Sleeping Wildflowers

1. Terminality of Being

Part One

The recognition of how unlikely it was that one would have come into existence, combined with the recognition that coming into existence is always a serious harm, yields the conclusion that one's having come into existence is really bad luck.

— David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence

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1. Terminality of Being

The Myranal, somewhere in Éagar y Monra, en route to Coéndoré. Twelfth day, twelfth month, 1165.

By the time the second prince of Coéndoré was born, everyone was quite tired of his existence. The flustered midwife flung herself onto the nearest chair and wiped sweat off her forehead; the exhausted mother exhaled heavily, then turned to sob into her pillow; the fearful ladies-in-waiting fanned themselves (and the mother, once they remembered her)—all very dramatically, of course. In all this commotion they did not notice the missing noise: the child crying.

He was not a perfectly well-behaved child right out of the womb. In fact, he was very disobedient. Very disobediently dying. He appeared to have fancied the noose and was, like a snake swallowing itself, trying it out on himself with the only cord available. He was out and it was loose now, but he still just lay there. He could have died then, and perhaps no one would have minded too much.

The midwife was a very inexperienced midwife, which was to say she had been pulled from the ship's hold as the only one who with a lick of medical information. Though she had had the sort of medical information that allowed her to cut up bones and bodies, and she was much more comfortable with a pair of blades than forceps. (It really had been a terribly-planned trip. Mostly because it had not been planned at all. One unexpectedly-dead aunt with a particularly heavy influence on her family could do that: send a queen into the sea with only a cousin, a sister-in-law, and two seasick-prone ladies in waiting, and her two-year-old son who would disintegrate if he was more than several reaches from his mother. If they had been from a country any more important none of this would have happened. As it was, terrible luck for all parties.)

A woman entered the cabin, hardly noticed. She had blood on the front of her gown and down her sleeves to her hands. She was still cleaner than the bedsheets. The newborn was faceup in the middle of the stain, unmoving. The midwife had left him there after failing to catch him. She could hardly be blamed.

The woman went and picked him up. He was very light and very limp. She patted him on the back and shook him. He began to move. His face scrunched and his mouth opened, but there was no sound; it was a silent scream. After a moment of just air, he seemed to decide against trying to cry and closed his mouth. He opened his eyes instead, blinking up at her with wide brown eyes. He did not look very happy to be there. But no one was.

A boy appeared at the open door, having escaped the clutches of his mother's cousin tasked with distracting him. He was scratching and picking his nose at the same time (with one finger, amazingly). He wiped it on the hem of his shirt, then remembered he had a handkerchief, took it out of his pocket, and wiped his shirt. He put the handkerchief back in his pocket and went over to his mother. He was two, and quite knowledgeable with his words by this point, though he seemed to like portraying himself as an idiot (or perhaps he was, at two), and all he could say to his mother as he went to her bedside was, "Why, Mama?"

His mother had stopped crying. She was very dry-eyed now, and staring up at the ceiling. She glanced at him. "Why what?" she said hoarsely.

"I saw her," he said. "She was crying. And so tiny."