The clan of the cave bear_ a novel - Jean M. Auel [188]
Iza inserted the slippery-elm stick, and Ayla’s birth waters gushed out, bringing on another contraction.
“Get up now, Ayla,” the medicine woman motioned. She and Ebra pulled the weakened young woman up from her bed and supported her while she squatted on the leather hide, like the one placed under all women when they gave birth.
“Push now, Ayla. Push hard.” She strained with the next pain.
“She’s too weak,” Ebra signaled. “She can’t push hard enough.”
“Ayla, you’ve got to push harder,” Iza commanded.
“I can’t,” Ayla motioned.
“You must, Ayla. You must or your baby will die,” Iza said. She didn’t mention that Ayla, too, would die. Iza could see her muscles bunching for another contraction.
“Now, Ayla! Now! Push! Push as hard as you can,” Iza urged.
I can’t let my baby die, Ayla thought. I can’t. I’ll never have another baby if this one dies. From some unknown reserve, Ayla drew a last surge of strength. As the pain mounted, she took a deep breath and grabbed Iza’s hand for support. She bore down with an effort that brought beads of sweat to her forehead. Her head swam dizzily. It felt as though her bones were cracking, as though she was trying to force her insides out.
“Good, Ayla, good,” Iza encouraged. “The head is showing, one more like that.”
Ayla gulped another breath of air and strained again. She felt skin and muscles tear, and still she pushed. With a gush of thick red blood, the baby’s head was forced through the narrow birth canal. Iza took it and pulled, but the worst was over.
“Just a little more, Ayla, just enough for the afterbirth.” Ayla strained once more, felt her head whirl and everything go dark, and collapsed, unconscious.
Iza tied a red-dyed piece of sinew around the newborn’s umbilical cord and bit off the rest. She thumped the feet until a mewling cry became a loud squall. The baby’s alive, Iza thought with relief as she began to clean the infant. Then her heart sank. After all her suffering, after all she’s been through, why this? She wanted the baby so much. Iza wrapped the infant in the soft rabbit skin Ayla had made, then made a poultice of chewed roots for Ayla, held in place with an absorbent leather strap. Ayla groaned and opened her eyes.
“My baby, Iza. Is it a boy or a girl?” she asked.
“It’s a boy, Ayla,” the woman said, then quickly continued so her hopes would not be raised, “but he’s deformed.”
Ayla’s first hint of a smile turned to a look of horror. “No! He can’t be! Let me see him!”
Iza brought the infant to her. “I was afraid of this. It often happens when a woman’s pregnancy is difficult. I’m sorry, Ayla.”
The young woman opened the cover and looked at her tiny son. His arms and legs were thinner than Uba’s when she was born, and longer, but he had the right number of fingers and toes in the right places. His tiny penis and testes gave mute evidence of his sex. But his head was definitely unnatural. It was abnormally large, the cause of Ayla’s difficult delivery, and a little misshapen from his harrowing entrance into the world, but that in itself was no cause for alarm. Iza knew it was only the result of the pressures of birth and would quickly straighten out. It was the conformation of the head, the basic shape, that would never change, that was deformed, and the thin, scrawny neck that was unable to support the baby’s huge head.
Ayla’s baby had heavy brow ridges, like people of the Clan, but his forehead, rather than sloping back, rose high and straight above the brows, bulging, to Iza’s eyes, into a high crown before it swept back in a long, full shape. But the back of his head was not quite as long as it should have been. It looked as though the baby’s skull was pushed forward into the bulging forehead and crown, shortening and rounding the back. He had only a nominal occipital bun at the rear and his features were oddly altered. He had large round eyes, but his nose was much smaller than normal. His mouth was large, his jaws were not quite as large as Clan jaws; but below his mouth was a boney protrusion disfiguring his face, a well-developed, slightly receding