The Serpent's Tale Read Free Page B

in her mouth, clamped her teeth on it, and began pushing. Adelia gestured to the girl to help her drag the mother’s body farther down the bed so that her buttocks hung over the edge and gravity could play its part.
    “Hold her legs straight. By the ankles, behind me, behind me, that’s right. Well done, mistress. Keep pushing.” She herself was on her knees, a good position for delivering—and praying.
    Help us, Lord.
    Even so, she waited until a navel appeared with its attached cord. She touched the cord gently—a strong pulse. Good, good.
    Now for it.
    Moving quickly but with care, she entered her hand into the mother’s cavity and released one leg, then the other, flexing the tiny knees.
    “Push. Push, will you.”
    Oh, beautiful, sliding out by themselves without having to be pulled were two arms and a torso up to the nape of the neck. Supporting the body with one hand, Adelia laid the other on the little back and felt the tremor of a pulse.
    Crucial now. Only minutes before suffocation set in. God, whichever god you are, be with us now.
    He wasn’t. Mistress Reed had lost strength, and the baby’s head was still inside.
    “Pass over that pack, that pack.” In seconds, Adelia had extracted her dissection knife, always kept clean.
    “Now.” She placed the daughter’s hand on Mistress Reed’s pubic region. “Press.” Still supporting the little torso, she made a cut in the mother’s perineum. There was a slither and, because the knife was still in her fingers, she had to catch the baby in the crook of her elbows.
    The daughter was shouting, “That’s out, Dadda.”
    Master Reed appeared at the head of the ladder in a smell of cow dung. “Gor dang, what is it?”
    Stupid with relief, Adelia said, “It’s a baby.” Ugly, bloodied, soapy, froglike, with its feet tending toward its head as they had in the womb, but undamaged, breathing, and, when tapped on its back, objecting to life in general and its emergence into it in particular—to Adelia, as beautiful a sight and sound as the world was capable of producing.
    “That’s as may be, but what is it?”
    “Oh.” Adelia put down the knife and turned the miracle over. It was male, quite definitely male. She gathered herself. “I believe the scrotum swelling to be caused by bruising and will subside.”
    “He’s a’going to be popular if it don’t, ain’t he?” Master Reed said.
    The cord was severed, Mistress Reed was stitched and made decent for visitors, and the baby was wrapped in a fleece and put into his mother’s arms.
    “Here, missis, you got a name as we can call him after?” her husband wanted to know.
    “Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar,” Adelia said apologetically.
    There was silence.
    “What about him?” Master Reed pointed at the tall figure of Mansur, who had come up with the siblings to view the miracle.
    “Mansur bin Fayîî bin Nasab Al-Masaari Khayoun of Al Amarah.”
    More silence.
    Mansur, whose alliance with Gyltha was enabling him to understand English even if it gave him little chance to speak it, said in Arabic, “The prior comes, I saw his boat. Let them call the boy Geoffrey.”
    “Prior Geoffrey’s here?” Adelia was down the ladder in a trice and running to the tiny wooden platform that served as a quay—all homes in the fenland had access to one of its innumerable rivers, its children learning to maneuver a coracle as soon as they could walk.
    Clambering out of his barge with the help of a liveried oarsman was one of Adelia’s favorite people. “How are you here?” she said, hugging him. “ Why are you here? How is Ulf?”
    “A handful, but a clever handful. He thrives.” Gyltha’s grandson, and, so it was said, the prior’s as well, had been set to serious study at the priory school and would not be allowed to leave it until the spring sowing.
    “I am so pleased to see you.”
    “And I you. They told me at Waterbeach where you were gone. It appears that the mountain must come to