Wildfire (34 page)

 

  
The midwife knelt between Mai’s legs and said, “I’m going to try to bring his head down now, while your pains are still far apart. Lie still.” Pressing through Mai’s flesh with her fingers and the heels of her palms, she gently nudged Mouse’s head downward and his breech upward. When a throe came Midwife looked at me and said, “Hold him!” She grabbed my cold right hand and placed it under the swell of Mouse’s buttocks, showing
me how to push firmly. Then she pressed Mouse’s head down with both hands, and he squirmed, and his head slipped toward the girdlebone and his buttocks moved up under Mai’s heart.

 

  
The midwife straightened up and her head brushed the lantern and set it swinging. Her face was bright with sweat and triumph. “Praise be. That might do it,” she said.

 

  
Mai said, “What do you mean, might?”

 

  
Midwife wrapped a magenta sash around Mai, between her belly and her breasts, tying it tightly to discourage Mouse from turning again. She arranged a pile of sacks against the back of the cart, and said, “Sit up here, and we’ll see if Mouse will stay where he’s supposed to be.”

 

  
“Oh gods, I told you he was contrary,” Mai said.

 
  

 

  
Sunup left the cart to empty the pisspot, and Tobe woke up and protested his abandonment, wailing, “Sup! Sup!” He crawled toward Mai and she told him, “Go on!” with a little push, which made him cry harder, shaking as if his little body couldn’t contain his despair. He pulled himself up using one of Mai’s knees. He wore a long shirt and a soiled breechcloth.

 

  
“Come,” I said, but he didn’t want me.

 

  
“Go on,” Mai said to him, gently this time, and I reached out and coaxed him into the circle of my arm.

 

  
Tobe had the shiver-and-shake. I knew as soon as I touched him. His skin was clammy and pale as whey. He’d been too quiet, and none of us had wondered at it, being intent on Mai. If I had spared him a thought, I would have been grateful he wasn’t clambering all over the cart and its occupants, or banging any two hard things together for the joy of making noise, or swatting someone just to rile them—all the things he always did, so that all day long he heard
don’t, don’t, don’t.
Mai had named her unborn child Mouse, for the Mischief in him, but surely Tobe had been touched by Lynx Mischief as well: Mischief in a playful mood, not a spiteful one.

 

  
“I’ll take him outsight,” I said, “until he quiets down. Have you a clean clout for him?” How could I tell Mai? I could not.

 
  

 

  
Half the sky was swaddled in a band of gray clouds, and half was clear and bright with stars. A smiting wind from the north carried the scent of snow. Mai’s varlet Trave and the midwife’s guards were toasting their feet at the fire. Trave nodded his head toward the oxcart. “It must be almost over, eh?”

 

  
“Ha,” I said. “Not lucky. Not likely, I mean.”

 

  
I walked away from them, holding Tobe close to me under my cloak. He held himself stiffly as he squalled, and his small chest worked like a bellows
against mine. I wasn’t Mai and he was indignant that I was trying to fool him. The poor boy had the squirts, one of the miseries in the shiver-and-shake’s sack of afflictions, so I crouched behind a big empty wagon and cleaned his buttocks while he kicked and cried. I made a sling of my cloak to hold him on my hip, and I rubbed his back to give him heat from my hand, to stop him shaking from chills. At last he let himself go limp and quiet, and rested his head against me.

 

  
I spread out my divining compass. So many times I’d called on the Dame and Na for counsel these last few days, and I was ashamed to ask so much of them, to tug them back again and again to the realm of the living by a thin thread of longing attached to their finger bones. They should no longer be troubled by what troubled us.

 

  
But my need was great. I threw the bones for Tobe, then for Mai, six casts in all. Certain signs were repeated in both readings. They touched twice upon Plenty and three times upon Wildfire. Three times finger bones crossed the line between Fate and Dread.

 

  
Hazard Fate and Rift Dread. These twinned signs filled me with foreboding and hope, contrary sensations so forceful that I had no doubt the Dame and Na impressed them upon me in answer to my questions. The dead can see farther than the living, and reckon both danger and opportunity ahead, and how by our actions—or inaction—we might change one into the other. I prayed they meant that Tobe and Mai could be helped.

 

  
There was another interpretation. They might mean that the gods would take one and let the other live. But if one was to die, which one, the mother or the son? I dared not ask, as if by asking I might bring about that which I most feared. As if I must choose between them.

 

  
The bones had pointed to the gods who must be propitiated. I made a cut in the crook of my arm and gave blood to Dread, and burned a lock of hair for Hazard. I had nothing suitable to give Plenty but promises: seedcakes and a dove, as soon as I was able. Paltry sacrifices, in return for a great favor.

 

  
Oh gods, let them live. Let them both live.

 
  

 

  
And now I must act as if what I did could matter, act in the hope that the gods would not be implacable. The Dame and Na had said as much as they could say. If their meaning was obscure, no doubt the fault was mine, an unskilled diviner. Signs on the compass, signs written on the suffering bodies of Mai and Tobe: none of the remedies I’d gathered so far seemed fitting.

 

  
It was not by worrying over the bones that I would get at the marrow of their meaning; I must go gathering.

 

  
I passed through the guarded opening in the palisade and crossed the ditch. The market was crowded with warriors and mud soldiers, peddlers and harlots. Bonfires sowed sparks into the wind. It must be true then: the king was mending. We would march tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow the army would fight the battle. One and all seemed glad we’d come to it at last.

 

  
Only a whore should walk abroad on such a night, when men were wrought up and eager to prove they weren’t afraid. I skirted the market, a shadow among the shadows, and passed through a pasture where horses were tethered and into a fallow field beyond, leaving the clamor behind. It was harder to silence the clamorous fears I carried with me.

 

  
Tobe dozed against me, small and heavy. Already his brow was warm, the fever rising in him again. I stood still and listened, and heard Tobe pant as he slept; a breeze rustled through the waist-high grasses.

 

  
In the quiet I was at last truly able to pray for him and for his mother—not by word or song, not by pleading or appeasing, but by looking and listening. By paying attention. Here no firelight blinded me. I saw the familiar branch pattern, dark against the night sky, of the elder tree, sacred to Plenty. I took what was given, the buds for Tobe’s fever, and berries against the squirts and chills. I walked on, and Plenty sent me butterbur growing in a soggy ditch, and shepherd’s purse, which stays green and blooming in all but the coldest winters. Fate offered evergreen rue.

 

  
I was grateful to the gods, truly grateful, nothing feigned or begrudged. But some of these gifts made me uneasy, being remedies for afflictions that had not yet come to pass.

 
  

 

  
The blessed quiet didn’t last. Tobe roused and began to cry inconsolably for his mother. I hurried back to the cart, and Mai reproached me for being away so long, and bringing him back red faced and bawling. He sobbed, leaning on his mother, his small potbelly pressed against her much greater one. He squeezed one of her breasts, trying to nurse, and milk dribbled from the nipple. She cupped his face between her hands. “What is it, little man? What’s the matter?”

 

  
“I hurt!” he said.

 

  
“How he burns!” she said, and she looked at me and knew. Her face twisted, lopsided, pain on the right, fear on the left. I’d been foolish to think I could keep his sickness from her.

 

  
I told Mai what the Dame used to say—that the gods send no malady without also sending a remedy, though we are not always wise enough to discover it. I told her I’d been led by signs to plants that might serve Tobe. I had to give her hope, even if it proved false; she needed her strength for the travail.

 

  
Tobe had a terrible thirst, but he craved mother’s milk and nothing else. I gave him elderberry tea and a gruel of barley water and elder buds, and he pushed them away, fretful and peevish. What little I made him swallow he spewed up again. In time he fell asleep in the crook of Mai’s arm, twitching like a dreaming dog.

 

  
Mai let me take him in my lap, and I felt the fever rising in him like a long swell lifting a boat. I drew heat knowing I couldn’t take enough, for beyond that swell was another and another, a boundless ocean.

 

  
On and on Mai labored. Her back hurt and she kept shifting about, trying to find a comfortable position. Midwife wouldn’t let her lie on her side, for fear Mouse would turn himself crosswise again. Sunup braced herself against the wall of the cart and pushed hard with her feet on the small of Mai’s back, digging into her flesh. It seemed to ease her pain. Midwife held Mai’s hand, and when Mai squeezed she never flinched; she’d say, “That was a good one.” Yet we all knew the throes were not strengthening apace.

 

  
Mai dozed between pains. Late at night Sunup curled up and slept, and I yawned with Tobe in my lap, and Midwife sat watchful. My eyelids were heavy and I nodded off, and I was in a bright dream on a windy hillside, watching swallows cut the air with their sharp wings. I smelled freshly mown hay. I jerked awake and saw Mai with her face shining in pain. My eyes closed again, my head dropped, and I saw laundresses kneeling by the stream at the bottom of the meadow, thumping wet twisted cloth against boulders. Tobe played near his mother in the amber waters, chasing the shadows of fish. He lost his footing and sat down with a splash and chortled.

 

  
I dreamed Tobe’s dream and not one of my own. If he could stay there, I wouldn’t fear for him.

 
  

 

  
The army marched before daybreak. We waited to take our place in the line, with Trave and the midwife’s guards as escorts, and Pinch beside the ox with his switch. Pinch was weak from the fever, but he wouldn’t sit on the cart, so close to Mai in travail. The ox pulled, and the cart lurched over the rough ground, which had been furrowed by wheels and pocked by hooves, and thawed and frozen hard again. I sat in front with Tobe in my lap, glad to be outside, glad to be moving. The ox tangled a harness strap around one foreleg, and we stopped with a jolt, and Pinch cursed and Midwife poked out her head between the door flaps. She retreated back inside and I heard her say brusquely, “Once we get to the road, it won’t be so rough.”

 

  
Mai said, “I can’t, I just can’t. It hurts too much.”

 

  
When next the midwife spoke, her voice was gentler. “We’ll catch them later,” she said.

 

  
I gave Tobe to Sunup, and said, “I’ll be back, I promise.”

 

  
The company of Crux had already marched away with the rest of the vanguard. I ran through the fields beside the road, dodging foot soldiers, and men shouted or laughed at me. When I was out of breath, I walked until I could run again. I reached the brow of the hill and saw warriors riding in orderly splendor down the other side, their caparisons bright in the dim snowlight.

 

  
The road curved and I cut straight across the fields, plunging downhill. Near the bottom I came around the shoulder of a knoll and stopped, gasping, doubled over from the stitch in my side. On the road below, riders bore the green banners of Crux and the golden banners of the king on poles strapped to their backs. Galan marched among them, carrying his banners on the shaft of his scorpion, under the blade with the sting and claw. He wore his helm with his visor raised. He said something to his uncle and the Crux leaned in his saddle to reply.

 

  
I was afraid for Galan, seeing him on foot among the great horses. And maybe I was just afraid, thinking he wouldn’t welcome me, not if he was of the same mind as when he saw me last; if I ran down to him, I’d shame him before his fellows. I let him go by, and the army flowed past me like an iron river.

 

  
I trudged back uphill, and in the baggage train I found Fleetfoot riding the lead mule and carrying Wren in the saddle before him. I told him Mai was still in travail, and when she was delivered we’d march all evening, all night if we had to, and catch up with them. Send word to Sire Torosus. See you soon, for certain.

 

  
The Sun rose behind a shroud of falling snow. Within the encircling ditch all was quiet. The movable city had moved on, but we weren’t the only ones left behind. Here and there were solitary pavilions of cataphracts brought low by the shiver-and-shake, some with horses waiting in full caparison, as if their masters expected to ride to battle. Drudges lay on the ground and men stooped over them, to rob or to help. Stray dogs nosed about. All seemed gray, even the glossy plumage of the crows that strutted about where so many men had lately bustled.

 
  

 

  
As the day wore on, Mai’s throes came and went in an unsteady rhythm. Midwife did all she could to speed the birthing. She gave Mai slippery tea and made her sneeze with a pungent snuff of burnt feathers; she bade us undo our girdles and headcloths, lest the knots obstruct the child’s passage. She got Mai up and outside, and made her walk three times around the cart. We bore her up between us while her legs shook from exhaustion.

 

  
Mai had been panting so long her lips were dry and cracked, so Sunup
soothed them with tallow. And when the throes came we winced with her, and rubbed her back and her legs and dried her brow and kissed her and said she was a brave one, a hard worker. Not much longer now, surely. Soon. Soon.

 

  
I daresay we were all impatient, but only Mai dared show it. She cursed Mouse and her own laggard body, she cursed Sire Torosus for getting her with child again. And she begged Desire to have mercy, have pity. Had she done aught to offend her? She would give her a mare in foal when this was all over, if she would only let Tobe live, and let this child be born.