Page 61 of The Dragon Ring
Morgawse nodded, her lips compressed together.
“Like this?”
She shook her head. “Not so bad,” she managed through gritted teeth. “A bit like the pains you get at your time of the month. Morgana said it was indigestion. She said she’d give me a potion.”
Was this girl an idiot? Surely she knew Morgana was in Cadwy’s camp. Morgawse had seemed to know about the planned coup her husband had engineered. Did she think Morgana could mean her any good? But of course, they were sisters. She must have allowed her familial feelings to get the better of her. And she must be gullible.
Karstyn put a hand on Morgawse’s belly. “I think she’s bin in labor longer than she thinks,” she said to me. “They say ye’re a healer. D’ye know anything about childbirth?”
Well, I’d watched every episode ofCall the Midwife. And Sian had given meallthe unnecessary details of her delivery. But that was it. My first aid course hadn’t taken into account the fact that I’d be shut in a primitive kitchen with a woman in her first labor. Feeling inadequate, I shook my head.
“Morgana would know what to do,” Morgawse said, rather unhelpfully. “That’s better, it’s wearing off now.”
“Aren’t her contractions coming really close together?” I asked. Sian’s had been every twenty minutes when she’d started and had escalated to every two by the time she was ready to give birth, some hours later, and even without a watch, I was sure these were less than two minutes apart.
“I think I need to go to the latrine,” Morgawse said. “I’m sorry. I told you it was indigestion.”
Crap. Literally. Well, not crap,baby.
“D’ye need to push?” Karstyn asked.
“Jupiter, I’ve wet myself!” Morgawse’s cheeks flushed pink with embarrassment as water gushed over the stool and the flagstone floor around her feet. Even I knew it wasn’t wee.
“Yer baby’s nearly ’ere,” Karstyn said, going down on her knees beside the girl, “when ye feel the next contraction ye need to push as ’ard as ye can.”
On television, when mothers in dramas start pushing, they get the baby out in seconds. It felt like Morgawse had reached this stage with only a few contractions, whereas in reality she’d been at it since the day before, so it wasn’t a quick labor at all. Had nobody told her what to expect? But now she was trying to push the baby the rest of the way out, everything seemed to stall.
Karstyn got another stool and shoved the two of them together so Morgawse was sitting half on each one, legs apart, with a clear run for the baby between them. She crouched there, face ruby red, in the position you’d take if you were monstrously constipated, which was exactly how Sian had described it to me.
The boy stayed by the door, listening, his eyes averted from the scene being enacted in the middle of the kitchen floor. The red-faced man had cleared away the pastry he’d been rolling and given the table a scrubbing. The girl had piled her vegetables into a couple of pots. I sat beside poor Morgawse as she alternately pushed herself purple in the face for a minute or two, then sagged onto me in an exhausted heap. She valiantly stayed as silent as she could, her poor lips bitten and bleeding. Karstyn had cut a strip of leather from a butcher’s apron hanging on a peg on the wall and given it to Morgawse to put between her teeth and bite down onto.
After what seemed like ages, Karstyn went down on her knees, and lifting Morgawse’s skirts, took a look at what was going on down there. Thank goodness she didn’t want me to do that.
Eventually, she looked up with a big beam on her face. “Well done, girl, I saw the ’ead that time!”
Morgawse collapsed back into my arms. “You only just saw the head?” she squawked in exhausted shock. “I thought he was nearly born! I can’t do this. It hurts too much. I can’t do it.”
Well, there wasn’t much of an alternative.
“Yes, ye can,” Karstyn said positively. “Not long now. Just a few more pushes. And then ye’ll be saying ’ello to yer son.”
Morgawse emitted a long groan, and then doubled up again as the pains rose once more. She gritted her teeth and strained hard.
Watching her was strengthening my resolve not to get put in the same situation. The trouble was, I was now a married woman, and it was unlikely that my new husband was going to want our relationship to remain platonic. My contraceptive injection could be counted on to last at least a few months, and its aftereffects maybe as much as a year, but beyond that I’d be at high risk of pregnancy. Sex was a problem I was going to have to face sooner rather than later.
“That’s right, give it all ye’ve got.”
When her next contraction started, Morgawse did as she was told, her small white teeth grinding into the thick leather.
But the good thing was that Karstyn had been right. Only a few more contractions brought the baby’s head out in a rush of bloody liquid, and another contraction brought its body.
“Tis a boy,” Karstyn said delightedly. “Ye’ve a son.”
“Jupiter,” Morgawse cried, tears streaming down her face. “He’s here. Medraut is here.”
Karstyn put the baby in her arms. It was a little purple and red creature like a frog, crying lustily.
But I was staring at the baby. At little Medraut. To give him the name by which he was known in my time– Mordred. I knew that name well. What reader of Arthurian literature doesn’t? Arthur’s nephew– in some stories his bastard son by incest– the man who would bring Arthur to his final battle at Camlann where both of them would fall. Except in the stories, Arthur wasn’t really dead– he was carried away by three queens to the Isle of Avalon where he supposedly lived on, ready to come to the aid of Britain in her hour of need. A load of claptrap most of it, yet here was little Medraut, Arthur’s nephew.
