The Serpent's Tale Read Free

eelam-peelam…” The ignorant might have thought the repetition to be that of a child’s skipping rhyme; others would have recognized the deliberately garbled, many-faithed versions of the holy names of God.
    Dodging the sheets, Dame Dakers crossed to where Father Pol had been sitting and picked up the cat, cradling and petting it as he had done. It was a good cat, a famous ratter, the only one she allowed in the place.
    Taking it to the hearth, she gave it a last stroke with one hand and reached for the cauldron lid with the other.
    Still chanting, she dropped the cat into the boiling water, swiftly popping the lid in place over it and forcing it down. The poker was slid through the handle so that it overlapped the edges.
    For a second the lid rattled against the poker and a steaming shriek whistled through the lid’s holes. Dame Dakers knelt on the hearth’s edge, commending the sacrifice to her master.
    If God had failed, it was time to petition the Devil.
     
    E ighty-odd miles to the east as the crow flew, Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar was delivering a baby for the first time—or trying to deliver it.
    “Push, Ma,” said the fetus’s eldest sister helpfully from the sidelines.
    “Don’t you be telling her that,” Adelia said in East Anglian. “Her can’t push til the time comes.” At this stage, the poor woman had little control over the matter.
    And neither do I, she thought in desperation. I don’t know what to do.
    It was going badly; labor had been protracted to the point where the mother, an uncomplaining fenwoman, was becoming exhausted.
    Outside, on the grass, watched by Adelia’s dog, Mansur was singing nursery rhymes from his homeland to amuse the other children—all of whom had been delivered easily with the aid of a neighbor and a bread knife—and it was a measure of Adelia’s desperation that at this moment she relished neither his voice nor the strangeness of hearing a castrato’s angelic soprano wafting minor-key Arabic over an English fenland. She could only wonder at the endurance of the suffering woman on the bed, who managed to gasp, “Tha’s pretty.”
    The woman’s husband remained uncharmed. He was hiding himself and his concern for his wife in the hut’s undercroft with his cow. His voice came up the wooden flight of stairs to the stage—part hayloft, part living quarters—where the women battled. “Her never had this to-do when Goody Baines delivered ’em.”
    Good for Goody Baines, Adelia thought. But those babies had come without trouble, and there had been too many of them. Later, she would have to point out that Mistress Reed had given birth to nine in twelve years; another would probably kill her, even if this one did not.
    However, now was not the moment. It was necessary to keep up confidence, especially that of the laboring mother, so she called brightly, “You be thankful you got me now, bor, so you just keep that old water bilin.’”
    Me, she thought, an anatomist, and a foreigner to boot. My speciality is corpses. You have a right to be worried. If you were aware of how little experience I have with any parturition other than my own, you’d be frantic.
    The unknown Goody Baines might have known what to do; so might Gyltha, Adelia’s companion and nursemaid to her child, but both women were independently paying a visit to Cambridge Fair and would not be back for a day or two, their departure having coincided with the onset of Mistress Reed’s labor. Only Adelia in this isolated part of fenland was known to have medical knowledge and had, therefore, been called to the emergency.
    And if the woman in the bed had broken her bones or contracted any form of disease, Adelia could indeed have helped her, for Adelia was a doctor—not just wise in the use of herbs and the pragmatism handed down from woman to woman through generations, and not, like so many men parading as physicians, a charlatan who bamboozled his patients with disgusting medicines for