Chameleon Ch 44

“Let me go find a doctor, or a midwife, or someone else who knows what to do.”

“Don’t you leave me here!”

“All right, I’ll stay. But, I’m… I’m a little scared here.”

“You is scared? Of what?!” A wave of heat from embarrassment flushed on his face like a red banner.

“Calm down, Love, don’t use your energy yelling at me! I’ve… I just don’t know what to do!”

“You can fly star ship! This not that hard!”

“What do you want me to do?!”

“You already done enough! Oh, it’s coming again,” she groaned, then said something unintelligible in her native language. He transferred her to the day-bed in the alcove hoping to escape. No, he couldn’t escape. “Go get paper or rugs or towels. I don’t want to ruin poor Jake’s furniture!” she hissed.

Tom didn’t want to think what she meant by that, but he scrambled for what she asked. He could hear her panting through the contraction, helpless to do anything about it.

“You’re doing fine, Love.”

“Shut up! I need think.” Tom took a couple of deep breaths himself and focused on Rianya. They both looked down at the same time. A small puddle of mostly clear fluid grew on the floor. Even in the dim light of the fire, however, he could make out some streaks of blood. He hated blood. Blood was never good. Blood made him think of horrible things, of death, and helplessness, and fainting.

“Get cutters, rope, water,” she demanded. Cutters, rope, water? What the hell was she thinking? “Now, hurry, please.” Her voice softened with a shudder, a deep breath, and the end of that contraction.

Tom stopped thinking and tried to just follow orders. Cutters? What were cutters? Scissors? A knife? And rope – why couldn’t she be more specific? A long rope or a heavy gauge, and did it have to be jute or could it be something else? Water: that he could do.

Neptune’s Ocean! He hated shining any kind of light on female anatomy. That was supposed to be dark, wonderful, and mysterious, not something functional, medical, and painful. He dashed out the rear door and found the water supply. He wasn’t sure it was safe to drink in its raw form. He stoked the embers in the kitchen hearth and fed the flames with tinder. Before it got out of control, he poured the water into the copper pot that hung on a hook, swinging the arm inward to heat the water.

He hurried back to see how Rianya was faring. She was relatively calm, sitting flat on the floor but leaning heavily on the wall, her eyes gently shut, her face relaxed. He let out a sigh he didn’t know he was holding, and inhaled with a shudder.

“Are you okay?”

“No! I’m having a baby, all by myself. No shaman, no mother, no sister, not even Dr. Clarke! Just a scared man! Did you get the stuff?”

“Water, I’m heating it. Cutters and rope?” She opened her eyes now.

“Yes.” He was afraid to ask why. When he thought hard enough, he realized he’d only ever felt this petrified once in his entire life, watching a house burn while he did nothing. That next morning, he vowed he would never let fear stop him from doing what was right, what was necessary to do, even if it meant his own life. And he never had. Fear was one of those demons to crush, and when it arose, the fire filled his eyes and his adrenaline boiled.

And this wouldn’t cost him his life in any way. Maybe two other lives, but not his own. Maybe those two other lives were more precious to him than his own, and screwing this up wasn’t an option.

“What’s it for?” he said with the enthusiasm of a mouse facing a snap trap. Her face began to pinch inward.

“The life line. We have to …” she scrunched her face and grabbed a hold of her abdomen. She blew a few breaths through her mouth. The next words came out in her first language. “You need cut the blood cord away. The rope is tourniquet, or baby bleed to die.”

Tom only understood about half of that, the words ‘blood’, ‘cut’, and ‘die’. He could hear Dr. Clarke’s voice, her unique, authoritative accent, admonishing him when Zalara was born. ‘Man up! You can crash a spaceship but a little blood makes you faint? Put it in perspective, Captain!’.

In the dark, Tom rummaged through baskets in the kitchen and took the sharpest knife available. In the bedroom where the girls lay sleeping, he found a hefty rope, a belt from the waist of one of Quinaal’s gowns, of all things. A couple of large tunics, folded and on the shelf, looked older, and worn out. He yanked one down and held it up. From its size, he had no doubt it had belonged to Quinaal’s husband, not Jake.

He crammed two tunics under his arm and went back to Rianya. Before she could ask, he went back for the water and returned, setting the copper vessel on the stone hearth.

“Good. Now, get away until I call you. No, don’t go, don’t leave me here alone.” She reached out and grasped his hand, twisting to one side, and then the other, her teeth clamped together. Her writhing hurt Tom near as much as it hurt her, in that he could do nothing about it. Somewhere in the depths of his soul he wanted to run, fast, from the impending chamber of horror.

The thought was primal, and shameful. Like a scandalous dream, it was involuntary, humiliating that he considered, even unconsciously, abandoning Rianya because of his own cowardice. He was a reluctant, and captive, witness to the pain of life coming into existence.

“Maybe I should find some of the purple tea, if it helps labor, like Mosi says.” He wiped sweat from his own brows.

“Jake won’t have any here. And you’re not going anywhere.” She shook and gripped his hand, her small bones and lithe fingers absurdly powerful. “Ooooohhhhaaaaaahh!” she bellowed. “I can’t do this. I’m done. I’m out of energy. I’m going to die.” He searched the room and snagged a small back pillow from a chair, shoving it into her hand. She wrung it into a perverse shape.

“You’re not going to die. No one dies from having a baby.”

“Yes, they do!” A dull saw ripped at her abdomen. She crushed his hand again. How could he be this callous, this insensitive, so much like a Kinnae man that she almost forgot he was human.

“I need a woman, not a man,” she growled. Delirium set in. She didn’t care anymore. She was compelled, urgently, desperately, to force that baby out. She heard nothing, saw nothing, just an intolerable need to squeeze her whole body with every last bit of her strength.

Tom had no idea what to say, or do, or not do. If he said the wrong thing, she might bite his head off. She might do that anyway. As it was, she moaned and cried like an animal caught in a trap.

“No, no, you’re not going to die. You can’t. What would I do without you? Ri’, tell me what to do. I can take instructions.”

“Get this baby out of meeeeeeeeeee! Oh, oh, oh!” She tried to stand; Tom helped her up. Her legs collapsed and she fell to her hands and  knees. “Nothing, nothing, there’s nothing you can do!” She moaned, then relaxed just a fraction and took a breath.

He wanted to scream every time she screamed. He had no appetite, he didn’t know what time it was, whether the sun was rising or setting. He soaked one of the tunics in the water and held it to her head, thinking hard of first aid, never before forgetting so much when faced with an emergency.

“Mamá! You’re hurting!” Zalara cried softly, running to her side.

“Lara, go back to bed, Pet,” Tom told her sternly.

“Mamá hurts!”

“Yes, but it’s okay, she’s okay.” He did his best to shield her view from the insanity with his body, but the girl plowed forward.

“Oh, the baby is coming,” the child said, relief evident in her voice. “I’ll help you,” she said.

“Pet, you’ll just be underfoot. Go back to bed.”

“It’s okay,” Rianya told him. “She understands.”

“I can hear her. She’s ready.” Rianya nodded, but Tom only wanted to get her away from the chaos.

“Love, are you sure you want her here?” His heart nearly beat out of his chest, terrified Zalara would be traumatized for life. Perhaps he was projecting his own fear on her. Rianya nodded, her eyes squeezed tight, her jaw clenched shut.

“I’m going to die!” she shrieked, drawing a huge breath, holding it, and bearing all her energy down for a final, exhaustive push and a primeval howl.

Rianya groaned raucously. In a sudden rupture of space and time, Tom found himself on the floor holding a slippery, squirming baby covered in the most indescribable, gelatinous substance of crimson viscera he’d never seen before.

“Oh, God!” Tom called out. He grabbed the other tunic and wrapped the child without dropping her. Still in command mode, despite the uneasiness, he had a brief lapse resolve.

“Wash the stuff out of her mouth,” Rianya gasped. He scooped a handful of water on the baby’s face, but she was silent. “Pat her back, hold her head down a little,” Rianya said. “She should breathe, cry, something.”

“She’s, um, still... attached,” he said.

 “What’s wrong?” Rianya called from her exhausted place on the floor.

“I don’t know,” Tom muttered. The tiny life was in his hands. Zalara squirmed in and placed her small forehead on the new baby’s. “Pet—”

“It’s okay,” she said, and a small cry and a breath came from the tiny being’s mouth. “She’s really messy. Yuk.” Zalara wiped her forehead and rubbed her hands on her shirt.

“It’s okay, Lovely, she’s okay, just quiet. She’s okay.” He wiped the baby’s face with warm water. “Now what?”

“I don’t know, I’m tired. Let me think.” Rianya lay on the floor, on her side, still breathing hard.

“I should cut this cord, right?”

“Not yet. Take care of baby first, that can wait a few minutes.” Sweating, he set the baby down, pulled off his own shirt and picked her up again, setting the tiny being in his lap.

“Can I hold her?” Zalara asked politely, almost in awe, her emerald eyes sparkling in the firelight.

“Mamá gets her first,” he said, and doing his best to avoid the slippery slop on the floor, he crawled over a meter and gave Rianya the little pooh, not sparkling clean but good enough for a ship’s captain to call a job well done. Zalara danced like a fairy around her father and got close-up in the baby’s face.

“She’s happy now,” the girl declared on behalf of the newborn.

Tom sat on the floor, drawing a blanket over Rianya to cover the things he didn’t want to see again. He tried to breathe and comprehend what he’d just done without replaying the scene in his mind’s eye. Zalara had taken a tremendous interest in the little being, imitating Tom’s warm water routine to clean the petite face while in Rianya’s arms. 

“The rest has to come out still,” Rianya reminded Tom.

“The rest?”

“It takes a few minutes.”

Coming down from an explosion of adrenaline, he placed a hand on Rianya’s hip, gently patting her. The room went silent.

“You did good, Mylan.” Tom wiped sweat from his forehead and rolled his eyes skyward. She sucked in a long breath and bore down, with a just fraction of the force from before. “That was it,” she said.

Tom did not know exactly what ‘it’ was, and he didn’t want to know, but his curiosity, and duty, compelled him to see what she was talking about. He shuddered seeing the purple pancake on the floor, attached to the other end of the baby’s umbilical cord. It quivered, like grape gelatin, and the pale pink cord trembled.

“Thank Neptune you know more about this than me,” he said quietly, referring to what looked more like a crime scene than what he imagined a birth would look like. Reaching the limit of his constitution, he heaved a small, clear pool on the floor that didn’t make a dent in the grand scheme of what needed cleaning up. This confirmed his decision to pursue aeronautics instead of medicine in school.

“I only know from what I did with the town animals we bred, not a person. Tom?”

“I’m here,” he gurgled.

“Tie the rope a hand-length away from the baby, and another hand-sized, from that. Tie it hard. Then cut in the middle, not the baby side.”

“Okay, I can figure this out,” he said under his breath. Zalara handed him the knife, surprising him with her calm, quiet help.

“Tie it tight, as tight as possible, and make a knot,” she told him. “A good knot.” A knot. Now that was something he knew how to do. He’d never have been let out of boot camp if he’d never learned a dozen different ways to tie a knot.

The thumb-width of living rope felt like rubber. As he cut through an artery and a vein, more blood spilled over his exposed hands, and on the floor. Clammy sweat sent a shiver over his body, and his eyes glazed over like a freshly killed antelope.

 “Papá?”

“I’m okay, ‘Lara.” Tom rolled onto his back and covered his face with his bare arm. It was over. He’d done it. Rianya was falling asleep, the new baby was making drowsy movements, Zalara was bonding in silence, and he could almost relax. But he still had to clean up the unpleasant chaos that remained on the floor of Jake’s home.

His shirt was ruined. The tunics also. He didn’t even know where to start. He was going to need a little light. He lit a twig from the fire and lit a fatty wick in the closest lantern. As the light came up, Tom clearly saw the overwhelming task ahead, the organs, the fluids, and the red, red blood. Then he heard nothing, everything turned white, and he collapsed.