Birth

[Rance]

Time crumbled into a pinpoint. At the rough and ragged edges of awareness, where her senses reached out and touched the world, she was blind and dumb. Since her dinner of potatoes and yesterday's bread, breathing had been a labor; fear and anticipation waged a very natural war in her abdomen, threading her thighs and knees and guts with tension bred from not knowing...

A few hours before Sunwake she ambled, a clumsy, off-balance sentinel, to Mercy Tirel's chamber-door in the Broken Dagger. Her breath, the progeny of repressed discomfort, hissed out from the cracks between her uneven teeth. Her black hair clung to her neck in sweat-dampened ringlets.

When the older woman answered, Gloria Wynsee held aloft the flat of her palm. Brown skin was smeared with wetness. A half-question, half-statement greeted the physician, carried on staccato breaths.

"Did I break," the pregnant girl said.

* * * *

The process had forewarned its coming over weeks: pangs and dashes of muscular agony that she could offset with forced breaths and adjustments in stature or repose; the occasional arctic fear of prematurity relieved with a few moments of measured breathing; stitches and stabs attributed to stubborn pockets of gas under her ribs or the babe's impatient furor.

But these did not vanish. Even at the Rememdium Edificium, an hour later, where hurts were made well, the spasms, the compressions, they refused to abate--

("We've newly-boiled linens," someone said.)

Candles sparked to life; there were white robes all around, each an indistinct silhouette, and all she wanted to say was Please, please, will you take it out, I'm quite ready for it to be out.

("And water for the ablutions, too, all properly purified.")

I'm all knees. I'm all knees and belly from this perspective, she thought as unseen arms aided in peeling her sodden gown from her. Compliant and rubbery, her limbs, one whole and the other halved, obeyed the assistance. Her eyes, meanwhile, rolled left to right, seeking out the physician, trying to find her friend.

("She attends chapel, doesn't she?")

And crumbled Time slipped by, cleverly elusive.

[girl]

Mercy is, if nothing else, fastidious. As soon as Gloria had expressed her desire for the young physician to oversee the coming of her girlchild, Mercy began her birthing preparations with fervor.

Reading came first. She spent countless hours honing her knowledge of childbirth, poring over tomes that ostensibly contained more dust than learning. After the information compilation was completed completed, her tutelage, by necessity, had to leave the library.

In the field she sought to amend her theoretical information with the practical. She availed herself upon the midwives who normally held the officious positions during birthing, and like a looming shadow traced their movements, notebook in hand. She noted their practices, poultices, preparations and catalogued them for reference.

Two weeks too early, Mercy had the birthing room fully prepared. Her list of demands was exacting: rushes, but only after they've been washed and sun dried; lavender to calm and keep the room fresh; braziers with three legs to prevent upturning; windows covered and boarded to keep out the natural light. The most peculiar tick on the list, however, is the birthing chair. Mercy had drawn up the concept by hand, and was particularly proud of the finished product.

In fact, when Gloria had come to her with slickened hands and a woman's intuition for parturition, Mercy had been perusing a primer penned by a particularly prolific physician with a predilection for problem pregnancies. The book was swiftly abandoned in the whirlwind of reality.

——————

The birthing chair, at least at this point in the game, has been forgone--abandoned in favor of the bed. Gloria is too pregnant, too limp, too pliable to be trusted to remain seated alone. They make her as comfortable as they can, the women who have gathered to assist in Gloria's miracle of life. And at her side, the physician is the obvious spearhead, replete with a quiet sense of command.

Murmured instructions are rendered to those milling around. A few moments pass, and Mercy reaches down to take Gloria's hand, smiling at the other girl. She is comforting, a beacon of calm amidst the bustle and pain.

“Do you want me to send someone for a priest? It is tradition,” the physician adds the last sentence on quickly, explaining herself without a shred of worry. Those fingers squeeze Gloria's own, gently.

[Rance]

...send someone for a priest? It is tradition.

It may have been seconds or minutes or hours that passed before she whispered, "I don't care, I don't care," with an impatient voice that hissed out from between moans and gritted teeth. At one moment she stood; at another, she was recumbent, digging her elbows into the hay-stuffed linens underneath her. She became vaguely aware of Mercy's hand squeezing hers. Her grip, in return, was ferocious and unwilling to surrender the woman's frail touch.

Time was breathing, pushing, forcing even though she hadn't yet been commanded; Time was Time was Time, dripping away like long fingers of wax; in one moment she laughed (nervously) and smiled (uneasily) at her friend, and in another, her heels buffeted the bedding and she blew sharp breaths toward some point on the ceiling that she stared, stared, stared at--

("I trust you," she told Mercy, but never remembered telling her.)

* * * *

--breathing
sweating every
muscle in her body
screaming and
someTimes she screamed too
needed to scream the sinews
in the girl's neck strangling the bones
within and straining against the Sun-darkened
skin and sometimes a disembodied hand mopped her brow or swept the strings of hair out of her face or whispered encouragement in her ear and sometimes the agony came in waves like a searing tightness that crushed her guts and her bowels under unrelenting stoneweights of pressure and sometimes someone said push and she wailed i am i am and sometimes someone said push and she shouted i can't i can't i can't
and then a constricted, infantile voice added its
song to the tumult of noise within the hot
sweltering room a single, piercing cry
and then the nesting afterbirth
came free and fell and (that
was strange that was very
strange and a bloody bit of
rope wanted for fingers
and shears

but its end dangled free, unoccupied
and maybe they'd never heard
a cry at all)

* * * *

When it was done, when the world stopped being a blur--

Gloria asked, "Can I see her," with all the smooth, impervious desire of an exhausted girl submerged in the afterglow of a woman's work.

But Mercy's hands held nothing.

[girl]

As births go, Gloria's parturition is spectacular solely in fact that the obstacles are few, and the progression is swift and without major complication. The bed had proven more a hindrance than a help, and with the assistance of all of the women present in the sealed birthing chamber, Gloria was maneuvered to the chair.

Her skirts, taut between her spread knees, provide the seamstress with cover--a modicum of modesty during her own personal miracle. The physician kneels on the rushes before her friend, and with gravity serving as a form of assistance, all Mercy was necessary for was encouragement. Pain, and tears, and pushing, and then--

”She is crowning!” the physician crows to the beleaguered Gloria. Mercy feels the top of her head, solid and slick, furred with what she can only imagine is dark and downy hair. There is a small thrum somewhere within her, some little darkness rearing its head, but she chalks its presence to nerves, to excitement, never to black oil. And when Gloria's work has done and the infant is released fully upon Myrken, Mercy shifts her hands, moving to cradle the squalling babe.

With triumph upon her face, the physician lifts that warm, wet, solid child from beneath the obscuring cover of Gloria's undergarments. “Blanket, please—no, not that one. The other,” she instructs to the nearest nurse. Mercy has not yet looked at the bundle of already well-loved joy that she feels within her arms; she seeks first to swaddle the infant in the blanket she'd embroidered, wanting to present the child in style.

”Can I see her,” comes the request, and the physician beams at her friend for just a moment before turning that face down to gaze upon the perfectly formed face of...nothing. She lurches forward, very nearly crashing into Gloria's knees and in a hastened moment of impropriety she jerks Gloria's skirts upwards, frantically searching for a sign of infant. The only hint that a child had been delivered, aside from bodily fluids that stain the physician's knees and the rushes beneath her is the umbilical cord, which dangles emptily, bereft.

A moment later, the placenta spontaneously descends from the seamstress, its appearance eliciting a strangled sound from Mercy Tirel; the sound of sudden and sharp hope suddenly dashed. She rocks back onto her heels, and looks up at Gloria, eyes as wide as saucers. “I've lost her,” she repeats the words tirelessly—a melancholy mantra delivered from a pale and shocked face.

The baby isn't there.

[Rance]

"What?"

Not a word, but a breath, a trilling, confused noise that slipped out from her lips and nose. The dark ventricles of her nostrils flared, diminished, flared, diminished. Every muscle in her body snarled with rigidity, the blue veins framing skull and neck beating against her black-smeared skin as if they still demanded to work. An absence of pressure and weight in her body was answered with a maelstrom of vertigo. Her throat had been scoured raw from screaming, cursing; her jaw pulsed where teeth, throughout the birth, had ground against one another like ancient gears--

I've lost her.

Bloodshot and wild, her bulging eyes dizzily found Mercy Tirel. Already, as if driven by a hivemind, attendants in white worked like restless ghosts: they sopped fluids with rags and cleansed the offal from the confused mother's flanks; they lit long twigs of incense and dashed scented rosewater across the floorboards; one of them -- a portly woman in bloodied robes -- dashed forward and, with her thumb and forefinger, tucked some foul lump of poultice and paste in the pocket of Gloria's cheek, where hot saliva began to dissolve it--

Powder of mandrake and atropa.

The woman, betraying no emotion on her face, worked her task with digits that trembled like branches in a vortex.

I've lost her.

"I've got to see her; I've got to..."

(Crying. She'd heard crying, hadn't she? A choked wail surprised at the coldness of the world, a babe, a newborn, her child, her baby.)

Courageous assistants gripped Mercy Tirel's wet sleeves, seeking to turn her out, away, anywhere but this soiled, befouled chamber, with promises of water and a breath of clean air and a seat, let's get you to a seat whispered into the physician's ear.

(What did it mean, I've lost her, I've lost her, where was that round head, that wrinkled face, those clawing, imprecise little hands that had beaten and twitched against her guts for so long?)

Sleep.