Near to Handy, standing with ashen faces and downcast eyes, were an elderly, heavily jowelled man and a thin, bony woman whose fingers constantly twisted around each other. From their air of tension and the way they held themselves apart from the rest of the family I guessed they were Star’s parents. A few youngsters squatted or kneeled nearby. I recognised one of them as Itzcoatl or Obsidian Snake, one of Handy’s younger sons, a boy of eleven or twelve years. I frowned as I noticed his slight figure: I was accustomed to see him looking lively and alert, but now he was hunched silently among his brothers and sisters and they all looked dejected and weary.
When I reappraised the scene I realised that apart from Handy and Goose, everyone was arranged in a rough semicircle against the walls of the courtyard. As Goose kneeled heavily on the earth floor with her nieces and nephews, I sidled across to speak to her, leaving her brother-in-law alone. I wondered what we were all distancing ourselves from: was it whatever was happening in the sweat bath, or was it Star’s husband and his grief?
‘There hasn’t been a sound from them since the last of the stars went out,’ the woman whispered, without prompting. She was not looking at me. ‘Not even a groan.’
I looked at the dome in the corner. It seemed too small to contain one person, let alone two. ‘What went wrong?’
‘The opossum tail didn’t work.’
‘I don’t understand.’
Childbirth was a mystery to me. It was not something I had ever been concerned with in my former life as a priest. It was the preserve of midwives, who had their own mysteries and rituals.
‘The opossum tail,’ she repeated dully, ‘and before that the cihuapatli, the women’s herb. Everything seemed to be going so well. She felt her first pains yesterday, just when she was due. All her children have been like that, never any problem. But something seems to have gone wrong since they went into the sweat bath. The midwife was shouting…’ Goose paused for a long, shuddering breath before continuing: ‘When we sent for my sister’s midwife, we were told she couldn’t be found. My niece had to go to the Pleasure House, to ask the women there if one of them would come instead. She was lucky to find Yolyamanqui.’ The name was an appropriate one for someone in her profession, I thought, as it meant ‘Gentle of Heart’.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Handy move, leaning forward as though he had seen or heard something.
‘She knows her work, and she’s done her best. She brought the women’s herb and the ground-up opossum tail. But it doesn’t seem to have done any good. She thought the baby might be adhering to the womb. She took my sister into the sweat bath at midnight. I know she’s doing everything she can – we could hear them from out here, my sister crying out and the midwife shouting at her – but everyone knows that if the opossum tail doesn’t work there’s nothing to be done. It was horrible, Yaotl, but this is worse. This silence…’
If she said anything else I did not hear it. A sound had erupted from the sweat bath: a loud, convulsive sobbing. I, like everyone else in the courtyard, was on my feet, starting instinctively towards the source of the crying. Then we all froze, everyone, it seemed, realising at once what that noise meant.
Only Handy approached the dome in the corner, but even he stopped when a woman emerged, crawling, through the hole in the wall. When she stood up I saw that she was not Star. She was a woman in late middle age, whose greying hair framed features that might normally be soft, the eyes wide and the nose a gentle curve, but whose face was now crumpled into a mask of anguish. The hem of her skirt and her legs were darkly spotted with what I took to be blood.
She had a small, cloth-wrapped bundle in her hands.
A gasp broke from Goose’s throat. One of the children called out: ‘Father!’ but Handy seemed not to have heard him. He just stood and stared at the midwife as she cradled his child.
Goose stepped towards the woman. ‘Gentle Heart, what has happened? Is my sister…’
The midwife looked at her and frowned. ‘Your sister?’
‘My sister, Star!’ Goose was almost screaming. ‘How is she?’
The other woman suddenly seemed to come to her senses. ‘I’m sorry. Please forgive me, I’m very tired.’ Then she turned to Handy, who stood just a couple of hands’ breadths away from her, his body swaying slightly, like a sapling rocked by wind, but his face as rigid as if it had been carved out of basalt.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said again, but this time deliberately, so as to leave her listeners no room to doubt what was to follow. ‘I did what I could. But it doesn’t seem to have been enough.’
A loud groan escaped the man. The old couple behind him both looked as if their faces had been slapped.
‘The mother is with the Turquoise Prince, the sun, now; she has joined the Divine Princesses. She has paid her tribute of death. And the child...’
Gentle Heart’s words fell on me like a blow, leaving me – a visitor here, not much better than a stranger – speechless and shocked out of any real awareness
