Chapter Sixty Four – Renewal
For a while he sat in the soft wing-backed chair. Then after a few minutes he got up, went to the hearth and stoked the fire, adding a log. He watched the flames for a while as though listening, listening intently but he heard no new sounds. He straightened up and went to the window, looked at the view. Spring had come around again and was already blooming into summer and the apples on the trees in the orchard were growing from small green hard things into russet coloured plump fruit. But the view of the garden and the orchard and their second years' strawberry patch hadn't changed since the last time he'd looked at it ten minutes ago, nor since the last ten or eleven times he'd looked. He walked to the table and sat, picked up a pencil and began to roll it to and fro; rattle – stop – return it – stop – rattle – stop – return…
A hand picked up the pencil mid-roll.
"Pazu, try and relax. You are making me nervous."
"How long does it go on Shuna? How long can it go on? I can hardly bear it. How can she bear it?"
Pazu was reminded again of what 'it' was when another agonized cry came from above them, muffled hardly at all by the floorboards. It started low, then grew in volume only to be cut off with an awful gagging weeping sound. Pazu got up again, fists clenched.
"Why can't I go up?"
"Because you cannot Pazu. It is how we do it. It is bad luck to have a man in the room. She has three midwives with her. Between them they have delivered over fifty babies, and there are three more nurses there too," the big man put a hand on Pazu's shoulder, squeezed gently, "she is in good hands, my friend. The best. She suffers only because that is the way it is meant to be. Nothing is wrong."
A woman came downstairs carrying a bowl. It was covered with a towel but Pazu could see that the water in it was stained dark with blood.
"What news?" Pazu asked her
"No change, nothing more."
"Can I go up?"
"Absolutely not. Now excuse me, I need clean warm water."
It was late afternoon. The sun was westering, soon it would go behind the trees. Pazu had watched it arc across the sky all this day, since mid morning. Since about nine when the cramping had begun. It had been nine hours now. Nine hours of relentless tearing agony. And that was just him.
How she did it without going mad he had no idea. When this was over he was going to hug her forever.
The sounds came again, starting as a low moan, building and building, becoming a screech. A voice interceded…
"Push. Push. Push again. One more, that's it. Push!... Good girl. Rest…"
The animal screech broke off to be replaced again by what sounded like sobs. Pazu looked at his hands, his fingernails had punctured his skin, his palm bled.
--I--
---o-o-oOo-o-o---
I I
She had been so happy, last summer, the dog days of that hot glorious summer. She had come to him one morning feeling awful, having vomited twice after breakfast. Even wiping her chin she came to him and hugged him, rejoicing. And as autumn came and then winter she no longer bled and her tummy began to grow and the two of them would lie in bed and cuddle it together as it got bigger and bigger. Sheeta had gone around the village with her huge belly proudly in front of her, delighting in showing anybody who asked. And at the Suethelhin celebrations it transpired that she was one of only three women pregnant that year and they had been specially honoured at the Solstice Dawn, her baby would be the second of the year in the village.
This spring and summer, as big as a whale, she had still gone down to the lake and floated like an island in the cool water, Pazu wading next to her, splashing her belly and stroking it, kissing it, talking to it.
They had been so happy, it had been a wonderful year.
Then Artiana who lived near Mother Whindera had suffered a miscarriage and the village had been in mourning for her small bundle of life, so tiny it had not even properly formed. Gondoans rarely buried their dead, and in Bruaendell it was customary to burn the dead on funeral barges on the lake. The raft Artiana's weeping husband pushed out into deep water had been pathetically small and not one heart in the village had remained unbroken.
Two weeks ago many more hearts were broken. Uthemara had a terrible labour and had become exhausted. The baby was trapped and would not come out. Her young husband, not yet fifteen, had to choose between saving his wife's life or that of his child. He chose his wife.
The second small floating funeral pyre had been only a week ago. The village had only just finished mourning.
Lucita still was. It was possible to bear the fury of Maerth-dhu when he took the sick, the elderly and the criminal. But when he took the unborn, each innocent undeserving death was her own. How Konuguen could see this as a fair balance she did not know.
--I--
---o-o-oOo-o-o---
I I
Nine hours into labour Pazu began to wonder if Maerth-dhu worked in threes. Or fours.
Another awful screech rent the air and tore at his heart. He went outside, slamming the door, strode to the woodpile, hefted his axe and began to furiously chop wood. The mindless repetitive violence was the only thing he could do to vent his worry and fear and the sense of helplessness that he could do nothing to ease his wife's suffering.
Out here though, with the bedroom window open, he could still hear everything.
--I--
---o-o-oOo-o-o---
I I
But this life, this life, thought Lucita, he would not have. Even if she had to give herself to preserve it, the wolf-man would not enter this dwelling today, for neither mother nor child. Two innocent lives in one village in one summer was enough, enough. He would not have a third, no matter what it took.
--I--
---o-o-oOo-o-o---
I I
Cry after cry came and the sun continued to sink, light was fading from the day now. Pazu shattered the last log with a final frenzied blow and cast the axe aside. He wiped his sleeve across his brow. There was crying again upstairs, and shouting. The crying went on, and on. He couldn't stand it anymore. He strode to the door.
and stopped.
Two people were crying, his wife whose crying was not that of pain but… different.
and someone else.
someone new.
It was a tiny reedy thing, weak and heartrendingly thin.
Shuna's face appeared in the doorway. Above his beard he wore a huge smile.
"Pazu, come. Come quickly."
He ran in and took the stairs two and three at a time. At the top he slipped and his shoulder struck the wall, the painting of the summerbird fell. He ran along the landing, the bedroom door was open. He stepped in.
She was there. And he knew. He knew her at once. He simply knew it was her, she had been given back. She had been taken yet Lucita had given her back.
The room was full of busily bustling women doing things with cloths and bowls and stools. The drapes of the bed had been removed so that the midwives had access and extra pillows had been put behind her shoulders so she was propped up and comfortable. A fresh coverlet was being placed over the bed by one of the nurses. She withdrew as Pazu approached.
One of the midwives spoke.
"Five minutes only," she wagged a finger at him, "Five only, I say, the lady needs her rest and we need to take the babe away to clean her."
Pazu was in a dream. In dreams time runs differently and the colours of things run, and spaces run and become distorted. The room became somehow sloped, it became a hill, a long climb. And much bigger, it took him a long time to walk up this hill to the bed. And the nurses and busy midwives became like ghosts and grew thin and pale and vanished away, unimportant. What was important was on the bed, the two people in the bed. He walked around it, somehow scaling this impossible mountain and knelt beside it. For a moment he said nothing, nor did she, and his daughter, well, she merely continued to cry as though she was cross that she'd been brought here against her will. No-one had had the common sense or simple decency to ask her if this was what she wanted. Right now it seemed it wasn't.
But it was what Sheeta wanted, and Pazu wanted this little person even more. He looked at his wife, her face was grey and she looked exhausted, marks under her eyes and hair plastered to her wet forehead, tear tracks down her face. But the tears she cried now were tears of joy.
Apart from that exquisite instant of frozen time last Hoemaeyanir at the lake at dawn… apart from then he had never seen Sheeta look more beautiful. He leaned forward and kissed her forehead.
"Is that all I get? After all that work?"
"No. Later when you've rested I'll give you more. For years and years I will give you more, but for now…"
He leaned toward her again and kissed her mouth. Her lips were as soft and as gentle as the day they had first touched him, two years ago.
Sheeta turned the baby around so Pazu could see her but the girl didn't want to know, all she wanted was to press against her mothers breast, and complain loudly to the world about everything. The world had only existed for three minutes and already she had decided she didn't like it.
"Daddy," said Sheeta
"Yes, mummy?"
"Kiss her. Kiss your daughter."
Pazu did. He leaned forward a third time and gently pressed his lips against the thick mass of blonde curls. Blonde curls he had seen before. Just once before, dusty and forlorn and in a shed clutched against a dead mothers breast. Pazu knew these curls, he was certain.
"What will you name your daughter, daddy?"
"Renewed," he said, "Renewed Again."
Sheeta, not showing the puzzlement she felt at the name, turned the small bloody bundle in her arms.
"Rhaeal-Aghana. Here is your daddy."
Rhaeal-Aghana gave her father a furious frown, a big deep grimace of a frown, as though he had a bloody cheek even daring to exist.
But she stopped crying.
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4 – 5 May 2007
For author notes about Chapter Sixty Four, please see my forum (click on my pen name)