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Dad snored gently.

‘I still don’t like to think about them,’ Dylan said to Mum.

‘Don’t, then,’ said Mum comfortably. ‘I don’t know where they came from in the first place – some movie? None of the others had such night terrors.’ She closed her eyes with decision. She always knew what to do. Dylan tried to be as firm about closing his.

They had rushed at him, jabbering, their eyes glowing yellow among the spines. And then a worse noise, a terrible rough growl, had stopped them, made them cringe, made them jabber quieter, at each other instead of at him.
Zing!
Someone had drawn a sword, over by the wardrobe.

Then a white flash, and a snap, and they’d gone, and Dylan was sitting up in bed staring at the wardrobe and yelling into the empty room.

Now, he buried himself deeper between Mum and Dad.

The creek rustled and chuckled and blipped.

Todd farted musically.

Ella said, ‘To-odd!’

‘What’s your fuss? We’re out in the open air, aren’t we?’

Mum gave a little laugh through her nose and Dylan let his giggle out.

‘Sh, now.’ Mum turned on her side so that her face was out of the moonlight.

Dylan followed the shadow-line of her profile, from silver-fringed forehead along to soft under-chin and lace nightie-collar. Nothing could go seriously wrong with the world while she hung there, could it? Or while Dad’s back was all up and down his own?

He thought he heard a sound from the hut, through the creek noise. He tipped his head so that both ears were free to listen. His body had tensed; he tried to go floppy again.

‘Still . . . Doug?’ said Mum.

Dad made an unwilling sound.

‘He’s asleep,’ whispered Dylan.

‘Hmm.’

Dylan waited for her to speak again, but she didn’t. ‘What were you going to say to him?’ he whispered.

‘It is odd, isn’t it,’ she whispered.

‘It’s
very
odd. It’s really, really,
really
—’

‘I mean, who are they? How come we just let them— Where did they come from?’

Dylan lay there a while. He breathed and she breathed, and when he thought, from her breath, that she was possibly asleep, he whispered, very quietly, ‘I found them.’

She lifted her head. ‘You found them?’

He nodded. The moon jiggled in the tree.

‘When? On your walk this afternoon? Up on the mountain?’

He shook his head. ‘When we were playing hidey. In among the rocks over there.’ And he pointed above his head, across the creek.

‘What, they’ve been lying low in the rocks?’

‘It wasn’t hard for them to hide,’ said Dylan. ‘They were only this big.’ He showed her with his thumb and forefinger. ‘Stiff, you know, not moving. On bases, like those soldiers Uncle Brett paints.’

He had held the little figures in his hand in the sunlight, waiting for Aaron to find him. He had admired their detail, the pregnant queen’s fierce face and helm, the bear whose every hair seemed to have been moulded separately. Its claws actually dug into Dylan’s skin – he must make sure the littlies didn’t get hold of these. These were like Uncle Brett’s soldiers – they were
not toys
. And the funny bald servant-man, all hung about with bags and equipment – something about his face, Dylan just knew he was going to up and
complain
.

Mum still hovered there.

‘So I put them in my pocket,’ Dylan said. ‘And when I got changed for bed, I put them under my pillow.’

‘And in the night they . . . expanded?’

‘Yes. Came to life.’

And the bed had broken under their weight, and Dylan had tumbled off the stinking bear, and then the queen struck him aside with a gauntleted hand (he rubbed the welts on his cheek), and the little bloke’s bald head rose against the window and said some foreign words anxiously. The queen exclaimed and raved and waved her daggers about. The bear made an irritated noise on a blast of clover-breath, and then the man’s voice, which was high-pitched, almost like a woman’s, said clearly, ‘Please vacate the room. The queen requires complete privacy.’

And here they were. Aunty Rachel and the others in the tents hadn’t even woken up. The
dog
hadn’t even woken when they filed out past its basket on the veranda: Mum and Dad, Ella and Todd, Ed and Titch and Aaron and, last of all, Dylan.

All around him the sleepers breathed. The creek chuckled by. Mum’s head sank to her pillow.

‘Well, I don’t understand it, Dyl,’ she said. ‘I have to believe you, because you’re hopeless at lying, but a
bear
? And that woman with the armour? Whoever heard of maternity armour? It’s got me beaten. I dare say it’ll all come clear in the morning, though, even the bear. It’ll be her husband or something, in a bear suit – one that needs a good dry-clean. Didn’t it
stink
!’

And she had talked herself, and Dylan, to sleep.

A high, anxious voice woke him. Dylan lifted his head. The bald manservant was walking, bent and hesitant, among the sleeping family. He held something to his mouth, some kind of magnifying glass, only without the glass, and he spoke through it.

‘Can anyone help?’ he said. ‘My queen is in difficulties. Is there a midwife here? Any kind of leech, any wise-woman? Please, my queen is in great pain.’ And indeed, the bellowing from up the hill was rawer and more desperate now.

‘You want my mother,’ Dylan said as the man came close. ‘She knows what to do at births.’ He rocked Mum and patted her head.

‘She does?’ said the man. Another instrument gleamed at his ear, and his lips moved differently from the words Dylan heard, as if he were in a dubbed movie. ‘Then she is just the person we need. Bring her up to the hut immediately,’ he said, suddenly imperious. ‘I must return to my lady’s side.’

But Mum wouldn’t wake. Dylan shook and shook her; he tweaked her hair; he pinched her cheeks; he held her nose and covered her mouth. She batted him away – ‘Don’t
do
that!’ – but her eyes didn’t open, and as soon as she could breathe again, she was deeply asleep.

The queen’s roaring went on.

‘Come on, Mum!’ Dylan shouted into her ear. ‘Come and help with this baby! Mum, it’s Dylan! Wake up and help!’

She didn’t move. Her eyelids didn’t even tremble. It was useless.

Dylan stood up. No one else had woken up either; no one was going to. They were all magicked asleep, or weirded asleep. Whatever had to be done,
he
would have to do it.

He picked his way among the bodies and uphill over the stones and tough grass. At the top, the veranda shaded the mad face of the hut, two yellow window-eyes and a gaping door-mouth. He didn’t know what the queen was saying, but there was so much rage in it that it must be swearing.

He climbed the stairs even more slowly. The bear’s head was in the doorway – so big! – licking something off the floor. Dylan peered in, hoping the bear would move aside. The manservant wept and clasped his hands at his mouth, beside the roaring stove. A chain slung over one of the rafters held up a very dirty foot— ‘Oh, there you are!’ The servant hurried to the door. ‘Out of the way – move, brute!’ He pushed the bear’s head aside with his foot. He frowned into the darkness beyond Dylan. ‘Where is she?’

‘She wouldn’t wake up.’

‘Fetch her, fetch her!’

‘It’s no good,’ said Dylan. ‘Whatever brought you here knocked everyone out. Put everyone to sleep. We’ll have to manage without her.’

‘And are you a midwife, too?’ The servant looked him up and down. Dylan felt less than impressive in his gold polyester boxer shorts.

‘Well, I’ve seen some babies born. And Mum and Ella, they’ve been talking non-stop about births for the last couple of months. And I can tell you right off, your queen is in the wrong position.’

‘What are you talking about? She’s in
exactly
the right position!’

Dylan edged in around the bear’s head. The floor was sticky – the bear had torn open a squeeze-pack of golden syrup and was spreading it thinly and widely with its tongue. Now he could see the whole of the struggling queen. She was flat on her back on the table, with her feet chained high and wide, and her arms tethered with a leather strap that ran under the tabletop.
The
stupidest position,
Mum always grumbled when she saw it on television.
Flat on her back for the convenience of some
doctor.

‘What have you got her like that for?’ Dylan heard Mum’s voice come out of himself. ‘How’s gravity supposed to help her there?’

‘I know nothing of this
Gravity
. It is always done like this at court,’ said the manservant angrily. ‘Look, here are the tools, all laid out according to the lore.’

Dylan had never seen instruments like these before. They looked very specific and very brutal – and very dirty.
That
was what the boiling water was for – for the midwife’s instruments, to sterilise them.

‘Well . . . well, you’re not at court now, are you? Get her feet down!’ cried Dylan over the queen’s noise. He took one of the daggers from the queen’s belt and cut the table strap. Immediately she grabbed both his upper arms and raved loudly, urgently, into his face.

The manservant fumed by the door, hands on hips.

‘Move! Get her feet down! This is cruel! The baby will never come out like this!’

The man closed his eyes, unhooked his listening-circle from his ear, and folded his arms.

‘You must let go of me,’ said Dylan to the queen. ‘I have to fix your feet.’ He twisted one arm free of her grasp, then the other, then – ‘It’ll be all right; you’ll feel so much better’ – he freed the first arm again. He pulled the woodbox up to the end of the table, and stood on it to work out how the shackles were fastened.

‘There,’ he said when the first was undone. He caught the queen’s foot and lowered it, hanging on to the open shackle with his other hand as the weight of her other leg dragged it high. She rolled onto her side and curled up tight around her big belly, panting.

Dylan unfastened the second shackle, then clipped the two together. That would be perfect. She could hold herself up on that.

He climbed down and went to the queen’s head. ‘You’ll have to sit up,’ he said. She opened her eyes and glared at him. ‘You’ll have to.’ He tried to show her with gestures.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ the manservant said disgustedly through his talking-loop.

Dylan waved him over. ‘Quick, help me get her up before the next pain comes.’

But the servant wouldn’t help. The queen, though, was stronger than other birthing mothers Dylan had seen. With only a little help she raised herself halfway to sitting. Then she stopped, and laid a hand on her belly, which began to gather itself with the next contraction. An expression of deep astonishment transformed her face.

‘Here, grab the chain! Put your feet here on the box!’ He helped her place them.

She braced her legs, and clung to the chain, and swung forward off the table edge with the contraction. She cried out –
a good, long, pushing cry, that one,
Dylan heard Mum say with a smile. By the light of the odd little lamps dotted around the hut, Dylan saw the bulge of the baby’s head-top between the queen’s thighs. She opened there, a wedge of the head-skin showed, scrawled with flat, wet, dark hair – and the contraction was over, and she hung from the chain exclaiming down at him. She was excited now – now that she wasn’t strapped down and being tortured.

‘I can see it. It’s good!’ Dylan grinned up at her and kept his hands underneath her to show he was ready to catch the baby. ‘Now you must do little breaths,’ he said, ‘so it doesn’t rush out and tear you.’
Because if you need
stitches, things could get complicated, doctors and hospitals and
such. Police, maybe. Immigration people.
‘So huh, huh, huh—’

She echoed him. Another contraction came, and her face stretched, but she stayed with him, and the baby’s head was out.

The bear pushed forward, vast and grass-smelly at Dylan’s shoulder, and licked the top of the baby’s head.

‘Stop that!’ He smacked the black nose, and tried to shoulder the great head away without moving his hands from under the baby. The bear let itself be pushed, but swung straight back, snuffing at the baby.

‘You there!’ he called out to the manservant, trying to push his body in between the bear and the queen’s trembling, sweat-slicked thigh. ‘Grab the honey!’

‘I see no honey-urn.’ Good, the silly man had put his listener on again. ‘I see no urns at all.’

‘On the shelf, with all the other glass jars. The one with the yellow label.’ Would he know what
glass
was? Would he know what a
label
was?

The bear was busy behind Dylan. Any old second it would slash open his back with its claws, or simply toss him aside. The queen’s belly tightened, and her eyes needed him to be there and breathing with her.

‘This one?’ The servant thrust the jar in front of his face.

Without taking his eyes from the baby, all the time panting with the queen, he grabbed the jar, opened it, put it behind him on the floor, and brought his hand back in time to catch the baby as its shoulders eased out. The rest of the body rushed after it, looped about with the cord, and Dylan had to snatch the baby out of the way as the great crimson cloak of the placenta slithered out as well, and fell onto the woodbox.