Soon afterwards, Kyra had severe cramps. Her birth pains had begun. She rubbed her stomach, willing for her baby to come out into the world.
Then Uma noticed some blood oozing from Kyra’s lower body. An elderly ape-woman came over to help. She smeared some wild honey over the wound as was their custom, trying to stop the bleeding.
During the night, Kyra became feverish. Tor stayed by her side. He cupped some water in his hand and tried to cool her down by dripping the water over her face. Still, the fever burned. Kyra would sometimes moan or groan or sigh or even cry out. Tor feared for her life and the life of the unborn one.
In the morning there was no reprieve. They gave her water and honey. Clearly, she was in agony. Her eyes were red, her body burning, her hands trembling. Everyone knew the end was coming.
Kyra had a fit, shaking in a way that terrified the onlookers, especially her family. After the fit was over, she drew one final breath and then struggled to breathe, finally rolling to one side, immobile. There was a respectful pause. Tor knelt down to put his hand in front of her mouth. No breath. He felt her neck. No pulse. His wife’s breath had gone, taken into the sky, part of the wind.
Tor went gone off to find a spot in the grasslands where he could be alone. For some time, though, Ayak lay on his mother’s stomach, weeping. After his long search, he’d found his mother – only to lose her again.
Clinging to his deceased mother, it seemed for a time that he was a young child again. Memories flooded his mind. He remembered being bathed in the river, his mother gently lowering him into the water and splashing his face and body. Then there was a flashback to when she took him berry-picking. An even more vivid memory came to mind – she’d often held him tight during thunderstorms. Then, just knowing she was there had taken the edge off his fear. Sometimes, he’d cuddled so closely to her that he could hear her heartbeat above the storm, beating fast and steady. Her calmness had rubbed off on him.
But wait, Ayak could hear a heartbeat somewhere…was it part of the flashback to his childhood? No, as his head lay on his mother’s stomach, there was a beat, and also some movements inside her. He lifted his head and looked into his mother’s face. It was completely still. And the skin of her expressionless face was cool to the touch. He put his hands around her neck to feel the life there. Nothing. He opened her mouth and put his nose next to her lips. There was no breath. His mother was not coming back to life.
Then Ayak placed his head back on her stomach and listened. Sure enough, there was a faint pulsation, a vibration. Again, he lifted his head, becoming animated. He put his hand on his mother’s stomach and that was when he felt the kick from the unborn baby.
Uma was puzzled about what was happening. Ayak took her hand and placed it on his mother’s womb. She, too, could sense movements. She smiled. The baby was still alive.
He ran to find his father. He saw Tor sitting on a rock, head in hands. His son grabbed his arm and pulled him onto his feet. He motioned to his stomach and made a gesture indicating the idea of pregnancy. Tor sensed the excitement but he didn’t know what his son was trying to tell him.
The hominids ran back to the tree where Kyra’s life had expired. By now, a crowd had gathered. Ayak placed Tor’s hand over the belly of his wife. When he detected the signs of life inside her womb, it made him happy, distracting him away from his grief. Now he had a goaclass="underline" to help to save the baby.
Tor looked into the eyes of his son. At that moment, Ayak seemed to know what to do. It was like when he and his father had hunted down their prey. Ayak handed him the handaxe. There was a cutting job to do. Inside the limp body of Kyra was a life, like a tiny creature lost inside a cave.
Tor had no qualms about cutting open his wife’s body, since her breath had already left her to return into the Sky. Just as he’d always cut open dead animals he’d slain, so he would find a way to cut this baby out of the womb before it, too, died, along with its mother. Many times, he had dissected animals he’d hunted, getting to know where their internal organs were.
Clutching the handaxe firmly in his hand, the ape-man made an incision right down the left side of Kyra’s protruding belly. Blood and fluids spilled out. He wiped away the mess. Undeterred, he cut even deeper so that he could lift up the skin. He carefully cut across the belly from left to right so as to create a kind of flap through which the baby would come.
From time to time, he would put his ear to the belly to hear the baby’s weak heartbeat. He needed to know its precise location at all times to avoid accidentally hurting it. Taking a deep breath, he began to cut through the walls of her abdomen. He didn’t know what he would find. But somewhere there was a living being he had to reach.
There was blood everywhere. Uma splashed water over the patient’s body and the surgeon’s hands to keep them as clear as possible.
When he came to the uterus, he sensed instinctively that the baby’s life was now at great risk. Any wrong move with the handaxe could kill the tiny infant. What would happen when he cut further? Beads of perspiration formed on his forehead and dripped down his nose onto the bloody belly of the dead mother. All the spectators were respectfully silent, although all of them were on tenterhooks.
Finally, Tor found the courage to cut into the uterus. Water and other fluids burst out once its wall was pierced.
He paused for a moment to think. His intuition immediately told him that the safest way out for the baby would be from the same direction as a normal birth: downwards. So he cut upwards from the lateral incision he’d made below her belly. When Uma had splashed some water over the wide cuts he’d made to increase visibility, he saw the umbilical cord which he recognised from previous births he’d witnessed. It was then that he realised he was on the right track.
At that point, the elderly ape-woman came forward as she’d had experience as a mid-wife in their community. She took over, thrusting her hands into the bloody womb to feel her way around to grab hold of the baby’s head. Tor held on to the cord and she extracted the squashed-looking, tiny creature, wet with amniotic fluid.
The bloody after-birth, including the placenta, was taken and buried under the tree where Kyra had died. They believed that this act would make the ground around them more fertile in future.
Now Tor severed the cord with the handaxe. The ape-baby was tipped upside down and it began to cry. The mid-wife checked its sex – it was a girl. Through her daughter, Kyra’s life would be continued.
Later, Tor and Ayak carried Kyra’s broken body out onto the plains. The grasslands had given her life: now, it had to be returned. They found some small rocks where they laid her remains down. Then they hurried away because they didn’t want to see bird or beast eating what was left of her body like carrion. So they never turned their heads to look back. It would have been disrespectful to watch her body’s remains being ripped apart by scavengers.
In these parts, nothing could be wasted, including death itself.
When they got back to the tree community, the new-born baby was asleep in Uma’s arms in the shade of a tree. Right now, they needed to find a female to suckle her.
Only when the infant was strong enough would they seek a new world, safe from Uma’s tribe, perhaps venturing, at last, beyond the North Mountain into the Great Unknown they no longer feared.
II
DARK FORCE
CHAPTER EIGHT
FROM THE EARLIEST tool-makers on Africa’s grasslands until the great dawn of civilization, more than one million years went by. Then, five thousand years passed before a Dark Force emerged which threatened to engulf Earth in a devouring fire….