Chapter VI Spare #2
Pliny’s robes were drenched in red up to his elbows, hands still working between Marozia’s legs. Upon hearing Agnes’s entrance, he paused his ministrations and looked up. Ninian and Waltrude, too, let their gazes leave Marozia and land upon Agnes.
Her silence was terrible, in that moment, in the blood-humid air, with Ninian’s tear-streaked face and Waltrude’s grave, green eyes and Marozia’s dazed, desperate keening. Only Pliny appeared unshaken—after all, he had seen so much blood before.
Somehow the silence had ensnared her again, that all-but-forgotten little noose. It had been her armor once and now it was her shackle. So Agnes had to swallow hard, and swallow again, until she tasted the burn of salt in her own mouth, until the words at last were freed.
“The prince has ordered that all measures be taken to preserve the life of the mother,” she said.
Still they stared on. There was only Marozia’s shallow panting to beat back the silence.
“So do it!” Agnes shouted, and she surprised herself more than anyone with the force of her words.
Flustered, the leech and the two women immediately returned to their task.
Agnes joined them at the bed and saw at once that indeed some progress had been made in her absence.
The head of the infant was now fully cresting into the world, plum-colored, smeared with the mucuses of birth—yet underneath those fetal oils were its eyes, the translucent lids showing a nexus of tender blue veins, and its lashes, which fluttered so very faintly, proving there was life within this yet-unborn creature. Agnes’s heart skipped.
Ninian was now the one who held Marozia’s hand, the girl’s fingers turned blistery red and throbbing with the pressure.
But her pain was a trifle to her; Ninian’s tears were all for her mistress.
She leaned down, close to Marozia’s ear, and whispered apologies, which were odd for Agnes to overhear.
She did not know what the girl had to be sorry for.
And she did not think that Marozia would care to hear them, either.
But this left Agnes to stare down at the branching of her cousin’s legs as she howled and thrashed and pushed and, at last, at last, the screaming of her child mingled with her own. It slipped out of her like a minnow, greasy and blood-dark, and Pliny caught it in a bundle of clean rags.
The denouement had come so suddenly, after these interminable and excruciating hours, that Agnes could only stare in blank shock.
Pliny handed the infant to Waltrude, who began to wipe off that blood and grease, and he snipped the cord with a small pair of shears that seemed such a quotidian tool, better suited to embroidery or gardening than to the weighty tasks of life and death, and Marozia fell back limply on the bed, silent and still at last.
The infant’s cries warbled through the air, tremulous yet strident.
Waltrude had managed, in a matter of mere moments, to bundle it up, to pin down its tiny limbs.
She rocked it once in her arms, then carried it past Agnes to the side of the bed.
As she laid the swaddling on Marozia’s chest, she said, “A girl, my princess.”
Weakly, Marozia opened her eyes. “A girl?” she echoed in the lowest, hoarsest tone.
Waltrude nodded.
With quavering arms—yet with a strength that surprised Agnes mightily—Marozia reached up and embraced the writhing white bundle.
Agnes had yet to see its full face, and still she could not imagine it as anything but a vaguely formed creature, more a dream in her mind than a living thing.
She could only watch as Marozia pressed the infant to her breast, as she lowered her lips to the crown of its head, weeping heavily, now in symphony with her daughter.
Her daughter. If already an unbreachable rift had grown between them, now Marozia had left her in the most permanent of ways.
Within moments, the second-greatest metamorphosis of all had taken place—birth and life, second only to death—and Marozia had become something Agnes never would.
A mother. This transformation was irreversible.
Both she and the infant were wound around the spool of time, in endless coils of red thread.
There would be no unwinding; the thread could only be cut by a single pair of shears, the shears of death itself.
Yet just as the infant began to quiet, as Marozia learned the first trick of soothing her child, Pliny said, “You must prepare for the other, Princess.”
Marozia’s head snapped up, her gaze swimming with weary bewilderment. “The other?”
“Yes. The second, your daughter’s twin.”
That horrible, weighty silence blanketed the room yet again.
There was only a sharp inhale from Ninian, a gasp of shock, and that selfish little breath filled Agnes with fury—why should even a moment be spared for the upset of some common-born handmaiden while the princess of Drepane had just brushed fingers with death?
Yet the fury vacated her as quickly as it had come, replaced with a stretching, frigid dread.
It spread its coldness through the marrow of her every bone.
“No,” Marozia managed, her voice a rasp. “No, there cannot be…”
“There is.” Pliny’s tone was gentle, yet it left no room for further protest, for disbelief. “Push, Princess. Else the child will die before it can make its way into the world.”
Marozia’s arms, curled protectively around her daughter, began to tremble. Her voice rose beyond a whisper. “No. I do not want another.”
This should be the end, Agnes thought. The princess should give her order, and no one should rebel against it.
She was Drepane’s future queen; her word was close to law.
But the laws of humanity did not—could not—govern the course of nature.
It would all grind on—time, birth, life, death—and not even the most preeminent of men could stop it.
In the face of such relentless yet indifferent power, even Marozia was cowed.
She was made as small as the cringing handmaiden, as the stoop-backed leech, as the wet nurse with wrung-out breasts.
And Agnes felt herself crushed like a mason’s brick.
It was Waltrude who spoke.
“The second will be easier,” she said softly.
“It is nearly here already. Nearly here, nearly here.” She turned these words into a chant, and Agnes was reminded of how she had crooned to her, Down the drain, down the drain, down the drain, as she sat in a bathtub of Lord Fredegar’s blood.
These recitations were as close to comfort as the wet nurse had ever come.
A sob broke past Marozia’s lips.
“No, please, no,” she cried. “I don’t want to. I do not want to do it again. Please.”
Agnes should have tried to soothe her. Ninian had become useless yet again, standing with her mouth hung open like a gutted fish.
Waltrude patted Marozia’s bent knee, as Pliny ducked back down between her spread legs, and the princess was riven apart once more by a new chorus of contractions.
Her belly, still swollen, began to ripple and warp again.
Marozia howled. The infant on her chest—who of course could not be ignorant of her mother’s agony—began to howl as well, her cries thinner yet no less passionate.
Agnes felt their reverberation in her bones.
Marozia pushed one moment and protested the next, her second labor a staggered, halting thing that made Agnes’s gorge rise.
She still could not move, could not speak.
She could only wonder how this could be so.
How, for all these months, could Marozia not have sensed the movement of two creatures inside her?
Where the chamber had once been overly warm and overly red, now it felt gelid and remote, as cold as the silver flash of a scalpel.
Yet to her relief, Pliny never brandished one.
Perhaps it was that the first child had eased the second’s passage, or perhaps Marozia felt even greater desire to be rid of this babe than she had its elder, but the labor indeed progressed more quickly—and within what felt like mere moments, another minnow-like creature slipped from between her legs.
This one did not weep. From Agnes’s vantage point, she could see only brief flashes: the infant’s mottled blue skin, its sylphlike limbs, its overwhelming stillness, the mouth that did not draw breath.
She saw Pliny rub his fingers furiously against its tiny chest, while Waltrude took up the shears this time and severed the stiff infant from its mother.
Marozia fell back limply once more, only able to keep one arm bracing her daughter to her chest.
Agnes, too, felt she could not draw breath.
She stared blankly at the spare child on the bed, the enormous hands of adults working over it, trying to grind life into its unmoving form.
They worked out of instinct, out of the base human obligation to banish death wherever they could.
They did not work for the infant’s sake, for Marozia’s sake, even for the prince or the king.
They worked because it was distasteful to watch anything die.
And then, impossibly, came the very weakest of cries. The infant’s blue-tinged lips moved.
Before it could even begin to thrash its diminutive limbs, Waltrude wrapped it in clean cloth, binding it within a cocoon of white.
The pallor of bloodlessness faded slowly from its skin.
Waltrude dabbed at its face, wiping off the sticky mucuses of birth, and its features revealed themselves—the tiny bulb of a nose, the pale fringe of lashes.
Agnes wondered for a moment until Waltrude proclaimed, “A boy.”
She moved to lay the child on Marozia’s chest. But Marozia jerked upward in a frenzied spasm and shouted, “No!”
Waltrude halted. “It is your child, Princess—”
“No,” she wailed. “Get it away from me; I do not want it.”
Her legs were still spread open and her bed was a slaughter-yard, doused in red and sticky-black clots. The infant squirmed in Waltrude’s arms, opening its small wet mouth to show soft, toothless gums, but it more panted than wept, as if it struggled to draw enough breath for screams.
“I will take it,” Agnes said. “Give it to me.”
She had not been aware of the words gestating in her mind; they seemed to have been born fully formed on her tongue.
Waltrude furrowed her brow and looked between her and Marozia for permission, but Marozia’s attention was only on her daughter, kissing and nosing her head, as Agnes imagined a mother-wolf would her cub.
After another beat of hesitation, Waltrude shifted the baby into Agnes’s arms.
It gave another hiccuping breath, still mostly soundless.
Its form was featherlight, but the warmth of its small body thrummed through Agnes’s skin.
Uncertainly, Agnes adjusted her grip, positioning the infant against her own breast. Mistaking her for its mother, the baby began to suckle against the bare skin of her collarbone.
Persistent was this suckling, as if the baby did not—could not—know that the endeavor was fruitless, that Agnes was as barren as a salt flat.
Yet she did not try to release herself from its latching.
When Agnes raised her head, she saw that Marozia was watching her. The look in her glazed black eyes was hateful.
“Get out,” she rasped. “Get that creature away from me; I do not wish to look upon it.”
Her voice was still weak from all her previous screaming, so Agnes did not perceive it as an order, did not at first understand how serious her cousin was. She merely stared back, as Marozia’s son sucked a red mark into her skin, trying to find words but failing. Surely, Marozia could not mean—
“Get out!” Marozia shrieked. “Get out, get out, get out!”
Jolted with shock, Agnes staggered backward.
Marozia’s shrieks did not abate. Tears tracked down her cheeks, and spittle down her chin, and her teeth flashed and gnashed, and she even managed to push herself up onto her elbows, grasping for the candleholder on her bedside table.
With perverse and freakish strength, she hurled it toward Agnes.
Agnes ducked, and the candleholder shattered against the wall. The white wax broke into pieces, like fragments of bone. The babe at her chest began to squirm and fuss, unlatching its mouth at last so it could give that same low, wheezing whine. Agnes righted herself, blood boiling with adrenaline.
Marozia screamed again, this time a wordless howl. And so Agnes turned and fled the chamber, leaving her cousin alone in her thrashing rage.