Episode 75
She hadn’t even known when the child had taken root in her womb. Her stomach was still as concavely hollowed as before, betraying no sign that a new, breathing life dwelled within. And yet, the pain of this very moment—as the child whose presence she had never once felt transformed into a stream of blood and vanished—was terrifyingly vivid.
“What are you saying? She’s giving birth to a baby right here, now?”
“No, what are you hearing? The baby in her belly died.”
“I’ve seen all sorts of things in my life. As if being doomed to die weren’t enough, now she’s miscarrying a baby too? Right now?”
“It’s already cramped enough to kill us as it is.”
Complaints burst forth from the prisoners, who had scooted back to avoid soiling their clothes with the blood pouring from Rijan. The room was already cramped for its number of occupants, and they had been forcibly roused from sleep and made to squeeze together to make space for her. There was no chance any kind words would come out.
Her already shrunken body curled in on itself even tighter.
Of course, after entering the camp and living there, Rijan had come to understand this well. This was a place where one could not afford to be at ease. Having been robbed of any hope for tomorrow, it was a place as lonely as an island, where a single piece of bread to eat today or one more wink of sleep right now became the greatest of desires.
And for people driven to extreme destitution, their own discomfort was inevitably more important than the circumstances of others.
Rijan gulped down the sob caught in her throat.
It was the reaction she had expected, but it hurt all the same. It hurt with loneliness. Her heart ached no less than the pain scraping through her womb. She had thought she was becoming a reasonably mature adult, but she was not. There were still far too many shadows in this world that she had yet to experience.
“From what I hear, that’s going too far even for this place. Just because you’ve got a loose tongue, is that the only way you know how to talk?”
Just then, a middle-aged woman who had been feeling Rijan’s sunken belly snapped sharply.
“A person is dying right before your eyes. You ought to know to pity a naive girl who fell for a man’s deceit and ruined her life.”
Once the middle-aged woman openly took Rijan’s side, people who had secretly pitied her began to appear one by one.
Someone came over and touched Rijan’s forehead, damp with cold sweat.
“She’s running a fever. Shouldn’t we call the guards at least?”
“What would they do even if we called them?”
“Well, that’s true….”
The women’s voices brushed faintly past her ears.
Still, to the middle-aged women who had given birth before, there seemed to be room for sympathy toward Rijan’s situation—dragged to the camp without family, only to suffer illness and ultimately miscarry.
With no doctor to examine her condition and no painkillers to ease her agony, the women who had experienced childbirth offered the most practical advice.
“Breathe in deeply and breathe out. Even when giving birth, it hurts less if you just keep your breathing steady.”
She was in such agony that she lacked even the strength to keep her eyes open. Rijan half-closed her unfocused eyes and focused solely on not losing her breath.
Hoo, hoo, hoo—following the rhythm counted aloud beside her, she exhaled deeply.
Pregnancy, miscarriage. …A child.
The words she repeated to herself still felt unreal. She couldn’t believe it. She felt as though she were lost in a dream, but when she remembered that the hot blood drenching between her legs was the remains of the child, she wished this moment were merely a dream instead.
Even a nightmare would be fine, so long as it was a dream from which she could someday wake and soothe her heart in relief.
In truth, it was a vain hope.
“She’s really got the worst luck. To get pregnant at a time like this, of all times….”
“Just be grateful you miscarried at this point. You can’t even take care of your own body—what business do you have with a baby?”
“Even the baby had some sense.”
Rijan understood what they were trying to say.
Receiving a death sentence or doing hard labor while carrying a child in one’s belly would be far more terrible. It might be better to accept that the child, realizing it had mistakenly settled in a body unqualified to be a mother, had left on its own.
But….
When she had heard that she herself was a child born only with difficulty, and when she heard the old saying that a daughter takes after her mother’s constitution, she had sometimes indulged in sweet imaginings.
If she ever entered an ordinary marriage with someone, she wouldn’t be easily disappointed even if a child didn’t come right away. Since she probably wouldn’t be able to have many, she would have just one or two and raise them diligently, with all her love.
At least she had the great advantage of being able to teach the basics of general knowledge herself, without paying tuition, thanks to what she had learned in school.
But if a child still didn’t come despite their efforts… she would accept it as Heaven’s will and enjoy a different happiness with her husband, just the two of them. It couldn’t be helped.
She had spun so many stories all by herself about things that had never even happened. Yet among all those daydreams, not a single one had involved miscarrying a fatherless child in an internment camp.
Sometimes, reality is crueler than imagination.
“But is it right for her to bleed this much?”
“It’s better to bleed a lot. My daughter went through something similar, so I know—they say you have to bleed a lot for it to come out cleanly. If it remains inside ambiguously, it rots and the mother’s life is in danger.”
Lying on the stone floor, twisting her limbs, Rijan endured the prolonged pain. Though it was not yet a fully formed fetus, the process of expelling a blood clot that had once been a life from her body—this too was surely a kind of labor pain.
However, what this labor pain would bring was not the birth of a new life, but the end of a love that had been filled with lies and deceit.
❖ ❖ ❖
Ejekail sat in a circle together with his subordinates. While other commanders usually sat in the seat of honor listening to reports, Ejekail did not assert his authority when among his men.
Ejekail’s company, which had mainly carried out special operations such as surprise attacks and infiltration missions, prioritized efficiency over procedure, unlike ordinary units. It was the result of a continued habit of sitting heads-together wherever there was space to briefly settle, planning and executing operations on the spot. The subordinates also spoke freely without waiting their turn.
“The Major’s guess was correct.”
Mongkam was the first to speak.
“They say unidentified men have approached Akenaus.”
This was something Ejekail had already suspected, judging by how the subordinates sent to follow Akenaus had failed to return promptly.
“For now, they are continuing to tail them, but it appears difficult because the enemies are fluidly joining and dispersing. They say the numbers started at five but suddenly increased by tens. So they have yet to determine the exact scale.”
Ejekail received a memo from Mongkam. In case it fell into the hands of civilians or spies, the memo was written in a code used only within the unit.
“The ones coming and going are likely contact agents. If enough contact agents are moving around to match those numbers, there must be several dozen to about a hundred spies scattered across Astrie. We had three men on their tail, yes?”
“Yes, three.”
“Too few.”
“If we had tailed them with any more, they would have noticed the suspicious signs and not approached Akenaus.”
If the other side learned they were being pursued by such a drastically small force, the risk of being counterattacked was great. Whatever identity they had disguised themselves with, they were fundamentally soldiers.
“But Akenaus isn’t even a soldier, is he? He shouldn’t have much information, so why would they approach him?”
Peder furrowed his brow and voiced the question.
“For one thing, the symbolic significance of the name Baldemara is immense. And our family has the most branch families throughout Astrie. He hasn’t left a region unvisited since childhood. Information on terrain and geography and such might prove quite useful to them.”
He couldn’t return to his family, for he never knew when Ejekail’s rifle might take his remaining eye and his life, and there were limits to how long he could entrust himself to the government authorities. Having lived his whole life savoring his own superiority, even for the sake of his pride, he wouldn’t have wanted to cut a pathetic figure.
And so, while floundering half-blind, if spies who regarded Ejekail as a thorn in their side approached him, he might have considered it an opportunity. Truthfully, he had no other choice if he wished to survive.
“What benefit could he gain by cooperating with enemy spies?”
“Money, of course.”
Ejekail gave a brief nod.
“The bounty under my name is enormous. It would be more than enough for Davis’s settlement funds.”
That bastard’s plan was to shove his woman in a camp and somehow run off alone to live the good life.
Compared to a man scrambling desperately just to save his worthless life, honestly, the woman who had attempted suicide by poison could be said to have kept her loyalty. Though that loyalty had been beautifully betrayed, of course.
Ejekail recalled the deathly pallor of the woman’s face.
It was time to look into her again.