“Yes, I know,” said Lanius, the twelfth king of his line. He hadn’t expected to wed the great-granddaughter of a peasant. Even Princess Romilda of Thervingia had fancier bloodlines than Queen Sosia did. But, while Lanius sprang from a long line of kings, Grus was the one who held the power in Avornis these days. Lanius liked that no better than he ever had, but he knew he couldn’t do anything about it.
Darkness fell. Servants lit lamps outside the birthing chamber. Light seeped out from under the closed door, too, so lamps also burned in there. Lanius yawned.
“We should have cots sent down,” Estrilda said. “We’re liable to be here all night long.”
Before Lanius could nod and send the servants to do just that, a groan came from inside the birthing chamber. Netta opened the door and stuck her head out into the corridor. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” she said briskly. “The opening is wide enough to let the baby out. Another hour, maybe a little more.” She started to go back in, then checked herself. “Don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl, but it has dark hair.”
“Oh!” Lanius said. That the midwife might see such a thing before the mother did hadn’t crossed his mind.
Queen Estrilda laughed softly. “The midwife always finds out first. It doesn’t seem fair—”
“It certainly doesn’t,” Lanius agreed.
“But it’s true, even so,” Estrilda said.
More groans came from the birthing chamber, and then something that sounded uncommonly like a shriek. Lanius jumped. “Is she all right?” he asked anxiously.
“I think so,” Estrilda answered. “Netta would come out and tell us if anything bad had happened. I hope she would, anyhow.” She checked herself. “Yes, I’m sure she would. Women make those noises when they have babies, that’s all.”
Another cry made Lanius flinch. The last time he’d heard such sounds was from wounded men on the battlefield. Men took their chances there, taking life. Women took theirs here, bringing forth new life.
When Lanius said as much to Queen Estrilda, she only nodded. “Well, of course,” she replied, as though surprised that wasn’t obvious to him.
He realized it should have been. But it hadn’t, not till he heard his own wife cry out in pain giving birth to the child he’d seeded in her. Men took women for granted more readily than the other way round, or so it seemed to Lanius. He wondered what he could do about that. He wondered if he could do anything about it. Since he hadn’t noticed something so fundamental till he got his nose rubbed in it, how likely was that? Perhaps better not to dwell on the answer there.
More shrieks came, one hard on the heels of another. Despite her air of confidence, Estrilda went pale. Her lips moved silently. Lanius had begun to read lips; he’d seen it might come in handy every now and then. He still wasn’t very good, but he had no trouble recognizing Queen Quelea’s name.
After those shrieks, he heard a noise he’d never heard before: half grunt, half scream. It suggested not pain but rather supreme effort. A man trying to lift twice his own weight and knowing he would die if he failed might have made a noise like that. The hair at the back of Lanius’ neck prickled up.
Queen Estrilda, by contrast, looked relieved. “She’s pushing the baby out,” she told Lanius. “That’s what that sound means. Everything else was just getting ready. This is what really matters.”
Lanius tried to imagine pushing a baby out—tried and felt himself failing. He wasn’t physically equipped to understand. But he was, as always, relentlessly curious. “What’s it like?” he asked his mother-in-law.
Again, her lips shaped a silent word. This time, it was Men. The way she looked saying it made Lanius embarrassed to belong to his half of the human race. But then Estrilda said, “Imagine you’ve swallowed a big pumpkin—whole. Imagine it’s gone all the way through your guts—whole. Now imagine you’re squatting over the pot and you’ve got to get rid of it or burst. That’s what it’s like.”
He did his best. He’d always had a vivid imagination, too. “Why on earth would any woman ever do this more than once?” he blurted.
Estrilda looked at him. “That may be the most sensible question I’ve ever heard a man ask about giving birth,” she said. “Because you forget some of it afterward, that’s why. Otherwise…” She shook her head. “Otherwise we wouldn’t do it twice— I’m sure of that—and people would get fewer and fewer, till nobody was left. I suppose the forgetting is Queen Quelea’s gift, if you want to call it that.”
In the birthing chamber, Sosia made that effort-filled grunting cry one more time. A moment later, Netta shouted. And then the king’s hair prickled up in awe, for he heard yet another voice from the birthing chamber—the high, thin, furious wail of a newborn baby.
Netta shouted again. This time, the shout held words. “Your Majesty, you’ve got yourself a son!”
“Crex!” King Lanius and Queen Estrilda said at the same time. Estrilda leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. Then she got up and dashed into the birthing chamber.
Plaintively, Lanius called, “May I come, too?”
“Wait a minute,” the midwife answered. “Here comes the afterbirth now.”
Lanius hadn’t known what the word meant till he watched Bronze deliver her kittens. In moncats, the afterbirth, like the kittens, was small. What it would be like in a woman… The king wasn’t sorry Netta kept him out till she disposed of it one way or another.
In hardly more than the promised minute, she said, “All right, Your Majesty. You can come in now.”
When Lanius opened the door, he smelled sweat and blood and dung—maybe Estrilda hadn’t been joking about squatting over the pot. If a woman was trying to push out a baby, Lanius supposed it made sense that she would push out whatever else happened to be in there, too.
His wife lay on a low couch, covered by a blanket. She looked as though a brewery wagon had run over her. Her hair flew out in all directions in sweaty, spiky tangles. Her face was pale as whey, except for the black circles under her eyes. She panted as though she’d just finished running five miles. She managed a smile for Lanius, but she almost needed to prop up the corners of her mouth to hold it on her face.
In Netta’s arms, Crex started crying again. That reminded the king of the reason all this had gone on. “Let me see him,” he told the midwife.
“Here.” Before she handed him to Lanius, she said, “You’ve got to keep a hand or an arm under his neck. You’ll need to do that for months yet, till his head’s not all floppy anymore. But he looks fine—he’s a good-sized boy.”
He didn’t look good-sized to Lanius; he was no bigger than a moncat. He weighed no more than one, either. His skin was reddish purple, his head squeezed almost into a cone, and his genitals absurdly large for his size. Netta had tied off and cut the umbilical cord; the stump still remained attached to what would become his navel.
He did have five fingers on each hand and five toes on each foot. Lanius carefully counted them all. And, by the noise Crex was making, he had a fine set of lungs. “Are you sure this is how he’s supposed to look?” the king asked nervously.
“I asked her the same thing,” Sosia said.
“He’s fine,” the midwife repeated. “Almost all the mothers and fathers having their first one ask me that. He’s got everything he should, just the way it ought to be.” She sounded very certain. Estrilda nodded, so Lanius supposed it was true. Netta went on, “What he’ll want now, I expect, is something to eat.”
For a moment, Sosia didn’t follow. Then she did. “Oh!” she said. “That means me, doesn’t it?” She pushed down the blanket, baring her breasts. Awkwardly, Lanius set Crex on her. She didn’t handle the baby much more smoothly than he did. But, though neither the king nor the queen quite knew what to do, the baby did. He rooted till he found Sosia’s nipple and began to suck.