by Tessa Afshar
He picked her up and carried her into the cart and laid her down on her mattress. The interior of the cart remained enveloped in shadows; he turned to light a lamp. The pain ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and Sarah forced herself to sit up.
“I’m all right now.” She sounded weak and shaky to her own ears.
Darius turned back to face her, holding the lamp in one hand. He looked frozen. “I am going to fetch Lysander,” he said.
“I don’t think it’s necessary. The pain is gone.”
“It’s necessary.” He held out his hand. It was scarlet. “You are bleeding.”
Sarah sucked in her breath. For the first time she became aware of the sticky feeling between her legs. She looked down and saw that her shoes were stained with blood. Denial was no longer an option. It dawned on her that her baby was dying. She squeezed her eyes shut and buried her face in the pillow, hoping to drown the wail that was rising, rising from the depth of her being. Darius lifted her into his arms and cradled her. “I must fetch Lysander, sweetheart. I’ll return quickly.”
Pari came to her side moments later.
“My baby,” Sarah said, her voice broken. “My baby.”
Pari’s eyes filled with tears. “I’m so sorry.” She sponged the blood from her skin and changed her into fresh garments. With soothing movements, she began to rub Sarah’s back. Another wave of contractions overtook her, not as intense as before, but painful enough to make her retch.
Lysander and Darius appeared at the foot of the cart. “May I come in, my lady?” Lysander asked.
She nodded, beyond words. Darius tried to follow, but Lysander held up a hand. “Give me a few moments alone with your wife, Darius. Her maid can remain.”
“I want to be by her side.”
“I understand. And you will be. But first, I need to examine her in private.”
Darius gave a curt nod. “Don’t take long.”
Lysander’s examination was thorough. Sarah’s misery overrode her embarrassment.
“You are losing a babe,” he said, not trying to cushion the news.
“Can you save him?”
He shook his head. “He was not meant to be. Nothing would have saved him. Now we must make certain that you do not hemorrhage and your flesh does not fester. If you take good care, there is no reason you should not conceive again and give birth to a healthy baby. Many women have miscarriages and recover fully to have a brood of children.”
Tears soaked Sarah’s cheeks. “He is the one I want. I love him so much.”
“My lady, am I right in assuming that your husband does not know?”
“Yes. I ought to have told him before coming. I tried several times since. We were always interrupted. I intended to tell him today. Now, it’s too late.”
“It will be hard on him. I’ll call him in now. Shall I tell him the news, or do you want to do it yourself?”
“Since I never told him that we had conceived a child, I should at least be the one to inform him that his child has died.”
Darius leapt into the cart as soon as Lysander opened the heavy curtains. He rushed to Sarah’s side and sat near her, careful not to cause her discomfort. “What is wrong with her?” he asked Lysander without taking his gaze off Sarah. With heartrending tenderness, he stroked the damp hair off her face. “You’ll be well.”
“Darius.” Sarah bit her lip, unsure how to go on. “My lord, forgive me. I have lost our baby.”
An impassive mask dropped over the perfect features. She knew that trick. Whenever his emotions erupted, he hid them with the dexterity of a magician with his staff. “You were with child?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Is she going to be all right?” He turned to Lysander. “There was a lot of blood.” In the dispassionate voice, Sarah thought she detected a thread of fear. She reached for his hand, desperate for his comfort. Desperate to give him comfort.
Lysander said, “With good care, she will recover quickly. I am confident she will conceive again, Darius.”
“Was it the travel?”
“I doubt it. I have known women engaged in more vigorous activity during pregnancy who carried their babies to term without difficulty, as well as women who avoided all strenuous exertion and miscarried, nonetheless.”
“But you don’t know for certain?”
Lysander pushed his hand through his flaxen hair. “No. Not for certain. No one really knows why these things happen. I think the body recognizes the existence of a problem, and expels the baby.”
Darius said nothing. His eyes, heavy-lidded and red, betrayed a weight of sorrow he could not hide entirely. He lingered by Sarah’s side, his hand in hers, keeping quiet vigil until she fell asleep.
She did not slumber for long. Darius was still there when she woke up. “How do you feel?”
Still groggy from sleep, Sarah tried to gauge his mood and failed. “Better.”
He leaned away from her. “I need to ask you a question, Sarah. Will you tell me the truth?”
“Yes.” She knew what he was about to ask. She knew that telling him the truth would drive him away from her. But she also knew that she could not lie. It was bad enough that she had hidden the truth from him. She would not make matters worse by trying to cover her offense with more lies.
His voice sounded brittle and hoarse. “Did you know you were pregnant when we embarked on this journey?”
Sarah’s mouth turned dry. “Yes, my lord. I knew.”
Darius rose to his feet, his movements awkward, as if he could not access the innate physical grace that marked his usual bearing. Without a word, he left.
Lysander remained with Sarah until the bleeding and cramping subsided. According to him, these were favorable signs, indicating that she would recover from her miscarriage without any lasting effects. As long as she passed the afterbirth in its entirety, he remained confident of her full recovery.
The convoy had begun to move again. Sarah hardly felt the uneven terrain of the road. A heavy curtain of grief descended over her mind. Her thinking became cloudy. She felt only anguish. Her baby was gone. Her husband was gone. And she had brought Darius’s abandonment on herself.
In the afternoon, Darius came. He stood over her, his green eyes accusing. But he could not hide the sorrow that mingled with the bitterness. She remembered how he had once told her of his longing to have children. The loss of this baby had wounded his heart as much as hers.
He laid a hand on her forehead, his touch impersonal. “Is she still bleeding?” he asked Pari, ignoring Sarah.
“Not copiously, my lord. And she has shown no sign of chills or fever. She is recovering well.”
Darius nodded and turned to leave.
“Forgive me, my lord!” Sarah cried.
He stopped, his broad back rigid. “It’s too late.”
“Please! I love you!”
“I don’t care,” he said, and vaulted out of the cart while it was still moving.
Sarah turned into her pillow and wept.
“He will come round,” Pari said, patting her shoulder.
“No. He won’t.”
Darius sat on his pallet, ready to bed down for the night. Not that he would get much sleep. Since Sarah’s miscarriage, his nights had consisted of long hours of torturous thought, interspersed with short spurts of restless slumber and nightmarish dreams. In the shadows he saw the wide-shouldered outline of Lysander walking toward him.
“I need to speak with you.”
“So speak.”
Lysander hunched down next to Darius. “Not here. What I have to say is for your ears alone.”
With a sudden rush, he felt the blood drain from his face. “Sarah?”
“Come.”
Darius almost throttled Lysander in his haste to make the man disgorge his secret. Was she sick? Was her life in danger? His friend refused to say another word, however, until they were out of earshot of the camp.
“Your wife is not in immediate danger, but I am worr
ied for her. It has been three days since the miscarriage, and she still can’t eat. She is nauseous all the time and too weak to leave her bed.”
“Has her womb begun to fester?”
“I don’t believe so. She has no fever. The bleeding and the cramping have ceased. But she is not returning to health as she should. Women’s maladies are not my specialty. I know of nothing else to do. She won’t mind me when I tell her to eat. You have to do something, Darius.”
Darius had visited Sarah every day for the past three days. His visits were always the same—silent, brooding affairs that left her shaking with nerves. He checked on her physical well-being, yet refused to speak to her. It was as if he came against his own will, she thought. As if part of him hated her and wished to be as far away from her as the sun from the moon. And yet part of him could not resist being near her—resist ensuring that she was recovering her health. In spite of his great anger, he could not entirely sever his heart from her. Sometimes, she found a wisp of hope in that connection. More often, she felt swallowed up by a despair that seemed unending.
She wanted to share her husband’s sorrow, for who understood better than she what it felt to have a beloved child ripped out of her life? But he had raised such a wall between them that she could not reach him. His bitterness breathed like a living thing, separating them. Every day she had begged for his forgiveness. Every day he had ignored her and left without a word.
She had trouble eating. Her body rejected food. The very sight of it made her ill.
On the fourth evening, just after the convoy had stopped for the day, Darius came in bearing a bowl of soup.
“You are going to eat this,” he said.
“I cannot.”
He placed the bowl on the floor of the cart next to her. Bending, he put a long arm behind her back and lifted her up. He piled a few cushions behind her to support her back before straightening up. His touch made the blood rush to her face.
“You are going to eat.”
“I don’t wish to be contrary, my lord. The smell of it alone is making me nauseous.”
“Nonetheless, you must eat. You have gone too many days without food, and Lysander says that if you go on like this, you could bring on a long sickness.”
He sat next to her on the mattress and reached for the bowl. He held a spoonful of the soup to her mouth. “Eat.” His voice brooked no disobedience.
If he had shown a glimmer of tenderness or even compassion, she might have believed that he still cared for her. But his manner was brusque. He would have done as much for a sick dog or a horse.
Not wishing to anger him more than she already had, she forced herself to gulp down the spoonful of soup. For a moment, her belly roiled with discontent. She closed her eyes and breathed deep.
“Good. Now another,” he said, unrelenting.
By the time he was done, a sheen of sweat covered her skin, and she shook with the effort not to purge the contents of her stomach.
He wet a towel and wiped her face and neck. “It will pass soon.”
To her surprise and relief, he proved right. The nausea passed and her stomach settled. For the first time since losing the baby, she felt almost well.
“You look better. Your cheeks have a tinge of color.”
“I feel better. Thank you.”
She expected him to leave now that he had accomplished his purpose in visiting her, but he lingered.
“Why, Sarah? Why did you keep the child from me?” He sounded more anguished than angry.
Sarah closed her eyes for a moment. “I feared you would not let me come.”
“You wanted to see Jerusalem that badly? Visiting Judah seemed more important to you than the health of our baby? Than my feelings?”
“No! Never. I kept the news from you because I did not wish to be parted from you for a whole year. Or to have our baby alone. I asked the physician you sent me if travel would be dangerous to the child. I would never have risked his life, Darius. Not even for the sake of being with you. He assured me that if I took care, the babe would be in no particular danger. Even the king brought his pregnant concubines on the road with him.”
He leaned back on the stool. “You had no right to keep this child from me. I was his father! I deserved to know, Sarah.”
“I know you did. I wronged you, Darius. I couldn’t believe you did not find out after the physician’s visit. He told me he would inform you.”
“No doubt against your wishes. You blush. I have made the right assumption, I see.” He crossed his arms in a tense movement. “You cannot blame this on him, though the poor man tried to visit me many times. This was your responsibility as my wife! You were the one to share it with me. You were the one to tell me that we had made a child together. Do you think I wished to hear such news from the mouth of a physician?”
“Oh Darius. Forgive me. I kept thinking that I would tell you soon. But then I knew you would leave me behind, and the fear of that parting made me mute.
“At first I thought I would have weeks. I had not bargained on Nehemiah’s speed, which hastened our departure beyond my expectations. I tried to tell you on the morning before we left. Do you recall?”
“You really imagined that I would have time to sit and chat with you moments before the convoy took off? That is an excuse. You wished to tell me when I could do nothing about it.”
Sarah could not refute his accusation. The silence in the cart grew heavy with the rupture between them. It felt to her as if talking had pulled the bitterness into the open, but nothing had been resolved. She realized now that speech could not heal what ailed them. Unreasonable mercy was the only solution to their plight. Mercy and forgiveness.
Her husband was a man who gave his trust frugally. And she had already breached that trust when she first came to him as wife. It had taken a disaster to soften his heart. It wasn’t until she had been stabbed and lay severely ill that he made peace with her. From Darius’s perspective, this new betrayal must seem incomprehensible.
“I should have entrusted myself to your decision,” she said.
He shrugged and rose, his movements heavy. “You should have entrusted yourself to my care. But you robbed me of the opportunity. Because of you, I had to mourn my child before I ever had the chance to celebrate him.
“You might have lost this babe even if you had stayed in Susa. But at least we would have both known that we had done our best for him. Now we will always have to struggle with that question.”
Nehemiah visited her in the evening. Pari leapt from the stool and offered the only seat in the cart to him. He gave a gracious nod, arranged himself neatly on the stool next to Sarah, and leaned over. “I’m so sorry, my girl.”
The gentle sympathy in his voice caused her to melt into tears. She had cried more in four days than she remembered doing since childhood.
“Why did God take my baby?”
“That’s too great a mystery for me, child. It was the same for your mother, you know. She lost a babe before she conceived you.”
Sarah’s eyes widened. “No one told me.”
“At the time she was as heartbroken as you are now. But then great joy returned to her when you came along. She didn’t seem to stop smiling for months after you were born.”
“She never spoke to me about it.”
“Perhaps she felt you were too young to understand.”
“I wish she were here now. She would know how I feel. I would be so comforted if I could snuggle in her arms like I used to do when I was a child.”
“Dear girl. I am so sorry that the one loss highlights the other. But the Lord can be as loving as a mother to you.”
“I feel that He has left me too. I feel abandoned by the Lord.”
“Sometimes the heart goes through such a deep valley that the Lord is overshadowed by its darkness. The trick is, when you feel God has let go of you, you don’t let go of God. Cling to Him anyway. And you will find that He never abandoned you—He remained near all along.
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“I am convinced that He knows your pain and desires to give you rest in the midst of it, for does He not seek to comfort all who mourn, and provide for those who grieve in Zion?”
Sarah struggled to sit up. Pari rushed forward to help her. She felt her meager strength abandon her after expending so small an effort. Even speaking was depleting her. “Cousin Nehemiah, I don’t feel that this wound will heal. This loss is too much for me to bear. I have wanted this baby so much. Why would God give him to me only to take him away?”
“All I can say is that your child was precious to Him. Planned by Him. For how could you have conceived him unless the hand of the Lord rested on you? No life can form in the womb without God’s breath. Didn’t King David say, You knit me together in my mother’s womb? So you see, the little one that you had for such a brief time, grew inside you by the will of the Lord. God’s awesome power knit him together within you. And this sweet life was treasured by Him.”
“What good is it to know that God sorrows with me? It will not change my loss.”
If Nehemiah noticed the bitterness in Sarah’s outburst, he did not mention it. No reproach marred his voice as he answered. “King David said:
You will not leave my soul among the dead
or allow your holy one to rot in the grave.
You will show me the way of life,
Granting me the joy of your presence
And the pleasures of living with you forever.
“Not all the leaders of our people agree with me on this, but when I meditate on the words of our prophets, I grow convinced that your child will have the pleasures of living with God forever. Though you’ll not have him in this lifetime, you can have the comfort of knowing that the grave will not have the last word. He’ll be granted the joy of God’s presence. And who knows but that in the world to come, you will be reunited?”
Sarah went still. Until that moment, she had been so drowned in her own grief and Darius’s loss that she had thought of little else. Death had always seemed so final to her. For the first time she began to realize that God’s sorrow might surpass her own. And that God’s power might somehow surpass death.
