by Sharon Shinn
“Then let’s go back to the campfire and start cooking.”
The meal was delicious, and the dinner hour passed pleasantly. The women chattered about inconsequential things, and Ezra added a comment or two as the mood struck him. He was a big, rather fierce man with hard, strong features, and Rebekah did not really like him—until the setting was intimate and relaxed like this one. Then he seemed at ease and willing to be amused. He treated his wife and children with affection, teased his sisters, and made a few clumsy jokes with Rebekah about her upcoming wedding.
“Pretty soon now,” he said to her. “Isaac will be getting a good look at that sharp little face of yours—not to mention the other treasures under your robes.”
“Ezra,” Aunt Rhesa reprimanded in a faint voice.
“A couple months,” Rebekah said serenely.
“Well, I hope your mother’s taught you all the secrets a girl needs to know! A man likes a wife with a certain set of skills.”
“Ezra,” Aunt Rhesa said even more strongly.
Rebekah thought for a moment of all the skills Ezra might be referring to and how she had acquired them. She couldn’t even allow herself to look in Martha’s direction.
“I hope he won’t be disappointed,” she said, keeping her expression modest but allowing a little lilt to creep into her voice.
Ezra loosed a crack of laughter. “And I’ll wager he won’t be! Your mother has kept two husbands quite happy. I imagine her daughter will be well prepared for her own role.”
“There’s some pie left. Would anybody like some?” Martha’s mother said, obviously trying to change the subject.
“Oh, pie—I’ll have it,” Ephram said quickly, and the topic was turned. “More bread, too, if there’s any left.”
After they’d cleaned up the dinner mess, they all sat around the fire for another hour just to enjoy its warmth. At first they exchanged desultory conversation, long silences intervening between the words, and then Aunt Rhesa began to sing. It was a slow lullaby, a song Rebekah had sung a hundred times to Jordan and to Jonah, and they all joined in a few notes into it. Ezra had a fine voice—he had performed with the Jansai more than once at the Gloria—so they let him sing the next melody all by himself when he swung into a new song. Once he was done, Aunt Rhesa offered a lighter piece, a call-and-response song, and they all warbled back her melody lines, occasionally managing a fairly respectable three-part harmony. The Jansai were not the singers that the rest of the people of Samaria claimed to be. They offered their prayers to Jovah, and they attended the Gloria, and they accorded music a certain careless respect, but they did not make it the center and focus of their lives.
As Rebekah had heard the angels did. But then, everything the angels did was different from the Jansai way. There could not be two peoples on the planet so different in outlook.
“Well, I think it’s bedtime for these old bones,” Martha’s mother said, coming to her feet with a muffled groan. “Ezra, where have you decided everyone should sleep?”
“I thought all you girls would want to stay close to the fire,” he said, seeming to have forgotten that two of the “girls” were at least five years older than he was. “It’ll be a chilly night. Eph and I will take the wagons.”
“Rebekah and I wanted one of the wagons,” Martha said. “We won’t be cold. We brought extra blankets.”
“You just want to stay awake all night and whisper,” her mother said with a sniff.
“That’s right,” Martha replied, grinning. “But why should we disturb you by whispering around the fire?”
Ezra was nodding. “You two take the smaller wagon. Eph and I will take the one I drove. Does anyone need anything else for the night?”
There was a quick little scurry as everyone took one last opportunity to go off for a private moment before bedtime, and then it was another ten or fifteen minutes before they were all actually settled down for the night. Rebekah found that it was cold indeed once she and Martha had stepped any distance from the fire, huddling down into the bed of the wagon and burrowing under a pile of five blankets. She shrieked as Martha sat up a moment to rearrange the covers, causing a whippet of cold air to dart in across her shoulders.
“Lie down. I’m freezing,” she hissed, and Martha giggled and snuggled back under the quilts.
“There, I’m getting warmer already,” Martha whispered. “Isn’t this better than lying by the fire?”
“Not yet it isn’t,” Rebekah grumbled, but she could already feel the heat of her body getting trapped by the down and cotton of the blankets and warming up the whole makeshift bed.
Martha took a long breath. “Can’t you just smell the starlight?”
“Starlight doesn’t have a smell.”
“It does. Breathe deeper.”
“All right. It smells lovely. I’m going to sleep.”
Martha laughed and was silent for a few moments. Rebekah turned over, trying to find a more comfortable spot on the hard wood of the wagon.
“That’s funny,” Martha said.
“What’s funny?” Rebekah said in a resigned voice.
“Your Kiss. Look at it.”
Rebekah didn’t bother to look, just pulled the cover up higher over her shoulder so that the crystal didn’t show. “What about it?”
Martha was sitting up, leaning over her. “Let me see that again. Is it—doesn’t it have a kind of peculiar glow?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Maybe? Your Kiss is lighting up at night and you haven’t said anything to me?”
“It’s just this faint little light. I don’t know why it does that. I don’t think it means anything.”
“Let me see again.”
So Rebekah pulled her arm out from under the covers and let Martha examine the crystal in her arm. “Is it hot? Does it hurt?”
“No and no.”
“When did this start?”
“I don’t know. I just noticed it one day and it’s been like that ever since.”
“Does it have anything to do with Obadiah?”
“How could it possibly?”
“I don’t know. But that would be very romantic.”
Rebekah yawned and buried her arm back under the quilts. “I don’t think it means anything,” she said again. “Anyway, I’m too tired to talk about it anymore. I just want to go to sleep.”
“I’m not tired at all.”
“That’s because you didn’t do any work all day! I did!”
Martha laughed. “All right. You go to sleep, then. I’m just going to lie here a while and think.”
“Good night, then.”
“Good night.”
Unbelievably for her, Martha didn’t say another word, just lay there quietly. Rebekah let her eyes close and her body relax as she grew warmer and more comfortable. She didn’t really expect to fall asleep right away, but the combination of sun, fresh air, and exercise had tired her more than she realized. After only a few fuzzy moments of conscious thought, she gave in to exhaustion and fell immediately into formless dreaming.
She might have slept straight through till noon the next day, except that Martha woke her the next morning while most of the rest of the camp was still sleeping. “Damnation and isolation,” Martha’s voice came in a furious whisper. “Corpses, crows, and curses.”
“What is it?” Rebekah asked sleepily, turning to her side to face her cousin and fighting to open her eyes. “Did you get bitten by something in the middle of the night?”
“No! I started my monthly bleeding. I didn’t bring anything with me. I wasn’t expecting—and my mother won’t have anything.”
Rebekah yawned and pushed herself up on one elbow. “I brought an old hallis with me, since I figured we’d be tramping through the sand and getting everything filthy. You can rip it up and make cloths from it. I don’t need it.”
“Are you sure? What a waste of good material.”
“Better than ruining your clothes.”
“And we’re nowher
e near water and I’ve made a mess—”
“There’s a gallon in the wagon. We’ll tear up my hallis and you can clean yourself up—”
“I don’t know why this never happens to you,” Martha grumbled. “All right, show me where this hallis is.”
The words struck Rebekah dumb. Silently, she climbed out of the warm covers and, shivering, dug through her pack of belongings till she’d located the ancient and tattered undergarment. Silently, she helped Martha rip the fabric into reasonable portions and watched the blond girl hurry off toward a windbreak of bushes where she could strip down in privacy and clean herself up. Still silent, and now both frozen and terrified, she slipped back under the covers and lay there trembling, realizing she would never be warm again.
When, in fact, had her own monthly bleeding last occurred? Not for weeks now—not for months. She had never paid much attention to her cycles, which had always been erratic and hard to predict; she had just learned to deal with each episode as it occurred. But she was thinking furiously now. If she had not had her bleeding this month, or the last month, or the month before that—
Sweet Jovah singing like a mournful angel of death. She was carrying Obadiah’s child.
Chapter Twenty-four
The pregnant woman screamed again, squeezing down on Elizabeth’s hand with a pressure that almost broke the bones, and then subsided into a quiet, moaning pant. Elizabeth didn’t even ask; she used her free hand to toss through her satchel and dig out two more tablets of pain-reducing medicine. “Here, take these,” she said, holding the pills to the woman’s mouth.
“I don’t—want to—faint,” the woman gasped.
“You won’t,” Elizabeth promised. “But I think you’ll feel better.”
Mary glanced up from her position between the woman’s legs. “Soon now,” she said.
“Is my baby going to be all right?” the woman managed, between huffs of breath.
“I think so. I see its head, that’s a good sign. We just need a little more effort from you—and some patience—”
“It hurts.” The woman sighed.
“Yes,” Mary said. “Unfortunately, that’s the way of it.”
And this child fighting for entrance into the world was not even angelic, Elizabeth reflected. Although Elizabeth had yet to actually witness an angel birth, she had formed a pretty fair idea of the difficulties an angel child could cause to its mother even before it was brought into the world. Just a week ago, she and Mary had been called to the bedside of Magdalena, who was suffering severe pains and terrified that her child was trying to arrive too early.
Elizabeth had never seen any angel look so desperate and pale, her skin whiter than her wings, her slender hands too shaky to hold a glass of water to her lips. Mary had commanded Elizabeth to mix a variety of herbs while the healer massaged the angel’s stomach and tried to feel for the size and placement of the tiny life inside. The potion Elizabeth had eventually fed to the angel had caused Magdalena to fall into a drugged sleep—and, Mary had predicted, would halt the early labor pains as well.
“But she must take some of this medicine every four hours for the next two weeks,” Mary had told the golden-haired woman who had appeared to be the angel’s private nurse. “And if the pains resume, you must call for me right away.”
The golden-haired woman had nodded. “Do you have something that will take away her nausea? Everything she eats makes her sick. But she has to eat, or the baby—” The woman gestured.
“Corvine works best for that,” Mary said regretfully. “But I don’t have any.”
“Oh, yes, the Edori use corvine for stomach upsets,” the other woman replied. “I’ll see if any of the clans are in town and ask if I can buy some from them.”
Which had seemed like such an odd thing to say that Elizabeth had paused in the repacking of her satchel to give the other woman a long, curious stare. She was mortal, and remarkable in looks only because of that hair, but there was something about her that rivaled the self-assured arrogance of the angels. Not a nurse after all, Elizabeth decided. A Manadavvi, perhaps. A friend of Nathan’s wife, come to aid her in her time of need, and willing to take drastic measures to make sure Magdalena was cared for.
“If you find any Edori willing to sell their herbs, send them over to me,” Mary had replied. “I prefer the Edori medicines much of the time.”
The golden-haired woman had smiled. “So often,” she had said, “everything about the Edori ways is to be preferred.”
Later that same day, a courier had arrived at Mary’s suites with a selection of powdered herbs in various pouches and canisters. Mary had exclaimed greedily over the new riches and carefully explained to Elizabeth which potions were to be used in which situations. In fact, Elizabeth had already fed one of the powdered herbs to their current patient, though it wasn’t clear that the medicine had had much effect. The two big white tablets, however, seemed to have tamed some of her pain, for she now lay more quietly on her bed.
“How much longer now?” the woman asked in a voice that was almost a whisper.
“Soon,” Mary said again. Elizabeth, who had now attended more than a dozen births, figured they had another hour to go.
There was a commotion outside the room and the sound of urgent voices raised, most of them male. Elizabeth knew one voice belonged to this woman’s husband, but the others were unfamiliar. They all sounded angry.
A minute later, there was a knock on the bedroom door, and the husband himself came into the room, giving his wife one wretched, compassionate look. “I’m sorry,” he said, addressing the healer. “There are men outside. They say there’s been an accident, and they need your help.”
“I can’t possibly leave her,” Mary said sharply.
“That’s what I told them. But they say a man has been severely hurt, and he could be dying.”
Mary looked over at Elizabeth, who felt her stomach do a giddy flip. “It’s up to you,” Mary said. “You can bind a cut and set a bone. Do you feel up to going on your own?”
“I don’t know, I—” Elizabeth stammered.
“What about my wife?” the man demanded.
“You’ll just have to help me,” Mary said. “I’ll tell you what to do.”
“What if I can’t help this man?” Elizabeth said.
“You’ll do him more good than a bunch of fool-headed men who would just stand around and watch him bleed,” Mary said roundly. “If you fail, you fail, but at least you’ll have tried to save him.”
Elizabeth felt stupid and nervous, unsure of herself and clumsy. She glanced around the room as if looking for an excuse to stay, and her eyes came to rest on the face of the patient on the bed.
“Go to him,” the woman panted. “I’ll be—fine. I would feel so dreadful if—someone died . . . because of me.”
Elizabeth felt her lips tighten and her stomach curl into a small ball. She stood up. “I have to wash my hands,” she said. “Tell them I’ll be right there.”
Three men had been injured at the construction site on the west edge of town, but only one of them was in severe straits. He was not only unconscious and probably suffering from a concussion as well, but he had an open wound that sliced from his neck across his chest and down to his hip, which was shattered. Elizabeth could not believe he had not already bled to death. Gazing down at him, she felt her own blood retreat in her veins, leaving her hands cold and her brain too numb to function.
“Those two over there—broken bones, that’s all, we know how to set those, but Henry—you’ve got to do something,” said the man who had brought her down here at a run so hard she was still struggling to regain her breath. “He’s going to die.”
“He might,” Elizabeth said in a small voice. “Somebody bring me a bucket of water. And somebody else set some water on to boil. I’ll do what I can.”
She knelt beside him where he had been laid on a blanket that had been thrown down in the middle of a muddy street. This was her makeshift sickroom.
Someone here had known enough to stanch the blood and put pressure on the wounds, but the cloth across his chest was still leaking with fresh blood. She could lather him with manna root paste to slow the bleeding and force tablets down his throat to prevent infection, but she was not sure she could sew up a wound that stretched so far and went so deep—not sure she could do it in time, not sure she could do it at all. So far the only cut she had sewed up on her own had been a small one on a little girl’s finger. She didn’t have a clue what to do about the shattered hipbone. She would start with the wound and hope that, by the time she was done, Mary would have arrived to finish the job.
“Somebody will have to help me,” she said in a small voice. “I need a pair of hands to peel back the cloth slowly and hold the edges of the wound together.”
It seemed like hours that Elizabeth labored over Henry’s broken body, moving as painstakingly but efficiently as she could. His breathing was ragged and uneven, and every now and then it seemed to stop for the space of a beat or two. Elizabeth had forced a mixture of painkillers and anti-infection drugs down his throat before she began working on his wound, but she was not sure he was awake enough to feel any of her ministrations anyway. He didn’t grunt or cry out whenever her needle entered his skin; he didn’t move or jerk away from the sting of salve along his open sore. He just continued that heavy, clumsy breathing, in, out, pause, pause, in, out, pause. . . .
Once she was past the tricky veins of the neck, Elizabeth felt more sure of herself, though the blood trickled out in sluggish, regular spurts as she worked her way across his chest. She was so cold; her fingers could not feel the oversize needle, trembled every time she tried to insert new thread through the eye. Someone brought her hot liquid and held it to her lips, since she did not want to touch anything with her bloody fingers. Someone else—or maybe the same person—brought a blanket and wrapped it around her where she knelt on the rocky dirt, looping it through her arms and tying it around her back so that she received some warmth without having the edges fall in her way. The third time she paused to rethread her needle, someone caught her hand.