Shadowkill

5

They were finishing a meal of stew and crusty bread when P’murr came into the barracks room where Ilip had brought them.

“Any of you know aught about birthing?”

Tinoopa looked up. “I do. She comin early?”

“You will address the Irrkuy as Matja Allina, chapa. No, it is only a little over five months, but it is a boy and boys come hard on women here. Anyone else? No? Come with me.”

Tinoopa pulled Kizra up with her. “Might need another pair of hands,” she said. “All right?”

He jerked his thumb at the door, then went out.

Matja Allina was sweating, in pain, listening with barely concealed impatience to a long-necked stringed instrument being tortured by a delicately pretty blonde girl sitting on a stool beside the bed.

Tinoopa pushed past P’murr and strode across the room. “Shut up that noise,” she told the girl. “Enough to turn a cat sick. Make yourself useful, scat to the kitchen and have them boil some water, eh? For hot bottles. You got them?”

The girl gaped at her, too startled to say anything.

Tinoopa snorted. “If you don’t know what I’m talking about, get some empty bottles, fill ’em and cork ’em and wrap ’em in towels and get ’em up here like five minutes ago. And have the cook heat up some broth. If the Matja don’t need it, cook can drink it herself.”

Before the girl could get out any of the words crowding in her throat, Matja Allina lifted a weary hand. “Do it, Kulyari. Please.”

When Kulyari had flounced out the room, Tinoopa bent over Matja Allina, touched and prodded her, took her pulse, inspected her eyes and her fingernails, talking all the time in a comfortable flow, asking questions, hardly waiting for the answers-as if she knew them before they came.

“… should be examinin your head, comin on a trek like this, ’specially since you’ve lost ’em before. You have, haven’t you, lost ’em this late before?”

“It is woman’s lot,” Matja Mina said. Her words came out with the patness of a lesson long learned, but there was nothing pat or submissive about her face or the rigid set of her body.

Kizra went as pale as the Matja and sweated with her as another spasm of pain seized her.

Tinoopa was feeling nothing but placid interest and cool calculation and the handmaids-there was nothing in them but a pale sympathy. They all seemed opaque, stone figures, while she and the Matja were filled with light, red light, shining pain.

She moved closer to the bed, drawn against her will deeper into that flood of pain.

Matja Allina’s eyes opened wide. They were beautiful eyes, an odd, pale blue-green only slightly darker than polished aquamarine, exotic in her stern lean face. She stretched out her hand and Kizra took it, smiling uncertainly. If this is a two-way link… She thought: peace, calm, accept.

Quiet flowed like cool water through her arm and into Matja Allina, her stiffness and her anger washing away on that flood. Though Kizra couldn’t do anything about the pain, the Matja found it easier to bear now.

Tinoopa looked from one to the other. “A weel a weel, I’d say the trouble’s over this while. Where’s that silly girl with the water? And the soup. Have you eaten, Matja Allina?”

The woman smiled a little, moved her head from side to side. “I didn’t think I could keep anything down. Better to go hungry than start something I couldn’t stop.”

“True enough.” Tinoopa clicked her tongue. “Send someone for that ooba-onk or she’ll take all night. What you need now is warming inside and out.”

“Yes.” Allina turned her head on the pillow, freed her hand gently and beckoned to a short, stocky middle-aged woman standing in the shadows by the door. “Aghilo, you go. See that the soup and the water bottles are brought immediately.” After the woman had bobbed a curtsy and left, Allina folded her hands over the bulge in her middle and looked up at Tinoopa. “She’s a fosterling, Kulyari, youngest daughter of my brother-by-law Utilas ampa Cagharadad. If you don’t know the practice, chapa… what is your name?”

“Tinoopa, Matja

Kizra waited for her to add the rest of it, but Tinoopa said nothing more.

Right. Lesson for the lesser folk, don’t irritate your betters with more than they need to know.

She moved as inconspicuously as she could manage over to the bed table, finishing up with her back against the wall; she had a feeling this wasn’t a great time to attract attention; besides, she wanted a closer look at the instrument lying on the bedtable. Her fingers itched to get at it.

“If you don’t know the practice, chapa Tinoopa, it’s a game of lessening your responsibilities by passing them off to your kin. And you, child, who are you?”

Well, that didn’t work. “Kizra, Matja Allina.” Nervously she ran her fingers along the dark polished wood of the musical instrument, touched the strings with her nails. The wood seemed to caress her fingers, comfort her.

“How did you learn to ease like that?”

“I don’t know, Matja Allina. I have no memories before I woke this morning.”

“I see. May your life be happier here, Kizra Shaman. You touch that arranga as if your fingers remember it though your mind may not. No, no, don’t move away. Try it, see what you can do. I have a fondness for music.” Her mouth twisted. “Though you might not think so from what you heard when you walked in. Sit there.” She pointed at the stool where the blonde girl had been sitting.

Kizra lifted the arranga, held it as she remembered Kulyari holding it. Tentatively she touched the strings, sounding each of them. Yes. Her hands did remember. She closed her eyes, let her fingers walk through a simple tune that quickly grew more complex. Forgetting weariness and fear, she let the music come out of her-until the door banged open, there was a hiss of rage, and Kulyari snatched the arranga from her.

Matja Allina clicked her tongue; her face twisted with anger, then smoothed to a calm mask. “Alka Cagharadad, come here.”

Clutching the arranga to her breasts, the girl went to the bed and stood beside it, sulky and unreceptive.

“Does the arranga belong to you or to me, alka Cagharadad?”

“To the Arring Pirs, Matja Allina.” Kulyari looked smug, her pale blue eyes were hard as stones. “A woman owns nothing but her virtue.”

She hates her, Kizra thought, startled. REALLY hates her.

“Put it on the bedstand, alka Cagharadad.”

Lips compressed in a straight line, Kulyari laid the arranga on the stand. “Don’t expect me to touch it again if that dirt smears her filth on it.”

“That is as it is. Go to bed, alka Cagharadad.”

When she was gone, Matja Allina sighed. “Watch your back, young Kizra; she’ll sink her fangs in you if she can. She’s tried it with me,” a quick smile, rueful, self-deprecating, meant to reduce the force in her words to a proper femininity, “and lost a tooth in the process.” She closed her eyes, sighed wearily, “But she grew it back. So, be careful, Kizra Shaman.” She moved restlessly as Tinoopa drew the covers back, took the flannel-covered stone bottles from Aghilo, and began placing them where the heat would do the most good.

“I have to have this baby,” Matja Allina said; she was talking as much to herself as to them. “I HAVE to. He MUST live.”

Aghilo murmured soothing syllables at her, helped her to sit up and tucked pillows behind her.

“I have two daughters now, but no sons. If this boy dies…” She sighed again, closed her eyes, let Aghilo begin spooning the savory brown broth into her. Between mouthfuls she said, “Play for me some more, please. You were a musician once and will be again, Kizra Shaman. Play.”