Solo Tyrants Willing to be Dethroned

[Aramenta]

ContentWarningThis post includes: sex, abortion/miscarriage, and abuse

SUMMER 14, 514
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Spindle, brass maiden, spindle, brass maiden, it whirls and whirls, and whirls, the long fibers of cotton whirling, twining, whirling, twining. Ara's finger smoothed and adjusted, and smoothed and adjusted, subconsciously, her hands like beings of their own. Her belly was rich and heavy, plump with child. She watched it with a kind of sick, familiar terror in her eyes, watched it sway as she walked, brushing the tops of the sun-roasted prairie grass. Her feet were bare - they had been swollen with this second pregnancy, and her boots no longer felt comfortable. The toes dug, trying to balance, into the exhausted, parch of soil, feeling the angry jab of dry grass and cockleburs. She was too big, now, to pull the burrs free - when she stopped, perhaps, she would ask Cora. Cora would pull them out, she helped so much, now, with...

No, not now. Not now, I will not think of that

The spindle ran on, and on, though. She hardly ever set it down now. It had to be that way, of course, on the one hand, for the pavilion she had joined with her wedding was suffering in the heat. The grand works always suffered, and the small-works, hand-works, had to pick up the slack. Spinning and dying. Weaving and felting. Her hands were sick with it, her fingerpads gleamed with callous, stained in the pale colors of summer, or a dry summer with increasingly desperate hunters: pale umbers, sickly tans, rough, desaturated greens, that crawled around her fingernails, drawing mad whorls across cuticle and knuckle.

She spun on and on, twine and twist, twine and twist.

There was more to it. There was, no longer, time to cry. For now, since the last child was lost, Ara lived continuously beneath the other wives' eyes. And when her hands were empty, Ara began to quiver under the weight of her emotions. It was hard enough to sleep, and she knew that if she coudl scream, she would keep the pavilion awake at night, for she woke, now, many mornings, to feel her throat hoarse with struggling to scream.

Since the child was lost.

No, not lost, not lost. I know just where I put her...
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[Aramenta]

She had not expected so much blood. Alone, alone, once they took Livvy away, even more alone, she had waited, waited so long, tried, tried so hard. But after the Winged Lady, after that...

It was half conscious, her choice, only half there - in the name of the shards of Zintilla, SHE was only half there, only the remnants of a woman, broken on the back of something much bigger than her. It began with Canter, still uneasy and a bit disdainful of her. She would mount and ride and ride and ride, faster and on rougher ground than she'd ever ridden. She was half unsure if she wanted to knock the baby out of kilter, or just have the horse throw its rider, and have Dira clean up the whole mess. Canter seemed half inclined to oblige her in it. But, the child was needed, and Canter, eventually, simply refused. The relationship had moved from accord, to compulsion, to unsteady negotiation.

In the end, she had done it herself, and with the same indifference as to the outcome. She could not ask a midwife, for there were no secrets in the camp. So she had simply gone and picked the bitterest herbs she could, things she vaguely remembered her mother warning her off of in her youth, thinks that smelled of death and sickness, things that grew in wicked places. She put them in a pitch-basket and boiled them over a cottonwood fire, then drank the mixture to the dregs. Then, she lay down in the rush of one of the rivers. They pulled her out a few miles downstream, mouth raspy with vomit, limbs battered with stones, and bemoaned the accident. She had 'fallen faint' while washing on the stones. She didn't even bother to explain the sick. Folk blamed it on the half-drowning. The healer, she was sure, had not believed a word of it. She suspected her husband had his doubts as well.

He had not been cruel. He had waited a full month, waited for her blood to come and go again, before he came to her, still bone-sore and only half-recovered from the sick, and came in wordlessly, his brow furrowed and hurt, and she had felt shame almost as deep as the nausea that overtook her as he filled her with child again. With the new child, they would not leave her alone - with the new child, they would stay close. To 'keep her safe.' She thanked them, and swallowed her tears.

References:
'The Winged Lady': http://www.mizahar.com/forums/topic35174.html

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[Aramenta]

He returned.

The work was thin these days, there was no spare goods to be thrown at what could wait. Not this summer. At first, He had gone on his rounds, assiduously, had stayed out late even, more so than the fat times, for he had gone from tent to tent, pointing out rents that he could repair, following news of new babies and growths and deaths in families, offering his labor. Not this summer. It would wait until next year, everyone said. A rent could be darned shut for now. And as for the new children, well, if the tent was crowded, weather like this would surely do its grim work of making space soon enough. In Ara's own pavilion, two elderly men, both only dimly known to her, had already passed in the oppressive heat, sparse food, and stale water. She had helped to lay them out.

As time passed, He stopped bothering to push so hard - what use was it? Noone listened. Their savings dwindled slowly. He drank sometimes - not in the way some of the folk did, not to where he became mean, not to where he came home and left bruises, the way Ara had seen on some of the women at washing (as seldom as that happened in this weather). He was a quiet drinker, and his eyes were so haunted, she almost wished the drink on him.

That was the trouble of it, he was a good man. He had been kind to her, in spite of it all - she knew, after all, she hadn't earned His kindness. He was a good man, but a broken one. And His family broke with him.

She knew He returned because of the sound of His horse, the step exhausted and irritable, the little whinnying pull of head against reins. Canter regarded the horse quietly. The two had mated the previous winter, ironically seeming to get on in the way that He had, no doubt expected she would with Him.

"Welcome, husband." Cora rose and rushed over to him, the picture of a good wife. She was a good woman, altogether. Almost Ara resented how good she was: it was so hard to be a bad creature among the good. HE would, Ara knew, not want to see her. So she stayed crouched in the grass, picking a burr from her distaff, quietly.

"Cora, love."

"How did..."

He smiled, but it was not a happy look, meant, perhaps to be comforting. Ara looked up at it. He had gone to sell off a few things, to try to make things meet - just until the rains. Just until the kine started to fatten and the business began again, "It will be enough. Your gowns, Cora, sold for something. And the young one's compass. They will keep us, for a little while."

The Young One - it was Ara's name now. She had no other in the house, hardly. The other wives KNEW her name, of course, but none USED it. "Young One, sit here," or "Young one, won't you mind the pot for a few minutes?" She had lost her name. To be honest, He likely couldn't bear to make a human of her in his speech. And the wives followed suit.

She sighed. The compass would do something, that was at least SOMETHING.
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[Aramenta]

"He doesn't HAVE a mark for her. Have you not looked?"

"That could mean anything, Nari. Lay off her. She's only a girl. Do you remember Shirna? She told me it took three months of being married to her man. They were scared when they were married, she isn't even sure which of them wasn't ready to keep their promises. But three months, they were together long enough, and she came to him, and they made promises to each other again, and the marriage mark appeared."

"Shirna Windpour? Shirna married a recovering alcoholic, petch, *I* wouldn't kept my oaths until I knew he was serious. This is different. Besides, its been six months, now!"

"It don't mean she ISN'T keeping her oath. Just one of the two don't know if they WILL. And I'm just saying, she's not married to you or I. She's married to him. And if he is happy with her, than I'm not going to say a thing."

Ara closed her eyes, slowly, reopened them. She had given up on 'happening to come in' when she heard things like this. What was the point? It did not stop them thinking it. It did not even stop her hearing it, for it spoke in screeches from their eyes, from the way Nari took her labor with a protective, barely suppressed dislike to the condescending, impersonal attention to her unborn. There was something almost humiliating in that, even if it was her only security now - that they never spoke to or tended her, that they never worried over or protected her. They protected her womb, for this is what she was now - an aberration, an unresolved, unreliable inconvenience, that must be put up with for the sake of it's womb.

Besides, walking was too hard, she was so sick. Sometimes, she did not even make it form her bed when her morning nausea came, and one of the older girls would have to come clean sick from her bedding, all the while as Ara sat huddled, shivering in the corner. The midwife assured them it would pass, that the first trimester was hardest, that nausea meant a good strong son, that her body was throwing out the things that coudl be harmful for the child. That last felt almost reasonable, for it seemed to her that she was attempting to vomit her very self out her mouth, some days, that once the last dregs of acid had trickled out, her stomach tried to heave itself up and through her mouth onto the ground.

Some of the girls muttered about it being from her 'accident' but here, at least, Ara knew that was simply resentment: before she had tumbled the first child from her womb, she had been just as sick. Something, perhaps, in her body had tried to warn her - to send her from producing more of herself in the world.

But what it meant for everyone, was suffering. Apart from the inconvenience, it meant that Ara had to eat more, and owork hardly at all. Left to herself, she would have chewed juniper berries and mint, and never properly eaten a thing, for even at midday, food in her stomach felt like a hungry rat, trying to scratch its way out. But she was being carefully tended, and the women brought her food, special foods even, to try to keep things down. Pale bread, sick with sweetness. Tender meats of the breasts of birds. Juice with flavors she did not know even existed in the sea of grass - or perhaps they didn't. Ara dutifully forced them down, then vomited most of them back up. A successful day was one where she held them until the next morning.

And each morsel she took, each sip she swallowed, she saw her drawing the lifeblood of the family. Seh saw the money fading. It would be enough, it had to be, for a child, these days, that was a precious thing, and a womb that made them, even if it needed to be fed tender bits, that was a treasure, as well. They would put up with her.
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