Chapter Eight #3
He stood there waiting to see what I would say or do, and finally I stared back at him.
Some servant—a different one—brought in another tray, which I totally ignored, but the noxious smell of the merula once again began stinking up the room.
I knocked it to the floor with my foot, making the servant jump away or get splattered.
“Bring me another one,” I said to the servant, cowering by the door. “I can do this all day.”
Snarling at me, Davos turned on his heel to leave the room. I know he would have loved to be able to slam the door behind him, but it slid closed behind him with only a heavy sigh.
A half-hour or so later, more servants arrived to clean up the mess on the floor, and a doctor arrived to examine me.
He brought me a bedpan, which I refused with a shake of my head, but when the urge to pee got too bad, and I got on my knees on the bed and started to pull up my robe with one hand.
He quickly undid the restraint and helped me get down off the bed to go to the bathroom.
When I came back to the bed, he helped me up and tried to question me, but I refused to answer anything he asked.
Yes, I was being an ass, but I hadn’t started this thing.
The doctor said he wouldn’t strap me down again and said he’d just sit with me instead.
Okay, maybe I had started it, but if I gave in to Davos now, nothing would ever change. I was showing him I could be as stubborn as he could. It all depended on how much he was willing to let me suffer, and I was betting he wasn’t as willing as he’d have me believe.
Sure enough, an hour or so later, another tray was brought to me, and this time it contained bread, some jam and Lycan tea.
There was also some brown rice, the powdered eggs again and a few pieces of fruit.
It was everything that I could eat from Davos’s Tygerian food stores.
I didn’t eat a bite of it, though, and pushed the tray away, because I really didn’t have much appetite. In fact, I was a little nauseated.
The doctors came back in—three of them—arriving to examine me again. They discussed me at length at the foot of my bed, and then the one who had been there earlier spoke to me in Earthan.
“Are you in any pain, Your Highness?”
I lifted one shoulder in a shrug. The three of them conferred again and all but one of them finally left my room. The doctor who had stayed was my favorite of the three. He was young, and he was the one who had taken off my cuff earlier.
Almost immediately, as if he’d been waiting right outside my door, Davos came in and took a seat on the side of my bed. He blew out a long breath.
“Blake, I apologize for what I said earlier. I shouldn’t have said what I did.” He looked over at me. “And you’re still refusing to speak to me, aren’t you?”
I turned my head away.
“You realize how childish this is, don’t you?”
“Doctor,” I said, looking only at the other man, “Would you please inform the king that I told him I wouldn’t speak to him ever again earlier, and he didn’t believe me.
Or he did, and he wanted it that way, because he said, ‘Don’t threaten me with a good time.
’ So, I hope he’s having one now. Please tell him I’ll never speak to him again as long as I live. Not ever.”
Davos growled low in his throat, and the doctor got a deer in the headlights look as he glanced from me back to the king.
“Doctor,” Davos said, “Please tell my consort that he’s acting like a selfish child.
” He said some word in Tygerian between the words “selfish” and “child” that I didn’t know, but I thought it was a safe bet to say it wasn’t a compliment.
Then he paused for a long moment, and I wondered if he was counting to ten.
Finally, he looked back at me. “Tell the consort that he’s only hurting himself, and certainly not me.
But to end this hunger strike of his, and strictly for the sake of my unborn child, I will allow him to order some food that he finds more to his taste.
The Nilaniums have stores of ‘Alliance type’ food on their ships. ”
He said the word “Alliance” like it left a bad taste in his mouth.
“And I’ve informed Atlanthium Rabb to bring a selection for the consort to choose from when he arrives.
Not that I think it will make the consort happy, you understand, because I doubt if anything would ever do that, but I do it in the hopes it might stop his abuse of the servants and end his constant complaints.
” He took a breath to try again. “Or at least try to satisfy his tastes when it comes to the food. I doubt that it’s possible to accommodate any of his other needs. ”
“Tell the king the food would be acceptable. And that he’s never seemed to be interested in satisfying me before, so why start now?”
That was a lie, but I said it for effect.
And it sure got one, because he jumped to his feet and said something in a low, mean voice that I knew was truly filthy in Tygerian, but pretty unpronounceable for me to even attempt.
He turned to walk out, but unwilling to give him the last word, I shouted at his back.
“You can tell him that if he keeps insulting me, and calling me names, he’d better sleep with one eye open! ”
Davos turned and glared at me—and if looks could kill, I’d have been writhing on the floor.
“There will come a day in the near future when you aren’t carrying my unborn child, Lieutenant.
And that’s when I will teach you some respect and the proper way to speak to your king.
I very much look forward to that day. You’d do well to bear that in mind. ”
He swept from the room before I could tell him to go fuck himself, but I suppose that was probably for the best, all things considered. A long silence ensued and then the doctor said, very quietly, “Your Highness, I still need to know if you are in any pain.”
I sighed and shook my head. “Not really. I do have a bad backache, but that’s no doubt caused by this torture device you people call a bed.”
“Actually,” he said, stepping up to the side of the bed. “You’re in the first stages of labor, sir. Your baby will be born tonight, I think.”
Chaos reigned after that little pronouncement.
I gasped and jumped to my feet and shouted for Davos and the doctor had to help me sit back down.
The shouting was loud enough to bring Davos running back down the corridor, though.
Then I couldn’t get my breath back, so I got scared and started choking, and the other doctors came crowding in, too, bringing oxygen for me.
One of them was listening to my chest with an instrument like a stethoscope, I guess.
Another one had a rolling cart a little like a wheelchair to take me down to their clinic.
Davos was beside me the whole time, his face looking flushed and alarmed.
He was yelling at the doctors and began haranguing them about the oxygen mask, or so I surmised from all the gesturing, but it was all in Tygerian, so I quickly lost interest and closed my eyes.
That must have scared him, because he got down in my face and yelled at me to wake up.
I quickly opened my eyes again and held out my hand to him, because even though I was still mad at him, I was frightened and needed comfort.
I knew it was too early for the baby to be born.
He grabbed my hand right away and kissed it, leaning in.
“It’s going to be fine, nobyo. Don’t be scared. I won’t let anything happen to either of you.”
“I’m not scared,” I lied, “but isn’t it way too early for the baby? Am I losing it? Tell me the truth. I can take it.”
“No, you can’t, but they say it’s a large baby, and you might not be exactly accurate with your dates, because you were still so upset over my supposed death.”
“No, I’m sure of the day. I told you. It was the last time I saw you before…”
“I know, love. It’s going to be fine, though. These doctors are all excellent. I promise you.”
“Will you stay with me?”
“Of course, I will, sweetheart.” The fact that he was saying nice things and calling me those pet names only scared me more. He must think I was dying if he was calling me “sweetheart.”
“The doctor said the bloody mucus earlier was probably a sign that labor might have started. It served as a protective barrier for the uterus against bacteria. As for the blood, they engineered a uterus for you, and it’s a highly vascular organ, full of blood vessels.
It bleeds easily, and that’s probably what happened this morning. ”
“It’s because I lost my temper and went for a walk, isn’t it? Tell me the truth. I’m so sorry. Tell them I won’t do it anymore.”
“No. The doctor said it would have probably happened anyway. I don’t want you to worry.”
“Listen Davos, if it comes to a choice between me and the baby, I want you to choose him, okay? Promise me you will.”
I was wringing my hands a bit though, like I often did when I got anxious, and he took both my hands and held them tightly in his. “No, nobyo. I will not do that. Never ask me to do that again.”
“But Davos…”
“No. I won’t lose you. But I won’t let anything happen to the baby either, baby. I swear it. Both of you will be just fine.”
He couldn’t promise me that I’d be fine, though I knew he was trying to comfort me.
Male bearers and babies died all the time doing this.
People were just like the stars that flickered and flashed and then faded away or just went dark.
Whole worlds just winked out of existence all the time. I knew that.
Nothing lasted forever, and even whole galaxies were transient things when all was said and done.
Eventually, after enough time had passed, even they would be gone.
The stars twinkled like fireflies high in the sky for a time, but one day they vanished into the cold darkness, and nothing was left of them but stardust.
But I could pretend, if he could, so I pretended to believe him when he said everything would be all right. I smiled up at him like I believed him. If this was to be it, I didn’t want the last memory he had of me to be us fighting and being upset with each other.
“I love you, Davos,” I said. “Remember me.”
But if he answered me, I never heard him.
?? ?? ?? ??
Blake
Rakkur made a little noise and gripped my hand. “You must have been so scared,” he said. “I was, when the twins came, even though I knew I’d be all right. But I’ll bet you had no idea what to expect.”
“I did a little. I’d read a lot of books on it by then and even talked to some human bearers with children who had gone through it. It was scary though, I admit. It would mean surgery, and I hated the idea of being put to sleep.”
Davos laid his hand on mine and quickly squeezed. “I was there to watch over you every step of the way.”
“I know, darling, but it’s not always a sure thing.”
“It was for you. I would never have let anything happen to you. Not ever,” Davos said, so arrogant and so sure of himself, like all Tygerians.
But then maybe it was their way to cope with the tragedies of the war and all the injuries and deaths they’d lived through for so long.
Maybe it was a kind of wishful thinking.
I squeezed his hand and glanced over at Rakkur to see his eyes filled with tears.
He was still so very young and romantic.
I knew he loved what his father had said and still believed in the fairy tale of happily ever after.
But I also knew that things didn’t always work out the way we wanted them to, and some people never got their happy life together.
Too many people had to settle for “happy right now,” and for far too many, that was the best they’d ever get.
Rakkur didn’t know that yet, and I never wanted him to learn the truth—that we could use every hope and prayer we had, take our very best shot, and things could still all go to shit.
But every once in a while, if we had just a bit of luck, and wished hard upon our lucky stars…when we least expected it, life would throw us a curve ball that brought us something even better than we’d hoped for. That’s what happened to me—though it took its own sweet time to get around to it.
But that was getting ahead of the story. An ancient poet I admired back on earth, whose name was Shelley, I think, said, “we are as clouds that veil the midnight moon; How restlessly they speed and gleam and quiver…yet soon, Night closes round, and they are lost forever.”
But not lost every time. Not every time.