by Hugh Cook
'Where are you going?’
'I'll be on the beach if you want me.’
'Come and help me dig.’
'I'm going to dig my own hole. In the lake. I'll dig down into the water so I can find some fish. I bet I find something before you do, Yen Olass.’
But before going down to the lake, Resbit had to go and have a good look at the five bodies swinging from the gallows. Flies buzzed away as she approached. She looked at them for some time, glutting her curiosity. They were really dead. Once they had been up and about, walking the world on their hind legs, eating fish and sticking their things into dogs and women, and now they were entirely finished with all that. Their faces were opening, revealing the bones. It was hard to say what they had looked like.
With one shy, hesitant hand, Resbit reached out and gave one of the men a tiny push, shoving at one of his boots. He swung from the gallows. The rope holding him creaked faintly, Resbit stepped back, in case the rope broke and dropped the man down into her arms.
She shuddered.
She had seen enough.
Yen Olass was still grubbing in the earth, grunting and swearing. She did have a temper when she was roused. Vaguely, Resbit remembered her Rovac warrior, Elkor Alish. He used to have a temper, and had showed it on the rare occasions when she had dared to cross him. She remembered his cold fury, and the way he had bruised her face once, knocking her backwards so that she ended up on the floor. Yet, other times he had been kind. It was his child she was carrying, and she did not regret it.
Slowly, Resbit made her way down to the beach, avoiding the pit in the middle of the track. The Melski were already a long way down the beach, tiny figures diminishing in the distance. Resbit took off her boots. Her socks stank. They were going into holes. If she could get material, she would make footbindings like those Yen Olass used. But there was not much chance of that.
Resbit wiggled her toes. They felt happy to be out in the warm sunshine. It was a good day for naked toes. And naked bodies, maybe. Slowly, Resbit stripped off her clothes. She stood there naked on the beach, with the freefalling sunlight caressing her skin. Lightly, she touched her nipples, her breasts, her stomach, her flanks. Thinking of her child shaping within her darkness, she smiled. She looked out across the lake, out across a shimmering immensity of water.
She felt incredibly free without her clothes. And without .. . without fear. It was a new and delightful sensation to be able to act without being constrained by conventions which specified slander, calumny and rape as the punishment for so many acts of selfhood which a woman might wish to undertake.
Resbit walked down to the water's edge. The beach was made of small stones and the shells of fresh-water shellfish. The most recent shells were a pale blue; the older ones were bleached white, and had sometimes splintered to a crackle. Resbit waded out into the lake until the water infiltrated the fuzz of fur at her crotch. Half water, half sky, she stood there, suddenly exhilarated. She felt as if all the trials of her life were justified by this one perfect moment. And she thought:
-- It is enough.
Gathering a breath into her lungs, she dived. Limpid shadows floated below her as the impetus of her body was damped down by the water. Finally she hung motionless, gazing down at the underwater world below her.
First lifting her head to take in air, she swum downward, then turned a slow, lazy somersault underwater. She blew out air, watched it globe into bubbles, then chased them to the surface. She was a perfectly fluid, fluent animal, free from the constraints of gravity.
Her hair misted in front of her face. Which reminded her of when she had last washed it -- about half a year ago. Standing in the shallows, she rubbed her hair vigorously, scratching at her scalp. Then she attended to the rest of her body. The water round about her grew dark with a spreading stain; she felt immensely invigorated and refreshed.
She lay down in the water and floated on her back, kicking gently with her feet. She propelled herself round in huge, leisurely circles till she grew tired, and made her way to the shore. There she spread her coat on the beach and laid her body down on that battered luxury, and went to sleep.
Resbit was awakened when someone kissed her buttocks. Opening her eyes, she craned her neck and saw it was Yen Olass. Who now came and sat down by her head. Resbit propped her chin on her hands, her elbows braced against her coat, and studied Yen Olass, liking the strength she saw there. Having cleaned her own body rigorously, she was aware that Yen Olass stank of sweat, grease, earth, blood, rancid fat and earwax. She did not find this unduly offensive, but even so:
'You need a bath,' said Resbit lazily.
'Later,' said Yen Olass. 'When we've finished digging.’
'We? Dearest heart, if you want to grub away with the beetles, that's your business, not mine.’
Yen Olass flicked something into the air. It nickered into the sunlight then fell with a plop just in front of Resbit. It was a golden coin.
'You told me to call you if I struck gold.’
Resbit reached out for the coin and bit at it. The metal refused to yield to her teeth.
'Yen Olass, this isn't gold. It's flash of some sort, that's all.’
'Flash?
'Pretty metal. Besides, what're you going to spend it on?’
'Don't be like that. Come and help me dig.' 'Yen Olass, I'm all clean.’
Saying that was a mistake, for the next moment Yen Olass was dumping handfuls of stone and shell onto Resbit's back, then following it with grit she found deeper down. Resbit surrendered, dived into the lake briefly to clean her body, then followed Yen Olass back to the clearing. She walked naked, her bare feet leaving damp prints in the earth, and picking up a brown coating. By the time she reached the clearing, she was beginning to dry out; she unrolled the clothes she had been carrying, and put them on, feeling how coarse and dirty they felt. Everything would have to be washed.
Yen Olass, working with furious energy, had excavated a considerable hole. Looking down into it, Resbit saw the mouth of a leather bag. It was full of coins. She admitted to a little bit of rising excitement, but:
'I still don't see what we can spend the money on.’
'Goose,' said Yen Olass, T don't want money. Think some. The pirates didn't drag treasure all the way over the Razorwind Pass just to bury it here. They found it here. They took it from the Galish. So . . . this is just the beginning.’
Yen Olass was right. By evening, they had uncovered enough to know that the pirates had buried a considerable amount of Galish loot. There were tools, weapons, bolts of cloth, jars of olive oil, sacks of rice, plates of keflo shell and leather bottles full of wine.
Resbit and Yen Olass got drunk that night, celebrating. The next day, they were far too sick to do any digging, but they guessed their cornucopia held everything they needed. A few more days of excavation proved this supposition correct. Yen Olass thought this just as well, for she grew more and more certain that she was pregnant.
'You will bear Khmar's son,' said Resbit, with a hint of something close to reverence in her voice. 'The son of an emperor!’
'Khmar belonged to a different world,' said Yen Olass firmly. T will bear the child of my own body. A child born to Penvash -- to a land without emperors and kings.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Resbit and Yen Olass built a house by the lakeside. They put up a woodshed and a storehouse. They designed and built traps for rats, not to secure skins for making clothes, but to protect their store of food. They were rich, and did not hesitate to deny their wealth to the bushrats of Penvash.
The days eased out into a long, leisurely rhythm, unlike anything they had ever before experienced. Rising with the dawn chorus of forest birds, they hauled in longlines from the lake, then gutted and scaled fresh fish which they cooked for breakfast.
With breakfast over, they tidied the house, checked the rat traps, disposed of any vermin, then made the rounds of the bird snares, pits and deadfalls which they had built in the forest. O
n these long, cool walks through the early morning forest, they were silent, feeling no need to speak.
Later in the morning, they worked on House Two. Unlike their present shack of sticks and branches, this was to be a proper log house with a fireplace and chimney, so they could winter over by the lake without suffering undue hardship.
In the afternoon, when the forest was suffused with lazy heat, they went swimming, and afterwards generally slept for an hour or two on the beach. Each evening, they massaged each other with a little warm olive oil, and made love to each other tenderly, teaching each other their own pleasures.
When they caught a sow and a piglet in one of their traps, they killed the sow but kept the piglet; Resbit planned to teach it how to hunt truffles. By the time the full heat of summer was upon them, House Two was finished, and they moved into it, leaving House One to the pig, who now carried the name Pelaki; however, Pelaki, by now thoroughly socialized, refused to be excluded from their company, so House One became the exclusive preserve of spiders and woodlice.
With housebuilding over, the days were slow, lazy, idle. They studied their own bodies, observing the changes. Flesh slowly thickening, casting a heavier shadow. A leisured, inescapable uneasiness surfaced in dreams which sometimes became nightmares. They were both aware, though they did not speak of it, that they were very much on their own, with nobody to help them if anything went wrong. And so many things can go wrong.
Then Yen Olass had a nightmare. First she was trapped in the darkness, with jaws locked tight around her. She knew where she was: inside the metal flower in the strange castle in the Valley of Forgotten Dreams. Voices spoke. Silken light smoked from her hands. Knots of time unravelled. She plucked a flower from an underwater branch, inserting it into her womb.
And then--
'Don't be scared,' said Lefrey.
But the voices hurt her. Lacerating pain struck through her pelvis. Fetid breath grinned down at her, crushing her body beneath groping weight. She saw a Collosnon soldier, a ceramic amulet gleaming at his throat, hacking away her mother's breasts. The voices swore, ripped away her fingernails.
Then General Chonjara was pulling her child out. His fingers were made of splintered wood. The child was jammed. He tugged. It ripped its way out. Its head was a wedge of steel. A spear blade. Slashed open, she stared aghast at the white gash-wound flesh into which blood suddenly welled, and suddenly--
The pain struck home.
Waking with a scream which startled Pelaki and shocked Resbit into instant wakefulness, Yen Olass started to cry. She sobbed helplessly while Resbit comforted her. She was convinced that the dream was a warning. She was convinced that the child in her womb was damaged. A monster. Or a dead thing, swelling there like a fungus. A bag of blood.
Resbit held her and kissed her, soothed her and stroked her. Pelaki snuffled into her armpit. And, eventually, her fears eased by this comfort, Yen Olass slept again.
But now the two women did talk, sharing their fears and pooling what knowledge they had. Yen Olass found Resbit knew much more than she did. Yen Olass had always distanced herself from women things, hating the life of the Woman Sanctuary which stank of servitude, and, in some secret part of her heart, despising herself for being a woman -- and, in a much less secret part of her heart, despising the sewn and mutilated body which had marked her as a slave. She had never cared to follow gossip about distant concerns such as pregnancy and childbirth. But Resbit was well versed in both subjects.
There were more nightmares after that, but, talking through her fears with Resbit, Yen Olass found the courage to face them, even if she could not entirely subdue them. She could not forget how the metal flower had killed the pirate Toyd, turning him loose with his skull ready to melt into liquid and a sick wet embryonic growth forcing out from between his ribs in a vicious parody of pregnancy.
Resbit, for her part, had her own worries, though these were less severe. She wished she had the help of an experienced midwife who would know how to cope if the baby was born buttocks-first, or if the cord started to strangle the baby as it was born, or if the afterbirth failed to follow the child, or if she started to bleed afterwards .. . she had heard that eating the afterbirth would, in an emergency, help stop bleeding, but she did not know if that was true. Besides, she had seen two births, and was of the opinion that an afterbirth was hardly the most attractive thing in the world, and surely only marginally edible.
In fact, in an emergency, eating a chunk of the raw afterbirth will tend to stop bleeding; many animals eat the afterbirth as a matter of course, gaining the benefit of its food value and the chemical intelligence it carries. But Resbit had no way to confirm this. So she discussed it with Yen Olass, and they argued it out.
'It's not meant to be eaten,' said Yen Olass. 'It's meant to be kept all in one piece so people can look at it. That's very important. Even I know that.’
'That's only so the wise woman can look at it to see that it's all come out,' said Resbit. 'If you get a piece left stuck inside, you can die. But there won't be any wise woman here.’
They decided that, in the absence of anyone to tell them otherwise, they would eat the afterbirth if they found themselves bleeding to death, on the principle that if they were going to die anyway it could hardly do any harm.
'And otherwise,' said Yen Olass, scratching Pelaki behind the ear, 'our best friend here can have it.’
'No!' said Resbit, truly shocked. 'That's a barbarous thing so say.’
'Then I'm a barbarian,' said Yen Olass complacently.
'Well you feed the pig as you see fit,' said Resbit, 'but it's not getting part of me to eat.’
Yen Olass laughed at her dismay, then kissed Pelaki on the snout. She, for her part, had no intention of disappointing the pig.
Talking over the details of the two births Resbit had seen, the two women prepared themselves for their own deliveries. Resbit by now was five months gone; she could feel her child kicking inside her body. Her rate of weight-gain was increasing. Her breasts had enlarged, and were tender; the colour of her nipples and areola deepened. A streak of pigmentation appeared, running from her navel to her crotch; it widened to a fat, dark band. She did not know if that was normal or not.
Yen Olass, with some sixty days to go before she reached the same stage, followed these changes with interest. As an oracle, living amongst virginal women, soldiers and administrators, she had scarcely ever seen a pregnant woman, not even in the crowded streets. Yet, in Gendormargensis alone, there must have been thousands of pregnant women. Otherwise, where would all the children have come from? But they had all been hidden away somewhere ... doubtless confined to their homes while their mothers and daughters performed whatever tasks demanded a venture out into the markets and thoroughfares.
The summer heat reached its blistering peak. The air became febrile with biting insects. Retreat to the lake became a necessity; they wallowed in the water for hours, and were thankful for the evenings when the bloated sun finally sank behind the hills in the west. Ringed by hills, Lake Armansis was sheltered from the sea winds which, in the south, invaded Estar, sometimes bringing cold and rain even at the height of summer.
Sometimes, as Resbit floated in the lake, Yen Olass watched Resbit's child kicking within her belly. And, as autumn drew near, that same child took to kicking her during the night, when she was curled up with Resbit.
The approach of autumn brought also the approach of the last stages of Resbit's pregnancy. That autumn, her wrists and ankles swelled. There were little room left in her body for her bladder; with its diminished capacity, she had to urinate frequently. She draped her body with loose clothing worked up from cloth and wool which had once belonged to the Galish. She experienced moments of triumph, times of anxiety and one or two moments of terror and outright horror. Yen Olass supported her without fail through all these vicissitudes.
As Resbit entered the last stages of her pregnancy, her vaginal tissues softened in preparation for the advent of her ch
ild. She found an ooze of colostrum on her nipples; her vaginal lubrication increased; membranes swelled in her nose. Heavy and swollen, she waddled down to the lake each day to swim in its steadily cooling waters. Then, toward the end, she started to feel more comfortable; she found she had more energy to spare. But Yen Olass, growing increasingly nervous about Resbit's health, insisted that she take life easy and get plenty of rest.
Then it happened.
Yen Olass was woken one cool autumn night by a piercing squeal.
'What've you done to Pelaki?' said Yen Olass, jolted out of dreams by that ear-splitting sound.
'Pelaki got clouted on the nose,' said Resbit, her voice shaky. 'Too curious, that's the trouble. Yen Olass, the pains have started.’
'All right,' said Yen Olass.
She raked over the ashes of the fires, found some hot coals and started a small blaze. Pelaki crouched in a corner, obviously frightened.
'Put the pig out,' said Resbit.
