“What’s the matter?” Ealstan could hear that something was.
“Now I know… why they’re called… labor pains.” Vanai got the words out in small bunches. This time, when her womb clenched, she really felt it. Maybe the water in there had shielded her from the worst of the squeezes. Nothing was shielding her any more. She’d been looking forward to having the baby. Now, all at once, she wasn’t so sure.
“Pybba won’t get his accounts cast today,” Ealstan said. “I expect he’ll figure out why I’m not there.”
“I expect so,” Vanai agreed-once the pang eased, she could speak freely. She also seemed to have stopped dribbling. She got up off the pot and waddled back to bed. She hadn’t been there long before her womb clamped down again. She grunted. This one was stronger than the last.
“Can I get you anything?” Ealstan asked anxiously.
Vanai shook her head. “I’m going to do this till I’m done,” she said. “I can tell. It’s real now.” She wanted to laugh at herself-she made it sound as if she were going into battle. But the laughter wouldn’t come. Thiswas a battle, and some women didn’t come back from it. She wished she hadn’t thought of that.
To keep from thinking, she got out of bed and started walking. It wasn’t so easy now, not with the pangs coming every few minutes. When the third or fourth one caught her in the middle of a step, she almost fell. That would not be a good thing to do, not now, she told herself. She stood there, waiting for the labor pain to end and her belly to ease back from rock hardness. That seemed to take a very long time. She was gasping by the time it finally happened. Moving slowly and with great care, she walked back to the bed and lay down.
“Are you all right?” Ealstan looked faintly green. But he stayed by the bed and clutched her hand, and she didn’t suppose he could do much more than that.
“I’m as well as I can be,” Vanai answered. “I don’t think I’ll do any more walking, though, thank you all the same.”
Before very long, her womb squeezed in on itself again. The baby didn’t like that, and kicked and wiggled as if in indignation. Because there was very little room in there and the walls of the womb were tight, that hurt, too, where it usually hadn’t before. Vanai hissed, which made Ealstan jump.
When the tension eased, she said, “This is all supposed to happen, I think.” Both of them had read as much as they could about what happened when a baby was born, but the Forthwegian books on the subject told less than Vanai would have liked. Back in Oyngestun, her grandfather had had classical Kaunian gynecological texts in his library, but they might as well have been a mile beyond the moon for all the good they did her now.
And the Kaunians of imperial times had known a lot less about medicine than modern folk did-even the Forthwegians whom the descendants of those Kaunians reckoned barbarians. A lot of what was in Brivibas’ texts was probably wrong.
Ealstan suddenly said, “You look like yourself again, not like a Forthwegian.”
Vanai started to laugh again, only to break off in the middle when another pang hit. She started to say something in spite of the labor pain, only to discover she couldn’t. What her body was doing took charge now, and her mind had to wait till her body gave it leave to work once more. In the time between pains, she said, “That’s the least of my worries.” Sweat ran down her face; her hair, newly re-dyed black, felt wet and matted. She might have been running for hours. People called giving birthlabor for a reason, too.
And it went on and on. The pangs came closer together, and each one seemed a little stronger, a little more painful, than the one just before. After what felt like forever, Vanai asked, “What time is it?”
“Midmorning,” Ealstan answered.
She almost shouted that he had to be lying to her, that it had to be mid-afternoon at the very least. But when she looked at the light through the windows, she realized he was right. In a small voice, she asked, “Would you get me a little wine?”
He frowned. “Should you have it?”
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I don’tthink I’ll puke it up if I drink it, and my mouth is dry as the Zuwayzi desert right now.”
“All right.” Ealstan brought it to her. He also brought in a wide-mouthed basin in case she proved mistaken. But the sweet red wine went down smoothly and stayed down, and she felt better for it. Her mouth no longer seemed caked with dust.
Another eternity that might have been an hour or two dragged by. Ealstan stayed by the side of the bed, squeezing her hand, running a cool, damp cloth over her forehead and neck every so often, occasionally holding up the wine-cup so she could take another sip. She was glad to have him there, gladder than she would have been to have a midwife, even if a midwife knew more.
And then, all at once, she wasn’t. “You-you-youman, you!” she said furiously, in between two pangs that hardly left her room to breathe, let alone talk. “If it weren’t for you and your lousy prick, I wouldn’t be in this mess now.”
Ealstan looked stricken. After a moment, though, his face cleared. “One of the books said that when you started calling me names, it was a sign the baby would come soon,” he told her.
Vanai called him more names then, all the names she could think of, in both Forthwegian and classical Kaunian. She hated to stop when the next labor pang took her, but had very little choice; just breathing through it was quite hard enough. But she resumed when it finally ebbed.
After a few more pangs, she felt the urge to use the pot again, as if her bowels badly needed to move. When she said so-her sudden storm of anger against Ealstan had passed away as fast as it blew up-he answered, “That means you’re ready to push the baby out.”
That wasn’t what it felt like. It felt as if she were straining to pass a stool the size of a football. She’d heard that a couple of times, from women talking back in Oyngestun before the war. She hadn’t imagined it could be true-how could having a baby be so crude? Now she found out for herself.
But, no matter how hard she bore down, the baby didn’t seem to want to move. “I’m trying to shit a boulder,” she panted as Ealstan ran that cloth across her face. “I’m trying to, but it’s stuck.”
“Keep trying,” he said. “It’s what you’re supposed to do.”
She had very little choice. Her body kept straining to force out the baby. It would have kept on doing that whether she wanted it to or not. The most she could do was concentrate, take a deep breath, and try to help it along. She pushed with all her might-and this time felt movement. That made her push harder than ever. She let out a noise half squeal, half groan, and all effort.
“Oh, by the powers above,” Ealstan said softly. “Here comes the head.” He let out a startled squawk. “No-here comes the baby.”
Once Vanai had pushed out the head, everything else was easy. That was the hard part, both figuratively and literally. Shoulders, torso, and legs followed in short order. So did the afterbirth. Ealstan made gulping noises. “You’ll have to throw away these sheets,” Vanai said, before asking the question she should have asked first: “Is it a boy or a girl?”
“A girl,” Ealstan answered. “Here-I’m tying the cord with one hank of dark brown yarn and one of yellow. Now I’m cutting it. Now…” He held up the baby. She started to cry, and quickly went from purple to pink.
“Give her to me,” Vanai said. “Give me Saxburh.” That was the girl’s name-the Forthwegian girl’s name-they’d picked. Vanai also thought of her as Silelai-her own mother’s name. If things in Forthweg ever improved for Kaunians, perhaps the baby could use that name, too.
Ealstan handed her to her mother as if he had in his hands an egg that might burst at any moment. Saxburh had a little hair, incredibly fine. What there was of it was dark. Her eyes were dark blue, but that meant nothing: all babies’ eyes were that color at first. Whether her skin would prove fair or swarthy, whether she’d be lean like a Kaunian or blocky like a Forthwegian- who could say? Too soon for such guesses.
“Here,” Vanai said,
and set the baby on her breast. Saxburh knew what to do; she began sucking right away. That made Vanai’s womb contract painfully. She let out a hiss and began to realize how worn she was. She felt as if she’d been run over by a wagon full of logs.
And then Ealstan had the nerve to say, “Move a little.” But when, after a groan, she did, he swept off the fouled bedclothes and gave her a pair of drawers and a cloth pad of the sort she wore when her courses came. She set Saxburh down for a moment so she could put them on. The baby’s high, thin wail made Vanai pick her up again in a hurry.
As Saxburh went back to nursing, Vanai asked Ealstan, “Could you get me something to eat, please? I feel like I haven’t had anything in years.”
“Of course.” He hurried away and came back with bread and sausage and olives and cheese and two big mugs full of wine. As Vanai fell to like a famished wolf, he raised his mug high. “To our baby!”
“To our baby!” Vanai echoed with her mouth full. After she swallowed, she took a long pull at her own mug. She wanted to bathe. She wanted to sleep for a year. For the time being, she was content to lie there with Saxburh and try to rest.
Major Scoufas looked up from his mug of ale at Colonel Sabrino. “Well, your Excellency, now I know you are truly in bad odor at King Mezentio’s court,” the Yaninan dragonflier said.
Sabrino’s mug held spirits, not ale. He hadn’t got very far down it, though, not yet. “I told you that the day my wing got here,” he replied. “Why do you say you know it now?”
“Because if your superiors cared for you at all, they would have sent you north to try to stem the Unkerlanter tide there,” Scoufas replied. “But no- they have left you here to keep us Yaninans company. And I happen to know they are sending everything they can possibly spare to the north.”
That called for a long pull at the mug of spirits. Sabrino wished he could have contradicted Scoufas. Unfortunately, the Yaninan was right. Sabrino said all he could say: “I am a soldier. I can only go where my orders take me. I can only do what my superiors tell me.”
“I understand that, and the answer does you honor,” Major Scoufas said. “But is it not true that something very like a catastrophe is taking shape for Algarve in the north?” He spoke with a certain avid interest. If Algarve went down to defeat against Unkerlant, Sabrino didn’t see how Yanina could avoid also going down to defeat. That didn’t stop some Yaninans from enjoying Algarve’s misfortune. Having tasted defeat so often themselves, they enjoyed seeing the once-invincible Algarvians learn what the dish tasted like.
“Disaster?” Sabrino shrugged. “I don’t think it’s so bad as that, Major. Sooner or later-probably sooner-Swemmel’s men will run out of soldiers, and we’ll mend the front, the way we’ve done here in the Duchy of Grelz.”
He realized, too late, he should have called it the Kingdom of Grelz. Scoufas raised a dark, elegantly arched eyebrow to show he realized the same thing. Using the Unkerlanter name for the region showed how much ground the Algarvians had lost in the past year.
And he realized he was liable to be talking through his hat when he claimed things would soon get better in the north. The Algarvian army defending that long and vital stretch of front seemed simply to have disappeared. Algarvian reports from the north grew more tight-lipped day by day. Swemmel’s men, by contrast, declared victory after victory and claimed the recapture of town after town. If those claims were lies, the Algarvians might have done a better job of denying them.
Scoufas said, “If you were truly a lucky man, Colonel, or a well-favored one, you might have been sent off to Jelgava and escaped from Unkerlant altogether.”
That held some truth, too, but rather less. Not many Algarvian formations were leaving Unkerlant to fight in the east. Mezentio didn’t have enough men in Unkerlant to hold back Swemmel’s soldiers as things were. The east would just have to take care of itself.
And if it doesn‘t? Sabrino wondered. If it can’t? He finished the spirits at a gulp. Then we‘re in even more trouble than we were before.
He eyed Major Scoufas. “You may not like Algarvians all that well, but I suggest you remember one thing: before the Unkerlanters get into Algarve- if we’re so unlucky as to have that happen-they have to go through Yanina.”
Like most Yaninans, Scoufas had an expressive face. The emotion he expressed wasn’t delight, nor anything close to it. Sabrino smiled. Maybe Scoufas thought he was allowed to snipe at Algarvians but they couldn’t say anything about his kingdom. That wasn’t how things worked, no matter what he thought.
Before either wing commander made the occasion more unpleasant, a Yaninan crystallomancer burst into the peasant hut where they were drinking and spoke rapidly in his own language. Yaninan always put Sabrino in mind of wine pouring out of a jug, glug glug glug. But he didn’t speak it, and had to ask, “What’s he saying?”
“The Unkerlanters seem to be stirring down here after all,” Scoufas replied. “They’re trying to cross the Trusetal River and set up a bridgehead on the east side.”
“Can’t have that.” Sabrino sprang to his feet. “If they get a company over today, it’ll be a brigade tomorrow, complete with behemoths.”
Scoufas dipped his head in the Yaninan equivalent of a nod. “Aye, that is so,” he said. “We may not love each other, but there is nothing like a common foe to point out where our interests lie.”
“True enough,” Sabrino said. “Shall we go pay a call on the common foe and try to make him extinct rather than common?”
“Extinct?” Scoufas frowned; he needed a moment to understand the wordplay, which robbed Sabrino of half his pleasure in it. But then the Yaninan smiled. “Oh, I see. Aye, indeed it would be well if the Unkerlanters were extinct.” They both hurried out of the hut, shouting for their men.
The Yaninan dragon handler with the big black mustache had taken it upon himself to minister to Sabrino’s dragon. He was as good as any Algarvian could have been. His name was Tsaldaris. He had no breeding to speak of; had he come from a notable family, he would have been flying dragons, not handling them. He spoke Algarvian after a fashion: enough to talk about dragons, at least. As Sabrino mounted the screeching, bad-tempered beast, Tsaldaris said, “Careful. Cinnabar-pfuifHe made a disgusted noise and held thumb and forefinger close together to show he’d had little to give the dragon.
“Any hope of getting more any time soon?” Sabrino asked, fastening his harness so the dragon couldn’t pitch him off no matter how much it wanted to.
Tsaldaris tossed his head, as Yaninans did when they meant no. “Supply got unicorn’s prick up arse,” he said, which, Sabrino feared, summed things up altogether too well.
Sabrino waved to Major Scoufas. Scoufas waved back. Sabrino looked to his own men. They were ready. He’d known they would be. And so were the Yaninans. They made perfectly good dragonfliers. Their trouble was, they had not enough dragons and not enough men trained to fly them, especially when facing a foe who came in such great numbers as the Unker-lanters did.
At Sabrino’s nod, Tsaldaris loosed the chain that held his dragon to its stake. Screaming fury at the world, the dragon leaped into the air with a great thunder of wings. Algarvian dragons painted in varying patterns of green and white and red rose with it. So did their Yaninan counterparts, those beasts painted simply red and white. Some carried eggs slung beneath them; others would protect those dragons and do what damage they could with their flames. Sabrino cursed the dearth of cinnabar. “The land of the Ice People,” he muttered. “The Mamming Hills.” Plenty of cinnabar both places. The Algarvians would never get to use any of it, not any more.
Flying west, though, always made him feel better. When he was flying west, he was going on the attack. He’d had too much of the Unkerlanters’ coming to him. He was, he’d always been, a man who wanted to make things happen, not one who sat back and waited for them to happen to him.
He didn’t need long to spot the Unkerlanter bridgehead. Eggs were bursting all around the edges of it. Most of them look
ed to be Unkerlanter eggs-King Swemmel’s soldiers had far more tossers than did the Yaninans facing them, too. And… Sabrino started cursing again, this time in good earnest. The Unkerlanters had thrown a plank bridge across the Trusetal River-their artisans were clever at such things-and were sending behemoths across to the eastern bank.
Sabrino had two crystals with him-one to link him to his own squadron leaders; the other, with somewhat different emanations, to Major Scoufas. He spoke into both of them at the same time: “Those behemoths are our target. If we can slay them and wreck that bridge, the footsoldiers on the ground ought to be able to close out the rest of the Unkerlanters this side of the river.”
Had they been Algarvian soldiers, he would have been sure of it. With Yaninans, one could only hope. However good their dragonfliers were, their footsoldiers had singularly failed to cover themselves with glory. No, plurally, for the Yaninans had failed again and again. But Sabrino couldn’t say that, no matter how true it was, for fear of offending Major Scoufas, who was as touchy as any Yaninan.
The dragons carrying eggs dove on the bridge. The Unkerlanters had heavy sticks mounted nearby to protect it, of course. One dragon-an Algarvian beast-went straight into the Trusetal. Sabrino cursed yet again: one more comrade he would never see again. But eggs burst in large numbers, in the river and on both banks. Then one struck the bridge, square in the center. The burst of sorcerous energy pitched two behemoths into the water and set the bridge afire. Sabrino whooped.
Whooping still, he gave new orders: “Now we attack the behemoths on the east bank of the Trusetal.”
“Cover us, if you would be so kind,” Major Scoufas said. “My men and I will show you what your allies can do.”
Although Sabrino had been about to order his own dragonfliers to swoop down on the Unkerlanter behemoths, he was willing to salve Scoufas’ pride, and so he answered, “Let it be as you say.”
Jaws of Darkness d-5 Page 39
