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Silna comes into the tent to find him washing himself with water from a bowl, lifting his clothes, rubbing a damp cloth over his skin. She notices immediately the pungent, bitter smell in the air. He hasn't noticed her, but she understands all too well that he must be doing something big, something hazardous.
She rushes to him, placing a hand over his own, staying it over his exposed navel, and he halts abruptly, arm locked in place, eyes wide. He opens his mouth to say something, then closes it. He jerks his hand out from under hers, cold and embarrassed. This is the most of his body she's seen, that any woman has seen. Neither the neighbor girl he'd had a youthful dalliance with some fifteen years before nor the dockside whores he had occasionally allowed himself to indulge in a lifetime ago had ever seen the whole of him. He understands it's probably nothing to Silna, but to him, even now, it means all too much. So he pulls his arm back through his sleeve and adjusts his shirt, regaining his modesty.
Silna’s eyes remain on him, frantic, desperate for an explanation. She tries to take the rag from his hand, but he tightens his grip, keeping it from her. This is the first time he's displayed his strength in front of her, and he regrets it immediately. Only, he wants to let her know that this must be done.
“I have to do this,” he says in her tongue, and she shakes her head, tries again for the rag, but he's still holding it tight.
He snaps his arm back behind himself, placing his body between the rag and her hand. “Please,” he says softly. “This may be my only chance to stop them.”
She shakes her head again and looks at the bowl, the bottle next to it, clinical and menacing. He notices where her gaze has fallen, but she is faster, snatching up the bottle and smashing it onto the floor, sending the remaining fluid and the glass of the bottle flying across the ice and frozen earth. The bowl follows in quick succession, clattering to the floor and losing its contents to the earth.
Her gaze remains fixed on him, stern and determined. She will stop him, that look says. He hates to see her upset, hates to go against her, so he lets her. When she reaches for his hand again, he loosens his grip, gentleness returning along with the building sorrow in his heart as he lets her take it, and she drops it into the mess of glass and already frozen poison on the ground.
“I'm sorry,” he says softly. “I'm so sorry.”
He lurches forward weakly, not from the poison but from remorse, and she doesn't hesitate to hold him as his body quakes with new sobs.
She wants to tell him it's okay. She wants to tell him so many things she'll never again have the words to say. But she doesn't let herself think about that for too long. His body smells of the same strong, bitter poison that now lies frozen on the floor of the tent. He needs water, soap, fresh clothes—whatever the remedy is for this terrible, foreign deed.
She lets him go and searches frantically for something that will fix this, something that will make him clean again, but she can’t find anything.
“I’m sorry,” he says again, this time in his own language, but she understands. “I’m sorry. Silna, I’m sorry,” barely a whisper. She knows those words, recognizes the intensity behind them coming out the way they do, not in her tongue but his own.
She caresses his cheek and smiles sadly and sympathetically into his eyes, wanting him to know he’s okay, that she forgives him, before taking his hand and pulling him towards the door. He starts to go, but stops abruptly, and she worries that he’s changed his mind, that he’ll stay and finish what he’s begun. But he reaches not for the blade on the table, but towards the neatly folded pile of clothes on the stool.
There’s no time. The others will be back soon, she knows. Silna grabs his coat and shoves it at him, taking the rest from him, and he understands. He pulls on his coat, and letting her slip her hand in his once more, they’re gone.
The journey to the nearest village takes whole days. More than four, but not quite five. He’s uncertain how to count it, how he should record it in his diary. Then he remembers he’s left his diary in the tent, and he laughs. It’s strange, he thinks, how much of one’s thoughts such habits take up.
Silna looks at him as if she thinks he’s gone mad, and maybe he has. Nevertheless, he smiles at her, and after a moment, she smiles back, their faces illuminated by the light of the fire in the small shelter she’s ushered him into.
A pair of women show him how to bathe, how to clean and rinse the poison off his skin, how to wash his hair, how to dress against the cold. He’s grateful. He tries to tell them that, but he’s not sure if he’s used the right words because they don’t say anything back, only smile knowingly and laugh as if they’re sharing some kind of joke between the two of them, which is just as well.
He isn’t sure how long his recovery takes. He knows that’s several more days at least, if not weeks. He’s weak and he’s tired, and even though he wants what she’s giving him, even though he’s grateful for this reprieve and the aid she’s brought and that her people are so willingly giving, he can’t help but stay in bed. There’s nothing else to be done until this sickness has passed, if it passes.
Eventually, it does, but after how long, he has no idea. The light and the chill in the air are still at the same level they were when he arrived, so a season can’t have passed, but that’s about all he can discern.
She sits with him, wrapped in a blanket she’s brought him, holding a bowl of something from one of the women. He speaks little now, unsure what there is for him to say, unsure what he should ask. So he just eats, and he thinks, and he remembers.
And then he tries not to remember.
A while later, he’s invited into a tent to speak with a group of men with Silna there as a sort of liaison, or perhaps his defense. He isn’t certain. All he knows is that this takes several days, and their words are generally directed towards her, which is, he tells himself, just as well. She is one of them, after all. It is not up to him to argue his case, especially not when he isn’t even sure what he would be arguing for, other than to say that he wants to stay with her.
“Wherever you go,” he says one night as he lies awake, facing Silna but not touching her, his head resting on one hand, “I want to be there.”
“I know,” she signs, and he smiles weakly, sadly.
“If they don’t let me go, maybe I’ll just follow you anyway,” he says. “Leave when they’re not looking.”
He laughs, and so does she, and for a moment, the weight he’s been carrying lightens.
He wakes terrified some nights, his heart beating quick, his hands shaking. He curls into himself, wanting to hide, or perhaps to disappear. More than anything, he wants to forget. He wants not to think of the things he’s seen and done these last few years. He wants to close his eyes and feel like it was all a dream, just a dream, and that the ones he has now don’t speak to anything real.
The one thing he doesn’t want, he learns soon enough, is home, or the place he once called home. Sure, he wouldn’t mind England’s more moderate winters, and he’d love to see his brothers again, but he doesn’t miss the expectations and the obligations of English society. He doesn’t miss the things he was not but was expected to be.
He doesn’t miss the way people there spoke at and about him, rather than to him or with him.
He doesn’t miss the loneliness that permeated every fiber of his being down to the pit of his stomach there.
He doesn’t miss the nights when he would wake similarly afraid (though now, of what, he cannot remember) and have no one beside him to hold or hold him.
Some nights, he imagines that he's always been here, with Silna. That he was born in the same village as Silna. Or that he's from a neighboring one that her father visited with her when they were young. He imagines himself meeting her as children, as young people, even as they are now. It would be so much easier for both of them, he thinks, so much nicer, if they had always known each other and the ships that brought his people hence had never come to this part of the world. But whatever he imagines, he can't bring himself to imagine a life where he never met her. Whoever he is, wherever and whenever they meet, they have to meet. That's the crucial thing.
Silna cannot stay in the village, so within a fortnight, they’re off again. It is anticipated that he will stay, though not expected, not compulsory. So, with as sincere an apology as he can muster, he declines. He wants to stay with her. It is with some resignation that they accept this, but he’s sure they must be secretly at least as relieved to see him go as he is that they’ve decided to let him go.
He learns from Silna how to make camp in the way of her people, the way of her father. He does his best to copy her, to help her, and she watches gratefully as he slowly catches on. It brings him pride to know that his efforts have both helped and pleased her.
Silna has taken to giving him gifts, mainly practical things which she makes herself or acquires in their travels from the people they encounter. Tools, hides and furs for his bed, warmer clothing. Sometimes it’s food that she explains is rare or special or nice, which she shares with him as they sit by the fire at night.
At first, he thinks she’s just being kind, that she’s helping him get used to this new life by giving him things that he needs or will need. It’s the food that changes his mind, makes him wonder if it’s something more. It is an act altogether more domestic, more personal, something shared.
Silna sleeps naked, as is apparently common among her people. Harry learns this about a month into living with her, when they begin sleeping in the same fur-lined bedroll rather than simply close to one another, needing now to actually share their warmth.
Once under the covers, she slips out of her clothes and tucks them down at the bottom of the bed to keep her feet warm. To Harry's surprise, this is incredibly effective, so he starts to do the same, or something like it. He's still too self-conscious and reserved for full nudity, so he keeps on his shirt, one of the few items of clothing from his old life he decided to keep. It's a thin cotton thing, very breathable, and doesn't do much to warm him, but doesn't keep out the warmth either. What it does do is preserve the last bit of modesty he’s still clinging to, that he needs to feel comfortable and whole, so it stays.
She lies close to him, her body pressed right up against his. This discomforts him at first, admittedly more than he hopes he’s letting on. He's never lain with a naked woman before, never felt so much warmth from another body, never felt this much skin against his own. Soon enough, though, it, too, becomes a comfort.
He tells her one cold winter's evening as they lie together bundled up in their furs, chest to chest, that he loves her. He doesn't know if he's said it properly, if he's used the right words, and she can't correct him anymore. But he says it anyway, and places her hand over his heart, palm flat against his chest, her skin separated from his own only by the thin cotton of his nightshirt. He hopes this is enough.
Her expression softens when he says it, and with her free hand she touches his cheek. The look in her eyes is one of reciprocity.
He says it again, and brings her hand to his lips, pressing them to her knuckles, not quite kissing them. It's too cold for that.
Silna smiles and pulls his hand now towards her own chest, placing his palm over her own heart, between her breasts. Even now, he averts his gaze, doesn't allow it to go too far below the shoulders, but he can't help but note how warm she is, and how soothing it is to have her close to him and know that she loves him, too.
This is the first night, too, that he realizes he wants her. That he even allows himself to consider it.
He imagines her on her back beneath him, her body being rocked gently by the movement of his own, practically hears the rustling of the furs and blankets beneath them, the sound of her shuddering breaths and the soft moans that slip through her parted lips.
He clears his throat, and with it tries to push the thought from his mind. It feels wrong. Somehow sinful, even now, after everything. Somehow tainted, bent on ruining whatever purity and cleanness remains inside him and between them.
But then Silna moves closer, wraps her arm around him, holding his body against hers, her breathing slow and even and becoming slower as she begins to fall asleep. And he holds her, too.
Perhaps there will be room for such acts, he thinks. Some day or night; just not tonight.
Silna teaches him to fish, or tries to. He's terrible at it, but he does try to do as she shows him. Mostly, he ends up watching her, which seems to embarrass her a little, though it's only the two of them.
He's seen her on a few occasions glancing at him, then smiling and looking away when their eyes meet, as if somehow she's adopted his own eccentricities, timidness, and British sensibilities all of a sudden.
There are other times, though, when he catches her looking at him, and she continues to look, completely unencumbered by the same sort of embarrassment that would make him look away if the tables were turned.
She watches him dress, watches him clean and shave, watches him bite his nails and rub his eyes or the side of his nose and all the other little things he does throughout the day, and he wonders what her reasoning is.
Perhaps some of his behaviors are still foreign to her. Perhaps she's studying him. Or, he allows himself to think, only once as they sit across from one another near the fire one evening and he watches the way her fingers wind through her hair, remaking her plaits and twists, perhaps she thinks there's something beautiful in the mundane, something desirable to her simply in the way he moves and speaks as there is to him when he watches her.
There is no more Tuunbaq, Silna tells him one afternoon. Something happened between Captain Crozier and Mr. Hickey and the creature, though just what it was that transpired is difficult for Harry to discern with so few clues and only his imagination—and what he is willing to posit to her—at his disposal. Apparently she saw the aftermath of the carnage on one of her solo expeditions, and whatever it was, it was final enough for her to be certain, and that was enough for Harry to cease his wondering about survivors. He is the only one left.
Still, he wonders some nights when he can’t sleep what must have happened to those last few men, the ones he couldn’t save and had, for a moment, thought would be better off dead by his own hand than left to destroy themselves and each other any further. But he finds those thoughts only make the nightmares and the half-waking memories worse, so he tries not to think on that too much.
It is summer again when they return to the village. A real summer this time, or as close to one as he can imagine. The snow has melted, though the ground remains mostly frozen, and the sun warms his skin when he lies outside their tent on one of those long, bright evenings, basking in the sunlight. Silna is sitting beside him, sewing something into one of her furs, and he places a hand comfortably on her covered ankle, earning a downward glance and a sly grin from her. He smiles back, happy and at ease.
Later, after they’ve gone into their tent, he’s surprised when she nuzzles her face into his neck and slips a hand under his nightshirt, the one he still insists on wearing. He almost doesn’t realize—or doesn’t allow himself to realize—what she’s doing at first, and he’s embarrassed at the stirring he feels in his loins as a result of her breath on his neck and her hand caressing his chest, his stomach, then down over his hip, until finally her hand reaches his member, and he understands that this has been her objective all along.
He can’t fight the moan that bubbles up from his throat as she strokes him, making him impossibly harder. His cock throbs under her touch and he turns his head to look at her. He wants to kiss her, but he doesn’t do it. All he can do is lie there and look at her, panting as she works her hand along his length.
Eventually, he loses track of the thought altogether and closes his eyes, letting his head fall back, his mouth open still.
She rubs her thumb over the head of his cock, and he whimpers. His hips rise without him meaning for them to as she coats him in his own slick.
“Yes,” he sighs. “Oh, God…”
The sensation stops abruptly, and he’s suddenly aware that she’s moved from beside him by the lack of warmth alone. When he opens his eyes, he sees her above him, feels her thighs settling on either side of his own. Her hand is back, stroking him once, twice more, and she rises. He looks down just in time to see her line his sex up with her own and sink down onto him, and he almost finishes right then and there.
“Jesus Christ,” he groans, closing his eyes again, rubbing one of them with the heel of his right hand while his left closes around a handful of the blankets beneath them. “Ahh.”
She rolls her hips, taking him easily, all the way in, and she moans, a gorgeous, round, dark sound, deep in her throat, and he realizes, half-consciously, that this is the first time he’s heard her voice since she made her offering. He’d almost forgotten what she sounded like. Now, it’s almost too much.
He’s going to come soon. He knows this for certain. He wonders if she knows it, if she’ll stop before he does, if he’ll need to figure out how to tell her to stop before he does. Somehow, he can’t remember the word in either language.
“No,” is what he manages an eternity later to get out instead, in English. “No.”
His cock throbs again, and she whimpers, going a little faster after that.
Christ, she doesn’t know. Or perhaps she does, and she knows something else he doesn’t.
“Wait,” he says next, and that catches her attention, slows her down. In her language: “I’m almost…”
Frustrated with himself and his inability to find the words, he sits up, rolls them over, and takes control.
His movements are a little slower than hers had been, a little more deliberate. In truth, he’s holding himself back. He wants to fuck her hard. He wants to pound into her until they’re both shouting as he comes deep inside her, but he knows he can’t do that. Not here, not right now, and especially not the first time they do this.
He wants that, but he also wants to make love to her. He wants it to be beautiful and rapturous and sweet, slow and languid and tender. He wants to draw these noises out of her and really feel the way her body reacts to him.
As it were, he settles for somewhere in between, and he knows it must be fairly awkward. It feels awkward, even to him. Nevertheless, she’s holding onto him, panting and clinging to his shoulders, letting slip the occasional whine or moan.
“ Ah, fuck,” he pants, feeling that familiar twinge in his cock, and he pulls out, finishing on the blanket beneath them with a long, low groan that he tries to muffle against her neck.
He kisses her collarbone, her shoulder, grateful for what she’s given to him, for what she’s let him have.
He’s startled to hear her laugh, embarrassed, though it’s not a hateful noise. She squirms under him, and he realizes she’s pulling her shoulder away from his mouth.
“Oh,” he says. “Er, sorry.”
He raises himself enough to look down at her, and she smiles at him once more. He smiles back, feeling the usual sleepiness creeping up on him. Tentatively, he leans in once more, hesitating momentarily before pressing his lips to hers, and thankfully, this time she doesn’t laugh. She accepts the kiss, following his lead after a moment, kissing him back just before he pulls away again.
Her hand is between them again. He can feel it slide down to the place where their bodies had connected a just few minutes before, and he pulls his hips back, curious to see what she’s doing, and altogether perplexed when he sees her caress her own sex, then rub it more deliberately, her fingers focused on a spot above her entrance.
He sits up to get a better look. Beneath him, Silna closes her eyes, opens her legs a little wider, and gasps. Her hand quickens and she moans, a little louder than before. Looking lower, he sees her opening pulse noticeably and become visibly wetter. Her hand slows, and finally stops, and so do her noises. She breathes slowly and deeply, her chest rising and falling with each breath.
Goodsir is perplexed and astonished, and admittedly, to his surprise, aroused once more. He has never seen anything like this before. But it makes sense. Somehow, it makes sense.
He lowers himself once more and kisses along her jaw towards the side of her neck and stops at a spot just beneath her ear, and she hums softly, biting her lower lip. She feels him, hard against her thigh, and reaches down to line him up again with her opening, and he presses into her. She gasps this time, and her back arches.
And this time, he makes love to her, free of the strangled desperation he felt earlier, and when he's about to come again, when she feels him beginning his retreat, she stops him, wrapping her legs firmly around him, pushing him deeper into her with her heels on his backside, and, taking that as permission, he continues. His thumb finds her clitoris and he rubs it in the same moderately quick circles he saw her use until she cries out and her hips rise to meet his as she pulses around him. He comes shortly after her, his cock buried deep inside her, and she moans again at the sensation.
“Oh,” he sighs. “Mmh, fuck.” He strokes her hair, and carefully pulls out. “Thank you,” he murmurs against her shoulder. “Thank you.”
Her eyes are on him, her brow knitted in confusion as if she can't comprehend why he's said it. This embarrasses him, and he makes a mental note not to make it a habit, thanking her for this kind of shared pleasure.
A little while later, as they lie awake side by side, his arm around her waist and his forehead pressed against her upper arm, the sweat on their bodies now cool but not quite cold, he ventures to ask, or begin to ask, “Why did you…?”
She takes his hand in hers and places it on her lower belly, and for a moment, he doesn't understand, refuses to understand.
Then it sinks in.
He wonders if that was the goal all along. If that was the only reason she wanted him. A baby. She wanted a baby. Did she care at all for what they'd done? For him?
She must have, he decides. To think otherwise is irrational, given the evidence.
She came back for him, more than a year ago now. She saved him. She let him stay with her, even though he must have held her back, must have been a burden. She trusted him enough to share her tent and her bed with him, to share warmth and resources with him. She trusted him enough to share this with him. She chose him for this, when it could have been any of the men from the village.
Not only that, she had been his friend long before all that.
“Oh,” he says softly.
She must have.
He kisses her again and moves to lie beside her. He wishes now more than ever that she could speak, that she could tell him the things her eyes and her body can't. Perhaps if she had a diary, she could write it down. He hates that he left his behind, but perhaps it's for the best. He'd only run out of pages eventually anyway, and regret the things he'd filled them with instead of saying what really mattered.
The following weeks are spent working, sharing the load with the other members of the village to get the summer work done before the sun goes into hiding once more. They must be gone again, too, when the ice returns. They are not part of the village, not a permanent fixture of it.
Apart from their work and the village, though, they are a permanent fixture to each other’s lives, more so than before. They spend much of their free time together, seeking each other out, never tiring of time spent together—something they’re both grateful for.
They sit together, eat together, walk together, and share conversations as he’s sure they would have if things had never gone so terribly wrong aboard the ships where they’d first earned each other’s friendship.
They make love in the evenings or in the mornings, sometimes every day. Often more than once when they do. He's never been married, nor has he fathered any children. But he doubts this is common practice in England, or any of the places he used to call his own. In any case, as an anatomist, he knows this isn’t necessary, either; but they aren’t doing it out of necessity, not as he would have done if he hadn’t met her, if he’d married an English woman instead.
Grudgingly, English women are taught to close their eyes and think of England while their husbands do the dirty work. That it will be over in a moment or two (and, from what he'd heard from his brothers and the men he'd once worked and sailed with, it usually is). That it can and should be expected to be unpleasant for a woman, that it may even hurt, but that it is her duty as a wife and a respectable Christian Englishwoman to allow it.
What he shares with Silna is nothing like that. It's enthusiastic. It's joyful. It's beautiful. Silna enjoys it, as does he, and it is usually she who initiates it.
Unlike the women in England, Silna's body is her own, ruled by no man, even himself. She has no obligation to him, has virtually no socially-imposed guilt about what they do. Only love. He knows he wouldn't want it any other way.
Perhaps that was part of why he never married before, only paid for it as many times as he could count on one hand, and shared two secret summers with a girl from the village where he grew up when he came home on holiday from medical school with no anticipation of anything more. Marriage is something between bondage and a business agreement in Britain. Hands are tied, one to the other, and men are expected to keep their wives like ornamental extensions of themselves. Love matters little for most of British society when it comes to choosing a partner. It’s nothing he felt he could bring himself to participate in, and instead only dreamt of some better version of it.
Here, for him and Silna, outside of everything, all that is different. Each of them was separate from their own society and therefore from many past obligations as well. There was room for love and want to find their way into their relationship in their own time, to soften and comfort.
He whispers these things to her as they lay together, kissing and touching and teasing before they actually get around to making love, the words coming as easily as breathing: I love you, I want you, I need you.
He thinks occasionally, mainly in the early days, that perhaps someone can hear them, that they are being too obvious about what they're doing, that they spend too much time on it or that they overindulge. That they're enjoying it too much, even. But he soon realizes he fears a judgment that never comes, and never will. Before long, that fear starts to fade away, though like the others, it is never truly gone, even when reason says it should be.
Three months later, he can see the first signs of it, her lower belly swollen slightly, her uterus distended into a small, rounded bump. It’s still a bit early, but he likes to place his hand over top of that small, barely-there bump as they lay awake at night and wait to see if he can feel movement. Most nights, they fall asleep like that, waiting.
The first time he feels it, though, about twenty-one weeks in, his heart nearly jumps straight out of his chest. He sits up and looks at Silna, and catches sight of her eyes wide with mixed excitement and shock. She looks back at him, her expression stuck like that for a moment before finally breaking into a smile to match his own. She reaches for him, and he catches her hand, clasping it firmly before she pulls him to her, hugging him.
They’ve created a life, he thinks. It feels like a remaking of something deep inside him, of something he didn’t even know was broken. It’s more than that, too, of course; it’s something entirely new. Something beautiful.
He doesn't wake in the night as often, doesn't have the same nightmares quite as frequently. He thinks perhaps making a life has helped begin his redemption, if there is such a thing as redemption. Anyway, it feels like progress.
He speaks to the baby. He doesn't know if it can hear him, but he hopes it can. It may never know its mother's voice, so he'd like it to know his own at least. He uses her language, the language of her people, the language that will be their child's, when it is born. There is no reason to teach it his own. That would only serve to alienate, he thinks. It would be too secretive. He doesn't want there to be any more secrets.
He catches himself narrating things in his head at various points throughout Silna’s pregnancy, as if he’s keeping a log, secretly, just for himself.
He’d always been scientifically minded, it’s true. He remembers the journals he’d filled throughout his adolescence, his time as a medical student, his time as a museum curator and archivist, his time as an anatomist and a surgeon. A part of him longs for that again.
Recording information is crucial to scientific discovery, of course, but it’s also a labor of love, making an effort to remember. And this is something he’d like very much to remember.
He hates seeing Silna ill. That's the worst part of it. That she tries to hide it from him is even worse.
What would normally be called morning sickness comes most often in the afternoons, as the day is winding down, and makes its home within her for the duration of her pregnancy. She rests often enough, eats often enough and well enough. She is strong and everything is going well, but it still weakens her for a few hours every day, and he can't help but think he's done this to her, even if she had wanted it.
He remembers his mother used to say this to his father. “John, you've done this to me. Again, you've done this.”
His father, a good man though he was, was also an unsympathetic one. He had seen her through multiple pregnancies, helped deliver several children, and felt it was all in due process, which made him cold. In Dr. John Goodsir’s view, as in many British men’s, you gave your wife a child, the child made her ill, the child was born and she felt even worse for a few weeks afterwards, then soon enough, the cycle began again. It was just how it was.
Harry wonders if his father ever worried at all, if it scared him half as much as this scares him now, the first time it happened, or if he was as dismissive each time, from the very beginning. Perhaps Dr. John Goodsir simply understood, or rather believed, this was just the process and there was nothing to be done, or even to consider doing. That this was just how it worked.
It occurs to Harry that he does not know very much at all about his father.
He holds Silna, rubs her shoulders and back, whispers apologies and promises to her, brings her the things she requests and some things she doesn't. He wants to take this from her, but knowing he can't, he seeks to make it easier.
She wears her hair loose now, for the baby. So it doesn’t choke when it’s born.
She signs this to him, mimicking something that looks disturbingly like a hanging when he asks her if she needs help tying her hair back, having assumed she was too tired or frustrated to do it herself.
When they return to the village in the spring, in the final weeks of her pregnancy, one of the women explains this belief to him in more detail, and he learns that this is also why Silna has given up wearing the cord around her neck with the charm she inherited from her father. Until the baby is born, anything even vaguely resembling a cord must be kept away from the mother’s neck.
He spends a lot of time with this woman—the midwife, he calls her, though he isn't sure how accurate this translation is—and the others who will be overseeing the birth. Despite his medical training, he will not be assisting in this process. He isn’t an expert in their birthing practices, though they are happy to answer his questions. He isn’t an expert in British birthing practices, either, as it happens, having never delivered a child before, and never being allowed in the room when his mother gave birth to any of his younger siblings. He doesn’t know if he could handle it, really; though he is hesitant to admit it, much of his socially-imposed squeamishness remains, and he is relieved that they have invited him to attend only in the capacity of a father—a supporting role only.
They are asleep when her water breaks, about four weeks after their return to the village. He wakes not to cries of pain or fear, but to Silna’s hand on his arm and a cold, damp feeling against his skin where her amniotic fluid has soaked the blankets and cooled in the chilly night air.
She’s so calm, which only makes him feel sillier for how frantic he feels. He nearly falls over himself when he jumps up to get dressed, but Silna, in her characteristic silence and equanimity, merely rises and pulls her pants and coat on and waits for him by the door.
The baby’s name is Uki, which was the name of Silna's mother. One of the midwives tells Harry this when she carefully lays the baby in his arms. They helped choose the name weeks ago, along with another, yet unspoken one, if the child had been a boy. Perhaps they’ll use it someday for someone else.
He’s only half-aware of what she’s saying, his attention locked on the child squirming in his arms, turning in toward him, though for warmth or in search of nourishment, he isn’t sure.
“A girl,” Harry says after a moment, finally understanding that bit. He’s astonished, but to the midwife it sounds like a question.
“Yes,” she says, her tone cautious. “Are you displeased?”
He looks up abruptly. “What?” he asks. “Oh, no.” He laughs, then realizes he's crying. “No, of course not. I'm happy. Very happy.”
She's beautiful, this baby, even with her face still flushed and scrunched up against the cold, bright morning, and her black curling wisps of hair plastered to her head from just being born. Harry smiles as he slips a finger under his daughter's hand, examining her own five tiny fingers with their even tinier nails.
He tucks the baby’s hand back under the blanket and reaches for Silna, and she takes his hand, holding it firmly.
“She's beautiful,” he says softly, and Silna smiles. “You’ve done marvelously, my love.”
He kisses her forehead and her hand finds the back of his neck, holding him there, relishing the closeness the three of them share in that moment: herself, Harry, and this new child.
Then it's Silna’s turn once again to hold the baby, to feed her, and then, with help from the midwives, dress and protect her against the cold.
That afternoon, they return to their own tent, and Silna rests while Harry keeps watch over both of them. He doesn't have to do this, he knows. They’re safe, and no one has asked him to do it. It's just he can't seem to sleep. He's still riding the high of the last twelve hours, and he can't sleep, even though he’s barely slept at all.
Harry remembers clearly now the lack of quiet in his parents’ house when his younger siblings were babies, though he was but a young boy himself at the time. Those babies had cried endlessly, plagued by discomfort and colic and things his mother and the nurse thought improper to explain to him or allow him to see at the time. The babies were kept separate from the other children, and often from his father as well, until they were beyond the age when they cried incessantly.
Uki cries, too, of course, as all babies do, but her wailing is not quite as constant as Harry remembers that of his siblings being. Perhaps the difference is always having her close at hand for Silna or himself to tend to—perhaps they simply reach her before it becomes too loud, too terrible. Or perhaps Uki is simply happier than his siblings had been, her situation easier without any bickering or resentment between her parents, without the stranger who she knew better than her own mother the first year of her life who, in turn, resented her parents.
Harry isn’t sure, but he has his theories, not that any of them are overly important now, with his childhood four decades in the past and his parents four thousand miles away.
Their second child, another daughter, is born the next summer. They name her Sedna, another relative Harry has never had the privilege of meeting. He asks the midwife this time if there is a particular significance to the names, if this is common practice.
“It’s common to name a child after someone who has died,” she tells him. “To carry on their memory. These names, I think, have a particular significance to you as well based on what Silna has told us.”
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“They’re named for you as well,” she tells him. “For your old life, to remember it in this one.”
“Uki and Sedna,” he says, shaking his head, his brow furrowed. He doesn’t understand.
“Uki is a survivor,” she says, “and Sedna is the mother of the sea and keeper of Adlivun.”
“Adlivun?” He doesn’t know this word.
“The place under the land and sea where the dead reside,” she says.
Harry says nothing for a long time, but looks to Silna, who holds the infant at her breast. She looks back at him, straight on, expression unreadable as she awaits his response.
“I think that’s very fitting,” he says, and he means it, though it has come as a surprise.
“Do you think so?” Silna signs to him. “Really?”
“Yes,” he says. “I think it’s… it’s a beautiful sentiment. For both of us.”
Harry likes to teach the girls things. Scientific names for animals and plants and weather phenomena. How to sew and tie small knots. How to protect a cut or other small injury from the cold and the elements.
He begins to teach them words in English, not out of nostalgia or sentimentality or a desire to speak it himself, but just to pass along information. They meet few white explorers and visitors—almost none, really, even to the village where Silna’s friends live, where Harry learns such things are becoming more and more common. There is no need for the girls to know the language, no one for them to converse with regularly in it, so they treat it like a game.
Silna doesn’t mind this. She listens when they go on walks and smiles when the girls come running to him, announcing the English words for things they find with glee, giggling and squealing when they get it right before racing away again.
Uki is seven years old, and Sedna will soon be six. They’re still easily amused and excitable, still innocent, and, Silna thinks, perhaps they believe the words their father teaches them are a language he’s made up for their enjoyment. Which is just as well, as far as she’s concerned.