Walking the Dust
15: Circling Life
They say the hardest thing a woman can do is give birth. What they don't tell you is that the next hardest thing is helping a woman give birth.
I was in the mid-North, in a small town called Little Monten (though I never did find a 'Big Monten'). It's pretty bleak up there, and cold, but I'm used to that. Lo-Wil isn't much better. The main difference is that the mid-North is flat as anything, so you get these really bad whipstorms coming through, and they can last for hours, even days. That's why I was still in town when this happened.
I'd been in town two days, and gotten to know a few people. (I'd travelled most of the way with a goat caravan, but left them to walk the last couple of days by myself. When I arrived, the whole town came out to stare. They didn't have many come through. But then who does, up there?) Everybody was pretty nice, and the town seemed to roll along just fine, even though they clearly didn't have much to live by.
One thing I've noticed is that the harder the living, the better everyone seems to get along. By contrast, go to the big cities and no-one seems to give a shit about anybody else.
One of the women I'd been talking to, Sharra, was pregnant. This was a huge deal for Little Monten. Apparently it was the first child to be born in a year, so ever since she passed the halfway mark and they knew she wasn't going to misbirth, Sharra had been relieved of work duty. She spent her days hanging around, with everything she wanted brought to her, while everyone else came in to see her, talk to her and give advice. Not that she needed it — she was sixteen, and in my experience of places this small, the whole town helps to raise kids born there. So she'd seen enough to know the deal.
Sharra was pretty close when I arrived, and stayed in bed all day, so she was perfect for me. Young enough to still be interested in the rest of the world, but old enough to be a good talker. We learned a lot from each other, and the folk that came in to see her all had something interesting to say.
What surprised me was how many men came in to see her, too. A lot of places, the men and women don't mix much outside of family or work. But here, they all got along fine and the men were just as big gossips as the women. I didn't comment on it, because it was clearly just the way things were for them, but inside I was laughing when a big, hefty farmer came in and started telling Sharra how if the child wouldn't sleep, she should hold it close and sing softly to it. Mind you, when he actually gave us a performance, everyone inside the house was laughing.
And then, on the third day I was there, Sharra got the cramps.
Suddenly everything changed. The men got up and left. That was it. I didn't see a single one for the rest of the day.
I heard shouting, and Tissha, the town's oldest woman, came hurrying in. While the door was open I could see everyone outside moving, even through the whipstorm. The men were all heading in one direction, the women were all heading straight for us. Tissha explained that the men were going to the male elder's house, where they'd sit and pray to Vishanna for a safe birth. I hadn't even known these people had a religion, but now I saw they were pretty serious about it.
I got up to leave — I wasn't part of the town, and it felt wrong for me to gawp — but Sharra grabbed my arm and asked me to stay. I wasn't sure, but Tissha nodded and said that whatever Sharra wanted was okay with her. The next thing I knew one of the other women had thrust a bundle of hemp towels in my arms and told me to heat them up. They'd placed bricks on the fire, and while I floundered around another woman poured water on the bricks and told me to hold the towels in the steam. I did, until they were damp, then I handed them out and started to wash Sharra's legs.
I'll spare you the details. It was noisy and chaotic — not just from Sharra screaming, which she did a lot, but also Tissha and the other women shouting orders. But there was a crazy kind of order to the chaos. It might have been a year since the last birth, but every woman in that house knew exactly what to do. Except me, of course. I felt like a goat in the ocean, way out of my depth and so worried I might do something wrong that I spent most of the time just holding Sharra's hand and mopping her brow.
But when that little girl came out, and Tissha smiled because the child was breathing, I cried along with the rest of them.
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