Birth: A Novella Read Online Free PDF Page B

towels off, helping me
while I slowly remove every piece of clothing. “Whom have you been
using for a maid?” he asks. “You mustn’t do without, not now.”
    “Katrina’s here sometimes,” I say,
defensive, embarrassed to admit I have let so many people go on
extended vacation. But I had felt guilty at our unannounced
reappearance right at Midwinter, when the servants had been
counting on freedom until spring. It’s worse in a way for those who
live at Aranyi, like Magali and her husband, Harald, who had been
enjoying the run of the castle with no master or mistress. “Magali
helps me when she can, or one of her daughters.” She has two who
are old enough to be of use, but neither one has Katrina’s deft
gentleness that I have come to take for granted, and I rarely ask
for them.
    Dominic shakes his head at my thoughts. “You
are ‘Gravina Aranyi,” he says. “You must get used to that fact.
It’s your prerogative to return to your home at any time and expect
maid service. Of course you don’t want to be capricious or
thoughtless, but by the balls of Erebos, Amalie! This close to your
time! The poorest laborer’s wife wouldn’t be left to cope by
herself.”
    He throws open the door leading to the
Margrave’s bedroom and walks in. A housemaid has been found and
she’s laying a large fire in the hearth. “Have someone bring more
wood,” Dominic says to the startled girl who attempts a curtsy and
goes red in the face at seeing the master naked. “We’ll need to
keep it burning all night.”
    Magali is made of sterner stuff. She barely
glances at Dominic but continues her work of laying sheet after
sheet on the bed on top of the relatively clean ones already there.
Every so often she intersperses a large towel.
    Dominic leads me out of the bathroom and
Magali runs to help, each taking one of my arms and crossing their
other arm behind my back. “I can walk,” I say, but only for form’s
sake. I enjoy the support of their arms, the comfort of the bodies
on either side. We have passed over, from the neutral territory of
bathroom, to the significance of the Margrave’s bedroom. How
many Aranyi women have taken this walk , I think, assuring
the legitimacy of their children, bearing them in the bed where
they had been conceived. Generations of Aranyis, begotten and born
in this room, probably this very same bed. Even though this
child has been conceived elsewhere, the tradition will be upheld
with her birth.
    I wasn’t conceived here either ,
Dominic confides to me. He has gone into memories of his own, the
transgenic mother singing to the little almost-human boy she had
borne, telling him the facts of his conception and birth, stories
he was too young to understand then, but recalls in adulthood, like
dreams or visions. A chance meeting, the handsome, gifted
‘Graven lord out hunting, and the beautiful, alien creature,
capable of both male and female manifestations, surprised near its
home in the deep woods, changing abruptly, violently, into its
female form at the sudden sexual attraction. The man and the
“woman” have rendezvous in the woods, or on the Aranyi grounds,
formalized eventually into marriage when she proves to be
fertile.
    And I wasn’t born here , Dominic says. My mother preferred to be outdoors for her ordeal.
    Another contraction hits and I go rigid,
then limp, leaning back against the crossed arms.
    Dominic stiffens with me in the communion.
“Breathe like this,” he says, demonstrating, panting in funny
little bursts. I have seen it so many times, in the hologram shows.
Every time there’s a birth scene they always show this breathing. I
laugh until the pain starts up again. “It’s true all the same,”
Dominic says, resenting the reference to the Terran entertainment.
“It helps.”
    He helps, more than anything. Each
contraction, he suffers it for me. He can’t really take it all;
communion cannot make pain disappear, or lessen it. But by sharing
it, undergoing it with