Lora of Two Worlds

The King led his company out onto the ball grounds, and the polo players were already mounted, holding for the King’s coming so they might open the game.

Leon, under the canopy, never said one word — but his heart had gone with Lora, into the little pavilion on the road toward Bright-Virtue Abbey.

Hugh Horn held the door for the Queen Mother, and the instant it opened they heard Truffle’s whimpers.

”We greet Your Majesty.”

The pavilion’s doors and windows were all shut, and the two vets were wet to the hair with sweat. Truffle sat hunched, back arched, on her cushion — plainly she had been at the work with all she had. At the Queen Mother’s coming in she got up and walked a few steps toward her.

”O hard case... vets — how does she stand?”

”She’s been straining on toward the hour, Your Majesty, and nothing shows below. Truffle’s frame is small — hard labor was always the risk of her. As it goes, she’ll not deliver.”

The vets were at their wits’ end, and no wonder. Their trade was the great beasts — oxen and horses. Truffle was a lapdog of the idle rich, a toy thing bred small on purpose, shorter in the body than the common run of lapdog even. It was why the King had had such a time finding her a male at all — and then to breed the little creature besides: what kindness was that?

No one would say so much to the Queen Mother’s face or the King’s. The two vets could have wept for a transfer to the army camps — anywhere but this: standing useless in a palace, delivering a dog.

A day sooner, a day later, either would have served. But no — it must be today, of all days, the King’s Birth-Feast.

The train of maids that had come in with the Queen Mother was a good few; Lora had squeezed in among them. One look at that small toy of a dog, and her brows came down:

A small dog whelping — the risk of hard labor runs high, and nothing to be seen of how the pups lie within — nothing, unless a hand goes in and feels.

”Your Majesty — I once picked up some animal-doctoring from a wandering horse-leech. Might I be allowed to lay hands on Truffle’s belly?”

She had been straining a full hour. Wait much longer, and the pups inside her would be past saving.

The Queen Mother and Hugh Horn turned as one. When had this young woman — the one who’d stood at the King’s elbow — slipped in among them?

But a drowning woman will catch at any rope. The Queen Mother gave way her place at once:

”You — you, then — come, come and help her.”

”Some of you help me hold her — forefeet and hindfeet, and lay her on her back. I must examine her.”

The Queen Mother consented, and Lora lost no time: she rolled her great sleeves up her arms, untied the two ornamental streamers at her skirt, and bound her cuffs tight with them.

The two vets had their knack at holding a beast — in short order they had Truffle pinned flat on her back, four feet in the air, and only then did her great belly show under the long coat.

”Three pups at least. She’s fed too well — the pups have grown big, and the mother’s small; that’s why she can’t whelp.” Lora felt her way over and gave it out. The two vets nodded — the very conclusion they’d come to themselves. With her saying it too, half the weight came off their chests:

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If it ever came to accounting, no one could say their medicine was poor.

As Lora soothed Truffle and made her check toward the root of the tail, two guards of the Silver Shield walked in: ”Your Majesty — by order of the Grand Marshal, we are to take the dog away.”

”Take her? Take her where? Truffle is well enough this minute — she goes nowhere.”

Before the Queen Mother’s words were done, another figure came slow through the door.

The vets all but let go their hold to make their bows — Lora glared them still, and their hands stayed put. Their mouths went on ahead without them: ”Our respects, Grand Marshal!”

So this was the famous, blustering Valentin Voss. Lids heavy, skin gone slack — a man that looked as if his neck had been left out of him; nothing to him but the eyes, and a poison in the eyes. Rest them on a face, and the face felt the knife go over it.

He bent his mouth into a smile, and bowed to the Queen Mother: ”Your Majesty — the King has laid it on me: Truffle is to go out of the palace, and on to the Blessed Isles. The Crown’s luck must not be risked for one beast.”

With that said, the Queen Mother was left without a plank to stand on. Sorry as she was, she could never dig a pit marked ”the Crown’s luck undone” and push the King into it.

Lora, for her part, had finished the examination: pups too big — and apart from that, Truffle sound as a bell. A Caesarean was the one road out, for her and her pups both.

All the way in she’d marked a palace gate. She asked, quick: ”Grand Marshal — you are taking Truffle out of the palace? Might I have a tent pitched outside the gate? Give me a little time — I may yet fetch her back alive.”

The Queen Mother’s face went bright: there was hope for Truffle yet.

Even Voss nodded in the privacy of his skull: A sharp one, this. No defiance of the King — no touching the Crown’s luck — and still she leaves the Queen Mother a thread of hope to hold, and pleases her by it. Only... are you a saint, then? In this Empire consorts and princesses have died on the childbed. Today I shall see what trick you have.

He smiled — a rare sight — and spoke to his men: ”Go — do as the young lady says. A tent, on the flat by the Left Silvergate. And carry Truffle out to it.”

The two vets stood like posts. This Grand Marshal that kills without blinking — this tractable?

Voss only turned his face to them, and the smile on it curdled their marrow: ”You two — take your medical cases and go along with the young lady. Whatever she tells you to do, you...”

Half the sentence, and no more sound. The two vets mopped their brows. Then, at his ease, Voss finished it: ”...do.”

With the Grand Marshal’s word given, the Silver Shield at the Left Silvergate moved fast. Truffle, wrapped in her blanket, was carried out.

The Queen Mother and Hugh Horn stood before the gate and watched Lora go out through the inner palace gate after the guards.

Outside the Left Silvergate, Lora understood why Voss had said ”find a flat place.” The left precinct beyond the inner gate was, as far as the eye ran, one rising slope — the guards had scarce managed to pitch her a small tent at all.

Truffle was laid in the tent, and quick enough the hot water and the medicines she’d asked for were carried in.

The palace gate swung slowly shut behind them.

The two vets and the two maids who tended Truffle watched Lora, all four faces tight. The gate being shut, Lora breathed easy for the first time:

”Easy, everyone, easy. Think of it this way: nothing we do out here can reach the palace. All we need care for is whether Truffle and her pups live. Isn’t that so?”

They nodded, wooden as dolls.

The vets came back to themselves, and as they walked they asked: ”Your ladyship — is it your meaning to cut for the child, or to destroy the child to save the mother?”

It isn’t that the realm had never seen a Caesarean. But that was done with the family head’s leave, in a house resolved to keep the child: at the mother’s dying edge they opened her and took the babe — and the mother’s death followed all the same.

The other way ran opposite: a long rod thrust up, the child killed first, its limbs cut apart, and so drawn out beneath. Either road, one life only was saved — never both.

”You know your suturing, I take it?”

Lora’s confidence stood on this: she had heard the old army surgeon at East Manor tell of the army’s surgical sewing — and the army’s vets had even saved a horse with its belly laid open and the guts out on the ground: the guts pressed back in, the belly stitched shut, and the horse lived.

The two vets nodded.

Lora smiled:

”Then let’s try. Truffle and the pups — both.”