Indispensible
A/N: Original work. Branching out from fanfiction. I don't write original work particularly often or well, but here you go. I'm a licensed women's health provider, have studied/practiced midwifery; and I just have a generally bad taste in my mouth for the way midwives and female healers were historically done dirty in post-Pagan, Christian societies. I poured those feelings into this work.
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Breathing in and out; a steady, measured rhythm like the wind through the trees. Here, at twilight’s edge, shadows move and the inanimate dons new life. Another day grasps at the sky, holding on best it can. Stubborn, unyielding; that brilliant, lazy orange clings to treetops above creeping purple hues: diurnal throes of death. Leaves rustle their protest. The trees groan and sway in mourning. From across the glade, the disconcerting jostle of plated armor rips through the evening’s tranquility. Step by step, a synchronized rattle of death. The birds fall silent and the surrounding woods still; a forest has a clairvoyance all its own.
Saoirse pulls her knitted shawl around her thin shoulders. Her hair falls to waist in waves of russet and gray. Braids are customary, but she had bathed for this with the most fragrant of wildflowers. These men, those people, will not have satisfaction; she will not fill that role. Witch, witch. Accusations fell from once friendly lips with an unchristian ease. Her hands are clean, scrubbed free of dirt and crushed herbs that usually adorned her. While she prefers the smell of earth and pine, her skin now smells of the soaps she oft made for village that condemned her. The breeze combing through her hair stirs the scent of lavender. She stands taller, dressed in her best gown reserved for religious observances. As the last band of sunlight catches her hair, she looks aflame.
The soldiers stand before her, as rigid as stone edifices on the church in which she’d lied prostrate so many times, praying for her rough and weathered hands to work gentle miracles. One would think it counteractive to press her face to cold stone, humble before God, if she courted the Devil.
“You are to come with us,” the shorter man says. He squares his shoulders, sets his jaw.
Saoirse sighs. They could have done her the courtesy of being punctual.
“Will you at least tell me of what I am accused?” she asks, but knows; they need to say it and look her in the eyes as they do so.
The taller soldier flinches. He cannot seem to meet her gaze, fist squeezing around his pike. The shorter man clears his throat. He puffs his chest, though it remains unimpressive beneath the armor.
He answers, “Trickery, witchcraft, and all manner of evil works.”
Saoirse could laugh. What humor, that delivering new life into the world could be called evil. Her hands brought many children, pink and squirming, from bloodied linens to their mother’s arms. Herbs, carefully chosen and blended, kept ailing women alive through the ravages of childbirth; perils uniquely feminine. She had broken fevers, blessed empty wombs, held mothers as they wailed in agony grasping on to small, lifeless hands. All the while, she prayed—for life, for healing, for grace. Deep mercies and gentle miracles.
Her work was but the afterthought of priests and healers preoccupied with the scourges of men and well-to-dos. Cough, gout, rheumatisms, and intimate afflictions of the bedchamber. Who, but Saoirse, care about the hysterics of older women, transition from one season of life to the next? Unclean work, it was, to wonder about female body and how best to calm it. She found utility in the world the God had made, turning plants to potent medicinals when prayer fell short. Her convictions were complaints not to be spoken, illnesses and conditions to be silenced and shamed—these were her crimes. She had only the audacity to be accomplished in it.
“Will there be a trial, or has my sentence been rendered?” she asks, taking a half-step forward. The soldiers took a full step back.
Their silence declare her fate with deafening certainty.
“Very well. Let us make haste then. The day grows short.”
With bold strides, she takes the lead, marching out ahead of them. Her shawl unwraps, hanging loose over her breasts as her arms swing at her sides. A wooden cross hangs around her neck on full display; her skin does not sear beneath it. One would notice if they cared to consider such things beyond their own shortsightedness.
She casts just one glance back at her house: a cottage her late husband had built, seeming to fade back into the shade of the forest, reclaimed by the earth as her ashes would soon be. Fear did not become her. The life she had lived was just but wild; too wild for the delicate constitutions of provincial life. They came when the needed her, and oh, needed her, they did. She would be missed. As the tiny graves proliferated and many a widower alone in the night, they would remember her. If they came searching, she would still be found in the wind, among the trees, on the front of each Spring’s rebirth. She would be one with nature’s gifts, more powerful in spirit than the flesh. Women would come seeking her still, for it was not they who accused her; it was the shame of scorned and covetous hands for whom rejection had been most intolerable.
“Do you deny the accusations?” the taller man asks as they march toward her end.
“I do not refute them,” Saorise replies, “only that they were evil works.”
“What would you call them if not evil?”
Saorise pauses, resolute. The soldiers stumble into one another, keeping safe distance from her petite frame. She faces them, eyes as green as sprays of fresh thyme.
“Indispensable. As am I. As my ilk shall be also. And so you will all come to know it.”
And she returns to her walk, steps ahead of the fearful men trailing behind.
