Just then it moved again, and I shrieked again, for it seemed about to do exactly that. But it did not. The movement quickly abated, making me ashamed of having shrieked. The animal might only have turned about a bit in its snuggery, as if to judge how inextricaby it was held there. I felt renewed wetness between my legs, and thought I had once more soiled myself in my fright. But when I put a hand down there I felt something awfuller than urine. I brought my hand up into my view, and my fingers were webbed with a viscous substance that clung in strings between hand and groin, moistly stretching and sagging and soggily breaking. The substance was wet but not liquid; it was a gray slime, like nose-blown mucus, and it was streaked with blood. I began to curse the Hakim Mimdad and his unholy philter. Not only had he and it given me an ugly woman’s body, and evidently one with defective female parts, there was also something ailing this body and causing a nauseous discharge from those parts.
If my new integument was indeed ill or injured, I thought, I had better not risk standing it up and taking it to look for Chiv. I had better remain lying where I was. So I called for her some more, still without result. I even began calling for Shimon, though I could imagine how the Jew would sneer and snicker, seeing me in a woman’s form. He did not come, either, and now I regretted having paid him in advance for a long stay. Whatever noises or cries he might hear from in here, he would probably take for boisterous lovemaking, and not intrude.
For a long time, I lay supine there, and nothing further happened except that the room got more and more hot, and I got sweatier, and my need to urinate became also a need to defecate. It might have been that the imagined small animal inside me was pressing its weight against my bladder and my bowels and squeezing them intolerably. I had to make a determined effort not to let go, but I did resist, not wanting to spew between my legs and all over the bed. Then suddenly, as if a door had been opened to the thawing snows outside, I was blasted by a chill. The film of sweat on my body became icy, I shook in every limb, my teeth chattered, my skin turned all to gooseflesh, my already prominent nipples stood up like sentries. There was nothing for me to cover myself with; if my discarded clothes were still on the floor, they were out of my sight and reach, and I was afraid to get up and look for them. But then the chill was as suddenly gone again, and the room was as muggy as before and my sweat started out afresh and I panted for breath.
Not having much else to meditate on, I tried to take stock of my feelings. They were numerous and various. I felt a measure of excitement: the philter had worked, at least partway. I felt a measure of anticipation: the philter was bound to do something more, and it might be interesting. But most of my emotions were not at all pleasant. I felt discomfort: my hands kept cramping, and my need to evacuate my bowels was becoming extreme. I felt disgust: there was still a seepage of that puslike stuff from my mihrab. I felt indignation: being put in this situation—and I felt self-pity: being left all alone to endure this situation. I felt guilt: by rights, I should be at the karwansarai, helping my companions pack and prepare to take the trail again, not here indulging my demon curiosity. I felt fear: not really knowing what the philter might have yet in store for me—and I felt apprehension: whatever happened next might be no improvement on what already had.
Then, in one paralyzing instant, all other feelings went away, abolished, demolished by the one feeling that takes precedence over everything else, and that is pain. It was a tearing pain that tore through my lower vitals, and I might have thought I heard the sound of it, like the ripping of sturdy cloth, except that I could hear only my agonized cry. I would have clawed at my betrayer belly, but I was so shaken by the pain that I had to clutch the sides of the swaying hindora to keep from pitching out of it.
In any access of agony, one instinctively tries to move, hoping that some movement might alleviate it, and the only movement I could make was to draw up my legs. That abruptness broke my control of my more intimate muscles, and my urine gushed out in a sudden wet warmth, down and about my buttocks. Instead of quickly abating, the pain made a leisurely departure, merging into an alternation of heat and chill. I jolted as each flush of fever gave way to a clamp of cold and that to heat once more. When those pulses finally, gradually subsided, leaving me awash in sweat and urine, I lay weak and flaccid and gasping as if I had been scourged, and now that I could make words I cried aloud,
“What is happening to me?”
And then I knew. Look: here on this pallet lies a woman, flat on her back, and most of her body is flat, too, only curved and shaped as a woman’s body ought to be, except for that horrendous bulge of distended abdomen. She lies with her legs drawn up and apart, exposing a mihrab that is tight and numb with tension. Something is up in there, inside her. It is what makes the belly big, and it is alive, and she has felt it move in there, and she has felt the first pangs of its wanting to get out of there, and where shall it come out except through that mihrab canal between her legs? This is obviously a woman in advanced pregnancy and about to give birth.
All very well, that lofty and cool and detached view. But I was not any viewer looking on; I was it. The pitiful, slow-writhing object on the pallet, in the absurd posture and semblance of a frog flipped underside up, was
me.
Gèsu Maria Isèpo, I thought—and loosed one hand from gripping the bedside to cross myself—how could the philter have made two beings of me, and put one inside the other? Whatever that was inside me, must I go through the whole process of birthing it? How long does that take? What does one do to help it along? In addition to thinking those things, I was thinking some less repeatable things about the Hakim Mimdad, recommending him to eternity in Hell. That was perhaps unwise of me, for if ever I needed a hakim it was now. The nearest I had ever been to childbirth was the time or two I had seen a pale blue and purple, flayed-looking newborn infant dredged dead from the waters of Venice. I had never been present while even a street cat actually gave birth. The more knowledgeable Venetian boat children had occasionally discussed the subject, but all I could remember was their mention of “labor pains,” and in those I now required no instruction. I knew, too, that women often perished of their childbed travail. Suppose I died in this alien body! No one would even know who I was. I would be buried as a nameless, unclaimed, probably unwed wench who had been killed by her own bastard … .
But I had more immediate concerns than the disposition of my inglorious remains. The tearing pain came again, and it was as rippingly severe as before, but I gritted my teeth and did not cry out, and even tried to examine the pain. It seemed to start deep in my abdomen, somewhere back toward my spine, and to wrench its way around to my front. Then I had a respite in which to breathe again before the pain made a new onslaught. With each succeeding wave, though the pain did not lessen, I seemed a little better able to stand it. So I tried to take a measure of the pains and the intervals between them. Each seizure lasted while I could count slowly to thirty or forty, but when I tried to time the intervening lulls I counted so high that I became confused and lost count.
There were other afflictions contributing to my confusion. Either the room or myself was still alternating between fever and chill, and I was alternately roasted to limpness or frozen to a clench. My belly, somewhere among its other troubles, found room for nausea; I burped and belched repeatedly, and several times had to fight against vomiting. I was still incontinently urinating each time the pain struck, and only by determined muscular contraction not emptying my bowels as well. The spilled urine might have been a caustic; it made my thighs and my groin and my underneath feel raw and chafed and sore. I had developed a maddening thirst, probably because I had sweated and peed out so much of my internal moisture. My hands continued spasmodically to cramp, and now so did my legs, from the ungainly position I kept them in. The contact of the bed against my back was an irritation. In truth, I was hurting everywhere, even at the mouth; it was locked open in such a distorted rictus that my very lips hurt. I could almost be glad when the labor pains rasped through my gut; they were so terribly much worse that they took my mind off the lesser hurts.
I had resigned myself to the realization that my drinking of the philter was not going to bring me any enjoyment. Now, as the endless hours ground on and on, I tried to resign myself to enduring what the philter had brought instead—thirst and nausea and self-pollution and general misery, varied by intermittent jolting pain-either until its power wore off and I was restored to being myself again, or until it besieged me with some new and different miseries.
Which is what it did. When the pains were squeezing out of me no more spurts of urine, I thought my body had finally been emptied of all its fluids. But suddenly I felt my lower self washed by more wetness than I had yet ejected, a flood of wetness, as if someone had upended a pitcher between my legs. It was warm like urine, but when I raised up to look, I could see that the spreading puddle was colorless. I realized also that the water had not come from my bladder, by way of the little female peeing hole, but out of the mihrab canal. I had to suppose that this mess signaled some new and messier stage in the exceedingly messy process of giving birth.
The abdominal pains were now coming at intervals closer together, barely giving me time to get my breath after each onslaught, and to stiffen my preparedness, before the next was upon me. It made me think to myself: perhaps it is your bracing yourself against each pain, and trying to flinch away from it, that makes them hurt so much. Maybe if you bravely met each pain and bore down against it … So I tried that, but “bearing down” in this situation meant exerting the same muscular push as is involved in defecation, and it had the same result. When that particular grinding pain briefly let up again, I discovered that I had extruded onto the bed between my legs a considerable mess of stinking merda. But I was really beyond caring by this time. I merely thought to myself: you already knew that human life ends with merda; now you know that human life also begins in merda.
“Of such is the kingdom of God.” I suddenly recollected having preached that to the slave Nostril, not long ago. “Suffer the little children to come unto me,” I recited, and laughed ruefully.
I did not laugh for long. Though it is hardly believable, things now got even worse. The pains were coming not in waves or pulses, but in fast succession, and each lasting longer, until they became just one constant agony in my belly, unremitting, rising in intensity until I was unashamedly sobbing and whimpering and moaning, and I feared I could not stand it, and I wished mightily for a merciful faint. If someone had leaned over me then and said, “This is nothing. You can hurt worse than this, and you will,” I might, even in that excruciation, have got out another laugh among my sobs. But the someone would have been right.
I felt my mihrab begin to open and stretch, like a mouth yawning, and the lips of it continued to gape wider, until they must have made the orifice a full circle, like a mouth screaming. And, as if that was not torment enough, the entire round of the circle seemed suddenly to have been painted with liquid fire. I put a hand down there, to pat desperately at the blaze. But it felt no burning, only a crumbly something. I brought the hand back to my streaming eyes and saw through my tears that the fingers were smeared with a cheesy, pale green substance. How could that burn so?
And even then, besides the rampaging pain in my belly and the searing fire at the bottom, I could sense other awful things. I could taste the sweat running from my face into my mouth, and the blood from where I had by now gnawed my lips raw. I could hear my grunts and moans and racking gasps. I could smell the stench of my squalidly spilled body wastes. I could feel the creature inside me moving again, and apparently tumbling and kicking and flailing, as it edged its ponderous way through the belly pain toward the blaze below. As it moved, it pressed still more intolerably upon my bladder and bowels in there, and somehow they found more contents to void. And out, through that last extrusion of urine and turds, the creature began to come. And
ah, God!
when God decreed, “In sorrow shalt thou bring forth,” God did make it so. I had known trivial pains in earlier times, and I had known real pain throughout these hours, and I have known other pains since, but I think there must be no pain in all the world like the pain I felt now. I have seen torture done, by men expert in torture, but I think no man is so cruel and inventive and accomplished in pain as God is.
The pain was compounded of two different sorts of pain. One was that of my mihrab flesh tearing, front and back. Take a piece of skin and rip it, ruthlessly but slowly, and try to imagine how that feels to the skin, and then imagine that it is the skin between your own legs, from artichoke to anus. While that was happening to me, and making me scream, the head of the creature inside me was butting its way through the enclosing bones down there, and that made me bellow between my screams. The bones of that place are close together; they must be shoved apart and aside, with a grinding and grating like that of a boulder going implacably through a too narrow cleft of rocks. That is what I felt, and what I felt all at the same time: the sickening movement and pain inside me, the crunching and buckling of all the bones between my legs, the tearing and burning of the outside flesh. And God allows, even in that extremity, only screaming and bellowing; no swooning to get away from the unbearable agony.