Magnus

by Joanna Bell

  When he was born, she said nothing. She said nothing and I did not even have the strength to lift my head to look at him. But I could still hear. And what I could hear was – nothing. No sound, no crying. There was nothing but the stillness of a tomb as Ora took her knife in her hand and did something between my legs. And then she left. She took something tiny, which had been wrapped in a dirty linen sheet, and she left. And in that moment of confusion, before my mind had the time to assume what had happened, I heard a cry. An infant's cry, just the same as those I had heard from the newborn infants of the Angle women. Just one, and no more.

  "Hey!" I shouted into the dark. "Ora! ORA!"

  I began screaming her name over and over as I struggled – unsuccessfully – to push myself up to a sitting position. I tried to swing my legs off the bed.

  Moments later, after I set up a howling wail and did not stop, the two apprentices returned.

  "Where is –" I began, my words slurring into each other as I lay on my bed, which was soaked with blood and sweat and afterbirth. "Where –"

  One of the young girls knelt beside my head, and looked up at her friend briefly before taking my hand. "He did not live," she whispered.

  "No," I said. "No, girl. I heard him. I heard him! I heard a baby's cry! I –"

  "He did not live," she repeated, refusing to meet my eye and glancing up once again at her friend. "It is common for a mother to think she hears a baby's cry when –"

  "I don't think I heard it," I insisted, groaning as a wave of dizziness came over me. "I don't – I don't think I heard it. I heard it. Girl, I –"

  And then everything went black.

  When I awoke, it was daytime. The bed I lay in was fresh, with fresh grasses packed into fresh linen. As my eyes adjusted to the bright light, I came to see that my husband was sitting beside me. I tried to say his name but the only sound that came out of my mouth was a weak croak.

  When he saw that I was awake, he began to weep.

  "Heather!" He exclaimed, blinking as if he could not quite believe what he was seeing. "Heather. My love! Oh, my love – do you wake?"

  He was beside himself. I'd never seen him like that, not even when Eidyth died. And I was still confused, weak from blood loss and the physical trauma of birth.

  "What's wrong?" I asked, as a strange darkness seemed to come into view in the corner of my eye. I was forgetting something. What was I forgetting?

  I looked down at my belly, expecting to place my hand upon it once again, and saw that it was no more. And then the darkness blew over me, a fog of despair, and I began to cry as it all came flooding back.

  "No," I said, looking to my husband as he lifted his wet face and looked into my eyes. "No, Magnus. I – I heard him. I heard him cry! When she took him I heard him cry! Why did she take him? Why did she take –"

  My husband took me in his arms and held me very tightly. And when he spoke his voice was so thick with emotion it was if he could barely get the words out.

  "Ora says it is a normal thing," he said, his eyes bright with tears. "She says it is a normal thing for a woman to think she hears her baby cry, even as he doesn't live."

  No. No. I hadn't imagined it. The cry was only one, but it was real. I even remembered how it sounded slightly far away, as Ora took him away out of the courtyard. I looked up at Magnus. "No. It's not – I heard him. I heard him! Why – Magnus, why did she take him? Where is he? Where –"

  "He is buried, my love. You have been asleep for five days, and the Angles say a baby who is born without life must be buried at once. They –"

  Panic rose up in my chest, and then my throat. Magnus barely managed to roll me onto my side before I vomited onto the floor, and then stayed where I was, leaned half off the bed, retching and disbelieving. He couldn't be dead. I'd felt him moving inside me, he was strong, I knew it. How could he be dead?

  I clutched at Magnus' tunic. "Did you see him? Tell me did you see him?"

  He shook his head. "Of course I did not see him. What people let a father see his lifeless baby? It was Ola who told me he was a boy."

  "So you don't know?" I whispered, through clenched teeth. "You don't know if he's dead! If you didn't see him – and if I heard him cry – how do we know –"

  "Heather."

  "NO! If you didn't see him, with your own eyes – how do we –"

  "Heather, Heather."

  I did not have the strength to fight. My husband held me close to his chest, and I found that I was out of breath and shaking. Even as I wanted to insist again, and louder, that it didn't make sense for our son to be gone, I didn't have the energy. I fell back into the darkness of slumber, and did not wake again for quite some time.

  They say I drifted in and out of consciousness, fighting an infection and the effects of losing a lot of blood during the birth, for almost a half moon. It didn't feel that long. It felt like a single dream, composed of various other dreams. I found myself running through fog-shrouded forests trying to find my baby as his cries echoed around me, not seeming to come from any particular direction. I saw faces from my old life, high school friends, my mother, the second grade teacher who had sighed with annoyance when I accidentally put a staple through my own fingertip. But even when the dreams seemed to be about people or things who weren't my son, they were still, in truth, about my son. Even as I was transformed into an eight year old again, watching the blood bead on my finger before falling, drop by drop, onto the dirty linoleum, there was in the background a terrible anxiety. I searched the landscape of my own mind for days, looking for my baby. I searched through endless dream-forests and countless eerily empty houses filled with doors that simply led to more doors. And all the while the sense that he was close, that he was right there, if only I could open the right door, or look under the right fallen tree, tortured me.

  When I woke from my sickness, my husband and my friends cared for me. Carefully, and with love, they brought me soups brewed from bones, to restore my strength. Magnus carried me gently out into the courtyard in the afternoons and put me in a special wooden chair that the Angles used for the elderly and invalid. And then he picked flowers as I watched weakly, telling me the name of each one. When he had enough flowers to make a bouquet, he would hand them to me, smiling and telling me that they still weren't as beautiful as I was.

  The Angles did not have mirrors. Sometimes, in the still waters of a pond or a puddle, I would catch a quick glimpse of my reflection – but it was never as detailed or finely-grained an image as that I would have seen in a mirror. So I couldn't be sure that my husband lied when he told me the flowers were not more beautiful than I, but I suspected as much.

  One day in the late summer, when the soft, golden evenings seemed to torment me even more with their beauty, I sat with Magnus out in the courtyard once more.

  "It will never be worse than this," I said quietly, as we held hands. "I'm not saying worse things won't happen – because it seems they happen all the time – I'm saying that if they do, it won't hurt this much. Nothing will ever hurt this much again."

  "Aye," my husband replied. "I know what you speak of, girl. I thought it could not be worse than losing Eidyth – but we were with her. You held her as she left this world. In truth I cannot think of our son alone, after the midwife took him away, because if I think of it too long, or too often, I will take to my bed and never leave it."

  The gentle snorting and snoring of the pigs as they settled in for the night came from the sty behind the house, as well as the sounds, through the trees, of the other families who lived outside Haesting's walls getting ready for bed. The gentle breeze carried Brona's lovingly impatient voice to my ears, as she admonished one of her younger children to put out the candle and go to sleep.

  "Why did this happen?" I asked, turning to Magnus in the dusk. "What did we do to deserve this? I keep remembering how happy I was when we met. Right from the very first moment, I was happy with you. How many people can say that? Even at the time it almost worried me, to be
so happy, and for so many years. Even then I would catch myself wondering, at night, if there would ever be a price to pay. I wonder is this the price? Our children dead and buried?"

  "It is your way," he replied, "to be unhappy with uncertainty. You speak of our early time together – I remember that you were always this way. You always wanted a reason, an explanation, for everything. It was one of the things I first loved about you – that you didn't have this passive response to life, that you didn't just accept the things that displeased you. But I fear there is no explanation for this, girl. The Gods do not concern themselves with our lives on this level, dealing out punishments or rewards, keeping a balance. There is no balance. You seek reasons and patterns because that it who you are, but any that you see are conjured by your own mind. There's no reason we lost Eidyth. There's no reason our son came lifeless into the world. And there's nothing we can do about any of it. Do you not think that I would take on an army of a thousand Northmen if it would buy you a moment's respite from your suffering?"

  In the newly fallen night, a hot tear ran down one of my cheeks. I didn't bother to swipe it away. "I know you would do anything," I told him, because I did. My husband had not left my side since I fell into the after-birth fever. We relied at the time on the generosity of Lord Eldred and the Angles to keep us fed and warm, as I was too weak to work and my husband refused to do anything that would take him away from me. And I knew, as surely as I knew the sun would rise the next morning, that he would have done anything I asked of him.

  The weakness eventually left me. It took a couple of moons, but the day came when I stood up from bed in the morning and felt like a whole, normal person again. Physically, anyway. Magnus said it was because of my childhood. He told me a child is the grown man or woman's foundation, as the stones under our cottage were to the cottage itself. He said that if a child is fed properly, and kept healthy, the woman the child becomes will carry that strength with her until she dies. That she will always benefit from that initial strength.

  When I first came to live with the Angles, and with my Northman, who was just as prone to spinning slightly fantastical stories about why this or that person either succumbed or did not to sickness, I thought all their stories were nonsense. Poetic nonsense, but nonsense nonetheless. But I did recover from an illness so severe most of the Angle women would have died from it. And when I recovered, I wasn't weakened. I could see it in the people on the estate, too. Lord Eldred's daughters, who had always had full bellies and warm beds, were noticeably stronger – taller and broader – than the other Angles. And even as I became one of them, my American heart never fully got used to the idea that it was right and good that some should eat better than others simply because they were born to a lord.

  "It just doesn't seem fair," I said to Magnus one day as we pulled weeds from our pea field. "And the people don't even seem to mind – even the ones who have lost children to sickness, as we did, seem not to be bothered by the fact that none of the lord's daughters ever succumbed to something like a bad cough."

  "Lord Eldred has been lucky," came the reply. "The highers lose their own to sickness all the time, girl. It's not –"

  "But they don't lose them as often. You said so yourself, that the only reason I survived after our son was born was my childhood health."

  "Aye, it's true. But what would do you expect Lord Eldred to do? Would you take bread from the mouths of your own children to give to others?"

  "If I had too much bread I would."

  Magnus chuckled. "Well then I suppose the point hinges on what we would consider 'too much' bread, does it not? You understand, by now, that even the highers in the Kingdom do not live as the everyday people in the United States of America, do you not?"

  "Yes," I replied. "I understand. I'm just saying, I don't think it's fair."

  "It isn't fair, girl. But I don't know whoever told you things were going to be fair."

  You would think that there are certain things in life that you could never get used to. And you would think that the death of your child was one of those things. You would be right, of course. Losing a child is not a thing a person 'gets used' to. But the wounds of life scab over, and then they slowly grow a thick layer of scar tissue. It is not that we mourned our son any less than we mourned Eidyth. It is not that we felt less pain at his loss than hers. It was that we had already been taught the lesson that his death just reasserted for us – that you can lose anyone, at any time, and your love for them, as great as it is, doesn't make a single bit of difference. Those who are lost to us are lost. Eidyth taught us that. So when we lost our baby boy, it did not take quite so long to accept that he was, in fact, gone. That his only existence would be in his parents' hearts, and in their memories of their hopes for him. We brought flowers to his grave, beside Eidyth's, and lay them in the grass.

  The winter after his birth was hard, and Magnus and I could no longer afford the luxury of hiding away in our cottage, grieving. We built a small barn, and spent the first truly cold weeks of the season mixing the mud, straw and dung mixture to slap on the slender willow-weave that made the walls that would keep out first cow warm.

  We were not the only ones expanding, either. The Haesting estate continued to spread beyond its walls, and the new stone walls that had been built around the first few homesteads were taken down and rebuilt further out, so there was more room within them. One of the boys from the estate, the son of one of Lord Eldred's men, was sent to one of the King's own estates, to learn smithing. When he returned, Haesting had its own smith, and people from nearby villages and estates began to visit to trade their goods for swords and nails and ploughshares.

  The estate continued to prosper, and so did its people. Even the lowest of the Angle peasants were soon moving out of their flimsy huts and into cottages with stone foundations and room to keep a pig out back.

  In one way, Magnus and I prospered, too. My husband had the best mind for all things combat and weaponry-related in all of Haesting, including Lord Eldred himself, and he found himself in much demand. Our stocks of grain, dried peas and smoked pork almost overflowed with how many of the Angles needed him to instruct their sons on how to wield a sword.

  And myself? I settled, along with my husband, into the knowledge that our lives were what they were. That we were going to live them there, in that place, doing the things we did then, until we either died or some serious catastrophe befell the estate. We had already experienced catastrophe by then – the worst of them all, and twice. It was not that we didn't worry about invaders from the North, or disease – it was that we already knew there was nothing we could do about those threats, so in the meantime there was simply nothing else to do but get on with it.

  To that end – getting on with it – I slowly and not entirely deliberately began to take on a healing role in the community. Many of the Angles had thought me benignly mad for quite some time – I swam in the river they shrank from, I freaked out about cleanliness when they saw no need to wash any but the most visible filth off themselves before they ate, or touched an open wound. But when one of the smiths apprentices burned his arm quite badly, I happened to be nearby at the time, and was unable to stop myself from advising against it when one of the Angle women advised rubbing the burn with a mixture of pig dung and tallow.

  Before I lost my children, I would not have said anything – I would still have considered myself an outsider on some level, a person whose voice perhaps did not deserve to be heard. But after losing Eidyth and my son, I became much bolder. When the worst has happened, and you're still alive, you can sometimes experience a kind of courage arising from the ashes of your own suffering.

  "Do not put dung on it!" I warned loudly, when the smith's apprentice stood whimpering and gasping and one of the Angle women had brought a fresh bucket of – well, of pigshit.

  The small crowd that had formed around the burned apprentice turned towards me when they heard the strident note in my voice.

  "But he's burned,"
one of the women said. "If we don't put the mix on the burn, it will fester and –"

  I stepped forward and grabbed the apprentice higher up on his burned arm, so as not to cause him further pain. And then I told someone to fetch some water that had been boiled, but was now cooled. I was insistent that the water must have been already boiled, too.

  It was the injured boy's luck that no one was in too much of a mood to argue with me that day. Most of them wandered away when I seemed to have it in hand, but some of the women stayed to see what I would do, eying me with open skepticism the whole time.

  The wound did not fester. Not after I insisted it be cleaned only with boiled, cooled water, and then wrapped in linens that had been left to dry in the bright afternoon sunshine. It wasn't possible in that place to achieve truly sterile bandages, but I knew sunshine was a disinfectant from spending time with my grandmother as a small child, and listening to her talk about how they'd done things when she was a girl.

  That incident with the smith's apprentice bought me my first measure of credibility – not as a person, because I already had that with most of the Angles who knew Magnus as a great swordsman and teacher, and knew what we had been through – but as a healer. It gave me, in the minds of the people, a use and wisdom of my own, that wasn't tied to the losses I had suffered or my husband's skills. When the boy's wound, which was deep and nasty, did not fester, and when it had within the week closed up and began to heal, I soon found more people arriving at the low wall that surrounded our courtyard, asking for my help and advice.

  I could not explain germ theory to the Angles – I didn't know the ins and outs of it myself. But I did know that cleanliness was important, and filth should be kept away from all wounds, and all vulnerable people. They knew it themselves, in some ways. They knew that milk had to be consumed when it was fresh, and that to drink it after it had sat out for a day would often lead to sickness. They knew to be careful when they butchered their livestock, to keep the contents of the beast's stomach and bowels from spilling over the meat that was to be consumed. They didn't know the precise reason why consuming old milk or unclean meat made them sick, and they didn't really need to, because the important part was knowing it made them sick. I just needed to extend their concern for clean meat and fresh milk to how they treated wounds and injuries.