by Gregory Ashe
Chapter 59
Ilahe’s heart almost stopped at the thought of Ly out on the street again. Ly had no right to risk herself, not after what Ilahe had gone through to save her.
“Where are they?” Ilahe asked.
Gyune shook her head. Ilahe pushed her way free of the crowded women, ignoring sharp glances, and made her way to her new room. She already had the remaining cam-ad around her neck; she did not even bathe without it, for fear that Ayde might still seek her out. When she had her swords strapped to her back and her belt knife in place, she made her way around the women, glad she could not see Naja’s battered face. The sight of Naja, beaten bloody like that—it made Ilahe’s blood stir, the way it had all those months ago, when she had first escaped.
Esmer stopped Ilahe halfway down the stairs and glanced at the waiting room below, then again at the gathering on the floor above. “Cu will be furious when she finds out they sent Ly,” Esmer said. “She’ll probably throw out whoever sent her in the first place. Just wait here; she’ll take care of it.”
“Where is she?” Ilahe asked. “If they’ve hurt her, I’ll—”
“Calm down,” Esmer said. “This happens more often than you think, and we roll with the punches. Ly will be fine. You start sticking your neck out, and it’ll be just as bad as the first night you snuck in here. Cu’s not going to risk the shrine for you again.”
“Ly will not be fine,” Ilahe said. “She’s ready to deliver that child, and on top of that she’s still recovering from the street harvest.” Without waiting for a response, she started down the stairs.
Two men—almost identical with their thinning blond hair and heavy jowls—stood up eagerly, their eyes running over Ilahe. She glared at them, letting her fear for Ly fuel her anger. One of the men quailed, but the other took a step forward, as though invited. Ilahe shook her head and walked past them without comment. Another night and she might have taken the time to deal with them, but not now. Sick to her stomach, Ilahe opened the front door.
“Stop,” Esmer said. The blonde closed the distance between them and, in a quieter voice, said, “Two streets down, then left. You’ll see a big house, halfway down the block. It’s abandoned, but the eses use it most nights. Tair protect you, Ilahe, if you go out like that, everyone in the city will try to split you open. Cenarbasins are not in favor.”
Ilahe shrugged. “I think I’m going to ruin another of your pretty dresses.”
Esmer let out a nervous laugh and said, “Tair around us, they’re not mine. Just things that other girls have left here. If a dress is all that you ruin tonight, count it a blessing from the tair.”
“Since when have the tair blessed anyone?” Ilahe asked.
Before Esmer could answer, Ilahe left the building. Lanterns hung along the street, spaced far apart, but enough to see. It was early evening; the sun had disappeared below the horizon, but smooth orange and blue-black strata still marked the rim of sky and earth.
People filled the street—corpulent men, sweating in fine wool shirts dyed blue and burgundy; women, their fair hair loose and free, not a decent set of braids among them. Similar to Cenarbasi in so many ways, and yet so different. Ilahe plunged between into the crowd. She could feel their eyes on her back, heard whispers and then raised voices, but no one pursued. Ayde’s proclamations must have been working.
It did not take her long to find the street that Esmer had indicated, and she trotted along, cursing the mass of people that kept her from running. Then she saw the house. The biggest on the street, built of wood like everything else in this blind city. Lights in many of the windows, and from within she could hear laughter and raised voices, even at a distance.
Before she reached the building, though, movement in the next alley caught her eye. Two boys, poking something Ilahe couldn’t make in the darkness with sticks. Running one hand through her braids, remembering, again, the black mourning cloth, Ilahe turned against the current of people and made her way toward the alley. More than once she was jostled and shoved, and calls of ‘bow-blood’ followed her, but no one did anything more. Ilahe barely heard them.
“What are you doing?” Ilahe shouted when she reached the alley. It was a person—a woman, Ilahe could see, from the shape of the body. The boys, their eyes wide with hate and anger, leapt toward her, sticks flashing toward her face.
Surprise held Ilahe for a moment. Then anger returned. Knocking aside the sticks, she stepped toward the boys and grabbed them by the shoulder. They were young—no older than nine or ten years—but they clawed at her forearms and howled like creatures out of a tale. Pain lanced along Ilahe’s arms. Grimacing, she knocked their heads together, and the boys dropped to the ground. Silent, but breathing.
Ilahe shivered; it must have been the spilt blood, to drive them mad like that, but it reminded her that this place, even with all its traffic, was more dangerous than even the most thug-ridden district of Osmir. Here, a merchant’s wife could turn on her neighbor not for coin, but out of the passion of the street harvest. Here, no one was free of the tair’s power. Another shiver. Not even Ilahe herself, though she hated to admit it.
She bent next to the woman and rolled her onto her back. Red and yellow bruises, already darkening to black, had swelled and disfigured the face almost beyond recognition, but the pregnant belly, and her condition, told Ilahe enough. Blood soaked Ly’s sky-blue dress. Most came from the wounds along Ly’s arms, from the street harvest, but with a sinking feeling Ilahe realized that the dress clung to Ly’s legs. Wet, and not with blood.
For a moment, panic buzzed in Ilahe’s mind like a trapped bee. Ly was giving birth. The thought bounced around inside Ilahe, desperate for release. Ly was giving birth.
A baby was coming.
The thought sent fire and ice racing along Ilahe’s arms, goose bumps and terror. She knelt and tried to lift Ly. After a few attempts, she managed to hoist the pregnant woman in her arms and gain her feet; the last time, with the strength of the cam-ad, Ilahe had not felt any strain. Now, she thought she would be lucky to make it a dozen paces.
She stumbled back into the street, shouting as she adjusted Ly’s weight. “Help,” she said. “A midwife, or a bloodletter. Somebody, help!”
Men and women stopped to stare, silence descending on the street. Then screams, shouts for help, for the eses. Ilahe staggered forward, pushing between people without any sense of direction. The crowd scattered like startled birds, as though afraid to be found near her, but Ilahe paid them little attention.
“Someone, please,” she said again, shouting to be heard over the panic of the crowd. “A healer, a midwife. Whatever you call them here. This woman needs help!”
A face bobbed toward her, against the receding tide of people—neatly parted white hair, cloudy green eyes. When he burst free of the last of the crowd, Ilahe recognized him. The surgeon that had attended Ly in the Shrine’s waiting room.
“Help, please,” Ilahe said.
The man grabbed her upper arm—he was shorter than Ilahe, although not by much—and with a gentle tug said, “Quickly, this way. Word will spread.”
Ilahe let herself be led down a side street, and then down another, her arms burning, knees threatening to buckle with every step.
“Faster, faster,” the surgeon said.
“Blind fool,” Ilahe grunted as she struggled to balance Ly. “I’m trying.”
The surgeon urged her on until they reached the back door of a low-roofed building. With a quick glance up and down the alley, the surgeon produced a set of keys and let them inside.
“Set her on the table,” he instructed.
The room was dark, but Ilahe could make out the edge of a table in the light from the street, and she took two heavy steps toward it and set Ly down. With a whimper, Ilahe freed her aching arms from underneath the pregnant woman and retreated a step.
Light bloomed, and the surgeon held up a candle. He moved about the room, lighting lamps on tall stands, and Ilahe glanced around her in s
urprise. Aside from a cupboard against the far wall and the heavy table, there was little of note in the surgeon’s workshop. A tray of sharp knives was the only mark of his trade, although Ilahe could smell something pungent and earthy—medicinal, in its way—in the air.
“Sehla,” the surgeon shouted, his voice echoing in the small room.
Ly stirred, but her eyes did not open. Ilahe took one of the woman’s hands, sticky with blood, and squeezed it, but Ly remained still.
“Sehla!”
A moment later the far door opened and a gray-haired woman, her eyes and mouth webbed with lines, entered.
“What’s this, then?” she asked.
“Pregnant and cut up,” the surgeon said. “See how far along she is with the birth while I sew these cuts again; no point helping the child if the mother bleeds out.”
The air in the room, thick and woodsy, pressed in on Ilahe. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. Her heartbeat pounded in the tips of her fingers, but all she could feel was the sticky pressure of drying blood.
“You know your way around a cutter’s room?” the surgeon asked.
Ilahe shook her head.
“To the front room, then,” he said. “Boil some water. You’ll find a pot in the kitchen, wood near the fireplace. Lots of water, mind you.”
Ilahe nodded. She tried not to run to the door, but it felt like the heavy air forced her out, and the thought of Ly giving birth made Ilahe’s heart pound so that black specks danced in front of her eyes.
A short hallway met her on the other side of the door, and Ilahe leaned up against one wall, breathing in air that smelled only of wood smoke and old onions. Slow, deep breaths. Wood smoke and onions. Real things. Things that didn’t mean life or death.
A low cry that rose to a scream broke through the thin door and into the hallway.
Tears in her eyes, Ilahe stumbled through the house, collecting a pot from the tidy kitchen, water from the rain barrel, and then set to work building a fire. Ly’s screams were irregular, punctuated by long silences that stole Ilahe’s breath until she thought she would faint. It should have been some comfort that the girl was awake and screaming, that the birth had begun in earnest, but somehow it only made things worse. The birth brought back Ilahe’s own fears of having a child, the terror of the imagined pain of delivering a new life into the world.
After her hundredth try to strike sparks with shaking hands, Ilahe got the fire to catch, and she built it up haphazardly, her mind tracing the screams out into the distance, becoming lost in the protracted quiet, and then pulled back again by a new cry of pain. The fire grew, though, and the water boiled. With a thick rag, she removed the pot from the fire and gave it to Sehla. The old woman, even with her thin arms, lifted the pot effortlessly with bloody hands and made her way back to the surgeon’s room. Not a word had been spoken.
The birth seemed to drag out into eternity, as though the sun would not rise until the child drew breath, as though night and day had no meaning any more. Ilahe boiled more water and paced, her fears like a flame that devoured any rational thought. Her mind retreated, again and again, to the feel of life within her, and then to the cold of the blade between her legs. Life and death, all of it taken from her by a man’s hand. And then a scream would sound and shatter her anger into more fear.
Midnight had come, perhaps, or some unknown hour lit only by distant stars and the cold moon. No welcome radiance from the solars to celebrate the child’s birth, to augur his or her destiny—successes and failures, joys and sorrows. A heaven empty of gods or meaning, that threatened to devour the earth beneath it. A child cried in the other room—weak at first, then louder.
Ilahe started from the wooden chair, pacing back and forth to the door of the surgeon’s room, but not daring to open it. The cry continued, then eased, then ended. The silence was worse than Ly’s screams, than the child’s cries. Had it died? Some children did not have enough of the solars’ spark to live long; had it gone even more quickly than it had come?
The door opened, and Sehla, hands now clean, emerged with a bundle of blankets in her arms. The old woman stopped in front of Ilahe and, with a wordless gaze, held out her arms.
Unthinking—or perhaps, with thoughts from all those months ago, when Ilahe had dreamed a time like this—Ilahe stretched out her arms and took the bundle. A pink, wrinkled face stared up at her, the lids of milky-blue eyes half-closed, a few tufts of damp blond hair appearing from under the cloth.
Tears dropped from Ilahe’s eyes, heavier than memory. This time the gods, or the empty heavens, or whatever force ruled the world, had brought life. Not death.
Life.