The girl looked at him, her eyes wide, and momentarily seemed to reconsider. Meriwether couldn’t tell if she understood him or not. He would have to wait for LaBiche after all.
Then the woman shocked him by speaking English. “You are…Son of the Dragon.” Her words had a French accent and something else, something deeper that changed the consonants into a faint lilt of the languages of the region. She raised herself up from the blankets, ignoring the fire nearby. “I came to find you—to warn you. But outside, just now in the storm, I saw your battle in the sky. You acquitted yourself well, Son of the Dragon.”
He stepped back, reeling, not knowing anything he could do or say. “You…saw the battle? In my dream?” He suddenly lowered his voice, felt a deep chill. “Did the dragon send you?”
“No, no! I escaped. Dragon had us captive, but I got away.” Sitting on the blankets, she wrapped her arms around her belly in what appeared to be a protective gesture. “Had to escape before time for the baby. Dragon would have taken him.” Then her composure shattered, and she ground her teeth, letting out a cry of anguish. He realized she must have suffered a labor contraction.
“I have delivered babies before. Many. My master back east has many servants, and I have helped many with difficult births. Let me help you,” he said. And cursed himself for not having brought those herbs he had used in the past to help with birth: red raspberry leaf, for instance, a tea of which often sped up delivery. He’d thought since none of the recruits were supposed to bring their wives, they would not run into this.
She nodded, her teeth still ground together. Her face had gone pale. She struggled to undo her clothing, but Meriwether calmed her by placing a hand on her shoulder. “Lie down. I’ll remove your clothes.” He called for York to bring the warm water, cloths that could be used for washing.
Looking into her face, Meriwether could see she had courage, this woman. “Is it your first baby?” He had seen other women so caught in the pains of birth, they twisted and screamed, but this girl showed only a clenching of her jaw.
She lay back down and muttered words in her native language before adding, “First baby. It hurts.”
He worked carefully and gently to undo the ties of her filthy garments, having to cut some of the knots free. He freed her of the clothes around her legs and her swollen belly, and made her comfortable in the blankets. A cursory look told Meriwether the delivery would hurt indeed. Before long, the baby was crowned, but the mother was apparently too weak to push it out.
He leaned closer, trying to encourage her. “You say the dragon would have taken your baby?”
“I was his captive. My…husband, his other wife, and I were held. And the dragon was waiting for birth so he could take my baby to…” She winced with the pain, struggled to find the right words. “Take him over? Make him a vessel? I ran. I walk,” Another pause for the pain of a contraction. “In winter he is weakest. I walk many days.”
Feeling tense and desperate, but forcing himself to sound calm as he struggled to figure if he could ease the child out, Meriwether said, “You speak remarkably good English.”
With her eyes squeezed shut, she laughed, as though this were an unexpected compliment. “I am for two years the wife of Toussaint Charbonneau. He speaks English and French and languages of the tribes. I learned.” She gasped, caught her breath, let it out in a hiss. “My name is Bird Woman.” Another pause. “In my language it is Sacagawea.”
Bird. Meriwether remembered the voice of the dragon saying that he was looking for his lost bird and her egg. Did he mean Sacagawea and her child?
He saw Pryor and several of the expedition men standing discreetly and nervously near the door to the chamber. He directed the man to bring some broth, cooled with a little snow, and asked Sacagawea to drink a little. From her drawn, lean face, he suspected she had not eaten for several days. She drank the broth demurely, without gulping. Meriwether hoped it would restore some of her strength, so she could summon the will to push the baby out.
Hours went by. The dawn came, but the morning remained gray with the lingering storm. Sacagawea endured the relentless pain of contractions with a stoic quality that Meriwether couldn’t help but admire. He’d seen men in war who suffered with less dignity than this native girl. Certainly, she was much more than a girl.
Among the tribes, Meriwether had seen women no older than twenty years who had half a dozen children, and he realized that back east in civilized America, many white women did as well. He knew that Julia, the woman Captain Clark was courting, was still a child herself. Meriwether wasn’t sure he approved of taking a woman who had not yet lived enough life to make a decision for herself. That and the fact that he’d delivered a few babies born to too-young tenant farmers and neighbors, made him leery of the practice of marrying women who were scarcely into puberty.
Women died in childbirth, just as men did on the battlefield, and in both cases it was easier to convince the young and foolhardy to do it, to use them up before they were so old that their bodies refused to do what was necessary.
If he, Meriwether Lewis, had not been young and foolhardy, he would never have been lured to war himself. And if his father hadn’t been young and foolhardy, then he would never have gone to war, and therefore would never have died when Meriwether was so young, leaving him and his mother adrift in the world, needing to count on each other for comfort and support. The death that had so shaped his life had been that of a man too young to have made a careful and informed decision to sacrifice himself.
He brooded as he watched the young woman labor in vain. Her response to pain seemed to be diminishing, because she had less strength to show it and less strength to suppress it. After a contraction rippled across her distended belly, he heard her gasp. A tear escaped and ran down her cheek.
York stood at the door and spoke so loudly he startled the men in the room. “Excuse me, Captain. In one of the Indian tribes we passed by, the women were talking about the snakes that rattle, the poisonous ones. They said just a bit of the rattle fed to a pregnant mother would ease her delivery. It’s a magic that works in these parts.”
“I shot that rattler specimen, and we preserved it.” He frowned. “I wanted to see if it was the same kind we have out east. I ran some tests on the venom and preserved the rattle in the vials. Do we still have…?”
York nodded. “I’ll fetch the specimens from the crates, sir.” He left quickly. In his experiments, Meriwether had ascertained that the rattle did not contain the deadly venom, but he did not know what its other properties were, or what sort of magic the natives extracted from it. But he had kept samples for Franklin. He had tested the venom on some rats, determined that it was deadly through the pierced skin, but a small dose administered in food drugged the rats into a daze; larger doses killed them. And how much of the venom, or magic, resided in the rattle itself? He had no idea what the proper dose might be for a woman of Sacagawea’s size.
He leaned close to the sweating woman. “Are you willing to try this? I do have a rattle from one of those snakes. We can give it to you.” He realized the very idea of the question would seem strange to her.
He had no idea if the magic from the snake’s rattle would be effective or dangerous, but he had to make certain Sacagawea had faith in it, and in him as a makeshift doctor. Whether or not the magic was real, its very potency might lie in her confidence and belief.