The Claiming (30 page)

Val-risa took a deep breath. “I think I might be in labor. That’s why I was downstairs. I didn’t want to wake Vin until I was certain. He’s been driving me crazy now that my time’s near, jumping up every time I grunt and heading for the door to fetch the doctor. He’s terrified I’ll have the baby with nobody here but him and the servants.”

Jana stared at her blankly. “I don’t think I understand … any of that.”

Val-risa glared at her, but in the next moment gasped and looked down.

Jana automatically looked down as well. To her horror, she saw fluid gushing from between Val-risa’s legs onto the floor. “What is that?”

Val-risa blinked at her, looking frightened now. “I think my water broke.”

“You made water?” Jana asked, repulsed.

“The baby!” Val-risa snapped. “It’s coming!”

Jana jumped to her feet. “Not now!”

“Now!”

“But … but I have to know where to find the ship! I have to know if I brought enough to trade for passage. You can’t do that now!”

“Vin!” Val-risa screamed.

In a moment, Jana heard the pounding of feet above them, then a great crash and several smaller ones. Vin limped into the room. “Fell down the blasted stairs!” he muttered. “You scared the hell out of me! What are you screaming about, woman!”

“The baby! It’s coming … now!”

Vin stared at her a moment, turning white. His eyes rolled back into his head. For a moment he teetered while both Jana and Val-risa stared at him in shocked dismay, then he tipped over.

Val-risa screamed, trying to catch him as he fell. Instinctively, Jana rushed to help. They caught him, but he was far too heavy to hold and both of them went down under his weight.

Jana was too stunned to move for several moments, then Vin moved. She glanced at him, but saw that he was still unconscious. When she looked up, she discovered Alain was standing over the tangle of bodies the three of them made in the middle of the floor. He rolled Vin’s limp form off of the two of them, then reached down to help Jana to her feet.

Val-risa had crawled over to her fallen husband on her hands and knees. She was clutching his nightshirt in both hands. “Vin? Dear heart! Are you hurt?”

His eyes fluttered, opened. He stared up at her. “What happened?”

Val-risa sat back, clutching her bulging belly with both hands, groaning.

Vin’s eyes rolled back into his head.

Alain cursed, strode across the room to a vase of flowers and snatched it off the table. Tossing the flowers to one side, he dashed the water into Vin’s face. Vin came up coughing and sputtering. “What happened?”

Val-risa gritted her teeth. “So help me, Vin! If you faint again I swear I’ll take that vase he’s holding and clobber you with it.”

He looked at her in alarm. “The baby’s coming?”

She punched him on the shoulder. “Go get the doctor!” she screamed.

He scrambled to get to his feet, but his knees looked like rubber. He wobbled to toward the nearest chair. Alain grasped him under one arm and helped him to a seat, then returned to help Val-risa. Bending, he scooped her into his arms and lifted her from the floor.

He turned to Vin. “Get hold of yourself, man! Go get the doctor!”

Jana could do nothing but watch, too stunned to feel anything, too stunned even to think.

As Alain strode past her, however, Val-risa cried out, reaching for her. “Jana! Please! Stay with me! I’m afraid to be alone.”

Quite suddenly, Jana felt as if the floor had dropped out from under her. She thought for several moments she would faint.

“Jana!” Alain snapped.

She looked at him.

“Your friend needs you.”

Jana nodded jerkily, took several deep breaths and managed to follow Alain and Val-risa up the stairs.

As he gently laid Val-risa on her bed, the servant who’d met them at the head of the stairs pushed past them and rushed into the room. She went immediately to the opposite side of the bed, leaning over and laying her hand on Val-risa’s stomach. “Good! That’s a good, hard contraction, Ms. Val-risa. Don’t you worry about a thing! You’re doing good. It’ll all be over before you know it.

“I don’t know if the doctor’s going to get here before this baby,” she muttered as she moved away and began jerking sheets from a chest. “A man don’t have no business in the room during a birthing. Don’t know what that man’s standing over there for, or what he thinks he’s going to do, unless it’s to grow roots.”

When she returned, she folded the sheets and instructed Val-risa to lift her hips. Val-risa merely groaned. Alain and Jana who’d been standing in the middle of the floor as if frozen, both surged forward at once, helping the servant to work the folded cloth beneath Val-risa’s hips.

Taking another sheet, the servant opened it out and tossed it across Val-risa, arranging it so that it covered her from her waist down. She reached beneath it then and pushed Val-risa’s gown up, grasped her pantaloons and pulled them off. Alain backed away hastily as she dropped the blood and mucus soaked pantaloons to the floor.

Jana stared down at the discarded underwear for several moments in horrified fascination, then looked up at Alain. He was as white as Vin had been. Her heart skipped a beat. If he fell, he was going to take out half the room. After a moment, however, he turned and walked a little unsteadily to a chair and sat down.

Jana would have loved to sit down, as well, or better yet, to run from the room. She couldn’t. Val-risa held her hand in a bone crushing grip. Each time Jana tried to pry her hand loose, Val-risa tightened her hold. Finally, she subsided.

When she realized, at last, that she was not going to be able to escape, her panic subsided, and she looked down at her friend. Val-risa was obviously in a lot of pain. She wanted Jana to stay with her. Jana just wasn’t certain what Val-risa thought she could do to help. “Val-risa?”

“Stay with me! Don’t leave me by myself!” Val-risa pleaded.

Jana felt ashamed, suddenly, that she’d wanted to do just that. She didn’t point out that Val-risa would not be alone if she left. The servant was there, and obviously knew what she was doing. She would be far more help than Jana would, but Jana realized Val-risa needed the comfort of contact.

“I won’t leave you.”

“Where’s Vin?”

“I think he went to get the doctor.”

Val-risa half rose. “Go make sure he’s all right. He fell. Maybe he was hurt?”

Jana and the servant pushed her back down.

“He’s just fine! I saw him run out to get the doctor myself,” the servant lied, glaring at Jana.

Jana nodded hastily. “Yes. That’s right.”

Val-risa relaxed, but in the next moment her face contorted and she began a long, keening scream.

Jana winced, but she couldn’t have escaped by then if she’d wanted to. The louder Val-risa screamed, the harder she clutched Jana’s hand.

“There goes another contraction!” the servant said, sounding satisfied, although Jana felt it was totally unnecessary for her to announce it when no one in the room could’ve been in any doubt. “I told you it wouldn’t be long. Not long at all.”

Jana stared at the woman, wondering if she was lying again to make Val-risa feel better. She wasn’t certain which would be worse—having to wait, or having to watch.

Either the servant had lied, or her conception of ‘not long’ was not the same as Jana’s. Jana lost all feeling in her hand as time went on. Her feet, legs and back began to ache from standing so long, for she could not move far enough away to sit and she could only shift from one foot to the other. She began to loose hearing in the ear closest to Val-risa’s surprisingly powerful lungs. Each time Val-risa rested, Jana tried to wiggle her fingers to see if she could get circulation into her hand, but no sooner did she begin to feel a tingle of blood flow than it began all over again. After a while, her eardrum began to rattle. Val-risa asked about Vin every few minutes. Each time, Jana or the servant had to reassure her that Vin was fine.

Her alternate question was to ask where Vin was.

After a while, the servant flipped Val-risa’s gown up, pushing her legs up on the bed until she was lying with her knees bent. “It’s crowned,” she said in a satisfied voice. She patted Val-risa’s leg. “I told you it wouldn’t take long. Any time now.”

Jana could not see what the servant was talking about—for which she would be eternally grateful—but she was relieved to hear it was almost over. She wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to hear again. She thought she might have broken bones in her hand, though she couldn’t be certain since she had lost all feeling in that hand some time previously.

Glancing toward the chair where Alain had been sitting, she discovered he was gone. She hadn’t noticed when he’d gotten up and left and she felt a pang of distress, the urge to go look for him.

A stampede of footsteps distracted her. She looked toward the door, waiting as the racing steps came closer. An elderly man rushed into the room. Vin was directly behind him, trying to thrust the man out of his way. He came up short at the sight that greeted him, paled. The man grasped his arm and hustled him from the room, slamming the door behind him.

Jana heard something fall, but she decided it wasn’t a loud enough noise to have been Vin. He must have stumbled over something.

The man, she quickly discovered, was the long awaited doctor. The servant had miscalculated. The doctor managed to arrive in time to catch the baby as Val-risa, screaming like someone had stabbed her, thrust the creature from her body.

She collapsed back on the pillows weakly afterward, gasping. In a moment, however, she lifted her head, fear etching her tired features. A loud wail rent the air. Relief flooded her features. She smiled. “Let me see. Let me see my baby.”

“In a moment,” the doctor said, working on something Jana could not see on the bed between Val-risa’s legs.

“Is it … all right?” Val-risa asked fearfully.

The doctor spared a moment to smile at her reassuringly. “A fine, healthy boy.”

Val-risa laughed weakly, but tears streamed down her cheeks.

Watching her, Jana felt confusion fill her.

Finally, the doctor lifted a small bundle of cloth, and moved around the bed, placing it gently in the arms Val-risa held up. She cradled it carefully, pulling the cloth back to look. Jana stared at the horrible, red faced thing. It’s eyes were squeezed tightly shut, it’s mouth so wide she could see gums that held no teeth.

She was still staring at it in revulsion when the doctor went to the door. “You can come in now.”

Vin rushed inside, his eyes wild, his hair standing on end.

Val-risa smiled at him tiredly. “It’s a son!” she said triumphantly.

A dopey grin split Vin’s face. He stumbled forward, pushing Jana aside. It wasn’t until then that she realized that Val-risa had, finally, released her. She felt as if she was rooted to the spot, however, could not take her eyes from the wriggling thing Val-risa and her husband, Vin, were beaming at while they carefully peeled the cloth away and studied the infant with fascination.

Vin laughed. “He’s fine! He’s a beautiful son! Thank you, dearest! I’m so proud of you!”

Jana blinked, shifting a little so that she could get a better look.

The infant was red all over, apparently from screaming, for he had done so virtually non-stop since he’d been deposited on the bed. Some disgusting looking cream coated him from the top of his bald head to the tips of his toes, and blood. His skin was wrinkled, as if it was too big for him, or he’d just emerged from soaking in water. He had no teeth, and he’d drawn his knees up to his tiny belly so that he resembled nothing so much as a frog … except he wasn’t quite as purple as the Orleans frog.

Val-risa chuckled happily. “He is beautiful, isn’t he? He looks just like his daddy, don’t you sweety?” she cooed, touching the infant’s hand.

Jana glanced at Vin. Instead of looking insulted, he was grinning senselessly.

“He’s got your beautiful eyes,” he disputed.

Jana studied the ‘beautiful eyes’. The infant had ceased squalling and managed to pry his eyes open. His whole face was screwed up with the effort. He looked like he was glaring at his doting parents.

Val-risa tore her gaze from the infant and looked up at Vin, smiling, her eyes shinning with happiness, and something Jana found hard to define. “I love you.”

Vin leaned over and kissed her. “I love you, too.”

The servant grasped Jana’s hand and led her from the room.

She stood in the hallway for sometime, vaguely aware of Vin and Val-risa’s voices as the continued to discuss the wonder of their infant.

Finally, she made her way slowly down the upper hallway and then the stairs. When she reached the bottom, she stopped, still puzzling over the horrific event she’d just experienced. After a time, she became aware that she was being watched and looked around. Alain was seated in a chair in the front parlor, studying her through the open doorway.

“Did she—is she all right?”

Jana stared at him uncomprehendingly for several moments and finally nodded.

“The baby?”

“I think so.”

“What did they say?

Jana thought about it. “They said it was beautiful. It wasn’t … isn’t. It’s the ugliest, most horrible thing I’ve ever seen. Maybe it wasn’t ready yet?”

“His lungs sounded well enough developed,” Alain said.

“They’re supposed to look like that?”

“I didn’t see him.” He looked away, studying the liquid that remained in the glass he held in his hand as if he’d forgotten he was holding it. Finally, he put the glass to his lips and drank, setting the empty glass on the table beside the chair. He looked at her again. “I will take you to the landing site.”

Jana felt something painful jolt through her. “You?”

He swallowed painfully. “Yes.”

She studied him, realizing that she saw him, finally, just as he was. Why had she not been able to see the things he felt? Had she simply not looked? Had she had been blinded by ignorance? Or was it simply because she was too caught up in herself to see it? She knew, finally, what love looked like, what it felt like, how it was shown.

She’d seen Val-risa, almost crippled by the birth pains, but crawling toward her husband because he meant more to her than her own suffering, because she was afraid for him … because he mattered more to her than she mattered to herself. She’d seen Vin’s love in his absolute terror, and in his eyes when he’d looked at that frightful thing and seen beauty, because it was his and Val-risa’s.