The tide goes out

It felt as if the trickle of warmth between her thighs had come to rush back over her body like the turning tide. It swept the last of the pain away, and she was at peace. Her breath slowed now, and its rise and fall gently rocked her body like the waves. If she closed her eyes she felt as if she were adrift on a warm sea.

If she opened her eyes, she could see the women bustling about in grim silence. There were women she knew, but she hardly cared for them now. They seemed like distant forms stranded on a shore, none loved more than another, none missed at all.

She wondered whether she would be able to move the right side of her body now. She did not care to try, but she thought she would. It seemed right.

She did not know for how long she had lain half-​​paralyzed. She had lost all track of the days. She did not know how long she had kept the child alive. She did not even know whether she had kept it alive. She loved it no more than the other stranded souls, and she missed it not at all.

She watched the women a while through half-​​closed eyes.

There was all the blood of a battlefield in her quiet, firelit room. The women moved silently around the bed, their faces pale and solemn, bearing basins in their outstretched arms like priestesses moving in a mysterious rite: basins of water, basins of blood, basins of bloody water.

The rush of warmth began to subside. It was as the knights said. The warm tide had begun to ebb. Soon she lay like flotsam stranded on a shore, cold on the cold sands, cold beneath the cold sky.

Her heart went out briefly to the women who moved silently around her. They moved as if they had not noticed the change. She would have liked to have told them. She would have liked to have told–

She opened her mouth to speak, to try again to ask for Alred. Again, only the animal sound came out. Their heads turned briefly, but they saw no change in her, and continued in their rite.

Her heart drew shuddering back inside of her like a crab into its shell. How it shivered! She was cold all over, even unto her heart.

Alred would not see the change in her either. They were stranded on separate shores. She could not ask for him. If he came, she could not speak to him.

But she no longer tried. If she said nothing, he would sometimes sit a long while and hold her hand – the living hand, so that she could feel him, and his warmth, and the warm tears he dried against her fingers.

But if she tried to speak, he would hear the animal sounds she made and soon go away. She had never been – would never be – able to explain.

She was cold, and the women moved around her, it seemed, or it might have been that she spun slowly in space and they only stood watching, like the stars. Their little faces were pale and grim. She grew dizzy at the sight of them. They passed in a blur.

She had never been quite at ease with women, and there were no men here. She would have liked to have been a soldier. She would have liked to have died on a battlefield, as the knights said, and to have had that glory.

And yet, on that cold shore, as her eyes fell closed, as the dark waters came up and as she drifted away, she thought that there might be little glory in a soldier’s death after all, or little use for glory beneath or among those grim stars.

It was the same for all men. Death was a cold and common thing. Men practiced for it nightly. Death was like sleep. Sleep would be the end.