Birth: A Novella (3 page)

“I was curious, I confess,” Roger says. “But
admit it, Dominic; you can’t lie in communion. The way you rode me
just now—gods, that was rough! I suppose I should have expected it,
but I thought– these past years– you seemed—” It’s difficult for
him to express his intimate feelings. No matter that they’ve just
shared the ultimate intimacy. For men, words are always the
roughest sex of all. “You haven’t changed. You still get off on
hurting people.”

Dominic stretches his hand toward Roger.
“That’s nonsense,” he says, but softly, doubtfully. “I was as
gentle with you as with a virgin.” There’s guilt at the back of his
mind, confusion. He’s telling the truth, as far as he knows, but
he’s more aware now, after the fact, of the discomfort I felt, the
strange combination of physical sensations he and Roger
experienced, doesn’t understand why. He tries a playful tone. “And
don’t tell me you’ve never been fucked, because I know for a
fact—”

Roger laughs. “You would know, wouldn’t you?
But that proves my point. You hurt me, deliberately, and it’s the
only way you enjoy it.”

“Not deliberately.” Dominic is humble,
apologetic. “Truly, Roger.”

“Lord Roger, to you.” The intentional
humiliation. Face stern, no smile to mitigate it.

Dominic groans, then laughs and complies.
“My lord,” he says. “I wanted us to have pleasure. Both of us. And
it gives me no pleasure if Ama—” He clamps his lips shut over the
betrayal he was about to utter.

Apollo protect me!
Even though he
suspected it earlier, Roger is at first shocked beyond words, can
only think the pious phrase to himself. “Your lady wife! You would
force her to participate in your filthy—”

“Filthy?” Dominic looks at Roger, sprawled
in the hay, his breeches lowered to his knees. “That’s a peculiar
choice of word for a man in your position.” He finds his sword
belt, unbuckled but never far from reach, draws the blade. “And you
will leave my lady wife out of your thoughts and your words,” he
says. “My lord.”

Roger has found his own sword, is unfazed by
Dominic’s belligerence. “Why don’t
you
leave her out?” he
says.

The men rise to their knees, tugging at
their breeches, and I’m convulsed with pain. We all feel it, the
men doubling over, clutching their stomachs—Dominic, who has not
broken the connection between us, and Roger, who has still, despite
everything, retained the communion of the aftereffects of love.

Dominic!
I call him, unable to
suppress the cry for help. He is my lord husband, and when I am in
distress it is to him I turn, no matter how we have hurt each other
recently, or who is with him.
Oh, Dominic, help me!

***

The days and the weeks that followed were more of the
same: failures, accusations, apologies and no real forgiveness.
Dominic had missed the opening of ‘Graven Assembly as he feared.
Not just the ceremonies and the ritual, but the crucial scheduling
of the coming sessions’ debates. He had no opportunity now to
decide what issues would be on the table; he could only participate
in the discussions that had been officially added to the calendar.
His mood was like Terran summer—oppressive, sultry and threatening.
Even Stefan began to have a scared look half the time.

At the ‘Graven Military Academy things were
better, although not much. Dominic had no hope of being appointed
Commandant at this late date. But when it was learned that he was,
after all, available to be Weapons Instructor, the old man who had
been drafted to fill in retired with relief. For the first week or
so, until Dominic calmed down, the infirmary was filled with cadets
suffering from bruised ribs and flesh wounds. But Dominic didn’t
kill any, and that was something.

It was the barrack-room jokes that made him
livid with rage: about the
vir
man who in middle age
discovers what a cunt is for and tries to make up for lost time;
and the married man with the male companion, who finds a warm body
and a place to dip his wick on either side whenever he turns over,
and so can never get out of bed. Since no one used Dominic’s name
or even hinted that it was a ‘Graven lord being spoken of, he could
not take offense at coarse words that were not overtly directed at
him, or at me or Stefan.

At night, when Dominic came in for supper, I
would look for Stefan, forgetting that he must stay in barracks. A
second-year cadet has more privileges than in his first year, but
if he were to be singled out now as the lover of Major Aranyi,
sleeping in a bed instead of a cot, in a room with a fire instead
of a drafty dormitory, he might as well give up hope of living
until Midwinter, much less of receiving his commission.

I had expected to continue some, at least,
of the pleasant life we had led in Aranyi, but Dominic didn’t talk
much, and I gave up trying after so many rebuffs. He was angry
about the way thing had turned out, and had no desire to share it
with me, no good news of making the decisive argument in assembly
or of progress in training the new cadets.

It was such an old story. We had studied it
in school, how things were before equality. People had written
novels about it, then treatises and tracts, then histories, but I
had not expected to live it myself. A man and woman marry. She has
no job, does not or cannot share her husband’s work and interests.
She is dependent on him; he loses respect for her. They grow
apart.

Many nights Dominic didn’t come home until
the small hours, or at all. He went to taverns after work with the
other officers, took supper there and continued on to dance halls
or brothels. “They all do it, married or not,” he said. “It’s the
way of soldiers.” When he did come home I would be asleep, or
nearly, in my own room, not stretched out invitingly in a silk
negligee, or seductively naked under the fur spread in the
Margrave’s bedroom, as he was accustomed to at Aranyi, when we were
in constant light communion and knew each other’s moods. After a
couple of nights like that he stopped looking for me, and he would
bring home a boy from the dance hall. I didn’t share their
communion. There was no communion. Just Dominic and an ungifted boy
fucking in the dark in the room next door.

***

Amalie!
Dominic answers my cry, throwing down
his sword without bothering to sheathe it or looking to see if
Roger is about to attack. He runs to his horse, only remembering to
pull up his breeches when he stumbles. But Roger has felt it too,
and the men know what it is before I do. Both of them fathers, they
have experienced contractions, are wondering why they didn’t
recognize it earlier: not rape or rough sex, but my labor beginning
on schedule, almost to the day.

Roger laughs with relief. “By Isis and
Astarte! I’ve never been so grateful for a labor pain.”

Dominic doesn’t turn around, won’t
acknowledge the attempt at apology. He’s mounted his horse,
spurring the surprised animal out the door, through the snowdrifts
to the castle’s rear courtyard and the kitchen entrance.

Roger follows slowly. He’s cold now, his
energy drained after the sex, and he’s strangely depressed. When
Dominic had wanted him all those years he was secretly proud to
have inspired desire in this man who always seemed to take what he
wanted. He knew Margrave Aranyi would have to ask him, Lord Roger
Zichmni, no matter how he teased him in barracks or how he battered
him in weapons training. Now that it’s done, ended so abruptly,
with mistaken accusations and no words of love exchanged, it’s like
a divorce or a broken engagement. He thinks miserably of Tariq, of
his companion’s unwavering devotion all through Roger’s affairs
with women, his begetting of natural-born children, his turning
away from being exclusively
vir
.

Amalie
, Dominic intensifies the
communion between us.
My love, my lady wife. Be strong. I am
with you.

I know it, Dominic
. It is the
beginning of mending, more than the return to our home. I have
called to him and he has answered me, is on his way to my side. I
am his wife, his second self; he is my husband, my completion. We
will not be separated again, I am sure of it.

“‘Gravina Aranyi.” Tariq Sureddin is at the
door to my room. “My lady, are you in trouble?”

He’s a cool one, Tariq, Aranyi on his
mother’s side, one of Dominic’s many half-sisters. He hasn’t
trusted me from the start, when I invited him and Roger to stay. He
knew what I was up to, knew his lover’s mind, that Roger was
intrigued, tempted. Knew that no good would come of it.

But I like him. Tariq is Christian, with
their virtues of honesty and faithfulness. He loves Roger in the
way I love Dominic. They can’t be parted, no matter what happens.
It’s what has given me license to orchestrate this encounter
between Dominic and Roger, knowing it won’t seriously endanger the
pledged love of the young men, while nevertheless causing me
twinges of guilt. I’ve rationalized it to death. Dominic will take
the active role with Roger that Roger usually plays with Tariq. It
won’t really be adultery because it’s not something that Roger
would do with his own companion.

And Stefan Ormonde,
Tariq is thinking
to me now.
How can you justify it to him? Or is it enough that
Margrave Aranyi waited until his companion is away?
To my face,
out loud, Tariq is all politeness. “If there is anything I can do
to help you, in the absence of your lord—”

“No, thank you. Margrave Aranyi is coming– I
mean, he’s on his way,” I say, flustered by the unintended pun.
“But if you could find Magali—”

Tariq bows to me and heads downstairs
slowly, as if to ensure that he’ll meet up with Dominic and Roger
in the entrance.

I move from the chair to the bed, think
about lying down. That seems worse. Another contraction begins,
builds to a climax of pain.
How could I have confused it with
sex?
Communion does weird things sometimes, and our communion
has become distorted with our estrangement. I clutch my middle,
small hands on an expanse of wool-and-linen-covered flesh. Even
allowing for my tiny frame, the child must be enormous.

It hits me, what we never talked about: that
I’m about to give birth for the first time, to a child with
peculiar genetic strains on her father’s side, miles from Terran
medicine and hospitals, in the most inaccessible place on
Eclipsis.

I
t wasn’t just sex or the
lack of it that drove us apart in Eclipsia City. As my body grew
big around the middle, and I had to pee all the time, and sitting
or standing or lying down all began to feel equally uncomfortable,
everything
seemed to turn us against each other. Dominic had
been proud of me at Aranyi, always wanting to show me off, rounded
and full, ripe with his child: a primitive, masculine assertion of
his power, which could persuade a gifted woman into the ultimate
surrender. Here in the city we were surrounded by other ‘Graven and
their women, all thin, exquisitely dressed, charming and witty and
not so modest or shy as I had been told they should be. None of
them wore burqas or even a light veil, and most of them were poorly
guarded, if at all. However Dominic felt, I was intimidated by the
contrast.

They weren’t wives. They were mistresses,
“companions,” the natural-born daughters of ‘Graven as I had once
been thought to be. Legitimate daughters with strong gifts worked
in a seminary; those with lesser gifts married and stayed home,
bore children and kept house. These women were the female
equivalents of the men Berend, the Aranyi steward, had talked
about: gentry and half-caste ‘Graven with no responsibilities of
Realm or family. They did not have to be guarded because they had
no husbands to be dishonored by their violation, and were free to
go to dancehalls and taverns and to sleep with men. They came to
supper parties that Dominic gave, and invited us to theirs, and
made brilliant conversation and drank wine and flirted and—

“Amalie,” Dominic said one night on the way
home from one of these gatherings, “it’s all right to laugh once in
a while, to talk. I won’t divorce you for making a joke or saying
something amusing.”

“How can I?” I said. “They’re all so elegant
and I feel so—pregnant.”

“They envy you,” Dominic said. “Most of them
are barren, or their lovers are sterile or impotent. You can
outshine them all, but you just sit there looking bored.”

After that, of course, I didn’t dare open my
mouth, knowing that Dominic was paying attention to women’s
conversation and expecting pearls to drop from my mouth.

***

Magali comes running up the stairs and down the
corridor, out of breath, big with her own pregnancy. “Oh,
‘Gravina,” she says, gasping and gulping between her words, her use
of the honorific a sign of how worried she is, “if I had known– I
was in the second cellar, that stupid boy said he saw rats– there’s
so few servants around– I didn’t know—” My attempts to tell her it
that it doesn’t matter, that it’s only just started, are lost under
her rattling indrawn breaths.

I feel safer already. Magali has given birth
ten times, is carrying her eleventh. She will know what to do;
things will be all right.

It’s as if she reads my thoughts. “I always
relied on the healer,” Magali says.
Four of them died,
she’s
thinking,
for all she did her best.

“Where is Naomi?” Dominic slips in at the
door behind her.

“Home, Margrave,” Magali answers. “Like most
of the staff. Home with her mother.”

“Well, don’t stand there gossiping.” Dominic
speaks brusquely, as he never does to members of the household.
“Send someone to fetch her.”

Magali shakes her head. “It’s a full day’s
ride there, my lord, and another day back.”