All very well, that lofty and cool and detached view. But I was not any viewer looking on; I was it. The pitiful, slow-writhing object on the pallet, in the absurd posture and semblance of a frog flipped underside up, was me.

Gèsu Maria Isèpo, I thought—and loosed one hand from gripping the bedside to cross myself—how could the philter have made two beings of me, and put one inside the other? Whatever that was inside me, must I go through the whole process of birthing it? How long does that take? What does one do to help it along? In addition to thinking those things, I was thinking some less repeatable things about the Hakim Mimdad, recommending him to eternity in Hell. That was perhaps unwise of me, for if ever I needed a hakim it was now. The nearest I had ever been to childbirth was the time or two I had seen a pale blue and purple, flayed-looking newborn infant dredged dead from the waters of Venice. I had never been present while even a street cat actually gave birth. The more knowledgeable Venetian boat children had occasionally discussed the subject, but all I could remember was their mention of “labor pains,” and in those I now required no instruction. I knew, too, that women often perished of their childbed travail. Suppose I died in this alien body! No one would even know who I was. I would be buried as a nameless, unclaimed, probably unwed wench who had been killed by her own bastard … .

But I had more immediate concerns than the disposition of my inglorious remains. The tearing pain came again, and it was as rippingly severe as before, but I gritted my teeth and did not cry out, and even tried to examine the pain. It seemed to start deep in my abdomen, somewhere back toward my spine, and to wrench its way around to my front. Then I had a respite in which to breathe again before the pain made a new onslaught. With each succeeding wave, though the pain did not lessen, I seemed a little better able to stand it. So I tried to take a measure of the pains and the intervals between them. Each seizure lasted while I could count slowly to thirty or forty, but when I tried to time the intervening lulls I counted so high that I became confused and lost count.

There were other afflictions contributing to my confusion. Either the room or myself was still alternating between fever and chill, and I was alternately roasted to limpness or frozen to a clench. My belly, somewhere among its other troubles, found room for nausea; I burped and belched repeatedly, and several times had to fight against vomiting. I was still incontinently urinating each time the pain struck, and only by determined muscular contraction not emptying my bowels as well. The spilled urine might have been a caustic; it made my thighs and my groin and my underneath feel raw and chafed and sore. I had developed a maddening thirst, probably because I had sweated and peed out so much of my internal moisture. My hands continued spasmodically to cramp, and now so did my legs, from the ungainly position I kept them in. The contact of the bed against my back was an irritation. In truth, I was hurting everywhere, even at the mouth; it was locked open in such a distorted rictus that my very lips hurt. I could almost be glad when the labor pains rasped through my gut; they were so terribly much worse that they took my mind off the lesser hurts.

I had resigned myself to the realization that my drinking of the philter was not going to bring me any enjoyment. Now, as the endless hours ground on and on, I tried to resign myself to enduring what the philter had brought instead—thirst and nausea and self-pollution and general misery, varied by intermittent jolting pain-either until its power wore off and I was restored to being myself again, or until it besieged me with some new and different miseries.

Which is what it did. When the pains were squeezing out of me no more spurts of urine, I thought my body had finally been emptied of all its fluids. But suddenly I felt my lower self washed by more wetness than I had yet ejected, a flood of wetness, as if someone had upended a pitcher between my legs. It was warm like urine, but when I raised up to look, I could see that the spreading puddle was colorless. I realized also that the water had not come from my bladder, by way of the little female peeing hole, but out of the mihrab canal. I had to suppose that this mess signaled some new and messier stage in the exceedingly messy process of giving birth.

The abdominal pains were now coming at intervals closer together, barely giving me time to get my breath after each onslaught, and to stiffen my preparedness, before the next was upon me. It made me think to myself: perhaps it is your bracing yourself against each pain, and trying to flinch away from it, that makes them hurt so much. Maybe if you bravely met each pain and bore down against it … So I tried that, but “bearing down” in this situation meant exerting the same muscular push as is involved in defecation, and it had the same result. When that particular grinding pain briefly let up again, I discovered that I had extruded onto the bed between my legs a considerable mess of stinking merda. But I was really beyond caring by this time. I merely thought to myself: you already knew that human life ends with merda; now you know that human life also begins in merda.

“Of such is the kingdom of God.” I suddenly recollected having preached that to the slave Nostril, not long ago. “Suffer the little children to come unto me,” I recited, and laughed ruefully.

I did not laugh for long. Though it is hardly believable, things now got even worse. The pains were coming not in waves or pulses, but in fast succession, and each lasting longer, until they became just one constant agony in my belly, unremitting, rising in intensity until I was unashamedly sobbing and whimpering and moaning, and I feared I could not stand it, and I wished mightily for a merciful faint. If someone had leaned over me then and said, “This is nothing. You can hurt worse than this, and you will,” I might, even in that excruciation, have got out another laugh among my sobs. But the someone would have been right.

I felt my mihrab begin to open and stretch, like a mouth yawning, and the lips of it continued to gape wider, until they must have made the orifice a full circle, like a mouth screaming. And, as if that was not torment enough, the entire round of the circle seemed suddenly to have been painted with liquid fire. I put a hand down there, to pat desperately at the blaze. But it felt no burning, only a crumbly something. I brought the hand back to my streaming eyes and saw through my tears that the fingers were smeared with a cheesy, pale green substance. How could that burn so?

And even then, besides the rampaging pain in my belly and the searing fire at the bottom, I could sense other awful things. I could taste the sweat running from my face into my mouth, and the blood from where I had by now gnawed my lips raw. I could hear my grunts and moans and racking gasps. I could smell the stench of my squalidly spilled body wastes. I could feel the creature inside me moving again, and apparently tumbling and kicking and flailing, as it edged its ponderous way through the belly pain toward the blaze below. As it moved, it pressed still more intolerably upon my bladder and bowels in there, and somehow they found more contents to void. And out, through that last extrusion of urine and turds, the creature began to come. And ah, God! when God decreed, “In sorrow shalt thou bring forth,” God did make it so. I had known trivial pains in earlier times, and I had known real pain throughout these hours, and I have known other pains since, but I think there must be no pain in all the world like the pain I felt now. I have seen torture done, by men expert in torture, but I think no man is so cruel and inventive and accomplished in pain as God is.