Disclaimer: I do not own any part of LOTR.

Warning: References to childbirth, various ways to get the baby out, and dissection. A whole lot of dissection.

Also reference to sexual organs and the use there of.

Once in a city where there were fewer hills and more tall buildings there was a rich merchant called Uttor who had two wives, one short in stature and one as tall as he, and both of them beautiful. The short one was called Kika and the tall one Nepherru, and between them they bore Uttor five sons and one daughter as tall as her mother. And the mothers were happy, or as happy as two wives who share a husband can be, and the children were happy too in the large house they lived in. Perhaps Uttor did not love all of them equally, or as much as he should, but that did not matter to his children and his wives for they had everything that they might desire.

Uttor grew ever wealthier, and he could send his children to great callings. His third born son became a priest of the Almighty One and the second born son was sent to a school of healing for the physicians were renowned in that city; and his daughter was sent there as well. For she desired to become a midwife, which was a noble and respected profession for a woman, and because Uttor had many sons he was not spiteful towards his daughter and agreed that she might attend as well. And so every day the girl would put on her veil and take her bag with her food in it, and she would walk with her brother, Loror, to the school of medicine.

There they learned alongside other youths and some few maidens, of the body and what lay beneath the skin of many creatures, of the bones and the organs, of the vessels that carried blood and the way in which the heart sent out the liquid of life. They watched as their teachers cut open dead animals before them, and held the sharp knives and parted skin and flesh themselves. They sliced apart human bodies as well, those that had died of wasting diseases upon the streets or those who had promised themselves to the school when their spirits left their houses. The girl cut up the body of a pregnant young woman and gazed upon what it would be her task to preserve, and ignored the whispers that the corpse had been the disfavoured concubine of one of the teachers. It mattered not to her, for all the dead were dead alike, no matter what marks they had upon them. She took out the baby from its mother and sewed it back inside her once she was done, and she did not see the body in the cold rooms again.

She and her brother read texts that had been written by men and women of long before that described what they observed, and she made careful drawings of what she saw as she peeled away what hid the workings of life. She examined pictures of the growth of the baby in the womb and the swell of a woman's stomach, and what took place when a child was born. She was taken to some births and watched as a child was born and its mother died. When she walked to and fro with Loror she would look at the forms of the people about her and dwell on the thoughts of the muscles working to make them move and the blood that seethed through them. And most of all she would think of the spirit that gave them life from the Almighty One, though not of the nature of the spirit itself.

Soon she was deemed worthy to become a midwife and received the rank of woman physician, and because she was of good standing and had much talent she was called upon to deliver the children of the rich and the noble. She was content in her work and brought money to her household, and she was respected and favoured and some men asked for her as a first wife, for to have such an important and gifted woman as a bride was a mark of great renown.

She might have married and lived out her life in wealth and privilege, but then demands from the West came.

Young and unmarried though she was, the maiden was not taken to be a companion to those young men that went; she merely watched as other, poorer girls were led behind the men. But she turned away as her eldest and fourth eldest brothers clad themselves in red and marched away with the soldiers to be high ranked leaders, and her favourite brother Loror went with them to be a healer of war wounds, and they did not meet again under the Sun. She wept but only where none could see her, for their service was considered a glorious thing and something to be praised and lauded. She cursed the One of the South who demanded her people's sons and she scorned those sons who would so willingly die so far from their home and the loving eyes of their mothers, and the god who let them be taken from her.

And there were more losses to be had. Kika knew as only a mother could know that her sons would never return from the West, and in utter despair she could do nothing but turn to the poppy smoke. This she found in plenty, a pleasure and a release from care and worry, and Uttor bought it for her willingly if it would only stop her tears. She lost herself steadily to dreams and did not seem aware when Uttor took her to his bed once more, or when she carried his new child, or even when she gave birth to twins and they were placed at her breast. She gave in to the di-ad, the 'half light' which so often comes to those who give themselves utterly to the smoke, and she became as a shell that walked and spoke and yet had ceased to truly live.

Nepherru was not so ready to fall. When Kika did not feed her new children she took them to her own breast until a wet nurse could be found, for she was still fertile and strong and was herself expecting once more. She turned to her gods that she had brought with her from her homeland, and determined to bring them to her daughter. The mother went went to the maiden as she cried for her brothers, and the elder comforted the younger and reminded her of her sacred calling. She told her that it was hard at times to understand the will of the Eternal Father, as she named the Almighty One, but she would find him through understanding his servants and those he had sent to carry his message to the world. She told her so many things and last of all she said farewell, for she knew that her daughter was now a woman and that they, too, would not meet again when she departed, as she surely must.

The maiden dried her tears and packed up her tools and most precious things and she left the house of her father when he was gone and could not stop her, dropping her veil to the ground and treading on it as she went. She named herself an isha, reborn in her sorrow and loss in the wars, and she joined a caravan and left for lands where the people would not think it good and right to send their sons and daughters away to die. She came to places where the Almighty One was deemed kinder and not so cruel, and there were other holy figures besides that One, gods and goddesses and spirits. She learned of the mystery of the goddesses and how to unlock the pleasure in her body, and of the Queen of Heaven and the Lord of Souls. She found healing methods that she scoffed at and traits that she adopted, adding to her store of knowledge all the while and to the contents of her pack, the drawings and notes that she made and the bones she picked up to clean and soak and preserve.

Years and more years after she had left her home and the eyes of her mother behind, she came to a tribe that lived by a great body of water with a wondrous temple set on a hill to great the rising Sun. She knew that here was where she would spend the rest of her days and she charmed the town elders so that they gave her a house to live in and she spread the word that here resided the best midwife in all the land of Rhûn. And slowly, like a thread of water moving down the outside of a cold jar brought out into the Sun, the women began to come to her; first in curiosity at this sallow woman from far away, and then in confidence.

She worked marvels, saving babies and mothers where other midwives could have done little or nothing, as she did very early on when she presided over the labour of the first and most loved wife of one of the richest merchants in the village. After two days the baby was nearly at the door but then became stuck and his mother, too small and narrow hipped and tired to push this large boy out of her, was near to collapse; the midwife shocked all those about her when she finally took up a sharp knife and opened the way for the baby, front to back, and reached in to pull him out. If the mother had died or even grown sick I don't know what the one who had held the knife would have done; but through care and craft the cuts that the midwife had made did not go bad and even healed. The merchant and his wife were grateful beyond words, of course, and they rewarded her greatly. She ate well for months after that child-bed.

A few moons later she delivered twin boys to another rich woman who had been unable to carry a baby to full term for years and to whom she had prescribed a special diet, and her fame was made. After that whenever a woman was near her time she would send for Kala the midwife; Kala who had delivered so many important men of the tribe, Kala who knew all the secrets of birth and death, Kala, who could cut a woman open and pluck out her child and sew her up again without harming her.

I knew very little of all this until Kala herself told me, of course. Girls are not even allowed into the room where their mother or any other woman is giving birth until they have bled for the first time, and all this took place years before my mother was born. Before the decision to have Kala take me on as an apprentice was made there had rarely been any talk of her in our house, for of course her services were no longer needed by my mother and bond-aunts. Bilhah had spoken of her from time to time, saying that Kala had told her that she needed to eat more of this or less of that to keep herself and the baby she was carrying healthy. But whenever the time came for her to give birth Rookheeya would run over to her house with Ishara, and my bond-aunt would bring back my cousins so that they would have something to eat and somewhere to sleep without hearing their mother scream, and we would wait to be called back when it was all over and the midwife had left. So Kala was a mystery even after our first proper meeting, for while I was told about what she did while she lived among us none really knew what sort of a person she was or the truly great things that she had achieved in her long lifetime.

There is a proverb in Rhûn: A horse is taught by its dam to be a horse, but a man teaches it what sort of horse it should be. More simply but in more words, it means that to achieve anything in life you need to be surrounded by more than just family; you need friends and most importantly teachers who can show you the world beyond your mother's arms. A mare nourishes her foal and shows it how to feed and how to run, but without a man's influence a horse would do nothing but mate and graze its life away. Under the whip of a trainer, that same horse could run in races and win prizes, or be taught to fight with hooves and teeth and carry a warrior into battle, or be the fine steed of a rich prince. The mare brings her offspring into the world, but something else makes that foal useful.

This, I think, is what my time under Kala was like. My mother and my four aunts taught me all the things that a good child and a good woman should be, but Kala was the first person who gave me something to strive desperately for, a distant goal to achieve and a prize to win. She led me ever onward and constantly made me try and retry, scolding and praising me as was needed. No one had ever demanded as much of me as she did, and there were nights when I would lie on my mat and weep into my blanket so that she would not hear. I feared that I would never be able to bear such a great weight and such a duty as Kala was preparing me for.

But I stayed, for what she taught me held and pulled me, like a fish hook in my brain. And Kala was so strange and foreign and enticing that I longed to know all that there was to know about her and what she had seen and done.

I asked her about the places she had gone to. She told me of a great city built upon a flat-topped and hollow centred mountain with many fountains and gardens, where they used strange pumps to bring up water from deep below the earth to cheat the rains all year round. She told me of another town, built above and behind surely the biggest waterfall in the world, where everyone went about in great cloaks pearled with mists of rain, made from the fur of woolly deer. She told me of cities surrounded by fields where they grew flowers for dye, or trees for fruit, or plants that gave a bounty of white grains. She told me of the horse festival, the Ran-Kiri, on the plains where sand and earth came together, where traders and owners of the finest horse flesh in all the East gather with their charges, and where there are chariot races and fleet races and buying and selling for days and days on end. She would bring out small books made from thin sheets of mashed wood and I saw the pictures that she had made and the words that she had written when she was young and sorrowful and loose in a world she longed to catch and hold to her.

I asked her if she had found it hard to travel, a woman all alone, even if she was an isha. She laughed, and told me of places where it was the men who went about with veils on their faces, veiled in precious lucky blue, and the women who left their skin open to the air. She told me of how there were nomads who travelled in great groups where the men took care of the herds and the women held sway in the tents, and looked into the future through their poppy visions to see where they should go next to find good ground and sweet water. She told me that in her home city and the land about it the Sun was so hot that people wore white muslin or silk and little else; that children, boys and girls alike, ran around naked until they were eight or nine, and that both men and women cut their hair close to their scalps and wore beautiful wigs if they were rich and went around with cropped heads if they were not. She showed me how she still kept her own hair short under her headscarf, though it was now grey, and the simple but important wig she had worn for the birthing room when she was a girl.

She even told me that there had been a man or two in the years since she had left her old life, and while she had become an isha she had not become 'dead below the waist'. I laughed back in humour and in shock, for it took a strange man to bed an isha, who by all rights should be celibate.

I asked her, very warily indeed, if she had loved her mother, even though she had left her, something I could hardly dare to think of. I remember that she paused in whatever she was doing to think awhile before she answered. "I loved her, and I think that she loved me. But she did not understand me. No, how could she? I was a bread-winner, she was a home keeper. We cared about such different things."

In a land where a daughter begins to learn to cook while still at the breast Kala was a curiosity; it showed how far apart from her mother she had been that she had never even learned to make bread or beer, tasks which servants had always done in her household. She claimed to know how to weave and sew, but everything that other women made for themselves she bought at the market stalls. When I first came to her she would buy hot rabbit stew or smoked fish and take it back to her house and we would eat it there, doing none of the cooking ourselves and only washing the bowls afterward to take back. Her tunics she wore until they were worn out, and then rather than patch them she would buy new ones and she would use the yellow scraps at births to soak up blood and afterbirth. She was a woman who made nothing but books which she would scratch letters in and then make me copy them time and again.

The drawings she had drawn or brought with her made me stare. I saw sketches of bones that made up the body, and the skull grinned at me from every page it was drawn upon. I would prod my cheeks and under my chin feeling for the planes of my face, I would run my fingers over my skin to find the pulse of my blood. I saw organs I did not even know that I had and where they were in my body. I blushed when I saw the drawings that looked so like the three cornered month cakes all bleeding women ate, and Kala laughed when I squeaked and looked away from the pictures of naked men. She said it was just as well I didn't want a husband, for I'd surely run away screaming when he undressed on the wedding night and came at me all ready. My face boiled with shame, and I looked and looked until I saw only objects of curiosity to be studied, nothing more. I drew them in detail, larger, at the peak of their use, filled and empty alike. I drew copied babies in the womb and did not ask whether they were drawn from life.

I learned what Kala had done as a girl instead of learning a woman's arts when I heard her speak about the house. The first time I heard her speak in a language so unlike any I had heard in the market place, I thought she or I had gone mad. A merchant has to be fluent in more tongues than his own and Uttor had firmly believed that his children should learn the same lessons that he had. As a child of a woman from the Sea and a man of further South Kala could speak in both languages by the time she was steady on her feet, but her prowess did not stop there. She learned the common tongue of the Haradrim and even some words of what the people of the West called Westron, the language that had so confused me, a strange dialect that I could never master despite her best efforts. When she went to the school of medicine she took to heart the ancient language of the doctors and healers that still clung to the bones and the organs of the bodies she cut up, and she taught me that not through books but by wielding a knife. I would cut and she would ask me the name of what the knife revealed, and ask again and more until I remembered it, and only then would she allow me to cut further.

We began with fish, for fish are plentiful and uncostly by the sea. Every morning we would go down to the docks and Kala would buy two fresh fish, and we would take them back to her home and she would place one in a cooling jar and sit and watch me cut up the other. She would demand the names of each organ and each bone, and she would scold me when I let the knife tremble for I should always have a steady hand when wielding a blade. Once I had cut the fish up as well as I could I would roast the meat and we would eat it with lentils or salad or some such that Kala had bought in the market along with the fish. In the noon she would make me copy words or drawings she had shown me the day before from memory, and then as the dusk drew on she would cut the chilled second fish apart – as skilfully as any butcher; how I watched her with envy! I would cook that, and we ate rather better than we did early in the day, and with far fewer bones to pick out of our mouths.

We did this for many days until my hand was steady and I could cut the fish apart well enough to please Kala, and she told me as we ate what was to be our last fish that on the morrow we would move on to a new carcass. I was glad, for I had grown tired of eating white meat every day and every night, and when the next day Kala bought two fine young does with the fur still on them I was very pleased indeed, for rabbit was one of my favourite meats. But I soon grew to dislike it! Taking one apart was enough to send me into a frenzy; there were so many tendons and muscles to sort through that Kala called it unlacing its robes. I would wake on my blanket and dread having to get up and go through the horrid business yet again whenever I knew that Kala would buy new rabbits. I began to sweat when I picked up the knife, and once more I could hardly hold it steady. Kala grew impatient with me and I feared more and more that she would turn me away and send me back to my mother, for I could not even cut up a rabbit to please her. But I kept on and kept on until in time I could unlace the carcass she put before me and name all that I cut away, and she praised me as she rarely did.

She brought me larger bodies to cut up as I grew more adept; full grown rabbit does and female hares from the market, and the bodies of yellow vixens and sand rats from the tanner who stripped off their pretty skins for bags and belts and gave up the carcasses for little or nothing. Once I rose in time to find her setting a dead dog with its head smashed in on the table where we did our work, very excited. She told me that the dog had been pregnant but that it had been killed by a stray kick from a mule, and she had claimed the now worthless remnants for me. It was not so easy for me to cut up that body, for it seemed worth more than to be peeled apart in such a manner, and it did not seem right to me to poke into and search for the treasure the bitch had carried inside her that she must have thought so safe.

But together we found the womb, for Kala had promised the bitch's master that we would count the pups inside so that he might demand their cost from the owner of the mule along with restitution for his favourite dog's life. There were seven of them in all, four of them males and three females all together and as lifeless as their mother, curled into themselves and dead. We took them out with her organs and dried them, and then we put them back inside her body and bound them inside with cloth and gave her back to her master so that he could organise for her to be preserved. When at last he died she would go into the grave with him, his servant in death as she had been in life.

I never forgot that dead dog and her dead pups. And I did not forget the time when Kala brought me to the table where something lay on it, covered, and she pulled off the cloth and I saw that it was a hand, a human hand with the skin removed so that I could see all that lay beneath, tendons and muscles and bones. I had seen things with their skin off for more than a year by then but to see this arm, cut off neatly below where the elbow would have been, cracked my hardened mind. It was a terrible thing to be surprised by, far worse than any skinned animal half opened, and it had been partly crushed too. I had to run out of the room as my stomach sent my meal back into my mouth. Kala only smiled as she waited for me to return, as she knew I would. And I watched as she pointed out each joint and knuckle, jabbing here and there with the knife. When she was done she wrapped the arm up and sent it back to the man who had lost it the day before, as if she were returning a cooking pot.

I did not tell my mother or my aunts about the arm. I think that the only one who knew about that dreadful morning other than we two were the man who had lost it and the doctor who had cut it off when it was crushed under a rock. Kala lamented that the tribe frowned on cutting dead bodies apart or open unless it was for a funeral and very few would let us have their dead to practise on. She had not minded so much before I was apprenticed to her, but now that she was teaching me she needed to find me human bodies. She might have gone to the elders with this problem but she was too proud and wilful to ask for their help, and she did not quite dare to offer families money so that we might use their lost one as a tool for a lesson.

Clever woman that she was, she made a deal with one of the embalmers so that we could go with them to see how they did their work, especially if their dead subject was a woman – women, Kala said, should be my particular attention. I never told my mother or aunts of that either; nor did anyone see what we did or where we went, for the embalmers always worked at night. I had always thought that it would hurt dreadfully to keep secrets from them, but I found that it was quite easy; easier than telling them that I watched as the dead were cut open and preserved and prepared for burial. As Kala had promised I went back to them every sixth day, and I looked forward to those days, but I dreaded them. I always had so much to speak to them about, but as my time with Kala grew longer and longer I had so much to quarrel with them about too. I often grew impatient with them and their views on the world about us now that I knew so much more of the land outside the borders of the village, and of the nature of the gods. Kala taught me many things, but she also shook my faith.

I questioned them incessantly about the fairness of the gods when they allowed such dreadful things to happen to the people who worshipped them. It was more than the crumbling disease or death in childbed that made me so angry; it was every ailment I had ever heard of from Kala, all the things that might go wrong with our frail bodies, our bodies that began to perish as soon as we began to live. What kind of loving deity would put their treasured children inside constantly dying sacks of meat? I remember that I hurt Werru deeply when I did what not even Ishara had done and called her belief in the Weaver's great design foolish. She grew angry and began to protest; I did not think that I was doing something wrong when I said that by believing in it she saw herself as still a slave to the will of others, which was a stupid and useless thing to do.

She hit me for it, Werru who had never struck me before, tears starting in her eyes, shrieking how I dared to say such a thing. The pain and anger of the blow unloosed my tongue and I said that I did so because there must be no gods, or if there were then they did not care about us or what we did because they were as cruel as the One of the South. Rookheeya slammed a bowl down so hard that she broke it and told me that if I believed this then I might as well leave and not come back, rather than say such things to her and my bond-aunts. And I screamed that I would do just that, and I turned and ran from my home, wiping my eyes and sniffing deeply so that none would see my dripping eyes and nose. I hated my mother then as I had never hated anything, and I called her bad names all the way back to Kala's house through the gasps for breath that hurt so much, with insults aplenty thrown in for Werru. I promised myself that I really would not go back and that I would not beg for forgiveness as a good daughter should, for I had done nothing wrong.

And I kept my word, too. I did not go back in the days after that, nor did my mother send to Kala's house for me. My mother was a proud woman, and I was her daughter, and she had taught her arrogance to me and I had learned it well. I did not want to go out in case I met her or one of my aunts and I drew pictures so hard that I tore Kala's precious paper. I did not want my guilt to hurt, but it did hurt so badly I felt as if I could claw and scratch but never pull it out of me. Kala soon grew curious about what had happened, and though I did not tell her anything of it she found out in her own way, or maybe one of my aunts told her in the market place. She told me one evening that she was taking me back there even if she had to drag me by my hair, and she led me by the hand like a sulky child.

"She's your mother, girl," she told me, "and you're the only daughter she'll ever have. You're the only daughter any of them will ever have. Perhaps they're not perfect to you any more, and perhaps you'll quarrel, but if you turn away from them it'll undo you. You're not like me, thanks to the gods. You'll never leave your mother while she lives."

She watched with my aunts as I walked to where my mother and Werru stood by the fire space and asked, doing my best not to cry, for them please to forgive my words and the thoughts behind them. Rookheeya let tears fall from her eyes instead. She told me that she didn't care what my thoughts were as long as I did not hurt others with them, that it tore her heart apart when we argued. Werru told me that she forgave me too, and that she was so sorry for striking me, and I forgave her. I felt as if a sore deep inside me had been lanced, and the pain brought draining and such relief.

I quarrelled with them again after that, of course. For as long as we lived we had arguments; we were not a family in a story, we were real. I was still growing, and they had still seen more than I had. I grew to like debating with Kala and Ishara and Rookheeya but I never again challenged their beliefs, nor did they try to tell me what to believe. They left me to find my own way to deal with the problems that now made up the gods and goddesses. Benti told me she would wait for me to go with her to the temple again, but no more than that.

There was a snake, once. Kala found it coiled around one of her herb pots and called me to look at it; I came running with a stick but there was no need to keep it away from us. It was dead, had been dead for a while. I don't know why it had chosen to die there in the cool and the shade but it had known, and it lay in the dark with open eyes that never blinked and with ants crawling over it. Kala brushed away the ants and picked it up and told me to get another pot and fill it with earth, and she placed the snake's tail in its mouth and buried the dead circle in that pot and planted a herb over it. When I took the plant out of the pot months later to transfer it to a larger home there were the snake's bones and skin, but its flesh had gone into the earth and been tangled in the roots of the herb that had feasted on it.

That was the truth of the snake besides its renewal, the truth of my whole apprenticeship, that the weakness of flesh spilled life out like a broken water skin.

Warning: Copious gratuitous author's notes following.

I based part of Adahni's training on what I had learned of high class Greek midwives: that they were expected to be highly trained in

obstetrics and gynaecological anatomy. And often the only way to do that was to cut things up. A lot.

Religion in Rhûn is a rather complicated affair, as religion often is. What Adahni doesn't go into greatly is the fact that what religion you follow in the East depends on where you live. The area around the Sea of Rhûn has different preferences in different settlements, but they're mostly based on the idea that, while there is a creative force from which everything came - i.e. Eru Illuvatar to us readers - they prefer to worship more tangible (relatively speaking) figureheads, the Valar turned gods. The nomads of the plains - the bit between where Mirkwood ends and Rhun begins, or the Brownlands on the Tolkein map, because you don't have a desert right next door to a forest after all - regard the Valar not so much as gods as spirits of the very world itself, whom they don't exactly worship but take care not to offend. They build shrines upon small hills at which they make offerings but no temples (which makes sense as no one wants to stay and look after a place which is visited only occasionally and likely has no food source; they live mostly on the meat of their flocks and what they trade.)

Slightly further South, religion becomes less of a pantheon and more worship of a single deity; who that deity is again depends on where you are. The city where Kala came from, while supplying warriors for Sauron's army rather more readily than Adahni's people, doesn't regard him as a god; they worship a rather puritanical version of Eru, 'the Almighty One'. Sauron ain't too happy about that, but as long as they do what he wants he leaves them alone on that point. Further South and East still – the short answer is that Men do worship him, the long answer is that he's an evil overlord who happens to be a rebel Maia; what did you expect?

There are also three distinctions of relation to the gods around the Sea, which the story will never really go into either but which you might want to know. The Rhûn year – in that part of the land, at least – has fourteen months, and each month is ruled by one of the gods, even Laban and Renna, although their months are called 'The Unlucky Days'. As such, people will say you're born in the month of so and so, like a star sign, and you can be given a name not quite like the name of the god of that month i.e. Adahni is named after Adah, so a few letters were added to the goddess's name; Ishara is named for Ishtara so a letter is removed. Usually such names are only reserved for first born children, but if a child is particularly remarkable, such as being born feet first or with the cord wrapped around their neck and surviving, they get named in such a manner as well. People might choose to worship their month god when they grow up, but sometimes like Ishara they choose not to. It's like saying you're a Capricorn but not believing in astrology.

There is no particular restriction on which god you give most allegiance to in public – for example, a fisherman would not be prevented from praying to Naani the Dancer instead of the god more linked with his trade, Hee-Un. However the name of your secret god, revealed to you when you reach puberty by various methods (such as drugging you up to the ears), is something you must never mention to anyone. This particular relationship is rather tricky to describe: the closest thing would be cause and effect. The theory is that the god claims you at your very conception and gives you a gift unique to them that becomes part of your character, such as mathematical proficiency or prophecy. And supposedly when you die their name should be the last thing you say, to inform them that one of their servants will be arriving soon. Creepy? Oh, yes.

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