Chapter Forty-Seven: Invalid
Chapter Forty-Seven: Invalid
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I came to violently. Swinging fists and elbows, I bloodied Aric’s nose and Gohar’s lip as I fought to gain my feet. Blinking in confusion at the scalp in my hand, I instinctively wiped and thrust the akinaka at my feet back into its scabbard on my warbelt. My whole body was bathed in another’s sticky blood. Nauseated, I limped to find a dry burdock bush where I could empty the meager contents of my stomach.
The wound in my hip was raw, and the pain was almost unbearable. I struggled to remain standing as Aric and Gohar propped me up, leading me to a place behind a row of carts. The oxen bellowed anxiously where they were tethered, tugging against their ties, and the wood of the wheels creaked as they swayed. They lay me on the grass and began cutting away the blood-soaked garments to get a better look at the wound. Only the pain kept me from drifting as I clutched the clotted scalp in my fist.
“It’s barbed,” I reported, and Aric grunted.
“It’s in deep,” Aric said, his voice cracking. He prodded with his trembling fingers, and I willed myself to remain steady for his sake. “I can feel it. Not a lot of bruising or blood. It missed the vein.”
“That’s good, right?”
“It’s not bad.” He frowned. “But it’s in the bone. What do you think, Gohar?”
I knew if the Siaposh and Geloni were anything like the Skythai, they imbued their arrows with death and rot and venom. Soon that contagion would pollute my body and probably kill me, as it nearly had Aric. It likely didn’t matter now.
“I think we don’t do this now,” Gohar said. “This isn’t the place. Leave it be until we can find a healer.”
“We can’t leave her like this… suffering.” Aric ran his hand over his hair in frustration. “And if there is poison…” he trailed off as if reading my thoughts. “We must do this now. They could be regrouping or sending their wolves to scavenge the fields, and she needs to be back on her horse or in a wagon before dark.” He looked at me with anguish in his eye. I was shivering with cold and just wanted to sleep. And that couldn’t happen until they pulled this hunk of bronze from my flesh. I nodded to Aric. He inclined his head toward me and, in a low voice, said, “Stormai told me what you did. It was stupid.”
“A simple thank you will suffice.”
“You have an arrow in you,” he said gruffly. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
There were other men and horses wounded far worse than I who needed the healers and arrow-pullers more urgently, including Aric. Mine could wait. But he would never see it that way.
Gohar pressed his lips together as if to contain words behind them. Then he spoke softly, the way one speaks to soothe a spooky horse: “I don’t like this. We should call someone practiced in knife medicine. Or a priest.”
“It’s not too deep,” I said. “I can feel the ferrule. Enlarge the wound for the arrow-puller.”
Gohar shook his head. “The king won’t like it.”
“Enough talk,” I said, losing my patience with their dithering. “Do it, or give me a knife, and I’ll do it myself.”
Gohar looked at me with indignation as he touched up the blade of his dagger with the whetstone on his belt and held it to the flame of a torch. Feeling down where the ferrule protruded, he cut a neat slit into the skin and prepared to extract the arrow.
“Forgive me,” Aric said as he took the spoonlike tongs from Gohar. Then he carefully inserted the pullers, clamped its jaws securely on the arrowhead, braced his hand against my hip, and began to rock the head loose with a strong, steady force. After a moment and a sharp pain, the point broke loose, and my blood poured out onto his hands. But the arrow was out cleanly. I closed my eyes, exhausted.
I opened my eyes to the stars, cold and clear and low-hanging upon the dome of the dark sky. Since departing the battlefield, I’d slipped in and out of fitful sleep. I lay on a bed of dusty hay, my head thudding against the boards of a rumbling oxcart. Just one in a train carrying the last of our food, the dying and the dead, and war trophies too cumbersome to dangle from a horse. Captives were made to walk, bound by neck and hands, in a long procession at the back. Their brief, defiant shouts—followed by the cracking of whips, then screams—punctuated the otherwise voiceless night. I turned aside, away from the pain in my hip, as the cart jostled down the track, listening to the hypnotic jumble of cattle and horse hooves padding over the frozen ground.
“Cheer up! You’re rid of her now,” said a voice to the right of the cart. “By the looks of things, Father may soon be, too.” In the dark, it took me a moment to place the voice as Oktamasad’s.
“What are you doing here?” Aric’s voice growled back bitterly.
“I swore that day, same as you. Should Arianta ask, I won’t have to lie.”
“Son of a bitch.” Aric cleared his throat and spat.
“We’ve fulfilled our obligation here, right?” Oktamasad chuckled to himself. It was hard to believe I’d once found his infectious laugh charming.
“Father wants her alive and well.”
“If you say so. But then you should have kept her in one piece, little brother. Holy Mother of Serpents! What a mess. But I suppose now is no time to test Arianta. Spargapaithi has consolidated his forces, and the Delians are nearly at war again. We probably do need her to live. At least until they’re married.”
Aric inhaled through his teeth with a hiss, kicked his horse into a canter, and rode away. I suffered at the sound of his horse’s fading hooves. Within the range of his voice, I knew safety. But there was much ground to cover before he could rest tonight, and I’d drift far from his thoughts. Perhaps for good. I suppose he had reason to be angry—more reason than even he knew. I hadn’t the mind to unravel the knot of all I’d done and couldn’t undo—to follow where those threads led. After hearing Oktamasad’s opinion of my worth, I dared not risk opening my eyes with him so near. I allowed myself to fade back into groggy sleep.
Awoken again by a nasty bump as the road jarred my bones out of joint, I risked peeking through squinted eyes but saw and heard nothing. I struggled to sit up. A warm gush of blood moistened my trousers. The wound was still open.
“Don’t,” a voice near me said. “Lie still. We’ll be home soon.” It was Oktamasad again. He still rode alongside the oxcarts instead of at the fore of the victorious war party with his army. Even with my eyes open, I couldn’t trace his voice in the moonless sea of night, lit by a tiny torch at the head of the cart, burning desperately against the black. I searched for Aric, and listened for his voice nearby, but he was not there.
Oktamasad’s voice both soothed and disturbed. Rest now, it said, and I tried, drifting in and out of restless sleep until the cart’s wheels stopped creaking and the road stopped lurching.
Upon the oxcarts’ arrival, the athravan, ministers to the wounded and keepers of the dead, had been summoned. Human crows of the battlefield, they flocked to the carts. Still delirious, I raised myself from the back of my cramped cart to see Aric there with them, speaking with someone concealed in shadow. His voice mingled with the soft speech of Erman.
“She needs healing,” Aric was saying, “and she must have a place to stay. Now that she’s made her tally, it is not proper for her to convalesce with the warriors. But the women,” he mumbled and shook his head, “you know as well as I, they won’t have anything to do with her.”
“She can remain among the anarei,” Erman offered. “We will find her a wagon and—”
“Can Ariapaithi entrust you with this honor?”
Erman hesitated a moment, holding his breath before exhaling slowly. “Of course.”
I didn’t care where they put me. My wound throbbed. Terrible cramps and stomach pains wracked my entire body. They could leave me here by the side of the road for all I cared. I just needed to get out of this torturous cart.
I braced myself again as the cart pitched and bumped along to the edge of the settlement. A sharp pain stabbed in my guts until I doubled up with the pangs. I felt around under my clothes for wounds I’d overlooked. Perhaps in the fury of battle, I’d missed a blade or point piercing me. Then a warm gush spread beneath me from between my thighs, and I understood the pains and what was happening. The potion had finally begun to take effect.
The cart came to rest separately from the long train of wounded and supplies. Suddenly the others were gone, and all was silent. I searched the dark again for Aric, but only an ox driver remained. We had reached a wagon with a felt-house set atop its platform. It stood on a little spit of land at a bend in the creek. We were only a few feet from other dwellings, but we had crossed into another world. No one was about. My hands, slick now with more blood, grew cold. Sitting up, I struggled to my knees, thinking I’d climb down, but my injured hip gave out, and I collapsed under the strain. I closed my eyes and lay back.
Soon a horse and voices approached. Hands reached into the darkness and lifted me up—Aric’s hands, helping me to a wagon-tent with a burning fire. Oktamasad, arriving behind us, followed. Despite the cold, Oktamasad and Aric stopped outside to cast off arms, warbelts, and their shoes. They also removed mine, leaving them hung on pegs outside the felt-house.
Once the door opened, I recognized the house immediately. The dry and shriveled horse phallus hung face-height near the doorway and caught us both as we entered. The weaving beam staff propped beside the door—the shelves of herbs and potions, the altar, the carpet and its gaming board.
More blood soaked my trousers, mingling blood from my wounds and the dried blood of the dead Siaposh—a scarlet sea with many tributaries. But now, Aric’s brows pinched together as he pressed his hand flat beneath his bast girdle and met my eyes. I took his meaning well enough and shook my head ever so slightly. He closed his eye and let his hand fall limp. Whether it was sorrow or relief that flowed through him just now, I could not tell.
“So you got yourself shot in the ass, did you?” Erman said as he peeled away the bandage stuffed into my wound and prepared to remove my trousers.
“Um,” I hesitated, “it’s more like my hip,” suddenly wondering if I wanted my wound inspected after all.
“Mmm, that’s probably what I’d tell people, too,” he flashed one of his cheeky grins. “Turn over,” he then ordered, and I reluctantly complied so that he could examine the wound. He cut away the already shredded trousers with a pair of iron sheers and poked around the edges of the injury.
“How bad?” Aric interrupted.
Erman leaned in close, lifting the clotted bandage to his nose; he drew a long slow whiff. “I do not smell poison.” He stretched the flesh front and back, poked around the edges, and peered into the breach left by the arrow as far as he could see. “It’s deep but clean. Her chances are good. Oktamasad, I hear you are an expert. What do you think: ass or hip?” Then blithely waved his hand. “Never mind. No stitches for this one. I will pack it, but it may yet abscess.”
Erman didn’t wait for responses, continually speaking as he worked.
“The lady must be washed. You should go,” he said to the brothers. “Rest. I’ll send word to the king in the morning.”
“Thank you on behalf of the king,” Oktamasad said, “I will inform Ariapaithi myself and have my most trusted men ride to King Arianta tonight. Be well, lady.” And then he made no delay in taking his leave, gathering his weapons at the door.
Erman stared pointedly at Aric.
“I stay,” Aric said.
“Then you can help me undress and wash her.”
“I—that—I don’t think that would be… appropriate,” poor Aric stammered.
“This isn’t necessary,” Erman said.
“What isn’t?”
“The pretense. There’s no time. And I don’t care.”
Aric bowed his head and said nothing. I glanced up at him, but his eye only flicked over me and back to Erman, who was prepping something in a mortar.
“It would be easiest if you could carry her to the stream. Strip her clothes there and bathe her quickly.” I cringed at the thought of being dipped in a frosty stream. The misery must have been evident on my face. “I’ll add fuel to the fire and ready extra blankets.”
“I won’t,” Aric said. “Hasn’t she suffered enough? I’ll fetch water to boil here. Where are your skins? Your cauldron?”
“You’re looking at it.” Erman pointed to the small vessel near the fire. “I live alone and can only carry so much. If you insist, we can wake the others.”
“Don’t bother,” I said. “I’m not a complete invalid. Cold water hasn’t killed me yet.” I stretched my hand to Aric.
“You can’t be serious.”
“Are you going to help me or not?”
Grimacing, he grasped my hand and gently pulled me up, sliding his shoulder under my arm and propping himself under me like a crutch. Erman handed him a heavy woolen blanket of green and brown plaid, and Aric helped me gingerly down the stairs to face the frigid waters of the creek.
Clean now and wrapped in the thick blanket before the fire, Erman packed the wound with a roll of fine linen soaked in honey and applied a sticky, red resin beneath the bandage. “I trust you have retained the arrowhead?” he asked, and Aric quickly produced the missile from within his tunic. This Erman also anointed and wrapped in a piece of linen, setting it near the fire. “Keep it safe always,” he said, “for it is now joined to you by blood. Its life is bound to yours.”
Though slighter of build than myself, he found one of his own robes for me to wear. When I was mended and dressed, he said he needed to retrieve an ingredient for making a poultice from one of the other anarei. He slipped on his heavy felt cloak and boots and thumped down the wagon steps with his staff.
I watched the door until the rapping of his staff against the frozen ground faded into the dark reaches of the night. As I turned back to face Aric, he grasped my face with both hands and pressed his lips to mine. Its suddenness stole my breath. With one hand, I pushed; with the other, I pulled, wanting and fearing him.
Finally, I pushed him away. His eye flickered back and forth, searching mine. Wet with tears, his cheek glistened in the stingy glow of the hearth. The anguish in his eye stirred the sweetest grief in my heart, and my whole body began to tremble with dread.
“It’s all over,” I said.
“It’s all right,” he whispered. “It will be all right,” his voice betrayed desperation, and he seemed to speak to reassure himself as much as me. His hands froze in the space between us as if he feared to touch me.
I combed my fingers over his tangled hair. “Don’t be angry with me,” I pleaded. “I just couldn’t remain behind. Tell me you understand? I had to fight.”
Fixing my face before his in the gentle grip of his strong hands, he held my gaze. “I’m not angry. I am awestruck.”
I lowered my eyes. “You are a mad fool,” I whispered, suddenly too bashful to look on his face.
Gingerly, I lay down on the lumpy bed and pulled him down beside me. There I burrowed into him, nestled into the crook of his shoulder, his sturdy arms pressed gently around me and mine around him. I let myself be lulled by the steady thrum of his heart, the tidal rise and fall of his breast, and the sheltering embrace of his arms for what I knew must be the last time.
“Don’t let me fall asleep,” I mumbled into his chest as I dozed, warm again, and safe for now, but cursing the stealthy coming of sleep for always robbing us of what precious little time we had.
Chapter Forty-Eight: Sacrifice