Chapter V Life and Death
V
Life and Death
Waltrude knew the sound of a woman greeting her death.
It echoed throughout the halls of Castle Crudele that night.
She woke to it with a start, as it reverberated like bells gonging within her ancient bones.
She rose and followed the sound. She was too fixed in her course to even be afraid of what she would see when she found it, to even be haunted by the howling of ghosts.
They were following her, but at a distance.
Iphigene. Philomel. Pale-haired wights, held aloft in the air like ornaments fixed on an invisible string.
The sound led Waltrude to the princess’s chamber, and she did not hesitate before swinging open the door.
She was not first to come—that was Marozia’s handmaiden, the queer-eyed girl Ninian.
She was holding her mistress’s hand as her mistress writhed and twisted in the sheets, her sleeping shift pulled up over her breasts and her gruesomely distended belly.
Her sweat had turned the bedclothes damp and dewed her forehead, but there was no blood to be seen yet.
Waltrude approached the bed briskly, sparing no moment for her own upset.
She had witnessed and aided many a violent labor before.
The only shock to her was how swiftly this labor had come.
The princess had complained of no pains; Waltrude had not even noticed her wincing as she walked.
Despite her thrashing, Marozia’s legs were wrapped together, the muscles in her thighs clenching and taut.
This was no good. Waltrude took one of her knees in each hand and began to wrest them apart.
“No!” the princess screeched. “Don’t touch me!”
The viciousness of her protest made Waltrude recoil, but only briefly. “The child will not come if you are blocking its path, Princess,” she said. To Ninian, she said, “Fetch some rags and hot water. Quickly.”
Her queer eyes wavered and her chin quivered. “I should not leave my mistress’s side…”
“This bed will become her deathbed if you stand there like a dumb statue,” Waltrude snapped. “Go. Now, you useless girl.”
Still, Ninian hesitated. With a deliberation that seemed to cause her physical agony, she untwined her fingers from the princess’s. Marozia gasped at the loss, but then she was racked with a great pain that made her howl and writhe again, swollen breasts leaking.
She did not—perhaps could not—protest now as Waltrude pried her legs open. The oils of birth shone on her thighs. Already the child had begun to breach the exit, horribly stretching the flesh of its mother with the overripe plum of its head. There came now the trickle of blood, madder red.
Marozia shrieked again, fingers scrabbling for purchase in the sheets. When Ninian returned with the rags, Waltrude would put one in her mouth for the princess to bite down upon, which was as much for her own sake as for Waltrude, whose ancient ears were beginning to throb at the sound.
Yet it was not Ninian who came through the door then. It was the lady Agnes.
Unlike Waltrude, she hesitated there, just past the threshold.
She, too, wore her nightgown still, suggesting she had been roused from her slumber and come running—her hair was loose around her, glossy yet mussed with sleep.
And her eyes, her stone-gray eyes, were flung wide in horror, the color having already drained from her cheeks.
When it became clear that Agnes was frozen there, Waltrude jerked her head toward the princess. “Come now. Hold your cousin’s hand. She will need a vessel for the pain.”
Agnes came, but her steps were wobbly, halting, as if she were being yanked rudely forward on a rope. She paused at the edge of the bed, her gray eyes round and huge, and then, after another moment’s hesitation, she found Marozia’s hand amid the sheets and laced their fingers.
Marozia clamped down upon Agnes’s hand at once, nails clawing at the flesh with such violence that it made even Waltrude shudder.
The lady Agnes did not flinch. Instead she glanced up at Waltrude and in a small voice asked, “Is there nothing to give her for the pain? We should send for Pliny. He will—”
“No,” Marozia gasped, and with a sudden surge of strength, she pushed herself up to a near-sitting position. “No leeches. Swear to me there will be no leeches.”
Waltrude raised a brow. “Then you will endure the pain baldly?”
Tears broke from the princess’s bloodshot eyes as she looked down at herself, at the swollen, undulating belly, at the open space between her thighs. “I do not care,” she rasped. “I do not care, I do not care—only get it out of me, get it out of me now!”
On that final word her voice crested into a scream. Her face contorted into a grimace of anguish, the whites of her eyes flooding with yet more red.
Waltrude dipped her head between Marozia’s thighs. The child’s head had made no noticeable progress forward, and her stomach twitched with alarm.
“You must push, Princess,” she said. “Else the babe will die half stuck within you.”
A strangled sob wrenched from her throat.
As she pushed, she howled and howled, and Waltrude could see, in her mind’s eye, the sawing and scraping of the princess’s vocal cords, which would steal her voice for days after her labors were done.
Agnes’s hand grew a blotchy purple, so mangled it was by Marozia’s unrelenting grip.
Yet still—the babe’s head did not proceed.
There was another twitch in Waltrude’s stomach.
Before she could speak and urge the princess on, the door opened and Ninian came through.
She carried a heavy bucket of water, which slouched her shoulders and slowed her steps to an awkward stumble, and under her arm was a bundle of rags.
She approached and set them down before Waltrude, shaking all over like a sapling in the wind.
“Is she well?” the girl asked, in her pitifully quavering voice. “Will the child be born soon?”
Waltrude did not answer. Rather, she said, “Damp the rags now and wipe the princess’s forehead.”
This was not essential and would not help along the labors, but it would keep the girl busy. Agnes’s hand was still being crushed and mauled. Still the princess screamed. And still the babe would not come.
It was not yet the moment for a new course, but it would be soon. Waltrude waited and watched. When moments passed without progress, she said, to Agnes and to Ninian, “Get the princess to her feet. And then down onto her hands and knees.”
Marozia protested, but it was a wordless, mewling sound, which only dribbled spittle down her chin.
Her eyes still twisted shut, she allowed herself to be maneuvered—more hauled—out of the bed and onto the floor.
Waltrude thought to cushion her knees, but this concern blew over and past her, for there was no opportunity to worry over small comforts.
They walked now within the shady membrane between life and death.
In these circumstances, time bore down on Waltrude like a lathe, grinding and grinding. The princess no longer screamed—she whimpered, and wept in blurry gouts, but all her exertion was for nothing, and so were her tears. The babe would not budge.
Waltrude found her own hands shaking as she moved to wipe sweat from the princess’s brow. Strands of hair were plastered to the skin, like kelp to a sunken statue, and she did not feel feverish but rather cold, and this frightened Waltrude to such a degree that she snatched her hand away.
Would this castle be so cruel as to claim another wife? Was Berengar’s line so bitterly cursed that all who were yoked to it—who merely brushed against it—were doomed, too? These were questions for mystics and prophets. They were beyond the purview of a wet nurse. So was the saving of a life.
Two lives: the princess, and the infant stuck half inside her.
Marozia was mangling her cousin’s right hand, such that it grew to resemble her scarred and ravaged left.
Yet Agnes did not flinch, did not move, only knelt there on the floor beside her, in a pose that was almost penitent, if anyone on the island of Drepane knew how to pray.
The girl Ninian had slumped over against the wall, her lashes fluttering.
Good, Waltrude thought savagely, let her faint and be done with this sniveling.
But she did not faint. Her knees were pulled to her chest, arms wrapped around them, and she rocked herself back and forth, whispering, “I’m sorry, I am so sorry, I never meant for this, never, never, never… ”
On and on she went. Anger smoldered within Waltrude. Her mistress was in the narrowing gyre of death, and the girl thought only of herself. She should never have been plucked from that hovel in the Outer Wall. What a vain and stupid creature.
“Waltrude,” Agnes whispered, interrupting the course of these cruel thoughts, “we must send for Pliny.”
The princess was too mired in her agony to overhear. She had sunk to the floor and tipped onto her side, other hand pressed to the freakish swelling of her stomach, which seemed somehow—impossibly—larger than it had before. Waltrude gave one quick, stiff nod.
“Yes,” she said. “We must.”
Agnes’s throat bobbed. “I will go.”
“If she will let you.” Waltrude indicated their joined hands.
At that, Agnes’s gray eyes began to shine.
Tears glistened at their corners, and her lips pressed into a thin grimace as if to keep from expelling a sob.
Waltrude was alarmed, as she had never seen the lady weep before.
By the time she had come to her after Lord Fredegar’s death, her eyes were flat and dull, the tears as dry as the blood on her gown.
The look of these coming tears filled Waltrude with dread.
Agnes bent over, lowering herself to her ground beside the princess, so that their heads were at a height.
Their long hair—the same smoky-black shade precisely—twined and tangled.
She pressed her cheek to her cousin’s cheek, her lips to the shell of her ear, and whispered something that Waltrude did not have the privilege to hear.
Whatever these brief, secret words, they moved the princess. Her fingers slid limply out of Agnes’s grasp, and her hand now rested like a dead thing on the floor. Agnes pushed herself to her feet and left the room without another word, her nightgown shuddering after her.
Alone now with the princess—except that useless lump rocking herself in the corner—Waltrude sat back on her heels and let out a breath.
Before her was Marozia, wife of Liuprand the Just, the once-heiress of the House of Teeth, the great beauty of Drepane.
But also before her was Iphigene, that golden child of Seraph, stiff as a doll in the white sheets that had been her death-shroud, and Philomel, the screaming queen, the lioness in chains, her throat crushed under her husband’s brutish hands.
All these others, whom Waltrude could not save.