She smiled. “Soon. In a little while. Lie down beside me.” He put his head down again and closed his eyes; she closed hers too, remembering that day a few weeks after the ceremony when, over a dinner of roast quail and greens, Turms had announced, “It would please me to have the child to be born here in the royal palace.” Before either she or Arthur could reply, the king had quickly added, “It is a long time since this house heard the sound of a baby’s cry. I would consider it an honour if you agreed to this request.”
“After all you have done for us, the honour would be mine,” she had said, picking out the words in his language—the first time she had spoken to him on her own. This surprised and delighted their noble host. “We accept.”
“She has been learning,” Arthur told him.
“I am impressed.”
“You have done so much for us already,” said Arthur. “We are in your debt.”
“How can friends ever be indebted to one another?”
Thus, Xian-Li had completed her time in the best place she could have imagined—luxuriating in the sun and warmth, the food and company, and all the accoutrements of the palace. Had she been a queen, she could not have been treated more royally. And the knowledge that she would be delivered of a living child made it all that much more to be cherished. The final weeks had passed, and now it was time for the child to be born. She was ready.
When, later in the day, she was in the throes of birthing the baby and surrounded by skilled Etruscan physicians, she knew that all was as it should be. There was a rightness to things that surpassed understanding, but she knew beyond all doubt that in each and every circumstance her feet had been guided along this path and to this place. A favourite saying in China—which she had heard on occasion from her own grandmother—was that the threads of life are easy to weave, but difficult to untangle. Xian-Li knew, for Arthur had shown her, that the threads of her life were being woven by a master of the loom.
It was Arthur who, having spent the better part of an anxious day sitting outside the birthing house, appeared at her bedside to receive his first glimpse of the newborn. “Well done, Xian-Li,” he said, beaming with pride. “We have a son.”
“Yes, a son,” she whispered, somewhat dizzy with exhaustion. “Is he not the most beautiful child?” Xian-Li pulled back the edge of her robe, which swaddled her baby, to reveal a small, pinched red face with a mass of spiky black hair resembling the glistening pelt of a bear. The infant’s eyes were shut tight and its tiny lips pressed firm as if the child was determined to sleep through any efforts that might be made to introduce him to this strange new world.
“He is perfect,” murmured his father. Arthur leaned close and gave his wife a kiss. “Thank you,” he said.
She reached for his hand and squeezed it.
“What shall we call him?” he asked, perching on the edge of the bed, his hand resting on the tiny lump beneath her robe.
They had been so preoccupied with the troubled pregnancy—and, truth be told, in some part of their deepest hearts they had not fully believed Turms’ prediction of a successful birth—that they had utterly neglected the important task of selecting a name. Whatever the reason, they now realised this oversight.
“He is your son,” said Xian-Li, brushing the infant’s forehead with her lips. “You should choose, husband.”
“Very well,” agreed Arthur. “Do you have any suggestions?”
She shook her head. “The son of an Englishman must have an English name. Whatever pleases you will please me also.”
He gazed at his newborn son, hoping for inspiration, but nothing came to him. “I don’t know,” he confessed. “There are so many.”
She laughed. “He needs only one.”
He rubbed his hand along his unshaved jaw. “This is going to take some thought.”
The Etruscans had a custom that a newborn infant should not be named until seven days had passed. “On the eighth day,” Turms told Arthur, “the child receives his name. This is a very old tradition. The eighth day—it is the most propitious day for naming, beginning a new venture, or undertaking a journey.”
Arthur liked that idea, since it allowed him plenty of time to think. It did not, however, make the thinking any