Paradise Red

by K. M. Grant

“But you’re a magician.”

  “This isn’t a magic trick.”

  Yolanda is too busy gulping to answer. The taste is vile, but she drinks every drop.

  “Now it will start,” Laila says, throwing the bowl on the fire, “though it still may take a few hours. It should be over by morning.”

  Yolanda gives a tight nod. They wait. Occasionally the baby kicks but Yolanda resolutely takes no notice. It is toward evening when she crosses her arms hard against her stomach. Here come the cramps. After an hour, she is finding it hard not to cry out. She was braced for sharp stabs, but this is a dull monotonous thud, as though two strong men are wielding mallets. Thud, thud, thud, thud, and though she is clutching her stomach, the pain is actually farther back. She wants to get into a bath, feeling instinctively that heat would ease the bruising. However, even in her distress she rejoices. This is the end. This is it. After tonight, she will never think about Hugh again.

  Brees whines and pushes his head under her arm. Another spasm. She tenses hard and afterward pushes Brees away, fearing that she could hurt him. “Tie him up ouside,” she orders.

  The real torture is the great wracking spasms that begin far apart and then run into each other. From somewhere beneath them, she vaguely hears Laila calling her name. A covered twig is pressed between her lips and Yolanda bites down so hard that her teeth puncture the leather. Now the pain is neither mallet nor spasm. It is a serrated sword twisting in her gut.

  “God alive, Laila!” she suddenly screams, dropping the twig, “how can this be right? It’s just a baby!” She sinks again, but the words bang around her head as she convulses. “Just a baby!” Did she not once say that Raimon was “just a weaver”? The pain changes. Now heat rises from her toes and descends from her scalp. She is certain that when it meets in the middle she will erupt like an earthquake, and the baby will be ejected like a missile. She finds herself looking for it, and then, in the panting space between spasms, at her arms. They are no longer clamped around her stomach. Somehow, without her noticing, they have raised themselves. But why? She tries to force them down but nothing obeys her. She is entirely at the mercy of her body. “I will not catch the baby,” she shouts out, absolutely convinced that it is about to hurtle into view. “I must not.” And surely here it is, rising in front of her. It should look like Hugh. After all, she’s expelling Hugh. But it just looks like a baby, any baby. No. That’s not true either. Another dagger twist. Her groans are low, like an old man’s. It looks like her baby. Suddenly the heat drains away and there is nothing in front of her. She can see no baby at all—at least nowhere except inside her head. It doesn’t vanish from there.

  Her teeth begin to chatter and she is freezing despite Laila piling on blankets and banking up the fire. Is that her howling she can hear? No, no, it’s Brees. Or is it the baby too? “No,” she implores, “please don’t let it be the baby. The baby must die, but it mustn’t suffer.” She can torture herself, but she does not want to torture it. She grabs Laila’s arm. “Has it come? Has it come?” She cannot hear her own voice for the roaring in her ears.

  Laila shakes her head.

  Yolanda’s spine contorts. She can feel such movement now, the movement of a thousand legs. The baby is fighting her, fighting her for its life. “Stop! Stop!” she begs it. “Don’t fight! Just go quietly!” But it is marshaling its strength against her, and she is marshaling hers against it. “You’re of the north, and I’m of the south. You’re French and I’m an Occitanian. Don’t you see? You tie me to Hugh, and I love Raimon.” She knows her mistake at once. She should not address this child personally. But how can she help it when its face keeps appearing? It’s just a baby. A baby. Her baby. Yet it is too late now. It must be too late. The baby kicks again, and this time she seems to see it opening its mouth to cry. “No!” she shouts urgently, “don’t do that. It’s too late. Don’t you understand? It’s too late. You’re gone.” But it kicks again, and suddenly it is she who is crying.

  Laila is with her, holding her shoulders. “Don’t die on me, Yolanda. Don’t.”

  “I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die. I don’t want it to die.”

  Laila crouches. “You don’t want it to die?” She shakes her. “Is that what you’re saying?” Cador is standing in the doorway, terrified. “Get out! Get out!” Laila bellows at him.

  Yolanda is babbling. Brees is barking and barking to be let loose. Laila cups Yolanda’s face hard enough to crack her jaw. “Listen to me. Do you want it to stop?”

  “No! Yes! I don’t know!” Yolanda rolls over, curling up and moaning, yanking at the blankets. “I don’t know anything. God help me!” She feels herself shoved flat back and then her head pulled up. “Drink this,” Laila orders her, forcing open her mouth. “Come on, Yolanda. Drink it.”

  Yolanda flips her head from side to side. Laila rams the cup against her lips, brooking no refusal. Half the stuff slides down Yolanda’s front and her stomach heaves to reject it, but Laila never lets up. For an entire dreadful hour, she forces her to drink and drink and drink. Now it is Laila who is shouting prayers and imprecations at her own dark gods, for Yolanda’s struggles grow fainter until finally as dusk falls, she lies limp. There is nothing more to do.

  Well after sunrise the following morning, Laila emerges, haggard and shaking. Cador is lugging a wooden bucket for the horses. She does not speak to him and at the sight of her, her curls flat, her hands red, and her legs dragging, he drops the bucket and rushes toward the shelter. Laila is in front of him in a second. “Don’t go in there.”

  “Why not?”

  The question is not Cador’s. He has not spoken and the effect on the boy is electric. Giving a shriek almost as loud as Yolanda’s, he launches himself at the figure slowly easing down the rocks. “Sir Raimon! Oh, Sir Raimon! I’ve been waiting.” He darts about, half wanting to get Unbent and half wanting to help.

  It is the first time Raimon has ever seen Laila look frightened, and that is more frightening to Raimon than anything else. “I knew you were keeping something from me. I followed you as long as I could, then lost you, but I saw smoke and heard barking. I knew it was Brees. I just knew it.” He is struggling to hurry, the Flame in his good hand while he flings the other arm out of its sling. All the wound’s healing and more is ruined but he does not notice and would not care if he did. He will get into that shelter if he has to kill Laila. He holds the Flame before him as though it were a talisman.

  Laila recovers herself. “If you go in, you’ll regret it.”

  “If you try and stop me, you’ll regret it.”

  Raimon is at the door now, Cador cowering behind him. They both blink, seeing nothing in the sudden shadow. Raimon fumbles forward through the arch into the back room.

  The fire is burning low, and he can see no movement of any kind from the blankets heaped on the stone beds. He holds the Flame high. “Yolanda?” There is no response. His eyes fix on the box of tricks. He lowers the Flame and hears Laila come in behind him. “What have you done to her?”

  “Only what she asked.” Laila tries to bypass him but he grabs her and thrusts her back through the arch. He does not want her here. “Yolanda?” Still nothing, except from outside Brees’s noisy unhappiness rises and rises. Raimon stands above the blankets, stares down, and then grits his teeth before pulling them away.

  Yolanda is lying on her back, her eyes closed. The Flame is superfluous for her face is so white that it illuminates itself. Her lips are half open so that he can see the familiar chip in her front tooth. Around her neck are the two rings they forged by the river to cement their love. He bends down, wanting so much to touch her but not daring. “Is she dead?” His whisper is barely audible, but Laila hears it.

  “She’s unconscious.”

  “Is she dying?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.” Laila’s voice is without expression.

  Raimon spins around. “What’s been happening here?”

  Laila says nothing. “Cador! Cador!” Ra
imon shouts. The little boy comes running. He repeats the same question.

  Cador’s eyes are irresistibly drawn to Yolanda. He claps his hands over his mouth. “Lady Yolanda came,” he stammers, “then Laila came and now you’re here.”

  “Yolanda came with Hugh?”

  “No. She came on her own, on the sorrel horse outside. I saw her and I was waiting for you, so we came here. Sir Hugh doesn’t know she’s here, at least I don’t think so because if he did, he’d be trying to find her.”

  “Was she hurt?”

  Cador hesitates.

  “Was she hurt, boy? Tell me!”

  “I don’t think so,” poor Cador offers, “but she was different.”

  “In what way different?”

  “She wouldn’t really talk to me. She was like”—he struggled—“like one of those actors you see at fairs, who paint themselves and pretend to be marble. She seemed very sick.”

  Raimon tries to calm himself. “Come, hold the Flame,” he says to Cador, and kneels down.

  “That’s the Flame?” This is not the reunion of which Cador dreamed. “It doesn’t look like it.” But he takes the lantern all the same.

  Raimon does not explain. He still cannot touch Yolanda for fear of finding her stiff and cold. He has no idea what he would do then. He gives a long shudder, his face almost as white as hers, then suddenly, unable to bear the suspense, he seizes her hand and holds it for a long, long moment. The fingers flex. He is suddenly squeezing it very hard. “Yolanda! Answer me!”

  Only one cheek twitches, just a tiny twitch as if from a fly, but it is enough. He drops her hand and tries to pick her up. Laila darts forward. “For goodness’ sake, Raimon, you’ll kill her yet.”

  He barks as loudly as Brees but lies her down again. “I’ll save her from you. What have you done?”

  Laila begins to hop from one foot to the other, tucking Yolanda in again. In her relief she lets loose a torrent of abuse. “So, Sir High and Mighty, what makes you think she doesn’t need saving from you and not me? We wouldn’t be in this mess if you’d really loved her. What sort of lover gallops off into the sunset in a huff, I’d like to know? If you’d stayed with her, none of this would ever have happened so I’ll have none of this ‘what have you done to her’ because if anybody’s to blame for this mess it’s certainly not me. I’m just the poor sap who’s been forced to help her out of it.”

  “But what’s the matter with her?” Raimon is terrified. “What is it?”

  “Nothing that need concern you. Now get out of my way. She’s not out of danger yet.” Laila berates him all the time that she fetches water and sends Cador for more water still. Now she is rough with Yolanda, pulling her away from Raimon and scrubbing her face and wrists with cold cloths. Cador holds the Flame for light until eventually Laila dries Yolanda off and goes outside to release an increasingly frantic Brees. The dog rushes in, rears up, and licks and licks at his mistress’s face before pulling himself completely onto the bed and settling between her inert body and the wall, his tail beating a persistent tattoo against her legs. Cador places the Flame’s lantern beside Raimon and goes outside. Somebody must still stand guard and that somebody must be him.

  Laila moves silently, bundling up soiled blankets, and only when she is convinced that Yolanda is sleeping more peacefully does she too venture back into the sun. She takes a dozen deep breaths before beckoning to Cador. “We’ll bury these,” she says. He nods, averts his eyes, and does not ask why.

  Sometime in the late afternoon, Yolanda speaks. “Did it work?”

  Raimon leans over. Her voice! Thank God! How he’s needed to hear it! “Did what work?”

  Yolanda’s eyes fly open and her expression is not what Raimon expects. “Where’s Laila?”

  “Does it matter?”

  Yolanda’s lips are flaky and her mouth tastes of ashes. Raimon finds an old flagon of wine. She turns her head away. “I need Laila,” she says.

  “Are you in pain?”

  She considers. “No.” She does not seem to know whether to be pleased about this or not. “I just want Laila.”

  Raimon tries not to let his hurt show. “Why do you need her? I can get you anything you want.” He touches her forehead. “Yolanda, your ring. I didn’t—”

  “I have both of them,” she murmurs, and now she turns to him. He strokes her forehead. “The worst of whatever it is is over, I’m sure of it,” he says.

  A tear slides horizontally over the bridge of her nose. Raimon wipes it away. “What’s the worst?” she whispers. “I don’t know anymore.” She drops her chin onto her chest. “I really need Laila. I need to ask her something.”

  “Why Laila?” Raimon suddenly cannot bear it any longer. “Why not ask me?”

  “I can’t, Raimon. Please.”

  He gets up. “I’ll fetch her.” His voice is dull.

  “Raimon?” He is back by her side at once. “You got the Flame?”

  “Yes,” he says, “I got the Flame. It’s here. But oh, Yolanda, the price was high.”

  She moves her fingers against his and closes her eyes.

  He goes outside. Laila and Cador are returning, their faces streaked black. “She wants you,” he says to Laila.

  “Yes,” she says, giving him a funny look he cannot interpret. “I expect she does.”

  He does not follow her but goes to Cador and makes much of him, allowing the little boy to return Unbent to him with formal ceremony. All the time, however, his ears are pinned for sounds from the shelter.

  At last Laila comes out, and to his alarm, Yolanda is beside her, walking with difficulty. Laila settles her on a flat stone and comes, whispering, to Raimon. “She wants you now. If you make her cry, I’ll punch you.” She skips over to Cador. “Come on. Let’s find the horses some new grass. This stuff’s got no goodness left in it, and we’ll be needing them soon.” They disappear into the trees.

  Just the fact of being together in the sun and with Brees beside them is a joy. Raimon and Yolanda lean against each other, just as they used to, except that they are no longer as they used to be, nor will be again. That part of their life is closed. Yet Yolanda can still rest her head on Raimon’s shoulder and feel everything he cannot say. She can have these few moments, surely, for once she has told him what she has to tell him, they may be the last. The sun shifts quite some distance before she forces herself to move. She sits independently now, tightens every muscle, and looks at him directly. “I’m having a baby,” she says and does not know any longer if she is horrified or exultant.

  Raimon flinches and then slams backward as though somebody has physically hit him. There is a long pause. “Hugh?” It comes out as a retort.

  She nods. She knows he is trying not to look down to where the baby still is, despite all her efforts, and though she cannot explain the turmoil she feels, she knows she must try to help him. “Raimon, please just listen without saying anything.”

  Her injunction is unnecessary. He is mute.

  “Hugh knows I can’t love him,” she says, trying to keep everything unrealistically matter-of-fact, “yet he wants a son. He came to Castelneuf.” Her words come more quickly. “I will not, will never, speak of that. But he got his way. He may not have a son, of course, but he has a child. I thought to get rid of it. I asked Laila to help. She didn’t want to, but I more or less forced her, and I wanted it to work and then I didn’t and I shan’t try to be rid of it again. I can’t explain why I shan’t, except that it has nothing to do with Hugh.” She laces her fingers.

  Raimon’s voice comes from far away. “When will the baby be born?”

  “January.”

  “Will you go back to Hugh?”

  “No.”

  “What about the—the child?”

  Now she trembles. “I suppose I shall have to give it up to him. It’s a des Arcis.” She wants to make everthing clear, expose it all so that nothing lurks, festering in a corner.

  “I had not thought that he would stoop so low.�
� Raimon’s voice is nothing more than a metallic hiss.

  “None of us knows how low we can go.” Yolanda puts out a tentative hand. Her crisis has passed as Raimon’s is just beginning. He does not take her hand. Instead, he gets up because he cannot stay still. The muscles in his face shift and roll. “Raimon, stay with me.”

  He avoids her eyes. “I’m going to murder him.”

  She stands as best as she can. “And if I say I don’t want you to?”

  “I won’t believe you.”

  “For God’s sake, Raimon, I’ve tried killing. I know it’s not an answer.”

  “He’s a common ra—”

  Now she leaps. “Don’t say that word! Don’t say it! Don’t you think I’ve said it enough times for all of us?” She crunches her arms around herself, protecting herself from everybody and everything. “Now he’s just a husband I once had and the father of this baby. Can’t you see? I must think of it like that, because it’s the only way I can survive without going mad.”

  Her face is so open to him, so pleading, so trusting, that despite himself he begins to melt. Now he can take her hand. More than that, he clutches at her as he might if she were drowning or about to fall off a cliff. He wants to gather her up, to reassure her, to hold her so tightly that their skin is welded together. Then he hears Laila’s laughter. She and Cador are returning with the horses. And the laughter, which has nothing to do with him, still seems to mock him, ridiculing all his cradling instincts. Before he can stop himself he draws back and Yolanda is left stranded.

  Immediately, Raimon curses himself, but the moment cannot be recaptured. Yolanda’s face is closing. Her hand has dropped. She is folding herself away. He backs toward Bors. “Where are you going?” Yolanda’s voice is tight.

  His response is clipped. “I told you. Hugh doesn’t deserve to live.”

  “And I’m telling you again. This is my business. Mine.”

  His soul feels as though it will burst through his skin. “How can you say that, Yolanda? What happens to you happens to me. Don’t you understand that? And this”—he gestures to her stomach—“is just”—he struggles—“not us. It’s nothing to us. It’s nothing at all to do with us.”