sound of relief.
A boy was, quite simply put, exactly what the kings of the past four centuries had all sat up in the night waiting for. Since time began its heavy progress truly it seemed that all men lusted for sons. Sons fixed things, propped the whole course of a country up and the ecstatic burst that exploded through the palace at just past midnight seemed testament to as much.
It may have, if handled delicately, been enough to seal Yugi and Atemu into a better alliance.
As the doctors slaved, for what seemed too long over the Queen, barring the doors Yugi and Mana'jet made off with the newborn and an Eastern nursemaid into a sealed office of the King's. Left with himself Atemu was given the business of confronting all his exuberantly excited, half drunk and half asleep, brothers who had been celebrating since the announcement of the labour twelve hours before.
It didn't even occur to Atemu that two very casual, very trusting, friends of the witch were now the sole protectors of his son who had vanished in the Gem Faher's arms being kissed. It… truthfully in the consummation of that splendid rush of pleasure, the sizzle of being a father, Atemu forgot all about detesting Yugi.
By dawn Atemu had had sparse sleep.
Timaeus pouring him a drink gave assurances of the Tsar's congratulations and the grin cutting Atemu's face could not seem to be quelled. He was settled in the fact this righteous motion of life had validated suddenly his marrying the Lady Anzu, he felt, in the the eyes of everyone. Even Atemu's father, surely, would've been appeased when presented with a timely grandson.
Yugi was the first however in the grey dawn light to push a very sharp needle into Atemu's side.
"Majesty," she came ducking in to clasp herself up beside the Sultan's seat utterly unable to notice the Ryssian ambassador. Yugi ducked at the knees, leaning over the arm of his chair to whisper as Atemu beckoned lazily. "He's gone quiet. He won't suckle."
"Won't…?" Atemu couldn't… everything eats. Everything. Everything with filled with the rush of sun and will of life and…
Yugi shook her head, tired in every detail of her face, whispering against his shoulder as if they were cohorts in pleasure and suffering.
"We got him to take a little in the last hour but he's brought it all up again."
"Stay with him," Atemu ordered though he shouldn't have wanted Yugi to do it, "he might take better to his mother when they release her." As Atemu was sure they would.
Yugi nodded keenly, responsive and obedient.
"Might I call the other wives?" She murmured. "Mana and I are failing in the eyes. The body wants to sleep even if the head does not I fear."
"Get them up, have them all," Atemu urged. "Send a dozen guards and if you will try another nursemaid."
"Yes Sire."
A prickle, a sensation, of lingering disbelief, panic, and unnerve plucked in every second heartbeat of Atemu's as Yugi took a quick step to sashay out into the hall pattering without so much as a glance to Timaeus.
Yugi took to rubbing the side of her hand against her lips, followed by the tips of her fingers, grasping her knee in one hand. They passed the boy round. He slept best against one of them, against a warm chest and in warm arms, and at three days old seemed to have a whole harem already. Yugi didn't like to watch him go round like a parcel because with the child in her hands she felt she could at least manage some brief something.
The Queen had, Yugi heard in whispers, stopped bleeding from a tear that it appeared was rather great. Still in the past two days, exhausted and weak, she hadn't risen from bed.
On the third morning she had a fever, all red and hot in the face. The salivating Frenchmen became frantic as Atemu's ever illustrious temper began to tumble into desperation.
On the fourth morning Anzu had become unable to eat.
In a fury Atemu had dismissed the Frenchmen and every hour the gossip of the whole palace seemed to change. In twelve hours it seemed the whole course of their joy had flipped for a bitter, gut wrenching, drop into fear.
The wives sent slaves round, guards, girls… trying to get news as they passed the boy who, still so small, had begun to breathe fast and had only drunk and kept down a little in his short life.
In the next hour it seemed Atemu had tried to send the temple clerics to tend Anzu but the Queen had sent them away.
In the next the clerics were attempting to consult up some course of action without seeing her Majesty and the Frenchmen had to be caught and dragged back from the docks to testify in detail about her condition.
In the-
Mana gave a gasp that, breaking high, extended itself in horror to a moan and a screech utterly agonized.
From the window Yugi stumbled up and she'd hardly reached her, demanding what was the matter, before a clamour of other voices were up alongside her.
"He's stopped!" Mana shrieked, eyes sunken and cheeks taunt tyring to open the still babe's mouth to see if its throat was blocked. "He's not breathing!"
"Here! Here!" Kisara demanded grasping for the child. She took it, she patted, she rocked, she hissed… "Come on now sweet one, come now, breath little one, breathe…"
They stood, a dozen of them tremulous, two of them already crying, Mana'jet hyperventilating into her hands.
He'd stopped.
At four days, unnamed in the chaos, the tiny, tiny, thing faded out of their reach without ever seeing his mother.
Without ever being named.
There was no telling the Queen. They feared the fact of the matter would annihilate her into hysterics that might turn her stuttering state all the more dire.
On the fifth day she'd had no solid food and fluids had begun to fail. Yugi knew from all she'd ever seen and attended that if the bowel movements gave way to slush then the wound from the birth could all the more easily be infected. Child bed fever was the next likely outcome and without anything in her there'd be no strength to make her better. The physicians however unable, at her orders, to see the state of her wound could not tend it or take guesses off it.
Yugi squeezed her hands between her knees, praying still in the great temple where she'd kept herself unable to sleep all night. She bit her lip, dragged her teeth over the chapped bottom of the set, and hunching her shoulders inhaled stoutly.
Anzu's damn inflexible British prudishness would be her undoing.
Head down Yugi took, in gusts, to chanting between alternating strings of her mother's incantations and Eastern prayers.
On the sixth day Atemu's resolve broke.
"I don't care what you do," he dragged Yugi by the elbow, his entire form ablaze. "I don't care how you do it. I don't care if you dance naked to Satan himself and consummate a contract with him at the foot of her bed. Just fix it."
Yugi was shoved, tumbled into the darkness of the Queen's rooms and glancing back saw Atemu with his hands out maddened from sleeplessness and intent on driving her forward if necessary. Desperation, appealing desperation, was burning in the Sultan and nipped by that Yugi didn't dare turnabout. Her mother always said to move on before men became desperate; their standards raised, their greed at its most intense, their condition most volatile but Anzu…
"Oh Anzu…"
She shook her head, another step fell out of her, and forgetting all else Yugi could not remember the hard learnt etiquette of court impressed upon her during her seven years here.
The sight of her, oh heaven the sight of…
She shook her head, couldn't…she…
Anzu lay, not quite conscious in the almost darkness of the shut up room, panting in the candlelight nearest the bed that ringed the room with tomb light. Her chest heaved and the nightgown that clung to her was so drenched with sweat she seemed to have dragged herself dying from the river. It gave her the appearance of drowning. The intense appearance of drowning… old stories of lakes, sighing women, the mermaid queen of France, the…
Collapsing onto the edge of the bed Yugi swooned with horror.
Oh God…
As she leant over every bone in Anzu's clavicle was pronounce, the precise arch of her collar and cheek bone crystal clear, and as she tossed her head Yugi could spy a throbbing vein arching down her neck.
Dying, dying…
She shook her head.
Anzu's hand was burning, her cheek was ablaze, as if Yugi had stuck her hands between two logs on the hearth and everywhere there was sweat, draining, drenching, sweat.
The longer she sat too the clearer the smell became. Anzu was loved, she'd been cleaned, she'd been damped down and dried but the putrid, fungal, smell of rot was neigh inescapable underneath it all. Under all the powder Yugi could taste the pits and the flies and the smell of death.
Infection.
The wound was infected. Anzu was rotting alive. Yugi knew, sensed it, as clear as she could see the light about her face or feel Anzu's fingernails in between her clutching fingers.
Yugi raised the back of her hand, kissed it, poor sweet woman and… Oh God!
Yugi caught the breath choking through her throat, her head falling towards her chest as it shook stubbornly. Anzu panted.
Dying. She was dying like a common urchin of the continent even a sea away and Queen of the East. Dying from church pew ideas and nonsense and holier than thou men with their potions and leeches and…
Oh God forgive me
Dying of Yugi's meddling, Yugi's spells.
Dying of Frenchmen who approved of so little of their Eastern cuisine, dying of laziness and lack of sun, dying of lack of endurance and strength, dying of blood loss, dying of infection…
Yugi gasped, inhaled, shuddering herself together and frantic cupped Anzu's face toward her delicately.
"Anzu, Milady," she urged, "sweetheart wake up. I beg you."
She groaned, she sighed, and trying to heave her heavy head closer glassy, swimming, eyes blinked sloppily. Anzu gaze seemed to see right through her towards the very edge of life.
"Milady I need to look at you," Yugi urged. "Friend, you're dying. I have to help you."
"Hnn," she moaned, "no…"
Whether it was to Yuig or a dream Yugi was not sure either of them knew.
"Please sweetheart," she begged tentatively because as the syllables passed she hardly knew if it would do either of them any good at this point. "Think of your son."
"My son…" She cried under her breath. Her eyes, swinging about lost, eventually found Yugi as she gasped. "You'll see he's well won't you? You're supposed to do all the things I'm too silly for."
"No, no," she promised, "you're not silly. You are a mother now."
Mother to a dead boy, indeed, but Yugi couldn't bear to tell her that. If she had to go to her heaven then she ought to think Atemu was well and she had given him something to make due with.
"I am," she laughed, "I'm silly. They all think so. They all think you should have him. They all think I'm a girl and a fool and that I've stolen something from you but, oh, I didn't mean to… but I love him and…"
She rambled, forgot herself, dazing off only really half present.
"Let me…" Yugi cut it, stopped herself because gathering up her breath she could go no further.
No.
It wouldn't help.
Nothing now would help. Anzu's belief, her pride and her urge for comfort had settled her here and distressing those ideals now… all the meddling Yugi might manage would do nothing to save Anzu only strip her of one last, desperate, shred of honour. To embarrass her now, to horrify and destabilize her was to be truly wicked.
Yugi couldn't do it.
She was lost.
"I will send his Majesty in," Yugi promised, kissing her brow. "Sleep well Sire."
Anzu muffled, eyes fluttering, gone back to the depths of the fever.
Yugi was still sitting in the window seat when Atemu came out again. Both of them had been crying. Both of them were dry now though redness puffed round his sharp eyes still and dry tracks crackled still on Yugi's cheeks.
"I am so sorry," Yugi whispered, laid up like a set aside mannequin in the corner of the stone shelf. "It's too late for anything."
Atemu pursed his lips, swallowing.
His eyes found the floor, scampering the tiles with a horrible lost quality, before his gaze rose again to twist upon Yugi in the corner yanked there as if tugged.
He swallowed and taking up the first, fiery, breath for so many moments seemed to inflate and reinvigorate. Yugi blinked at him, still watery, and saw for the first time in a year or so the sharpened edge of real hatred.
Atemu took short steps, strong strides, and in what seemed all at once he was wrenching Yugi up by the pale lankness of her upper arm hooking his thumb into the skin hard. Yugi gasped and growling Atemu tossed her down onto the bare ground so she hit the tiles in a hard clattering of sparse jewellery and thumping limbs.
Yugi made a noise, hurting, her arm pulsing where the bruise would be and a step above her leaning down, as Yugi twisted onto her side to look up, Atemu breathed so deep he seemed a dragon. It was as if little puffs of smoke would come out his flared nostril.
"You have given me a wet match."
There were two, very grand, funeral processions. They had different rites, different colours, but the same very tangible kind of cold about them. The prince they buried in the Valley with the Kings with his kin. The Lady they buried at a temple during the day with secret Christian rites in the night when everyone but the King had left.
The death of a boy, especially a boy, was something worth sobbing over to the great and small of the East. They were of the belief that emotion ought to be expressed and great men deserved great emotion so there was never any elegant attempt to protect their make-up and tribal paint from gushing, unattractive, tears. Yugi however could not quite sob the way she had for Qazzadara, her dearest friend, while following Anzu's pyre. Her throat thick, her shoulders set and her eyes straight ahead the tears came but the sound did not. Fear turns, wheels, grief into hysterics and she feared if she started to cry she would not stop.
The Lesser Council sobbed. Death in childbirth was something of an honour to them, a true bravery, a sacrifice to god and clan. Yet underneath that slim level of tradition was the esteemed truth that to them a woman's will to stand their ground was their greatest virtue. In her refusal to take all the help that had been thrust upon her, Anzu, having only until now been their mild, distant, friend had endeared herself irrevocably and uselessly to the wives. She could've died of any fever and they would've, very softly, missed her resilient presence but the last stubborn acts of an unyielding woman had transformed her memory into that of a worthy Queen.
Yugi took back the stiff, straight, blacks and greys of mourning and with a graveyard sigh the Great Lesser Council was all under her command again. As it had been during Qazzadara's reign, as it had been during Anzu's, as it would be until Atemu killed… burned…
The world seemed to go quiet after the burials and the fires. Revelry died off and feasting became, in Yugi's opinion, a secondary priority so long as Atemu took such long meetings and seemed still so tense.
Yugi was not the kind of traveller to throw off the threats of any man let alone a king.
Yugi was also not as poor and helpless to the whims of men as her mother had been however.
Court knew her, court loved her and with every second she had she would play it to her advantage. If Atemu thought she would vanish so easily, be quietly dragged up to the stake and fire which had been the natural resting place for half of Yugi's ancestors, then the King was mad.
In a war council of five or less ladies she split up the duties for the next fortnight and the next day among Mana'jet, Kisara, Sesset and Lurek. She gave them cards from the standard deck of fifty-two highlighting the manner of what she expected and making things simpler.
The exact specifics of the motions and the conversation were difficult to transcribe even in hindsight because of the complexity of the act of running the palace and tension of the situation. While they, Yugi's associates, did not seem to think the worst- a witch trial- could happen they were aware enough and respectful enough of the possibility to proceed with all the caution she ordered.
If anyone came looking for Yugi, any men of the King and especially at any unordinary hour, the four ladies were always to be apart and they were always to say she was with one of the others. Lurek was to say Yugi was with Mana, Mana to say she was with Kisara, Kisara with Sesset, and Sesset with Lurek. It was a ring.
With them occupied running the house Yugi had time enough in her rooms for three processes in the hours immediately following the funerals;
Firstly she had amassed a stupendous fortune from Qazzadara's pension and payments. Ten gold pieces were promised to a group of fifty slaves Yugi called up in batches through the servant's passage. They were, in very subtle ways, to tell her where the King was, what his motions were, where the big men of court were going and if, if ever, men in any number were approaching Yugi or her rooms.
One of older slaves (spry, ambitious but a flagrant supporter of misandry) was recruited to draw up for Yugi a detailed map of the servants passages and the channels under the walls whether they be for sewerage or allowing river water in to the shallow lakes.
The last thing Yugi managed, as the moon started to rise, was to find her old friend the guard through the endless passages.
She found him finally, feet aching, in a secluded corner under the veranda of the temple along the back wall.
"Sir," Yugi whispered.
His head did not turn, spear in hand, but those dark eyes swivelled in the stone maw of that impassive face toward her. Yugi ducked down to a bow.
"Sir I don't know you but you were very kind once," she began, "might I ask you a favour I can ask of no other?"
Yugi was on the other side of the palace, in the empty grand hall with Lurek, a few days later when a barefooted slave came running to yank excitedly at her elbow.
Yugi lay down her cards on the table, leant, and arching up the child bubbled into her ear: "His Majesty has sent men!" The boy bounced. "They're going to search Miss's rooms!"
"Hmm," Yugi snorted, sitting back tall to brush the child's face with her hand and squeeze the boy's nose. "Wonderful. Thank you darling."
Nodding curtly, clumsy and ruffled with a child's confusion, the slave pattered off at a frenzied pace evidently quite intrigued by the idea of making it back in time to spy on the proceedings as well.
"Should I be concerned for you?" Lurek supposed congenially. The issue of Yugi's soul and whether or not it was as black as Atemu suspected was not something that concerned the wives. It was not something they discussed because, witch or not, Yugi was theirs.
"No," Yugi smiled, "there is nothing for them to find."
Not anymore.
"I am very glad not to be your enemy," Lurek smiled. She was a mature woman, grim and stern but after so many years she knew to pick fair odds over certain moralities.
"I would rather not be anyone's enemy," Yugi shrugged. "We shall see if we can't dissuade his Majesty from as much."
It was not that today Yugi's mourning agony had faded from its dull, aching, thrum inside. It was not that the ache would ever fade. That pain had nothing to do with Yugi's ability still to smile. It was simply that courtiers always had to smile.
The world would not wait, not for her, and as it rushed on Yugi's cunning had to train itself to click and clunk along steadily despite the wails of her own heart. After her tutelage dragged lopsided across the countryside she knew well enough the first lesson that: if one survives today then they can cry tomorrow when the wolves are gone and the sun above is warmer. When Atemu was done with his fury, with his witch hunt, then Yugi could scream into her hands and moan at the moon. Yugi trusted the depths of her guilt and her pain as deep enough to last until the Sultan, like all men, became bored.
The search resolved nothing given it found nothing of any value.
Yugi's chests were turned upside down, the bed flipped, all her clothes dragged out and her needles disturbed. Her books were riffled through, her jewellery checked for contents and anything Yugi had suspected Atemu might wish to reclaim she had taken to wearing on her person at all times. Still after four very exhaustive hours, in which Yugi contented herself with lunch by the river, utterly unconcerned, and Atemu no doubt paced feeling mocked, there was not a dead mouse or a scrape of dust or anything any greater that might be questionable.
Smug, though her lips never twitched upwards, Yugi returned to find the servants cleaning her ruffled rolls of fabric and remaking her bed as if nothing at all had happened.
It was a minor but critical victory.
Yugi had to outpace, stay abreast, of the King however because endurance was more imbued in the men here than in any other species of the same sex across the continent.
One slave whispered to Yugi that the King was seeing a temple priest frequently during the night.
Another slave told Yugi a fortnight later, as Yugi continued to order the wives, carefully prep a few mild festivities and finalize the month's accounts, that Atemu had counselled with the ambassadors.
Nose down, ears perked, Yugi would have to wait the storm out.
Atemu was not off the scent yet…
1 Why yes 'match' was a pun.
2 So both Anzu and the baby are gone… not unexpected given we all seemed sure someone was going to die but, being horrid, I took both.
3 Yugi and Atemu were getting along so well up until Atemu decided to launch a witch hunt! Damn.
4 What on earth did Yugi have her friend the guard hide?
Next Time: Atemu's search for evidence to use against Yugi intensifies and, after another prophecy, it appears he might have something. Should Yugi flee…?
