“Eh?” The old woman rose from her pallet and tottered in my direction, cupping one ear. “Ready to pop, is she?”
“Aye.” I blew out my breath, trying to remember what Raphael had taught me. I had assisted him with a difficult birth once, although I’d come in at the end of the process. “Sarangerel, you will bring a bucket of water, please?”
“Yes, Moirin!” She dashed away.
One thing about the Tatars, they were not much for bathing, at least not in the dead of winter. I had not seen anything resembling soap in the ger; but I had a dwindling ball of soap in my battered canvas satchel. As soon as the water was warming on the stove, I scrubbed my hands and arms thoroughly, raising a goodly amount of lather. “Good,” I said. “We need blankets and cloth. Clean.”
“You needn’t fuss so,” Grandmother Yue said irritably, taking Checheg’s arm and helping her walk around the ger. “Nature will take its course.”
Checheg grunted in assent, rubbing the small of her back.
“I am trying to do a good thing!” I said in frustration. “Clean is better. Not to make sick.”
They exchanged a glance and shrugged.
It was a long process.
When the contractions began to come hard and steady, Checheg lay down, propped against pillows, her knees spread apart. She did not protest when I eased the cleanest of the felt blankets beneath her. Gently, I removed her thick, felt-lined boots and woolen trousers. Half undressed, she seemed much smaller to me.
Ah, gods! Mortal flesh is a fragile and vulnerable thing. I knelt between her wide-spread thighs and placed my hand on her immense belly, feeling it harden and tighten, then ease, over and over. Checheg groaned with pain, eyes squeezed tight.
“Breathe,” I murmured to her. “Push, yes, but not hard.”
Eyes closed, she nodded.
I bowed my head and centered myself, breathing the Breath of Earth’s Pulse. I breathed the Breath of Ocean’s Rolling Waves, slow and deep. It eased Checheg, and she breathed with me-until the pace of her breathing quickened again, one breath coming hard and fast after another.
Delicate flesh tore and parted.
“Gods!” I whispered in awe, seeing the infant’s head crown. I put my hand beneath it to support it as it emerged, first the head, then the narrow shoulders following. “Stone and sea!”
Checheg hissed between her teeth.
All in a rush, the infant slithered loose from her body, tethered by a pulsing cord. I caught it in my hands, gasping with wonder.
“You’ve got to turn it upside down so it can breathe,” Grandmother Yue counseled, hovering over my shoulder.
Carefully, so carefully, I tilted the tiny, slippery creature so its head was lower than its miniscule feet. It drew a choked, soggy breath, and made a bubbling sound. Mucus and fluids sputtered and drooled from its mouth and nostrils. It drew another breath, and squalled. It was a healthy sound.
I laughed out loud.
Checheg opened her eyes and smiled wearily. With cloth boiled in the water Sarangerel had brought, I wiped the babe clean of blood and birth fluids, then wrapped it in the cleanest dry woolens I’d been able to find.
“Boy or girl?” Checheg whispered, reaching out feebly with both arms.
“Girl.” Gauging the length of the birthing cord, I set the swaddled babe on her belly.
“I’m glad,” Sarangerel announced, seeming not in the least unnerved by the entire process. “I wanted a sister.”
“Well, that’s done, all but the messy afterward bit.” Grandmother Yue gave a mighty yawn. “I’m off for a nap. Keep them warm. Wait for the rest to come out before you tie and cut the cord, you hear?”
I nodded. “Yes, Grandmother. Thank you.”
While I waited for the messy afterward bit, I draped more warm blankets over Checheg, checking beneath them when she grimaced in the throes of a secondary contraction. For the most part, she reclined against the pillows looking tired and peaceful, her thick coat unbuttoned beneath the blankets as she coaxed the babe to nurse. Sarangerel cuddled against her mother’s side, peering at her new baby sister with fascination.
I gazed at them, filled with complex emotions.
“Why do you look sad, Moirin?” Checheg asked me, her voice soft with concern and exhaustion. “You did well. I have never known a birth so easy.”
“Oh…” I smiled, knowing there was a shadow of sorrow in it I could not hide. “Yes, today is a day for joy,” I said, choosing my words with care. “Only I am thinking of my Queen very far away. She was with child. She was afraid of this day when her time came. She did not want me to leave. I wanted to be there for her.”
Checheg understood. “And instead you are here for me.” She cradled the back of her babe’s head with one hand, summoning a sweet, tired smile. “But now you see there was nothing to fear. I am sure it was so for your Queen.”
“I hope so.” Although I had underestimated her before, I could not imagine Jehanne facing the ordeal of childbirth with the same calm, steady courage.
“You will see.” Checheg closed her eyes. “I will be sorry when you leave. All of us will.” Her voice took on a dreamy tone. “But you will find your legendary peasant-boy, and together you will return to faraway Terre d’Ange with its white walls and great palaces, and forests growing beneath glass pavilions, and there you will find that all is well with this Queen of whom you are so very fond.”
I had not spoken of my role as Jehanne’s companion, since it was foreign to Tatar customs. Now I flushed, suspecting I was not as good at concealing my feelings as I thought.
“By then her baby will be as big as my little brother Mongke,” Sarangerel added. “Already making trouble!”
It was a charming thought.
I wondered if Jehanne’s child, boy or girl, had inherited its mother’s mercurial temper or its father’s sense of grave resolve. Secretly, I hoped it was the former. And I gazed at the babe in Checheg’s arms, hoping she inherited a measure of her mother’s innate kindness; hoping she would come of age in a time of peace, and need not believe that to live was to suffer.
Like as not, I would never know. But I could pray for it.
The babe stirred in its mother’s arms.
I reached out to stroke her tender cheek with one finger. “Welcome to the world, little one.”
TEN
They named the baby girl Bayar, which meant joy.
“It was your idea, Moirin,” Checheg said to me, eyes dancing. “Remember? When she was born, you said it was a day for joy.”
“I remember,” I said, touched.
Grandmother Yue chewed her lips. “Too bad it wasn’t a boy.”
Batu smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling. “I do not mind. I like daughters, too.”
Life settled into a new rhythm in the ger. Having been trained by Checheg during my first month among the Tatars, I took on her duties, letting her rest, recover her strength, and nurse the babe while I saw to the daily preparation of tea and food, ladling it out at meal-times in the correct order of precedence.
Days passed, one by one.
Betimes, I grew restless and stifled, the felt walls and dried-dung smoke of the ger closing in on me until it was hard to breathe. When it happened, Checheg was sensitive to it. She would rise from her pallet, Bayar cradled in one arm, and tilt her head toward the door in an implicit command.