Shadow's End (50 page)

“Saluez is in labor. She would have died had this siege continued. She may die regardless. And her child.”

Lutha opened her mouth, but nothing came out. He would have sent Leely out if there had been no Saluez. Saluez was only an excuse, but she was a good excuse, one Lutha could not argue now.

“Dananana.” Unhelpfully.

“I'll go to her,” Lutha said stiffly. Later she would deal with Leelson. When she had more time to tell him a terrible thing. When he had time to hear.

“I'll go with you,” said Snark, with a glance at the zenith, where the Rottens had vanished. “I guess they're gone! Who'll take this sample down and put it in the analyzer?”

The ex-king took the packet from her and trudged off toward the camp.

“Come on,” she said, nudging Lutha. “I know a bit about baby taking.”

“I didn't know shadows—” Lutha murmured.

“Before I was a shadow,” she interrupted with an exasperated look. “When I was a street rat. Street rats get pregnant like real people. But they don't have
responsible sponsors
to sign for their babies. Who'd sign for a street rat's kid? So they can't go to a registered birther. They have 'em unofficial, like.” She shook her head. “Street rats don't eat too good, they get beat on a lot. Sometimes they have a hard time! Let's hope Saluez won't.”

They scrambled back into the cavern, where Lutha harnessed Leely to his pillar once more, fastening the latches of the tether, making a sound she was surprised to hear coming from her own throat, half a snarl, half a moan.

“What?” demanded Snark, turning a surprised face.

Lutha pressed her eyes with her fingers, shutting down the frenzied, ugly thoughts that possessed her. “Not now,” she said. “We have other things to do now.”

Besides, she told herself, trying to calm her frantic
mind, the matter didn't concern Snark. It concerned Leelson. Leelson and Limia, and their damned posterity!

Snark didn't pursue the matter, for one look at Saluez was enough to push other concerns aside. Saluez's labor was proceeding without her, so to speak. Her body heaved and pushed, but her mind had gone elsewhere.

“Jiacare,” said Snark. “She's filthy. So are we. We'll need some wash water.”

He picked up a bucket and went out. Snark knelt beside Saluez, a strange expression on her face. “Dinadhi,” she said, as though to herself. “It's her first birth and she's Dinadhi.”

“Of course she is,” Lutha said impatiently.

Snark nodded to herself, rubbing her forehead fretfully, then went across the cavern to busy herself among the emergency kits.

“What are you doing?” Lutha asked.

“Making a catch bucket.”

“What in…?”

Snark stopped, staring at the wall as though puzzled at Lutha's question. “Saluez is Dinadhi. My mother, she … said, have a catch bucket, with a lid.”

Lutha pursed her lips and forbid herself to say anything at all. Some cultures made quite a ceremony disposing of the placenta and umbilical cord, and perhaps it was for that reason that Snark had emptied the contents from a folding emergency kit, had resealed the sides and top, and was now cutting a narrow opening into it. Whatever Snark's reason, she needed help less than Saluez did.

The floor beneath the unconscious woman was a sodden mess. Lutha dragged Saluez to a drier spot, removed her filthy robes—little filthier than Lutha's own—and covered her with clean blankets. While she was doing this the ex-king returned with a full bucket, put it near the stove, and departed with a nervous look in Saluez's direction.

Lutha scrubbed her hands and arms, then bathed
Saluez as best she could. Snark finished her self-imposed task and rejoined Lutha, bringing her “catch basket” with her: an emergency kit with a hand-sized opening surrounded by latches cannibalized from other kits.

Snark set it down with a thump. “The lid,” she said, adding a thick slab roughly cut from another kit.

Lutha was muttering over the lack of medical equipment. Had it been oversight? Or had it been purposeful? Had those who sent the shadows to Perdur Alas not cared that they might be hurt or ill? Or had they simply not thought about it?

Snark tapped her. “Stop fuming. There's antibiotics in the kits. We'll make do with those.”

Growling, Lutha went to fetch them while Snark dug out several of the unused overalls and ripped them up to make a dry bed between Saluez and the floor.

“She's sucking that veil in every time she breathes,” Snark said. “Let's get it off her.”

Lutha removed it and set it aside, turning back at Snark's exclamation.

“Her face!”

Saluez's face was a whole face. Like Lutha's. Like Snark's. No bone showing through. No mutilated lips or eyelids. One ear was still slightly battered looking, but even that flesh was smooth.

“How?” breathed Snark.

Lutha had no idea. The woman between them moaned, a remote, careless sound. Her eyes stayed blank. She wasn't there. She didn't know what had happened to her.

They propped Saluez's knees on folded blankets.

“What else?” asked Lutha.

“We wait.”

“I'm tired of waiting.”

Lutha stared at Saluez, her face, her form, the skin of her legs. She'd never seen a natural birth before. Leely, of course, but there had been medical people there, able to
handle any emergency. What would they do if Saluez was in trouble?

“What?” asked Snark.

“Just…my mind, pestering me. I need to think about something else.”

Snark grinned ferociously. “Think about this. I hated you, you know?”

Lutha swallowed. “So you said.”

Snark squirmed, settling herself, her eyes on Saluez. “I got to thinking about that. Truth was, it wasn't just you. I hated ever'body. Ever since they called me a liar and thief in that home, I hated 'em.”

She scowled, lines of concentration between her eyebrows. “Thing is, I got to figuring, it wasn't just me! It'd been the same for any female. If it'd been a boy and they'd called him a liar, he'd have said so what and who wants his nose flattened over it?”

“Probably,” Lutha said, intrigued.

“Boys get in a fight, nobody thinks much about it. Boys tell a few stories, or thief a few things, boys'll be boys, an' nobody says civilization's coming to an end. Do they?”

“Not usually,” Lutha agreed. “But you think it's different with girls?”

“Girls go for somebody, they're out of control! People at the home said that; justice machine said that. Snark, you're out of control! I never done anything men I knew didn't do, and they're still back on Central, scavenging and telling lies, just like always. Men a lot like Mitigan, killing folks right and left. Men like Leelson, doing whatever he wants…”

Saluez moaned. Snark's voice trailed off, waiting. The moan didn't go anywhere. It fell off into quiet, and Snark resumed her discourse.

“It's different for women. And for some men. Men like the old Procurator, I guess. And for the king too.”

“Jiacare?”

“Him, yeah. Old Proc and the king, they're more like
Saluez, trying to be in control all the time. More like you.”

“Like me?” Lutha was astonished.

“Yeah. You carry on—crying, laughing. Flapping around sometimes like a bird. Lotsa drama, you know, but down at the bottom of it, you're like Saluez too. Trying to hang on.”

Lutha laughed, a hollow sound. “Drama,” she said. “My family does have a tendency toward …drama.”

Snark accepted this. “What I think is, men, they can rape and ruin, maim and murder, kill each other off in dozen lots, so long as there's one left, he can make babies enough for the next go-round without even working very hard at it. If you're a woman or a king, though, you got more invested than that, right? You got yourself invested in civility, ‘cause that's what's safe for people. You get invested like that, you got to be righteous and do the looking out for other people. There's the young ones, the old ones, the sick ones. Got to stay in there, hoping for something different…”

Saluez moaned again. Snark wrapped several folds of her shirt around her hands, like clumsy mittens, watching intently while Lutha wet a cloth and wiped Saluez's sweaty face.

Lutha asked, “You think that's what Saluez is doing? Hoping for something different?”

“Saluez says she wants to lie in sweet grass, eating apples,” said Snark. “That's different. That's paradise. Like it was on Breadh.”

“Were there many people on Breadh?”

Snark laughed, abruptly joyous. “Hardly any! That's what made it paradise! I told Kane the Brain about Breadh. He said we all make up an Eden. Some old-time place. Some never-never place. Someplace just over the hill, maybe, where things're the way things used to be, ought to be, the way they never were.”

Lutha caught her breath, aware of a sudden pain behind
her breastbone. Not her heart. Lung and stomach, probably, contending for the title of chief dramatist. It hurt, nonetheless. “Can't there be a real Eden?” she gasped, astonished at the pain the question evoked. “Somewhere? Can't there?”

Snark shrugged. “We could make one here if we wanted. We could make one anywhere, if we would. Instead it's apples and sweet grass, long gone, long past. Kane said we ate them all—”

Saluez shrieked abruptly, a senseless sound that accompanied a seemingly endless convulsion. Her teeth ground together. Her belly heaved and clenched.

“Why is she unconscious?” Lutha demanded. She hadn't been unconscious when Leely was born. Women who chose to give birth usually chose to experience it.

“She's Dinadhi,” Snark replied, as though this meant something. Then she shook her head in momentary confusion. “I think I remember what Mother told me. I hope I haven't forgotten. I think we have to do this thing first….”

“Do what first?”

The question was answered, but not by Snark. Saluez shrieked mindlessly. Out from between her legs came a white thing, a bloody white thing, a small head with closed and bulging eyes, a wide mouth that showed the tips of sharp little teeth. The moment the head came into the light, the eyes opened and the teeth began snapping, snapping at them, the eyes glaring.

“Quick!” shouted Snark, grabbing at the thing with her mittened hands, wrenching it from Saluez's body, and thrusting it through the narrow neck of her recently manufactured catch bucket. Despite the wrappings of cloth, the thing brought blood from her arm, leaving a nasty gash.

“Watch out,” she cried. “There may be more!”

There were two more. Snark got one, and Lutha got the other one, while one part of herself gibbered mindlessly
and some other part demanded that she should not behave stupidly in front of Snark. The creatures were slimy and pale, they shrieked and gnashed, and the gaping slits along their backs quivered like gills as grim-faced Snark thrust them into her bucket and fastened the lid down tight.

When the contractions stopped and it was clear there were to be no more of them, Snark tied the catch bucket top with line and put it inside one of the larger supply cases, which she also lashed closed. The entire bundle rocked and shrieked at them as they returned their attentions to Saluez. She had expelled the afterbirth. With it was what remained of the infant she had carried.

Snark wrapped the bloody fragments in the clean cloths they had intended to receive a living child.

“Did you get bitten?” she asked matter-of-factly.

“A little,” said Lutha faintly. “What …?”

“It most always happens,” Snark said, her eyes wide and unfocused. “Mother said it's a rare thing that a first baby lives. Sometimes it does, if there's only one scourge inside, but usually there's at least three or four of them.”

Lutha trembled, unable to get any words out. Now she knew where the next generation of Kachis were on Dinadh. Even now they were being incubated and born.

“They didn't have wings,” she said stupidly.

“Those slits down the back,” Snark replied. “As soon as they dry, the wings pop out. They can fly almost right away.” She shook her head. “These looked sort of not ripe, though, didn't they?”

Lutha had no idea what a ripe Kachis would look like. “How does this happen?”

Snark made a face, a spitting sound. “It's the Dinadhi way. It's part of the choice the songfathers made. First time a woman's pregnant, a helper takes her to the House Without a Name. They take food and water so the scourges won't be hungry or thirsty. And the helper ties her down on the table and then rings a gong, and maybe
one or two scourges come and lay eggs in her. They've got these long pricky-looking ovipositors. But sometimes instead of one or two coming, lots of them come and eat on the woman's face. Only the face, though. No other parts.”

She wiped at her cheeks with the back of one bloody hand. “And when comes time for the woman to have the baby, the scourges get born first. The midwives take 'em and feed 'em and turn 'em loose as soon as their wings're dry. And then, if the scourges didn't eat it, the baby is born.”

“But why do the Dinadhi do it?” Lutha screamed.

“I'm tellin' you! The songfathers
command
it, so's there'll be
beautiful people
to hold all the people who die. Places for their souls to go. The women are supposed to have this duty so the people can live forever.”

Snark took a deep breath. “If the baby's messed up but alive, they take it away somewhere.”

“By the Great and Glorious Org Gauphin,” Lutha said fervently. “Knowing all this, why does any Dinadhi woman get pregnant!”

Snark shared a bitter half smile. “They don't know it. It's taboo to talk about it. All the girls know is there's a kind of a trial they have to go through to become a woman, but they don't get told about it until after it's happened.”