The Dawn Stag: Book Two of the Dalriada Trilogy (23 page)

‘Caitlin,’ Rhiann begged, as her sister sagged in her arms. ‘Come to the bed now, and rest. There I can rub you, help the pain.’

Caitlin held her belly, sweat running down her brow, her shift clinging to the bulge in damp folds. She allowed Rhiann to seat her on the sickbed, as Eithne scurried around to prop her up with cushions. Caitlin’s pale face was blotched, and the shadows were now smears under her eyes. ‘Keep going,’ she whispered to Aedan, on the other side of the bedscreen. ‘Take me away from this.’

Aedan’s throat bobbed as he swallowed a sip of ale, his wide eyes searching for Rhiann on the end of the bed. Silently, Rhiann nodded and bent to rub Caitlin’s feet, concentrating hard to blink her own tears away.

Yet Aedan had not got far into his next tale when he was cut off by the greatest of Caitlin’s cries yet, and Rhiann was instantly on her feet, soothing her, struggling to smooth the fear from her own face. ‘The tales will have to wait,’ she said, around her dry tongue. ‘It is time for you men to leave us; go to Talorc’s house and bide with Belen.’ She turned to Eithne. ‘Top up the water in the cauldron, and find Lorn – tell him I need Aldera and the old women.’

‘Yes, lady,’ Eithne whispered.

Alone, Rhiann gave Caitlin a rowan stick to bite down on while she examined her, pressing on her belly, then carefully sliding a few fingers inside to feel for the womb. As she sponged her hands clean with soapwort, she turned away from Caitlin’s pained gaze.

For though the waters had broken too early, the night was now far advanced, and the rest was happening nowhere near swiftly enough. Despite the pains, the baby would not come.

CHAPTER 18

T
he rest of the night was a dark tunnel that seemed endless. And yet somehow, the daylight did eventually return, creeping up from the east to spill, damp and cool, through the open doorway.

In the shadows of the bedplace Caitlin’s eyes were squeezed shut, and she did not seem to see or hear any of the women around her. It was as if the dregs of her energy had been forced inward, to rally her for the waves of crushing pain. Against her drained face, the circles under her eyes grew darker as the sun rose outside.

‘The babe should have come by now,’ Aldera ventured. All there knew it, but it must be said.

Rhiann sat on a stool, her hands lying useless among the bloodstained folds of her dress. Sometime in the night her hair had worked its way free; now she smoothed it back over her ears with shaking hands, as if it mattered.

Aldera wiped sweat from her brow and upper lip with a clean rag. ‘It must be turned the wrong way.’

Caitlin let out another whimper, and all the old women looked down at the bed. Those sounds were becoming softer, hour by sweat-soaked hour, as Rhiann’s fear clutched at her ever more desperately.

‘She is so small,’ Rhiann whispered. ‘She is small, and he is not.’ Her face twisted; she bit her lip. ‘And now she is losing strength. I cannot risk turning the babe when she is so weak, for she will tear, and bleed.’

Aldera placed a solid hand on Rhiann’s aching shoulder, the pity clear in her eyes. ‘Then we can do little but pray to the Mother for deliverance. For her, for the babe.’

Rhiann’s eye fell on Eithne kneeling before the hearth, sprinkling more grain at Ceridwen’s stone feet as she muttered her prayers. Ceridwen, goddess of life – and death. She wished Caitlin and the babe to be delivered from the agony. But to what? The Otherworld?
No!

Yet it had been too long; a body could not last much longer.

With a deadened mind, Rhiann drew back the damp, rumpled sheets, and checked Caitlin once more. The skin of her poor, distended belly was pale, sweat-sheened, rippling with wrenching pains that brought only faint gasps. The child had dropped, but it must be twisted. The womb gateway had widened, yet still he would not come.

Rhiann covered Caitlin’s naked body again. ‘Leave us,’ she ordered hoarsely, and with no arguments all the women did. Then Rhiann considered Eithne, hovering by the bed. She could send the girl on an errand, but they had shared too much for anything to be said that was not the utmost truth. ‘I need to be alone with her,’ Rhiann said simply. Eithne nodded, choking down a sob as she left.

When they were gone the house fell silent, and Rhiann drew the stool closer to the bed. Only Caitlin’s laboured breathing disturbed the close air, scented with the cleansing herbs thrown on the fire. Every few moments Caitlin’s breathing caught, and the hand that Rhiann held went rigid and clawed into a ball. At those times, Rhiann murmured, ‘Breathe, cariad, breathe with me. Like this: one … in … two … out … there … there.’

And Caitlin’s thin chest would sink back down under the covers, and the laboured rasping of the breath-between-pain would begin again, rasping until it rang in Rhiann’s ears and she could barely stand it.

The day slowly brightened, yet only the fire, set for boiling water, gave the bedplace any light – a lurid glow that painted Caitlin’s cheeks with false colour. Rhiann sat without moving now, her forehead resting on Caitlin’s fevered hand. Now, when that hand clenched, Rhiann no longer raised her face to give any encouragement, for she was sure that Caitlin was beyond hearing. Instead, she found some part of her listening to that breathing and hoping – for one moment – that it would end, so that at least her sister would be free of the pain and struggle.

Rhiann had attended many births like this, first with Linnet and then on her own, and so much could go awry in bearing. Sometimes the babe would not come, and the massaging of the belly, the concoctions, the chants and prayers would be to no avail. The woman’s strength would ebb, the cries turning to moans, and the moans to gasps, just like Caitlin now. The rippling of the belly would slow and stop, and more blood would leak from between the mother’s legs, and when she died, sometimes the babe would be released from the body alive, and sometimes blue and still.

Conaire will not want the babe
, Rhiann found herself thinking.
Conaire will not want the babe without her
. And as she said the words to herself, pain lanced her own belly.

Her mother, her father, her foster-family – all had died. Yet her love for Caitlin was an adult love, not that of a child, the love of soul-friendship found in the most unexpected place, shared and given back in abundance. And so its loss would be all the more unbearable for that. Only Caitlin had Rhiann been able to love freely, without fear or reservation.

The house was completely silent now, holding its breath, as once before it had waited, on a night when Eremon took Rhiann’s hand for the first time. No wind crept through the door; no dogs barked. Nothing came but the occasional crack and spit of the fire, and that was all. Rhiann knew that the silence was creeping in from the edges of the house until, at the last, Caitlin’s breathing would also stop, and then there would be nothing.

We need her
, she found herself whispering.
Goddess, we need her
. She, the smallest of them, was their anchor. Someone moaned, and Rhiann raised her head, thinking it Caitlin coming back to herself. But it was not; the sound had escaped from Rhiann’s own throat.
My sister
…

Suddenly, Rhiann sprang to her feet, surprised by the bolt of rage that struck her, a wild fury as bright and hot as the pain had been. ‘No!’ she cried, leaning over Caitlin, grasping her thin shoulders and raising her up. ‘No, Caitlin, you will not! You will not go!
You are my sister
, my heart’s kin. Come back to me!’

Caitlin’s head lolled back, and now she did groan, her eyelids fluttering, her lips dropping open with a sigh. In the grip of the rage Rhiann shook her, as she would shake life into a baby who would not breathe. ‘Caitlin!’ she cried. ‘Listen to me, Caitlin! This babe is a boy. He is a warrior, strong and handsome and fine! One day, he will bear a spear and shield and sword in great hands, just like his father, and strike down his enemies with fire and blade! He will be proud and fearless, Caitlin, and so you must be! Come now and fight for him! Come!’

She shook Caitlin again, her sister’s head snapped back and, miraculously, Rhiann saw her struggling to open her eyes. It was then that Rhiann knew she had heard. With a relieved sob, she rested Caitlin back on the bed and grasped her hands, chafing them between her own, willing life back into her eyes.

And so it came, slowly.

‘Fight, Caitlin!’ Rhiann begged then. ‘Scream and fight and never give in!
Fight!
’ Her fingers dug in to Caitlin’s arms and, with sheer will, Rhiann forced her own strength down into Caitlin’s body.

And at last Caitlin’s eyes focused, as she took the first deep and true breath of the day.

‘Caitlin,’ said Rhiann, her voice shaking as she dashed her hands in the bronze basin of warm water, ‘I am going to reach inside and turn the child. It will hurt and tear, but you must be strong. Will you let me do this?’

A pained sigh escaped Caitlin’s dry lips, but with an effort she nodded. ‘Do anything, Rhiann,’ she whispered. ‘Anything to save him. Let me go if you need to …’

‘No.’ Rhiann wiped her hands and set the rowan stick between Caitlin’s lips, pausing to stroke her damp hair. ‘I won’t let either of you go.’

A shriek sounded, the first for many hours, and another, and another. And when Eithne and Aldera and the other women rushed in, prepared for the worst, they found Rhiann kneeling behind a squatting Caitlin on the bed, holding her up, their hands interlaced.

Aldera rushed to the bed, pushing aside the tangle of bloodied sheets around Caitlin’s ankles. ‘Good girl! Keep at it, not much more now! Push! Push!’

All the women leaned into the bearing. Yet with Caitlin’s back wedged between her legs, Rhiann felt as if she was squeezing every grain of strength she possessed into that straining body, as if they both bore the child.

‘I see the head!’ Aldera cried. ‘It’s coming, Goddess be thanked, it’s coming!’

Caitlin let loose one great, hoarse scream, her thighs rigid against Rhiann’s own, and sagged back so violently that Rhiann could only collapse under her, bracing her fall on the bed, tears streaming down her face until everything was a blur.

Yet Rhiann didn’t need to see, for over the exclamations of the women and Caitlin’s wrenching gasps, the high, thin wail of a baby pierced the air.

CHAPTER 19

R
hiann jerked awake and, in the confusion of her returning senses, heard only the silence around her.

She half started from her rush chair, struck with terror, desperately blinking sleep from her eyes. Yet something stopped her; an unexpected, languid weight across her breasts, a faint tug in her hair. It was a tiny hand, caught in the sweat tangles at the nape of Rhiann’s neck. And in her ear was the strangest breath of all, rapid and shallow, like that of a bird. Nodding asleep in Didius’s chair, Rhiann had held the babe across her chest, his head over her shoulder, her hand spread protectively across his skull.

For a long moment she didn’t move, absorbing every detail of the warm weight on arms and chest and shoulder, the scent of new skin and tiny, wheezing breath.
The first day with my nephew
. The surge in Rhiann’s chest then was a feeling that had no name. It stopped her heart and took her own breath completely away, so she could hear only his.

At last the beat of her blood returned, and she shifted in the chair, rising to stretch her aching back and stiff legs. From the open door came a waft of air, heavy with the last of the day’s salted, briny heat. Rhiann tiptoed past Eithne on her pallet, and in the doorway carefully tipped the baby off her shoulder until he lay back in her arms, his fists falling out to each side from the linen wrap. The dusk glowed on his new skin.

At the disturbance the child squirmed and whimpered, but then his eyelids fluttered open and he stopped moving, looking straight up at Rhiann, his eyes dark and bottomless. As she’d expected, he was heavy as well as long and, though six weeks early, was nearly as rounded as a full-term babe.

‘What will you be then,
cariad
?’ Rhiann crooned to him, echoing the question all new mothers asked the priestess who attended their birth.
What do you see, lady? What will he be?

And as his eyes caught and held hers, and she lifted him closer to her face, the colourless light seemed to waver before her sight, and for a moment out of time Rhiann glimpsed something that made her gasp. For the tiny, wizened face before her shimmered into the features of a man. The whisper of fuzz on his head flowed into braids of barley-gold, and the blue eyes now shone with such a commanding power, such fierce determination, that Rhiann did not need to see the circlet of gold that sat on his brow.

Her hands tightened with shock, and the child squawked and became a wriggling, squirming babe again. She clasped him to her chest, her eyes blurring, and then she heard a stir from the bed behind her. ‘Rhiann?’

Rhiann smiled shakily as she returned the child to Caitlin’s arms, helping her to sit up against the pillows. The flushed lamplight hid the worst of the exhaustion and pain scored into Caitlin’s face, and only pride and joy gleamed in her eyes as she gazed down at her son, stroking his cheek with one finger. Then at last she broke the long silence with a voice that breathed tiredness, yet great solemnity. ‘What will he be, lady?’

Rhiann laid her hand on the child’s head, still trembling with the wonder. ‘He will be a king.’

Caitlin seemed to absorb that with no visible reaction beyond the ghost of a nod. ‘I knew. I always knew.’ She raised her face to Rhiann. ‘You saved me, and him. I owe you our lives.’

Rhiann stared at the babe’s mouth moving against his fist, until Caitlin grasped Rhiann’s fingers in a firm grip. ‘I heard you, Rhiann, when you called me. I floated far away, but I heard you.’

Rhiann’s throat ached, and she swallowed to ease it, meeting Caitlin’s eyes.

‘In my heart I always knew, anyway.’ Caitlin smiled through her tears. ‘I always knew you were my sister.’