125 – A disorder among the most primitive peoples

It’s not every Yeoli man who gets it, but enough of us do that everyone knows that it happens. I should have known I would, as it often runs from father to son. And yet I hadn’t when Tanasha had given birth to Fifth; why? I had assumed back then it was due to the distance, but then why was I feeling it now, over much further?

I’ve never found a certain answer, but I think the likeliest is that Fifth was Tanasha’s sixth child, so it was quick and easy and fearless, as she’d told me, whereas Shaina was doing it for the first time, so her inexperienced womb would take longer at its business, and for her mind and heart, it was a journey onto unknown land. So she felt it intensely enough for me to feel, too.

I hadn’t known it was possible to feel it so far away, in truth. I’d have to ask a midwife when I got home. Perhaps it was like weapon-sense.

The change-room of Vae Arahi, by which we Yeolis mean the sacred room in which both birth and death (if it is not too unexpected) take place, is in the Hearthstone Independent. They would already have gathered the spruce, pine and cedar branches, started the lavender-oil heating to fill the air with its calming scent, hung the tapestries on the stone walls that symbolize the womb of the Earthsphere, and done the first ceremony, which reminds the mother that she is doing what the female of every creature that walks or swims or flies has always done, and so she need not fear, or imagine she doesn’t have the strength.

My mothers would be with her, of course, to lend her their calm and wisdom, and Etana to give her his love; she might have the closest friends she’d made in Vae Arahi there; the midwife would be feeling her inside now and then so as to make sure it was proceeding as it should, and the apprentice making things ready. There might be a Haian there if they expected something might go amiss; I hoped not. The only curses I knew they’d feel for sure was the war, and that I was not there.

When I looked back, this explained a few other things; why I’d been feeling bloated in the belly now and then, and why I’d sudden gone off rich meat, though since the Haian had ordered me mostly off it, I should be craving, and craved kale and spinach, which previously I hadn’t been able to stand.

Skorsas was hard to strike speechless, for one so young, but I had managed it. The word he managed to form, when he was finally able, was, “Whaaaaaat?”

“My child! My second child is coming! My wife… my dad… my child, aaaiiiigh!”

“Ahmmm… with all due respect, Raikas… I mean Shefen-kas… from what I can tell, you’re a man, and men don’t, em, you know…”

Of course, in this land where men look down on women and women must hate men, I thought, it doesn’t happen and so he has no idea what I’m talking about. “Bear children, no, of course not! My wife back in Yeola-e is having the baby, for me it’s… aaaaaiiiigh! Sorry, it’s…” Of course I had neither Arkan nor Enchian words. “Nayasin chiravesai. When the father feels the pain as well… my father used to get it.”

Skorsas looked at me as if I’d grown a third eye out of a stalk on my head. “Better tell Iska,” I said to him. “I’ll be fine—it’s not an illness. But… wait… ah, don’t go telling the Director that.” Pain might not be an illness, but it can still throw you off and so get you killed in a fight. He scurried out.

I learned later that what he told Iska was that I’d gone out of my mind and was raving. That’s touchy for getting a fighter off a fight; sometimes it is seen as dangerous to him, and sometimes an aid. “Might being in labour along with your wife at a distance get you on the Mezem sick list?” I asked Iska, when he came back.

“Being in what? With your what?” At least he didn’t give me the eye-stalk look. “Is this something Yeolis get?” he said. “Something I can look up, perhaps?”

“Some Yeolis,” I said. “My father got it with every child. In this city, I’d be surprised if you couldn’t look it up.”

“A familial illness,” he said, half to himself.

“It’s not an illness!”

“You’re in pain, and raving… it looks like an illness to me.”

“It’s a bond! Between me and her! I am no more ill than she is, and I am not fikken raving! But—if that gets me on the sick list, fine. Tell the Director whatever you have to.”

“Please calm down, Raikas,” he said, lips pursed.

“Are you kidding? It’s my second child! You expect me to calm down? Don’t you have kids?” I wanted to dance around the room with him in my arms, in truth, now I was between pains.

“Yes, I have children. But my wife actually had them. I didn’t.”

“Well, look it up, for the love of your little professional, literate God!” Trust my luck, there wouldn’t be a single reference in this entire benighted city. I explained more, how it was fairly common at home, and so forth, and the next one started to come up. “I’ll be back,” he said. “Skorsas, look after our, em, labouring fighter, will you?”

“What should I do?” said Skorsas, grinning at me. “Boil water?” The pain was coming up hard so I just answered, “Aaiiiggghh!”

A midwife can tell when the child is likely to be born from how severe and frequent the pains are, so it occurred to me that if I found one, she might be able to tell me whether it was likely to be while I was mid-fight, if Iska couldn’t get me off, or before, in which case it wouldn’t matter. I fondly remembered the midwife who’d picked me up out of the ditch the first day I’d been truth-drugged. “Skorsas, who’s your mother’s midwife?” Probably in the fessas quarter; but I could skate.

I’d grown a second eye-stalk, by his look. “My mother’s what? Raikas-I-mean-Shefen-kas, I have no idea! I don’t know anything about women-baby-birthy-icky stuff! It’s almost making me sick hearing you talk about it!”

This from a boy who didn’t even blink to see guts fall out of an opened-up belly in the Ring, or the horrors in the lion-trench. But you can’t tell an Arkan to be less Arkan. “Any midwife, then! I know Arko has midwives; I’ve met one.”

“Eww, eww, eww, eww!” he said, with a flinch on each one. “You could… ask a… Masker”—he said the word with the utmost distaste—“if you have to. They’re abomination enough to know about that stuff.”

“Sure, abomination, whatever, as long as she’s been doing it for a while and so knows. Where do I go?”

“Go!? Are you out of your mind—in that condition?” I didn’t know it then, but birth, in Arko, is something done locked away and secret, out of sight of decent people, as if it is something to be ashamed of; to his mind, obviously, this should apply to nayasin chiravesai as well. He heaved a huge, pointed sigh. “I’ll go and fetch one… everyone will think you just want to fik her stupid, so that’s fine. My little professional God, the things I must do for you.”

“Fik her stupid? Why would anyone want to think I’m sending for a midwife to fik?” Who could even begin to understand Arkans? He just ran off down the corridor, leaving me alone, except for one of the spare boys, who shyly fetched me tea and more water, now and then. It was just as well to be alone.

What I did not know was that, since both midwives and whores do shameful work in the eyes of the rest of Arko, they work out of the same establishments, and often the same women perform both functions. There is much more to the Houses of Masks, in truth, but I didn’t learn that until much later.

Iska, meanwhile, had taken a fast chair to the University Library, gone to the shelves on medicine and had a librarian delve him up an old book on obscure afflictions. It was a disorder among the most primitive of peoples, the book said, going on to say that this sort of perversity is a cogent example of why Arko should conquer the rest of the world, so as to bring the light of civilization to its most benighted corners. With that information, he ran back to the Director.

He should have borrowed the book; the Director dismissed his story (“It’s ridding the abdomen of a parasite”) out of hand, and ordered Iska to call in a Haian. Sometimes fighters do fake illness, or even madness, to try to evade fights, especially against higher-chainers, and my adversary for that day, Biorio called Monkey’s Shadow, was indeed a higher chainer, though only by four. We were fifth on the slate.

Since I’d given up on hiding the pain—it felt better when I yelled freely—Biorio’s boy was asking around quietly if anyone knew; it might be useful information for his fighter. So was Mana. Niku took the more direct approach, telling Eo that she wanted to sit out in the new garden for a time, then sending him to fetch a cup of kaf. “Omores!” she whispered, from right outside my window in broad daylight, between my yells; she was hiding under a bush. “Are you all right?”

“I… am… wonderful!” She didn’t blink at the reason; turns out Niah men sometimes get nayasin chiravesai too. Another benighted people. She congratulated me, but her face took on a touch of sourness, when I mentioned Shaina by name. “Niku… don’t worry… it’s you… I love… aiiigh! I didn’t… know I… was going to… meet… you… when I… conceived…aaaaaaaahh…”

“Of course not,” she whispered. “I’m just jealous, that’s all… oh, Eo’s coming. Strength, pehali!” She ghosted away.

Down in the Fighter’s Parlour, the remarks followed Skorsas as he showed the masked woman to the stairs. “Just what the doctor ordered for Raikas? Been so long since he’s had a fik that he went over the edge? I don’t know… she looks pretty long in the tooth for him, forty years if I have three chains… Maybe he likes older women.” He’d had a hard time convincing her that the Mezem sought to contract her midwifery services, not her others, in the first place. “He wants just to talk?” she’d said. “I charge just as much.” Biorio’s boy sidled behind Skorsas and the Masker in the hope they’d let something slip, and Skorsas slammed my door in his face.

An experienced Masker, it seems, does know about nayasin chiravesai, vaguely, but this one, at least, had never heard of it at such a distance. “Look, just pretend I’m a woman, all right?” I said to her. “Forget that I’m anything other than a woman in labour, watch me go through it a few times and tell me, from your consummate knowledge, about when she, I mean I, will be delivered! You must do it with a bead-clock; my boy here can get you one.” It was half-way to noon from breakfast already.

She had brought her own bead-clock; she set it up on my night-table. “Which child is this, first or later?” she said, suddenly turning professional. “And what date is he due?” All children in Arko are ‘he,’ until half of them cruelly dash their parents’ fond hopes for sons.

“Atakina 70”—I might as well have been speaking Yeoli to her—“and it’s 60 today, so, ten days from now. The pain started this morning, though it wasn’t really enough to pain until maybe two beads ago. It’s coming up again now.” She had me lie down, and laid her hands on me with her eyes closed. Whether she always closed them, or did not want to see my man’s build so as to help in her imagining, I could not know. “You know how to breathe through it?” she asked me.

“Yes… I saw… my mother… do it… often enough.”

“And this wife of yours is Yeoli, so she only needs to open the one way, which is good,” the midwife said, half-absently. Pain turned into a surge of nausea when it came to me what that meant. Purification can leave parts adjoined to other parts which should not be. I didn’t want to throw up; at least I could scream, relatively unnoticed. “Is she strong and healthy?” I answered all her questions that I could, and she timed me on the bead-clock. “Sometime tonight,” she predicted. “Past midnight, I think, but it might be sooner.”

“Not this afternoon?”

“No, that’s far too soon.” So—if Iska couldn’t talk my way out, I was fighting through it. About that time, Iska came in with the Haian. Kyash, I thought; he checks me and he’ll know it’s nothing really wrong. Their ethics, of course, forbid them from ever giving a false diagnosis. Maybe he can be talked into it if he knows my life might depend on it? But as a Haian, he was neutral on all bloodshed; a false diagnosis might be the death of Biorio. The midwife packed up her clock quickly—I got the impression she wanted to be away from me—and said to Skorsas, “We shall send you the bill.”

Haians, of course, are familiar with nayasin chiravesai. Between watching me go through one bout of pain and touching my wrists, he confirmed handily my own diagnosis. Iska looked as if he’d eaten something rotten. “I can… fight… through pain…” I gritted. “I have… before.”

“What tends to happen when a man is labouring in concert with his wife, and there is an emergency, is that it goes away, as long as he is in the emergency,” the Haian said, in his thick delicate accent. “Then comes back after, if she is not yet delivered.”

“Truly?” I gritted. “And… going into… the Ring… you count… an emergency?”

“It does not matter what I count it,” he said. “It’s whether it is an emergency to you, or more exactly, your vital force… whether your vital force considers it enough of a danger that it decides to turn your mind away from this and so eliminates the pains.”

“Not whether I consider it enough of a danger?” There was too little of my will and my choice here for my taste.

“Well, your mind and your vital force might disagree. I’m sure, for instance, you’d prefer the pains go away now—breathe, Raikas—so you would be less apprehensive. But, notice, they haven’t.”

I tried to discern whether a ring-fight was an emergency to me. They were never unforeseen and so never a shock, other than the bone-deep, endlessly ongoing shock that was this life. I was generally calm when I went into them; my desperate wish to be anywhere else on the Earthsphere but there didn’t come from fear. But once I was in the Ring, it was life and death from stroke to stroke, of course, same as in war. What might not seem an emergency could instantly turn into one if I missed a stroke. Would the pain cease only then?

There was nothing the Haian could do but offer me painkiller, which might dull my mind, so I declined. He handed his bill to Iska, and left. The word went out—I would go on as scheduled—and as the lines began to form at the gates, Biorio’s boy couldn’t stifle his grin.

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