The Birth

The sun was a rustic orb lowering itself beneath the distant peaks. As if fleeting. Or hiding. Unable to watch from above the horror unfolding across the land below. The slow-moving death swept across the fields and villages and towns like some spectral being unseen. Killing not instantly the peasants in its trail but slowly draining them, sapping them of their lifeforce until they had no choice but to collapse with fatigue and hunger, and wait. 

And this was what the pregnant one saw as she shambled past the lonesome cottage in the moors. She’d spotted it a few miles back — a beacon of crumbled stone on this barren flat land. A whisper of salvation. But the rot had gotten them. The chimney of the cottage had fallen inwards upon the roof and further toppled forward again, slate-grey boulders forming a pile by the entrance of the hut. Through a sunken window, she crouched down and could see the skeletal remains of a family which had once been. In the dim light she could see the presumed mother, laid against the back wall by the stoves corroded steel. Her cheekbones were shown through her face as if the bone had gnawed through the skin. Deep were the sockets of her eyes and the eyeballs themselves were not visible in the lumbering darkness. The pregnant one, still glaring in the window, concluded that the rats had taken her eyes. She’d known rats to go for the eyes of her deceased cattle first, before burrowing their way deeper into the animal's skulls.

By the mother dead on the wall was a child whose skin was drawn tight and looked waxen. The child’s hair was short and straw-like and had begun to crumble from the scalp.

The pregnant one felt a pain — a bolt of electricity shooting from her solar plexus down and through her groin. From her crouched position she straightened up and clutched her stomach and let out a shrill howl. A wall of wind came like a blade cutting across the moors and carried her pitiful shriek away and onward deeper into the country across the peatlands. She stumbled sidewards along with it and groped for purchase on the fallen stone. 

Her child was coming. Now, here. The child was coming. 

With her legs like saplings and her ribs pronounced, the pregnant belly looked so unnatural. She stepped forward with her back to the sun’s resting place and began forward, clutching her swollen abdomen. Follow the moon. The clouds parted before her and the moon was full, a bone-white coin suspended in the darkness. She moved along the sodden mire carefully, slowly. Eastward. 

The land flat and painfully featureless save for a tree on her path. She fought her way up a brief incline with her calves burning like hot coals and her raspy breath torching her throat. Tears in her eyes had no time to materialise for the wind howling westward dried them on her lids. Her lips cracked and tongue like sandpaper and she reached out to lean on the trunk of the oak tree which, in such a desolate setting, reached from the rotten land and spread its branches heavenward like the hand of some principled friend. 

She let her weight fall forward onto the trunk but her hand could not hold the weight of her and the person inside of her and she fell forward onto the ground hard. So weak and drained was she that her vision danced with stars and lights and upon looking up into the cloudless black canvas above she could scarcely distinguish the true cosmos. A million distant bonfires in the abyss. Specks of light, and the moon — watching. 

She shuffled back so that her back was against the trunk of the tree and from her periphery she could see the leaves and branches ebbing above her in the wind. Against the tree, she could feel the power of the wind as the trunk and the roots strained against the cascading gusts. 

She was giving birth. Her legs were numb. She was giving birth. 

There was a warmth beneath her and a pain as if the sun itself was burning inside of her. With her head foggy and vision blurring, she slipped into unconsciousness. 

Here, said a voice. It was a man.

She opened her eyes. A man was sitting beside her. In his arms, he held a child. It was wrapped in dirty rags. Here, he said again and held the child forward. It’s a girl.

Her arms were not hers but she held them out anyway and took the bundle of rags from the man. Thank you, she said. Behind the man, a horse stood idly gazing into the distant night. 

She’s been here before, the man said.

What?

She’s been here before.

She pulled the rags away from the face of the child, who slept. A picture of innocence, with flush red cheeks and a single black strand of hair from its scalp.

The man stood up and turned and fumbled with the saddlebag on the horse, before putting one foot in the stirrup and hoisting himself onto the steeds back. 

Thank you, she said again. 

That’s alright.

He pulled a canister of water from a shoulder pouch, shook it, and threw it down onto the grass beside her. That girl has been here before, he said, and the horse trotted off into the night.