Free Birth: A Novella by Ann Herendeen Page A

as if to hold him in the life he
almost gave up.
    I take a deep breath. Honor requires that I
acknowledge what has happened, and I refuse to get this wrong. “You
saved my life,” I say aloud, needing to hear the words, a kind of
proclamation. “Roger and Tariq saved yours. I owe them a great
debt, one that will take a lifetime to repay.”
    Dominic lies in silence. I think he’s fallen
asleep, until he says, I owe them the debt, not you. It’s my
life they saved, not yours.
    This is familiar ground. I know, I
say. A woman doesn’t pay debts of honor. It doesn’t matter
anymore that I will always get it wrong. So long as Dominic is
alive to scold me, to chastise me, so long as he regains his
strength so that I can safely curse and shout at him, that is what matters.
    “Is that how I am with you?” he whispers,
appalled into speech. “Do I scold and chastise you? It’s a wonder
you wanted them to save me.”
    “It’s my fault,” I say. “I shame you and
make mistakes—”
    “You never shame me.” Dominic is
vehement, fierce, shaking with the effort of articulating his
emotion. “I shame myself, hurting you, frightening you. You can’t
be expected to know all these things. It takes years, growing up
here—”
    “No,” I say, “all it takes is keeping my
marriage vow, knowing your mind, thinking before acting.”
    “Don’t do that,” he says. “Promise me you
won’t start thinking our marriage to death.”
    “That’s easy,” I say. “I haven’t been
thinking straight since I met you.” The baby’s sleepy head nods,
falls on my breast. Black hair and—blue eyes I think, under the
milky eyelids. She will be a beauty.
    All babies have blue eyes, Dominic
thinks.
    She’ll look like him, I can see it already,
will be like him. Tall and dark-haired, quick in speech and
thought, athletic and short-tempered. I put both arms around her,
hold her safe to my side. How I love her.
    Magnificent , I think, and we sleep,
the three of us, in communion. All babies have it—communion with
parents who love them.
    ***
    Dominic and I were no longer speaking by the time we
returned to Aranyi, the good work of our slow journey undone by the
stay at Ormonde. It was the beginning of the Midwinter season, and
the household, what was left of it, had anticipated a visit to
distant family or the quiet of an empty house, the freedom to
celebrate without the stifling presence of the master and
mistress.
    I granted all requests for leave. Naomi
didn’t ask—she had already gone on her long trek into the deep
forest. She went on foot, people said, taking no provisions beyond
gifts of hothouse fruit for her mother, and with only the clothes
on her back. The old people chuckled knowingly. She’d manage fine,
they said. She knew how to get meat without snares.
    I told myself not to panic, that my own
internal examinations had shown me that the child was healthy, and
that my body was adjusting well, expanding and softening in the
pelvis, gaining a good amount of weight, and going through the
correct hormonal changes. People had used natural childbirth for
centuries, I lectured myself. Yes , my cynical self replied, and maternal and infant deaths had kept the population down for
centuries, too .
    Dominic was supposed to help me. He had gone
through it before, with his natural-born son, and the mother had
survived, with a healthy child to show for it. But what if our
estrangement altered things? It was all based on communion, and
ours wasn’t really functional. I must be the one to reach out to
him, I decided, make the overture. It was essential.
    There is no tradition of gift-giving at
Midwinter as there is on Terra for the vague equivalent of Xmas. I
knew, from his thoughts, that Dominic had found a gift for me
anyway, months ago, before things were so bad between us, that it
was small enough to carry on our journey, and that he had
remembered to bring it, despite everything. So perhaps there was
hope. More than that I