Gilded Cage – Game of the Gods – Character Backstories

The phone rang at ten past eleven, and Ida had her boots laced before she’d hung it up.

“She’s been at it since supper,” Castiel had said. Nothing else. He never used more words than a thing needed.

It was raining hard by the time she turned onto Church Road. The Castell house stood at the end of it with its back to the churchyard wall, and one window was lit upstairs. He opened the door before she could knock. He was a big man, not yet thirty, in a white shirt buttoned to the throat at half past eleven at night. He took her wet coat and hung it on the hook without being asked.

“She’s upstairs,” he said. “I’ll be in the study.”

“You won’t sit with her?”

“I’ll be praying for her.”

He went into the study and closed the door. Before Ida reached the top of the stairs she could hear him through the floorboards, reading the Psalms out loud. His voice was deep and unhurried, and every line came down in the same place as the one before it.

Aylin was on her hands and knees on the bed with her forehead against the headboard. When Ida came in, she lifted one finger off the quilt and breathed her way to the end of the pain. Then she turned her head.

“Ida,” she said. “You came out in this.”

“I delivered your husband in a snowstorm. This is a drizzle.”

Aylin laughed, and then stopped laughing, because the next one was already on its way.

She was twenty-one. She had come to the church three years ago with one suitcase and no people, and married Castiel Castell before the year was out. The other wives had never known what to make of her. She laughed out loud in the fellowship hall. She sang the alto line a little behind everyone else and didn’t seem to mind.

Ida set her things out on the dresser: the scissors and the cord clamps, the bulb syringe, the stack of clean towels, the bottle of olive oil. She washed her hands in the basin. Under the floor, the reading went on.

“He reads when he’s frightened,” said Aylin.

“He doesn’t sound frightened.”

“No. He never does.”

The night went slowly, the way first babies do. Ida walked her up and down the landing. She fed her ice chips and said the things you say.

Around one, Ida went down for more hot water.

The study door stood open a hand’s width. Through it she could see him on his knees on the rug in front of his big chair, with the Bible open on the seat of it and his forehead nearly touching the page. He was still reading. He didn’t look up.

She filled the kettle at the kitchen sink. The telephone hung on the wall beside the back door, cream-colored, with a long curly cord. She looked at it while the kettle came to a boil. Then she carried the kettle up.

“Does it get easier?” Aylin asked her, somewhere past two. “The second one?”

“Some.”

“Liar,” said Aylin. She laughed into the pillow, and then had to stop and hold on to the headboard.

Around three, with her face in the pillow between pains, she said, “If it’s a girl, she’s Asena.”

“That’s not a Bible name.”

“It was my grandmother’s.”

“Castiel will have his own ideas.”

“Castiel always has his own ideas.” She gripped the headboard for the next one, and when it was over she said, very quietly, “I’d like her to have one thing that’s mine.”

Downstairs, the reading paused. A page turned. It began again.

At four Aylin said she had to push, and Ida didn’t argue.

The baby came at eight minutes to five, blue and furious, with a head of wet black hair. Ida cleared her mouth with the syringe and rubbed her back hard. She pulled in one breath and screamed.

“A girl,” said Ida. “A big girl.”

“Give her to me.” Aylin was laughing and crying at once. “Give her here.”

Ida clamped the cord and cut it and laid the baby on her mother’s chest. On the way, the baby’s left hand found one of Ida’s fingers and closed on it. Ida had to peel it off.

“That’s some grip,” she said.

Under the floor, the reading had stopped. Ida waited for the study door, and his feet on the stairs.

After a while the reading began again.

The afterbirth came, whole, and Ida checked it and set it in the basin. Then she looked at the towels.

The blood kept coming, slow and steady, and it didn’t stop.

She put both hands on Aylin’s belly and kneaded, hard, the way she’d been taught forty years ago by a woman who had learned it from her own mother. Under her hands the womb was soft. She kneaded harder. She put the baby to the breast, because sometimes that was enough. She changed the towels. She changed them again.

“It’s all right,” said Aylin. Her lips had gone pale. “I’m just tired.”

Ida went to the top of the stairs.

“Castiel,” she called down. “Come up.”

He came up. He stood in the bedroom doorway in his white shirt and looked at the bed. Then at the towels in the corner, and the basin.

“She’s bleeding,” said Ida. “It won’t stop. She needs the hospital now. I can’t fix this here.”

He didn’t move.

“Castiel. Call them. It’s forty minutes. Call them now.”

“Woe to them that go down to Egypt for help,” said Castiel, “and trust in chariots.”

He came into the room and knelt at the side of the bed nearest the door. He put his big hand flat on his wife’s forehead and closed his eyes.

“The Lord is her physician,” he said, and began to pray.

Ida stood on the far side of the bed, by the window, with her hands on Aylin’s belly. The only phone in the house was on the kitchen wall.

*Go around him. Fourteen stairs, and the phone on the kitchen wall.*

Her hands kept working. Castiel’s voice filled the room, deep and even, asking the Lord to stay His hand. Aylin’s eyes had closed. The baby had fallen asleep on her breast.

Ida didn’t go around him.

The window was still black when Aylin opened her eyes again.

“Is she all right?”

“She’s perfect,” said Ida.

“Asena.” Aylin turned her head on the pillow, very slowly. Her skin had gone gray, and she was cold to the touch. “Do you know what it means?”

“No.”

“Come here. I can’t do loud.”

Ida bent close.

“My grandmother used to tell it. Soldiers came to a village and killed everybody. There was a boy. They cut him and threw him in a marsh to die.” Aylin breathed. It took her a while. “And a gray wolf found him. She licked him clean. She carried him up into the mountains, to a cave. She didn’t leave him.”

Behind Ida, Castiel prayed on. He hadn’t opened his eyes.

“Nobody else came back for him,” Aylin said. “She did.”

“That’s a good story.”

“Tell her.”

“I’ll tell her,” said Ida.

Downstairs, in the hall, the tall clock began to strike six.

Aylin’s hand was spread across the baby’s back. Between the fifth stroke and the sixth, it went loose. Ida caught the baby before she could slide.

Castiel finished his prayer. He said, “Amen,” and opened his eyes, and looked at his wife.

“The Lord gave,” he said, “and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

He stood and held out his arms. Ida put the baby in them. She didn’t know how else to do it.

He looked down at the small furious face.

“Sofia,” he said. “Wisdom. Wisdom hath builded her house.”

“She wanted Asena,” said Ida. “Your wife. She told me.”

“That isn’t a name.”

He carried the baby out. On the stairs she began to cry. The study door closed. After a while the reading started again, even and deep, and the crying stopped.

Ida washed Aylin with warm water from the kettle. She closed the eyes, which were already closed. She took the braid down and brushed the hair out and braided it again, tighter, the way a woman would want it for company. She put the towels to soak in the bathtub in cold water and salt. By the time she was done the rain had stopped, and the churchyard behind the house was white with frost.

At noon Ida sat at her own kitchen table with the county form for a birth outside a hospital. She had filled out forty of them. She knew where every box was.

Time of birth: 4:52 AM. Place: residence. Attendant: Ida Mae Pruitt, lay midwife. Mother: Aylin Castell. Father: Castiel Castell.

Child’s first name: SOFIA.

Her pen stopped over the next box.

Castiel hadn’t given a middle name. Nobody at the county would ask him for one. Nobody at the county read the middle box.

*He’ll never look. Men like him never look at the small print.*

She wrote ASENA in the middle box in capitals. She pressed hard enough that it came through onto the copy underneath.

Then she put on her coat, and walked the envelope to the box at the end of the road herself.