Chapter 60: First Birth and Weddings I

The first of the sixteen came to term at midsummer.

Her name was Ylva, and she had been carrying since those first foul weeks on the beach, which meant she had carried it through the caves and through the whole of that winter.

She was the one everybody had quietly been counting the days for.

Because they had no midwife.

That was not an oversight. A manifest is a list of what a man can sell, and nobody has ever been paid to write midwife on one.

So some of the older women had spent the spring working the thing out between them, out of whatever they remembered of their own villages and their own mothers, which was a great deal more than nothing and a great deal less than enough.

When Ylva's time came they took her own house for it, because there was nowhere else, and they had made it ready days before.

Clean straw down. Cloth boiled and folded. A pot on the hearth, water hot, the shutters open for the air, and a lamp for when the light went.

They did it well, too.

For eleven hours they did it well.

Oddr had made arrangements of his own.

He had asked the neighbour four days earlier whether he might have the back room, and the neighbour had said yes without asking why, and the old man had moved a blanket in there and slept in it every night since with his bag of things beside him.

Nobody had asked him to. He had simply moved into the house next door and waited.

It was the shrieking that woke him.

He lay in the dark and listened to it for about three breaths, and then he was up and had his boots on, because he had been listening to women give birth for longer than most people on that island had been alive.

And he knew the difference between the sound of hard work and the other sound.

He came out into the street.

One of the women was already out there with a bucket. Her sleeves were red past the elbow and she had not gone anywhere near the water. She had stopped in the middle of the road with her hand over her mouth.

Oddr went past her without a word.

He got as far as the door of the room, and two of the women were in it.

The pair of them, one on either side of the frame, arms out, blocking it.

And it was not cruelty and it was not stupidity. This was a house where a woman was giving birth, and the man in front of them was seventy years old and filthy and known chiefly for being funny at other people's expense.

Behind them, inside, Ylva screamed again.

Something in the old man's face went out.

"You are not coming in here," said the older of them.

"Move."

"You'll only make it worse," said the younger. "You will frighten her-"

"She has been at it eleven hours and the child is turned."

His voice went somewhere neither of them had ever heard it go.

"And you know it is turned. You have known for two hours. Move."

They did not move.

So he tried the other ways, because there were two lives behind that door and he had nothing else to spend.

He reasoned first. He told them, fast and flat, what he could see from where he stood. The colour of what was on their sleeves. How much of it there was. What it meant that the pushing had stopped and the screaming had not.

The older one told him it was women's business.

So he begged. He was not proud, and had not been for fifty years, and he stood in a doorway at three in the morning and asked two frightened women to let an old man past.

Then he went to work on them properly.

He turned his head to the younger of the two.

"You have a daughter."

He said it gently, which made it worse.

"When she comes to it, and she will, this year or next, who is going to be standing in the door then? Me? Or you, on the outside of it, listening?"

The younger one's face did something.

"Do not-"

"Because that is what you are choosing right now. You are choosing what happens in this house every time, for the rest of your life. And you are choosing it because you do not want to look a fool in front of a woman who is dying on the other side of that wall-"

"That is enough-"

"No, it is not enough, you stupid, frightened, useless pair of hens."

His voice cracked right through the middle of it.

"She is bleeding out in there while you defend a doorway. And when she is dead you will still be standing in it, and you will have your dignity, and she will have nothing, and neither will that child, and I will spend the rest of the year listening to the pair of you explain to everybody how you did everything you could-"

Inside, Ylva made a sound that was no longer a scream.

Through the gap between them Oddr could see the third woman on her knees in the straw, both arms red to the shoulder, her whole face pulled tight and wrong, mouthing something that was not any kind of prayer.

The older one's jaw was set. The younger was crying and did not know it.

Neither of them moved.

And then they noticed what was standing at the corner of the house.

Hiccup had come out of the shadows without a sound. The green of his eyes had come up brighter and the pupils had gone to two hard threads, and he did not raise his voice at all.

"Let. Him. In."

He did not do anything else.

He did not have to.

They stepped aside.

Oddr rolled his sleeves up as he went past and did not thank anybody.

It took another few hours.

Let it be said plainly, because there is no soft way to say it and no reason to go looking for one.

It was a butchery.

The child was lying across her instead of down, one shoulder wedged, and it had been like that since the evening.

She had torn already. The straw under her was black with it in the lamplight and there was more coming, steadily, the whole time, in a slow warm spreading that Oddr watched out of the corner of his eye and did not once mention out loud.

The room stank of blood and sweat and the sharp animal smell of a woman at the very end of what a body will do.

He got his arm into her to the elbow and turned the child by hand.

She screamed until she could not scream, and then she made a noise like a man being drowned, and then she stopped making any noise at all, which was worse, and the older one had to hold her head and keep talking to her about nothing.

The younger one wept the entire time and did exactly what she was told the entire time, and Oddr found, somewhere in the middle of it, that he had stopped being angry with her.

He knew things.

Nobody on that island had ever asked where from, and nobody ever would, because he would not have answered.

He knew which herb, and how much of it, and how long to boil it.

He knew where to put his hands, and where to press, and how hard.

And he knew the thing that mattered most, which is that a woman that far gone stops being able to help you, and you have to do it anyway.

The boy came out grey and folded and did not breathe.

Oddr cleared his mouth with a finger, turned him over along his forearm, and hit him between the shoulder blades harder than anybody in that room thought you were allowed to hit a newborn.

The scream that came out of him went the length of the street.

Afterward there was the bleeding, which took the rest of it, and which Oddr stopped with both hands and a great deal of swearing.

Then it was over.

They cleaned her as well as they could and got the worst of the straw out and put the child on her chest.

And Ylva, who had been past speech for an hour, who had lost enough blood to kill a smaller woman, whose lips were the colour of old paper, looked down at him.

And laughed.

It was not much of a laugh. It was mostly breath.

But it was the first sound of joy anybody in that house had made all night, and it went through the pair at the door like a blade.

She got one finger onto the back of his head. She said something in her own tongue that nobody caught.

Then she was asleep, hard, in the middle of the sentence, with the child still on her.

Both of them lived.

Oddr came out at dawn with his forearms scrubbed pink to the elbow, and sat down on the step, and did not say one funny thing for the rest of the day.

Hiccup was still there.

He had not moved from the corner of the house.

He had been there the entire time. All of it. Every sound of it, standing perfectly still in the dark with his arms folded, and there was no version of that night in which he had not heard every single thing that happened in that room.

When he finally did move, he rolled his head over to the left and stopped halfway, the way he had been stopping halfway for weeks now.

The bruise had gone yellow by then. A long soft stain under his jaw that a man had to be standing close to notice, and it had stopped being worth mentioning some time ago.

It still did not much like being ignored for a whole night in the cold.

Neither of them said anything for a while.

It was the first child born on that island, and the tally of the business ran roughly as follows.

The women had done their very best. They had prepared the house days in advance and they had worked eleven hours and they had known what they did not know, and every one of those things was to their credit.

That they had known for two hours and held the door anyway was not.

They came to Oddr about it before the sun was properly up, both of them. The older one could not get the words out and said them anyway, and the younger simply cried again.

The old man heard them out and told them to sit down and eat something, and then told them what to watch for over the next three days, and that was the end of it as far as he was concerned.

They went and found Hiccup afterward, which took more courage, and apologised to him too.

He looked at the ground the whole time and said it was fine about four times.

Ylva woke the following afternoon.

She had them carry her out onto the terrace because she wanted the sun. And when Oddr came, she took his hand in both of hers, hands with no strength in them at all, and wept, and thanked him in three languages until she ran out of all of them.

Then she asked for the other one.

Hiccup came up the street looking like a man walking to a gallows and stood in her doorway with his head bent under the lintel and his horns in the shade and his hands very carefully where she could see them.

She held the child up as far as her arms would go, which was not far.

She had named him Hiccup.