the Dalaverse

Warning: less humor, more foof.



Nothing New Under the Sun (V)



Upon Will’s entrance into the women’s tent, there was an immediate barrage of shrieking. A group of females rushed him, looking like nothing so much as hens pecking an intruder out of their coop. He shrank back, but the little girl gripping him by the hand spoke harshly to the stampeding women. Whatever she said in their lilting, musical language caused his welcoming party to pause, shooting each other doubtful looks before peering at him intensely.

“Er, hello,” said Will nervously as they sidled closer, reaching out to run curious hands over his clothing. A few of the boldest curved fingers over his stomach in too knowing of a way and he jumped. “I’m – I’m looking for Sanna?”

A tiny bright-eyed woman pushed her way to the front, shooing others out of the way. She had red beads dangling from her braids and she was, as Manollo had said, hugely pregnant. In fact, Will noticed, most of the women in the tent were heavy with child.

Will’s guide spoke to the woman with respect, touching fingertips to her brow. Sanna nodded and the girl pulled back the flap, turning to flash him a white-toothed grin that he couldn’t help but return, before she ran out into the sunlight.

“Hola, Will Turner,” said Sanna. Her face was marked by a disfiguring scar stretching across her right cheekbone up to her hairline. It looked like the memory of a nasty burn. One heavy breast hung outside of a sarong that wrapped across her chest and went around to cover her belly, a style of dress favored by most of the women in the tent.

It suddenly occurred to him that she had spoken to him and he had understood. “You speak English? Spanish? I thought Manollo was the only one here who could.”

“Manollo teach me palabras,” said Sanna with a smile that was more sedate than her husband’s but no less charming. “Come, siéntese,” she said, pulling Will toward some mats near the center of the tent. He sat cross-legged and many of the women arranged themselves around him, the bulkier ones taking great care in lowering their bodies to the ground. They allowed Sanna to take the seat on his right; he offered her the support of his arm as she sat. A very young woman, hardly older than the girl who’d led him into the tent, sat to his left, gazing out from beneath a finely-woven veil.

“She is chief wife,” said Sanna. “She has child comó tú.” The girl dimpled beneath her veil, reaching out to take his hand. She pressed their interlaced fingers first to her own abdomen, then to his.

“Oh!” he said, understanding. “You were the one – the night we came here...”

“The concepto mágico, yes,” Sanna replied. The chief’s newest and youngest wife squeezed his hand strongly before releasing him. “Our chief, he goes older y necesita ayuda con...” She cupped one hand and jabbed at it with a forefinger. Will turned red and the rest of the women tittered at his embarrassment.

A woman with reddish-tinged black hair called out something and giggles turned into honest laughter.

Sanna said something that sounded vaguely like a rebuke, but she was chuckling as well. “She says she seen tú hombre y he have no need para ayuda.”

Will squirmed, curling his toes in his boots and half-wishing nausea would give him an excuse to get away from this friendly nosiness.

The chief’s wife reached out to finger a curl that had fallen loose from his short braid. She murmured softly and Sanna translated once again.

“Suave – soft, comó un infante. She asks after el pelo de tú niño when you have so soft already.”

The touch was gentle and he rather liked the doe-eyed young woman. “Tell her that I – I haven’t thought about it yet.” Which was not exactly a lie – he hadn’t thought much about what was inside of him because he wanted to keep from going mad over it, but the moment she said it an image of a baby with the full weight of Jack’s twisted locks popped into his head. A terrible burden for any child to bear, but Jack’s hair was perfectly nice at the roots, thick and soft and straight. It must’ve looked relatively ordinary when it had first sprouted on his head.

He was distracted from his thoughts when the chief’s wife patted him on the cheek and cooed something.

“She call you ‘white baby-boy,” Sanna informed him.

“She could call me Will instead,” he said with a raised eyebrow.

Sanna shook her head with a wry smile. “No; yo creo que this name sticky.”

Will puzzled over that last bit. Sanna had a good grasp of English, but it took him a moment to realize that she meant the name would stick. Sure enough, as a few of the women tired of the novelty pregnant male and wandered off to other parts, they called out what sounded like the same word or string of words.

Jack, he told himself, was never, ever going to know about that moniker or he’d never hear the end of it.

Clasping both his hands in her own, Sanna bent close in and asked, “Bien, Will Turner? You feel most right para first days de embarazo?”

The first thing that popped into Will’s mind was a list of grievances he ran through whenever Jack dared to ask a similar question, but a glance around the tent and its collection of expectant women froze his tongue. Though many of them were young and firm-bodied, just as many looked as though they were mothers already, and several times over. They would cluck their tongues and offer sympathy, but he feared they’d secretly joke amongst themselves over the pasty-skinned man sniveling about what they had gone through many times without complaint.

“All right, I suppose,” he finally said, smiling uncertainly. Sanna’s lips pursed suddenly and she rubbed a hand over her stomach.

“The five-th,” she explained, forming the word carefully. “He moves todo el tiempo. Manollo says he será un gran corredor – very fast. Feel?” She pressed Will’s palm flat against the round dome of her belly. For a moment he felt nothing except discomfort at this intimate contact, and then the flesh beneath his hand stirred in a not-quite ripple. Will forgot himself entirely and bent closer, placing both hands on Sanna, fascinated by a second kick and then a third. It was nothing like what he’d felt this morning in the half-lit hours before dawn. That had been the faintest hint of movement, as if the child had quickened long enough to let him know it was really there and then subsided back into obscurity. In the instant it happened he’d thought to wake Jack, swinging in a hammock beside the bunk and muttering in his sleep, but though he stayed awake till the sun rose, it did not come again.

He looked up into the laugh-lined eyes of the woman and a hundred questions suddenly spilled into his mind. Before he could choose one, a cry broke out somewhere behind them.

Sanna glanced over his should. “Myaran, just up from nacimiento the last noon. Her girl-child cries. Come.” He stood, helping her to her feet, and followed her to a sectioned-off part of the tent he had not noticed before. A woman lay on a bed of skins, an infant swaddled in a clean cloth at her breast. His cries became stilted and finally stopped as she shushed him. Sanna squatted beside Myaran and took the baby, speaking quietly and glancing at Will. The other woman nodded and smiled at him. At Sanna’s urging, he sat next to her. When she leaned towards him, holding out the now-silent baby, he balked.

“Oh, I’m not – I’ve never been around small children –”

With a snort of laughter, Sanna ignored his protests and he had no choice but to take the bundle lest he make her drop it. “Tú necesita – what is la palabra?– custom to it. You going have su propio niño for to hold, soon enough.”

“But I don’t intend to –” He broke off, startled, as the baby’s mouth opened. “What’s it doing? Why is it doing that?”

Sanna held her hand to her own mouth in a mimicry of a yawn. “To sleep, después she eats.”

A tiny sound like a sigh escaped from the perfectly round circle of the baby’s mouth as her eyes screwed up. It was a remarkably sizable yawn for such a tiny creature, Will thought. Once her face relaxed, she gazed up at Will with black eyes, studying him suspiciously. He held his breath as she appeared to be making up her mind about whether she wanted to cry or not, fully expecting to provoke wailing the likes of which would bring the tent down around their ears. Instead the baby blinked, and blinked again more slowly, until she succumbed to a full belly and went to sleep in his arms. Even then he didn’t dare take his eyes from her face; he watched the faint rise and fall of her chest as he let himself breathe again. Without even thinking about it, he rearranged his grip to bring a hand up and brush back the few errant curls on her head. He understood the women’s interest in his own hair for the first time; he’d never felt anything so fine. And the earth-brown baby skin, when he stroked his fingertips down her rounded cheek, was softer than anything he had ever imagined, except perhaps clouds when he was a boy and hadn’t really understood what they were. The baby’s lips moved and he froze, fearing he’d awakened her, but she slumbered on.

Sanna watched him and her face was passive but for the warmth in her eyes. Will did not see it, was unaware of anything beyond the child in his arms. Both of them became lost to dreams.




All together now: awwww. And then *teeth shattering from the sugar* I swear there are more hijnks instead, because guess what the Norringtons have been up to!