Precious Cloud, already wide-eyed and frightened even though her contractions had only just begun, gripped me fiercely by the wrist and said, ‘Catherine, I thought you wouldn’t come!’
I took her hand in mine. ‘Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be all right.’
Not surprisingly, my platitudes did nothing to dispel her anxiety. I thought of the baby I had lost – a baby I scarcely knew I was carrying before it was gone for ever. This was not going to be easy for me.
‘Please,’ Precious Cloud said. ‘Ask them all to go.’
‘They can’t,’ I said soothingly. ‘Someone qualified has to be here to help you.’
‘Just for a while. I need to talk with you alone.’
I looked at Yeipanitl.
‘No problem,’ he said in English. ‘You can have a little time together – it’s early days yet. But naturally it’s important we closely monitor her throughout her labour.’
‘Of course,’ I said.
Mia showed no reaction to Precious Cloud’s request. She withdrew with the others, closing the door behind her.
‘They talk as if I’m not here,’ Precious Cloud said. ‘I think the baby is all that matters to them.’
‘Of course it isn’t,’ I assured her.
She gripped my wrist again. ‘Make her go away, Catherine. I want you here, not her.’
I knew she meant Mia.
‘I think she’s only trying to help. She doesn’t have to be here.’
‘Then send her away. She’s watching me! All the time she’s watching me. I think she’s hoping something will go wrong. I can’t bear it!’
The bed bulged outwards as she arched her back. I put my arms around her. She had begun to sob, and I waited until she was calmer.
‘It’s all right,’ I said softly. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll see to it.’
She cried out as another contraction came. I held both her hands, and she pushed against them. Afterwards, she slumped back and closed her eyes. For the moment, she seemed calmer. I rose and went to the door.
‘You will come back, won’t you?’ she said from the bed.
‘As soon as I can,’ I promised.
Outside, I spoke privately to Yeipanitl. ‘Is she going to be all right?’
‘All the vital signs are normal,’ he replied. ‘She’s young and fit. I don’t anticipate any problems.’
‘She’s asked me to stay with her.’
‘I think that would be a good idea, if it doesn’t inconvenience you.’
‘Not at all. Just get ready to catch me if I pass out when it gets gruesome.’
He smiled at this, then returned to Precious Cloud’s room.
I stopped Mia at the doorway from following the nurses in.
‘Can I have a word with you?’ I said in Nahuatl.
She merely blinked at me; but she allowed me to lead her a short distance along the corridor. Then she surprised me by saying, ‘She doesn’t want me there, does she?’
‘She’s very vulnerable at the moment,’ I replied.
‘Of course,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘I have many other duties to attend to.’
She made to move away; I caught her by the arm.
‘Mia…’ I began, unsure what I was going to say. ‘I think perhaps she’s a little bit afraid – or rather, in awe, of you.’
I suppose I was hoping for some sort of real human reaction to this, something which would allow me to gauge her feelings. But again nothing was visible on the surface.
‘I find that hard to imagine,’ she replied in the same flat tone as before. ‘She’s a princess. I’m merely trying to serve her. What reason would she have to fear me?’
I wondered what to say. ‘I think perhaps she needs friends more than servants at the moment.’
I meant to suggest that she herself might try to show a warmer side to Precious Cloud, but she took it quite differently.
‘I understand,’ she said. ‘I don’t wish to do anything to make her uncomfortable. Perhaps you could inform me when the child is born.’
Again she made to move away. I hastily decided that indiscretion was the better part of valour.
‘Mia, did Extepan ever ask you to marry him?’
She closed her eyes in a slow blink, as if wishing me vanished. Very reluctantly, she said, ‘That would not have been appropriate.’
‘Do you wish he had?’
She turned her head away from me without moving any other part of her body. Obviously she did not want to talk about it, but at the same time she was too dutiful to refuse to answer.
‘It’s always been my role to serve him in whatever way he wishes. I’ve never expected anything more than this.’
‘I find that hard to believe.’
‘As Your Highness wishes. I do not feel it’s correct that we should be discussing this when his wife is soon to give birth to his child.’
‘You’re not his slave. You must have needs and desires of your own.’
She looked through me. ‘My duties have always been honourable ones. They have accorded my family high status.’
‘I wasn’t suggesting otherwise. But that can’t be the whole of your life, existing merely to attend Extepan. This is the twentieth century. I can’t believe that anyone would willingly devote themselves utterly to another person’s life without thought or feeling for their own.’
Again the slow blink, like that of a teacher who could not credit a child’s stupidity. Of course I was overstating the case, in the hope of breaching the wall of her reserve.
‘Your Highness will excuse the impertinence,’ she said, ‘but possibly that shows how little you understand us.’
Precious Cloud gave birth to a son at two thirty in the afternoon, Yeipanitl having decided to cut short her labour and perform a Caesarean after drugs failed to blunt her agitation. The baby promptly emptied his bladder in the lap of one of the nurses, to the amusement of everyone present. He weighed eight and a half pounds, and looked strong and healthy.
Precious Cloud woke from her drug-induced sleep soon afterwards. The baby, swathed in white linen, was immediately placed in the crook of her arm. She began talking to him in Dakota, and he promptly fell asleep.
Precious Cloud looked exhausted but delighted. I smiled and said, ‘I think it was worth it in the end, don’t you? He’s marvellous. ’
She nodded. ‘I wonder when Extepan will see him.’
Both Extepan and Maxixca had been dispatched to the Russian front soon after the disaster at Tsaritsyn, Maxixca as Extepan’s second-in-command. A total news black-out on the war had prevailed since the disaster, and we had received no word of him.
‘I’m sure they’ll make it a priority to see he gets to hear about it,’ I said. ‘What are you going to call him?’
She drew the child closer to her. ‘Extepan wants Cuauhtemoc.’
It was a popular royal name which meant ‘Descending Eagle’. The first Cuauhtemoc, a tlatoani in the sixteenth century, had been greatly instrumental in establishing the basis of a modern state by defeating the last of the conquistador armies while at the same time giving freedom of entry to missionaries so that his people could profit from European knowledge. The empire owed as much to the civilizing effects of Spanish culture as it did to Aztec prowess at war.
Precious Cloud began to stroke the baby’s cheek with her forefinger.