The Bastard King

by Harry Turtledove

  Sosia finished, This was a fine idea of yours, Father. I wish you had thought of it years ago. I have never seen Ortalis as cheerful as he is these days. May it last. And may I have this baby soon! The next time you hear from me, I think you will be a grandfather. With love—She signed her name.

  After reading through the letter again, Grus slowly nodded. It wasn’t the news he’d wanted to hear, but it was good news all the same.

  Bronze had just had another pair of kittens. Again, one was male, the other female. That didn’t prove moncats always did things so, but made it seem more likely to Lanius. As had Spider and Snitch, the new babies clung to their mother’s fur with all four hands and wrapped their tails around her for whatever extra help those could give. He wondered what to name the new ones.

  He just watched her. That she accepted, warily.

  Someone knocked on the door. “Who’s there?” Lanius asked, doing his best to stifle his annoyance at being disturbed here.

  “Me, Your Majesty,” Bubulcus replied.

  Now Lanius snarled much as a moncat would have done. “Don’t come in,” he told the servant who’d let Iron get loose in the palace corridors. “Just tell me what you want.”

  “Believe me, Your Majesty, I wasn’t going to come in,” Bubulcus said with such dignity as he could muster. “Not me. Not again. But you have to know, sir—the lady your wife’s been brought to her bed.”

  “Oh!” Lanius said. Baby moncats were one thing—important, yes, but … Next to his own firstborn, they were only little animals, after all. “I’m coming.”

  Bronze didn’t seem the least bit sorry to see him go. Even so, he made sure he closed and barred the door behind him when he left. Now that she was a mother again, the female moncat wouldn’t be quite so agile as usual, but he didn’t want her getting away anyhow. If she escaped, she could still find places to go from which no mere human could easily retrieve her.

  Lanius hurried through the palace to the birthing chamber. He’d been born there himself. Since then, the room had been used to store this, that, and the other thing … till Sosia realized she was going to have a baby. Then the servants quietly took away crates and barrels and sacks and got the chamber ready for its most important function.

  A couple of serving women stood outside the doorway now. “You know you can’t go in there, Your Majesty,” one of them said. “It isn’t customary.” She’d never had the chance to tell the King of Avornis what he could and couldn’t do before. It isn’t customary, though, said everything that needed saying.

  “Yes, I know that,” Lanius said. Ever since his wife got pregnant, people had been telling him what was and wasn’t customary. He raised his voice and called, “Are you all right, Sosia?”

  “It’s not too bad so far,” Sosia answered. “My waters broke—that’s what they call it—and they brought me in here to …” She paused. After half a minute or so, she went on, “That was a pang. It wasn’t much fun, but I could stand it.”

  “Have you sent for the midwife?” Lanius asked the serving women.

  They both nodded. The one who’d spoken before sounded a little put out as she replied, “We certainly have, Your Majesty. And we sent a messenger to the arch-hallow, to ask him to pray for Her Majesty.”

  Would the prayers of Grus’ bastard sway the gods? They might, Lanius supposed—after all, Anser was praying for his half sister. Still, it was irregular.

  “Here comes the midwife,” the other maidservant said, pointing up the corridor. “Her name’s Netta, Your Majesty. She’s the best one in the city.”

  “I should hope so,” Lanius said; that the Queen of Avornis should have anything but the best in any way had never crossed his mind.

  Netta was somewhere in middle age, with one of those strong faces that looked little different at thirty-five and sixty. Plainly, she had no use—or, better, no time—for nonsense. “Hello, Your Majesty,” she said, startling Lanius by speaking to him as one equal to another. “Before long, you’ll have yourself a little boy or a little girl. I expect everything to go just fine.”

  “Good,” Lanius said. “Why do you expect that?”

  “Because it usually does. If it didn’t, we’d run short on people, eh?” Netta said. “I’m ready in case things turn sour, but I don’t expect them to. You understand what I’m saying? You’ve got nothing to worry about.”

  I don’t want you joggling my elbow, was what she plainly meant. Lanius asked, “Can I do anything to help you?”

  That did surprise Netta, just a little. She shook her head. The big gold hoops she wore in her ears flipped back and forth. “All you have to do is stay out here and wait till you hear the baby yowl.” She started into the birthing chamber, then checked herself. “Oh, one other thing—don’t get upset by whatever noises you hear before the baby’s born. Women in labor aren’t quiet—believe me they aren’t. All right?”

  “All right,” Lanius answered—she did want him to keep out of her hair. But what else could he do? He felt singularly useless.

  Netta eyed him, as though to make sure he meant what he said. At last, satisfied, she nodded. Into the birthing chamber she went. For good measure, she closed the door behind her. She didn’t need to do that, Lanius thought. I wasn’t going to look in. I don’t think I was, anyhow.

  She’d also shut the door on the two serving women, of course. One of them asked, “May I get you a chair, Your Majesty?”

  “Please.” Lanius wouldn’t have thought of sitting down if the serving woman hadn’t suggested it. He’d expected to pace back and forth till Sosia delivered their child, however long that took. How long would it take? He didn’t know. This was the first birth with which he’d ever concerned himself. Some went faster than others—he did know that much.

  When the servant came back with a chair, he perched nervously on the edge of it. Then he got up and started pacing again. He paced for a while, sat for a while, paced for a while. He expected to hear strange noises from the birthing chamber. For a long time, though, he heard nothing at all, except occasionally the midwife’s voice or his wife’s coming faintly through the closed door.

  Word of Sosia’s confinement spread through the palace. Estrilda came to the birthing chamber. The serving women let her inside, which irked Lanius. Netta didn’t throw her out, either, which irked him more. What a stupid custom, he thought. Just because I’m a man, that doesn’t mean I’m worthless.

  A great many Avornan customs kept women from doing things they might have done. A great many customs assumed they were worthless, or else simply ignorant. Lanius had never stopped to wonder about those. Why should he have? They didn’t pinch him.

  After half an hour or so, Sosia’s mother came out again. She nodded to Lanius. “Everything seems to be going as well as it can. Her pangs are coming closer together, the way they should. Netta knows her business, too.”

  “That’s good.” Lanius got up from the chair. “Here—sit down.” To the serving women, he said, “Bring us another one, please.”

  “And food, and wine,” Estrilda said. “We’re going to be here for a while.”

  The serving woman curtsied to her. “Yes, Your Majesty,” she said, and hurried away.

  She came back leading a manservant, who carried a chair for Lanius. The woman bore a tray with bread, a pot of honey, a jar of wine, and two cups. Lanius poured for himself and Estrilda. No indignity to a king’s pouring for a queen, especially if she was also his mother-in-law.

  “Thank you, Your Majesty.” Queen Estrilda was always polite to Lanius. “Here, let me get you some bread. Do you want honey to go with it?”

  “Yes, please. Thank you very much.” Lanius took the bread, ate half of it, and then said, “You’re sure everything’s all right?”

  “It seemed to be,” Estrilda said, as she had before. “These things go on and on for a while before a woman really gets down to business.” She looked down into her cup, then softly added, “I remember.”

  If you didn’t re
member, I wouldn’t have a wife, Lanius thought. And I wouldn’t have Ortalis to worry about. Is that a good bargain, or a bad one? He couldn’t very well ask Estrilda. Instead, he picked a safer question, saying, “How long is a while?”

  She shrugged. “Nobody can guess ahead of time. It could be a few hours, or it could be most of a day or even all day. It varies from woman to woman, and it varies from baby to baby, too. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

  “All right.” Lanius didn’t know what else to say. He’d always wanted definite answers to his questions, but this question didn’t seem to have one. He wished it did.

  He and Queen Estrilda drank more wine. They finished the loaf of bread. The serving woman brought another, and cheese and sausage to go with it. Lanius had had what amounted to supper before he thought about eating food better suited to a farmer or a soldier than a king. Estrilda seemed to take it for granted. Surely she’d never gone into the field with Grus?

  Before Lanius could ask about that, Estrilda said, “Food like this takes me back to the days when we didn’t have much. Grus’ father was just a guardsman, you know, and his father was a peasant down in the south.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Lanius, the twelfth king of his line. He hadn’t expected to wed the great-granddaughter of a peasant. Even Princess Romilda of Thervingia had fancier bloodlines than Queen Sosia did. But, while Lanius sprang from a long line of kings, Grus was the one who held the power in Avornis these days. Lanius liked that no better than he ever had, but he knew he couldn’t do anything about it.

  Darkness fell. Servants lit lamps outside the birthing chamber. Light seeped out from under the closed door, too, so lamps also burned in there. Lanius yawned.

  “We should have cots sent down,” Estrilda said. “We’re liable to be here all night long.”

  Before Lanius could nod and send the servants to do just that, a groan came from inside the birthing chamber. Netta opened the door and stuck her head out into the corridor. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” she said briskly. “The opening is wide enough to let the baby out. Another hour, maybe a little more.” She started to go back in, then checked herself. “Don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl, but it has dark hair.”

  “Oh!” Lanius said. That the midwife might see such a thing before the mother did hadn’t crossed his mind.

  Queen Estrilda laughed softly. “The midwife always finds out first. It doesn’t seem fair—”

  “It certainly doesn’t,” Lanius agreed.

  “But it’s true, even so,” Estrilda said.

  More groans came from the birthing chamber, and then something that sounded uncommonly like a shriek. Lanius jumped. “Is she all right?” he asked anxiously.

  “I think so,” Estrilda answered. “Netta would come out and tell us if anything bad had happened. I hope she would, anyhow.” She checked herself. “Yes, I’m sure she would. Women make those noises when they have babies, that’s all.”

  Another cry made Lanius flinch. The last time he’d heard such sounds was from wounded men on the battlefield. Men took their chances there, taking life. Women took theirs here, bringing forth new life.

  When Lanius said as much to Queen Estrilda, she only nodded. “Well, of course,” she replied, as though surprised that wasn’t obvious to him.

  He realized it should have been. But it hadn’t, not till he heard his own wife cry out in pain giving birth to the child he’d seeded in her. Men took women for granted more readily than the other way round, or so it seemed to Lanius. He wondered what he could do about that. He wondered if he could do anything about it. Since he hadn’t noticed something so fundamental till he got his nose rubbed in it, how likely was that? Perhaps better not to dwell on the answer there.

  More shrieks came, one hard on the heels of another. Despite her air of confidence, Estrilda went pale. Her lips moved silently. Lanius had begun to read lips; he’d seen it might come in handy every now and then. He still wasn’t very good, but he had no trouble recognizing Queen Quelea’s name.

  After those shrieks, he heard a noise he’d never heard before: half grunt, half scream. It suggested not pain but rather supreme effort. A man trying to lift twice his own weight and knowing he would die if he failed might have made a noise like that. The hair at the back of Lanius’ neck prickled up.

  Queen Estrilda, by contrast, looked relieved. “She’s pushing the baby out,” she told Lanius. “That’s what that sound means. Everything else was just getting ready. This is what really matters.”

  Lanius tried to imagine pushing a baby out—tried and felt himself failing. He wasn’t physically equipped to understand. But he was, as always, relentlessly curious. “What’s it like?” he asked his mother-in-law.

  Again, her lips shaped a silent word. This time, it was Men. The way she looked saying it made Lanius embarrassed to belong to his half of the human race. But then Estrilda said, “Imagine you’ve swallowed a big pumpkin—whole. Imagine it’s gone all the way through your guts—whole. Now imagine you’re squatting over the pot and you’ve got to get rid of it or burst. That’s what it’s like.”

  He did his best. He’d always had a vivid imagination, too. “Why on earth would any woman ever do this more than once?” he blurted.

  Estrilda looked at him. “That may be the most sensible question I’ve ever heard a man ask about giving birth,” she said. “Because you forget some of it afterward, that’s why. Otherwise …” She shook her head. “Otherwise we wouldn’t do it twice—I’m sure of that—and people would get fewer and fewer, till nobody was left. I suppose the forgetting is Queen Quelea’s gift, if you want to call it that.”

  In the birthing chamber, Sosia made that effort-filled grunting cry one more time. A moment later, Netta shouted. And then the king’s hair prickled up in awe, for he heard yet another voice from the birthing chamber—the high, thin, furious wail of a newborn baby.

  Netta shouted again. This time, the shout held words. “Your Majesty, you’ve got yourself a son!”

  “Crex!” King Lanius and Queen Estrilda said at the same time. Estrilda leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. Then she got up and dashed into the birthing chamber.

  Plaintively, Lanius called, “May I come, too?”

  “Wait a minute,” the midwife answered. “Here comes the afterbirth now.”

  Lanius hadn’t known what the word meant till he watched Bronze deliver her kittens. In moncats, the afterbirth, like the kittens, was small. What it would be like in a woman … The king wasn’t sorry Netta kept him out till she disposed of it one way or another.

  In hardly more than the promised minute, she said, “All right, Your Majesty. You can come in now.”

  When Lanius opened the door, he smelled sweat and blood and dung—maybe Estrilda hadn’t been joking about squatting over the pot. If a woman was trying to push out a baby, Lanius supposed it made sense that she would push out whatever else happened to be in there, too.

  His wife lay on a low couch, covered by a blanket. She looked as though a brewery wagon had run over her. Her hair flew out in all directions in sweaty, spiky tangles. Her face was pale as whey, except for the black circles under her eyes. She panted as though she’d just finished running five miles. She managed a smile for Lanius, but she almost needed to prop up the corners of her mouth to hold it on her face.

  In Netta’s arms, Crex started crying again. That reminded the king of the reason all this had gone on. “Let me see him,” he told the midwife.

  “Here.” Before she handed him to Lanius, she said, “You’ve got to keep a hand or an arm under his neck. You’ll need to do that for months yet, till his head’s not all floppy anymore. But he looks fine—he’s a good-sized boy.”

  He didn’t look good-sized to Lanius; he was no bigger than a moncat. He weighed no more than one, either. His skin was reddish purple, his head squeezed almost into a cone, and his genitals absurdly large for his size. Netta had tied off and cut the umbilical cord; the stump still remained attached t
o what would become his navel.

  He did have five fingers on each hand and five toes on each foot. Lanius carefully counted them all. And, by the noise Crex was making, he had a fine set of lungs. “Are you sure this is how he’s supposed to look?” the king asked nervously.

  “I asked her the same thing,” Sosia said.

  “He’s fine,” the midwife repeated. “Almost all the mothers and fathers having their first one ask me that. He’s got everything he should, just the way it ought to be.” She sounded very certain. Estrilda nodded, so Lanius supposed it was true. Netta went on, “What he’ll want now, I expect, is something to eat.”

  For a moment, Sosia didn’t follow. Then she did. “Oh!” she said. “That means me, doesn’t it?” She pushed down the blanket, baring her breasts. Awkwardly, Lanius set Crex on her. She didn’t handle the baby much more smoothly than he did. But, though neither the king nor the queen quite knew what to do, the baby did. He rooted till he found Sosia’s nipple and began to suck.

  Netta smiled. “That’s how it’s supposed to work, all right.”

  “Yes,” Lanius said softly. He’d done a lot of reading about magic. He’d seen some of what wizards and witches reckoned it to be. Here, though, looking down at his son, he understood the word in a way he never had before.

  Some of General Hirundo’s cavalrymen led a line of unhappy-looking Therving prisoners past King Grus. Grus nodded. “Send them back over the Tuola,” he said. “We can get some useful work out of the ones King Dagipert doesn’t bother ransoming.”

  “Right you are, Your Majesty,” a cavalry captain replied. He added something in Thervingian. The prisoners shambled away.

  Grus turned to Hirundo and said, “Somewhere else in this province, Dagipert is probably saying the same thing about some sorry Avornan captives his men have taken.”

  “I know,” Hirundo answered. “There’s no quit in that man. He’s brought more and more men from Thervingia. He doesn’t want us getting the notion we can beat him.”

  “No,” Grus agreed. “Nothing comes easy against Dagipert. If he weren’t so stubborn, we’d be fighting in Thervingia now—I’m sure of it.”