Wildfire (33 page)

 
  

 

  
I saw the king’s golden armor ride to war with no one in it. People spoke to this armor as if it were the king, and the armor wielded a sword as well as the king and rode as well as the king, and went on the battlefield where men most needed to see their king. A horse was killed under it and the armor fought on foot. But after the battle was won, the armor clattered apart on the ground, cuirass here, greaves there, mail hauberk all in a heap. No one in it. Died of wounds, they said. A proper death for a king, better than the shiver-and-shake.

 
  

 

  
I saw Malleus. I saw a woman lift a small boy onto a low stone parapet around a flat roof and point to the plains below, where armies fought. I understood why Prince Corvus came forth to do battle rather than forcing us to pry him out by siege. The city had no walls, save at its very center, the ancient heart of it. Buildings covered the slopes beyond the wall as if a jar had overturned and spilled them everywhere. Malleus was as beautiful as the songs had promised, with white walls and gilded domes and spires. And she was as lush, ripe, and easy to take as a whore.

 

  
The woman brushed a fly from her boy’s face. He had rolls of fat at his wrists and neck. His skin was brown and his hair bleached the color of wheat straw. The woman wore red gauze and a wide-brimmed hat. She pointed to the golden armor on the field below and the boy squealed. An incensier shrub, green and fragrant even in winter, grew in a blue pot. The woman’s face was pockmarked, but the city, she was fair.

 
  

 

  
I saw and heard Mai. Sunup was helping her sit on the pisspot. Mai grimaced. When she was done she settled back on her nest of sacks, breathing hard. Tobe whimpered in his sleep.

 

  
And in the tent just over there, a sheath I knew was sleeping, and I was almost caught by the fever dreams that flickered around her as she burned.

 

  
In a wintry wood a black-haired man was running, pursued by wolves. All this I saw quick as a bird darts from one branch to another.

 
  

 

  
The dead were impatient, they called me away. They filled me with dread, those councilors. When Sire Rodela and I summoned them, we awakened what should have remained dormant: pride, ambition, jealousy, fear, anger, and longing. Now the shades yearned to be clothed in flesh again and to thrust themselves into other flesh, to couple and fight, for coupling and fighting were two sides of an overweening desire: to see their descendants ascendant. They wanted the Crux to be king. If not him, his kin, their kin, blood of their Blood.

 

  
Where I sought wisdom, I found low cunning. Rodela reveled in it, hard and swollen under my skin. He had died childless, and now he wanted to father himself on the world. He pulled me to my feet and shouted.

 

  
Kings used to be chosen by the consent of the Firsts of the clans, but for four generations—far too long—the clan of Prey had passed the kingship down in succession. It was time to return to the old ways.

 

  
A king should be foremost of the Firsts, the best of them all. But sometimes it was better not to choose the best. A strong man like the Crux had too many enemies, both men and gods; a weak man offended no one. Find such a man, and no one would want him, but everyone would consent to him for fear of worse. Make such a man a king, bend him to your purposes, and when the time came, break him. Such was their counsel, and Rodela was their messenger.

 

  
He was strong, but I was stronger. I subdued him without the help of the Summoner, driving him down with his song, dancing him to exhaustion. I scratched my face with my fingernails, and when that didn’t quench his thirst, I opened my scalp with a knife.

 

  
Yet I feared I would never be rid of Rodela now. He was part of me, not his shade entire, but a revenant of a revenant—the part of him I’d tried to murder—his fearful and fearsome rages, his urge for dominion. By taking these into myself, I paid my debt to him, allowing his shade to journey on unburdened.

 

  
We spun and spun until I fell again, and I hammered with my heels and rolled my head against the carpet, and there was a hard bit between my teeth and the taste of iron on my tongue. My eyes were clotted with tears. I stiffened and arched and bucked against the hands that held me down.

 

  
“Take her away,” the Crux said, and the impassive masks looked down on me.

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

  
  
  
CHAPTER 13
  

  
Travail
  
  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  
S
ire Rodela lingered, soiling my tongue and buzzing in the small bones of my ears. He filled me with an unaccountable urge to laugh when I should not laugh. Sire Galan wiped drool from my mouth, and held me up as I wobbled like a drunkard. He did this without tenderness or cruelty. It would have been easy to be cruel. Yet I wanted to laugh at his disgust and surely it would have been more fitting to cry. He left me in his tent and I washed the blood from my face. I was glad when the mirth faded—such an ugly thing, delighting in detesting. But with Rodela gone, so was his triumph and his strength.

 

  
I remembered what I’d seen. I wasn’t sure of everything I’d said and done.

 
  

 

  
I’d left Mai that afternoon and now the long winter evening had begun. I heard loud talk and laughter as I came near her canopied oxcart, and I wondered if I’d arrived too late and she’d delivered her child without any help from me. But no, visitors had come to speed the time of travail: some whores of our acquaintance, Yarrow, Corona, and Gladwin, were squeezed into the cart with Mai and the children. They’d brought gifts of food and ale, as I should have done. The raisin cakes were all gone, save two for the midwife.

 

  
Mai said, “Come in! We can always fit one more straw in the broom.” Everyone shifted around so that I could sit next to Mai. Her bodice was unlaced and her breasts sprawled on either side of her belly, showing through the thin gauze of the underdress. When a pang came she barely winced. But her face was flushed and her forehead bedewed with sweat. Her head was bare and tendrils of brown hair clung to her neck. She fanned herself with her headcloth.

 

  
Corona passed me a chicken leg and I discovered how hungry I was. I couldn’t recall when I’d last eaten. All I remembered of the past few days and nights was the shiver-and-shake and how Galan had set his face against
me. And I remembered the dead, who even now thronged around us in the crowded oxcart, trying to warm themselves by the hearthfires of the living: Mole and the laundress and Penna and warriors in masks. My skin prickled and I wanted to weep, but someone had made a jest. Too many people were talking at once and I couldn’t disentangle the words.

 

  
I crammed bread into my mouth and washed it down with ale, and listened to the women trading stories of difficult travails and rumors about the battle to come. And before long I felt myself more in the company of the living than the dead, and when everyone laughed I laughed too, no matter how lewd the jest. A lantern with small panes of glass bobbed as the oxcart shook in the commotion, and light slid over our faces. Sunup kept her eyes on her embroidery, but I’m sure she was listening. Tobe slept through it all, leaning on her, breathing with his mouth open, making a small whuffling sound.

 

  
I was beginning to think Mai had enough company, and I should go where I was needed, amongst those suffering from the shiver-and-shake. I should look in on the priestess of Hazard, and Jillybell’s daughter. But then Mai said the throes were nothing much, but her back felt like a harrow was being dragged over it. She made a jape of it, but I could see she was in earnest. I got behind her and rubbed hard with the heel of my cold hand.

 

  
Before long the midwife hailed us from outside the cart. She climbed in and Mai greeted her respectfully and kissed her hand. “I didn’t expect you yet,” Mai said. “I didn’t want to bother you—the throes are still far apart. Did Sire Torosus send for you?”

 

  
Midwife smiled. “My grandmother’s shade tugged on my ear and told me it was time. She never fails to give warning.”

 

  
The midwife was named Coralbell, and she was the mistress of a brothel. I’d heard it said she became a midwife because too many of her whores had died bearing children or trying to be rid of them. In both her callings she was a servant of Carnal Desire, and Desire had favored her with fortune. She was prosperous enough to have two guards to escort her and wait outside the cart. She wore a quantity of gold, chains and pendants and bangles and a girdle of enameled plaques over a magenta sash. Her skin was tawny, and covered with golden hairs so fine they couldn’t be seen until she was close enough to touch. I expected her to make more of a fuss when she arrived, but she seemed content to sit and gossip, and keep a watchful eye on Mai when the throes came.

 

  
Mai asked, “Any word of the king’s health?”

 

  
Midwife said, “He showed himself before his tent, dressed in armor. He leaned on his armiger, but he stood on his own two feet, they say, and the crowd raised such a cheer! I’m surprised you didn’t hear it.”

 

  
“I’ve been busy,” Mai said.

 

  
“We march tomorrow,” Midwife said. “So don’t dally, my dear.”

 

  
The king alive! It made me feel safe, the battle good as won. Why had I been so foolish as to trust my cloudy right eye and the dreams I’d seen with it? True foretellings are a gift of Foresight; she is the least capricious avatar of the god Lynx, more trustworthy than Sleep and Mischief, but still she may mislead. I prayed I had been misled in dreaming that the king died—let all the visions be false, no matter if Galan and the Crux thought me a charlatan in consequence. All visions but one: I had dreamed we won the battle. That much I prayed was true.

 

  
I said, “So—are the pontificators, the contakators done talking? How soon is the baffle?”

 

  
Midwife looked at me in surprise, as if I ought to know. “The day after tomorrow.”

 
  

 

  
By and by the midwife let Mai’s visitors know it was time to leave—such a gentle hint, they didn’t know they were being herded. In the same quiet way, she let me know I was welcome to stay. She took off her bangles and set about arranging things to her liking, taking cloth and string and pots and packets of herbs from a painted goatskin satchel, moving with a precise grace that was soothing to watch. Her hands were small and deft, and on the little finger of her right hand she had a sharp curved nail.

 

  
She unwrapped a wooden statue of Carnal Desire, an old crude carving polished by the touch of many hands seeking blessings. This Desire was fat, as always, but she was also heavy with child and heavy with presence. Midwife propped the statue in a corner of the cart and anointed it with lavender oil. Mai reached out to stroke Desire’s belly. Her fingertips came away smeared with oil and she rubbed it on her upper lip and inhaled deeply.

 

  
“Well, Mai,” Midwife said, “I’d like to see you eat something, keep your strength up.”

 

  
“I’m not hungry.”

 

  
“Drink this.” She handed Mai a wineskin.

 

  
“What’s in it?”

 

  
Midwife laughed. “Something that will do you good, so drink! Have you had the bloody show?”

 

  
Mai nodded and took a drink and made a face. “Can’t you give me something stronger than raspberry leaf tea?”

 

  
“Your water hasn’t broken?” the midwife said.

 

  
“Mouse is teasing me,” Mai said, with her hands on her belly. “I had a few pains yesterday. But whenever I began to think I should send for you, they stopped. Is something wrong?”

 

  
“Mouse?”

 

  
“The boy.”

 

  
“It’s a boy, is it? Lie down and I’ll give you a rub.”

 

  
“It hurts worse on my back.”

 

  
“All the same,” Midwife said. “I want to see which way the babe lies.”

 

  
The cart wasn’t much longer than Mai was tall, and she took up a good portion of it both length and breadth. I sat cross-legged so she could rest her head on my lap. “Your legs are too bony,” she said, smiling at me upside down.

 

  
Mai pulled up her skirts to bare her belly. The flesh of her thighs was soft and dimpled, floury smooth like the dough of the Blood’s fine bread when it has been set to rise, but the huge dome of her belly was solid and taut, as if Mai had swallowed an enormous egg. She bore a slymark, a dark line down the middle of her belly to her cleft, which curved slightly around her protruding navel as if the unborn child had stretched it out of true. The midwife rubbed Mai’s belly in circles with scented oil until it glistened, and I thought: it isn’t an egg she has swallowed, it’s the Moon!

 

  
Sunup watched. She’d set her embroidery aside so Tobe could lay his head in her lap. I wondered if she’d seen her mother in travail before. She sat still, but her hands were restless, winding Tobe’s black hair around her fingers.

 

  
Midwife sat back on her heels and said to Mai, “The babe lies crosswise.”

 

  
“You mean bum first? I should have known Mouse would be backward.”

 

  
“No, dear. He lies crosswise, like a bar across a door. See? His head is here,” and she put Mai’s left hand flat on that side of her belly, “and here are his buttocks. Can you feel him? That’s why your throes don’t march along as they should, but dawdle like a foot soldier.” The midwife’s voice was calm, but one side of her mouth drooped as if she didn’t have full command of her expression.

 

  
I put my warm hand next to Mai’s, over Mouse’s head, and my cold hand over his breech. Mouse stirred under the soft blanket of Mai’s flesh. I felt her womb tense and harden, and I looked to her face and saw how her thoughts turned inward and away from us.