by Gayle Greeno
“Well, they’re gone for now, then. Did you take hurt elsewhere?”
“When the handle broke free it caught him in the ribs,” Doyce interrupted, aware that Jenret would offer the eumedico less resistance than he’d offer her, despite her training. She suspected he would have fought her attempts at ministration, preferring the pain and discomfort to exposing his vulnerability. The relief she felt surprised her as well: the thought of running her hands over his chest and upper abdomen attracted her and angered her at the same time. All eumedicos learned to suppress emotions of that kind; when had she lost the skill? Curiosity, she thought, only curiosity. Not as muscularly built as Oriel had been with his dark tanned skin and his breadth of shoulders from years of early apprenticeship to his blacksmith uncle. Nothing like the white marble flesh and the silken shift of muscles she’d seen that morning and could still envision beneath the black garments.
Doyce turned her back hurriedly as Harrap arrived with an oil lamp and a reflector spotted with grease and rust, and Mahafny, with his help, began to peel off Jenret’s clinging wet tabard and shirt. She wrinkled her nose at the wet wool smell. Wet wool reminded her of wet sheep, and wet sheep of wet ... ghatti. How could she have forgotten them?
Approaching the bar, she asked the innkeeper, “Have you a dry sack or two, please?” With several in hand, none too clean but dry, she began a brisk rubdown. While ghatti could stand the cold, the damp and wet left them notoriously vulnerable to chills and ague. Rawn might be more used to it, but Khar was not, nor was Saam, especially given his recent stresses. Khar and Saam huddled close, woebegone, and she murmured endearments to them. She did Rawn with the same thoroughness but harder, exactly what the muscular midnight-hued ghatt craved, a rumbling purr and half-lidded eyes proving her right. She’d thought Rawn a pure, solid black, but in the light of the fire she discovered a tiny patch of white, no more than six or seven hairs, far down on his chest.
“Well, what do you think of our company?” Khar asked between licks, her pink tongue searching and busy. “Ugh! Have to groom forever!” Her mindvoice shifted to include everyone, giving Doyce a chance to consider the question. “Rawn and Saam wanted to swim out after them.”
“I don’t know, but I don’t like it. Harrap wants to help, but Mahafny’s presence bothers me. ” With a handful of sack, Doyce wrapped her palm around Rawn’s tail and pulled outward from base to tip. Rawn’s tail twitched in anger, whether from her action or Khar’s last comment, she wasn’t sure. She juggled back to the outward conversation. “That would have been foolhardy. You’d have been swept along like wood chips, tossed wherever the current carried you. With luck you’d have been swept ashore downstream. Without luck, you’d have drowned.”
“Would have made it if Jenret could have held the raft.” Irritated, Rawn’s tail flicked, scattering a few jeweled drops of water. “Don’t know about him,” he stretched his neck in Saam’s direction, “but I could have.”
She wanted to speak more with Khar but couldn’t muster the strength to separate the conversations. Khar had not indicated whether she approved or disapproved of their visitors, and she wondered if that were on purpose. Finding a dry part of the sack, she continued rubbing, letting the mechanical gestures take over.
Parm bounced twitchy-footed around the tableau, licking at first one ghatt, then another, unsure where to begin the cleanup. He squeaked, skittered to another spot every time he trod in a patch of water. “Aren’t you going to ask how we knew to come here?”
Parm’s thoughts seemed to dance in all directions. The multi-colored ghatt found almost everything in life vastly diverting, as if determined to derive as much entertainment from life as people did from his crazy-quilt appearance. He stretched on his hind legs and rasped his tongue against her cheek, shoving back a strand of wet hair, gave her a considering look and licked again until he was satisfied.
“Well, aren’t you?”
“No,” replied Khar, Rawn, and Doyce in unison.
“Later,” she soothed, scratching his chin. “When everybody’s listening. How goes it with Harrap?”
Parm’s chest puffed with pride. “I did right! It will take time, because he is still fearful, still draws back sometimes. But he is a good learner, with much wisdom of his own.”
“But what of Georges? What will become of him? What really happened?” Knowing that Georges lurked somewhere gave her one more worry.
“I do not know. I wish I did, but the Bond is dissolved. I can no longer feel him. Always I will remember our early days together, but later . . . the growing wrongness . . . it burned, burned at my heart and vitals like a spear impaling me. I could not convince him he lied to himself or find the source of his lies, no matter how hard I looked within him. It was leave ... or die.” Parm stared into the distance, through and beyond the snapping fire, thoughts far away. Then he gave himself a violent shake and began to groom Saam with delicate concentration, stroking each clump of wet fur into place, his final words a lonely whisper, barely reaching her. “Saam knows what it is like to meet the badness.”
When she rejoined the others, Jenret sat, tightly cocooned in bandages from his armpits to his waist, as Mahafny deftly tucked in the tail-end of the bandage. Harrap made his way back from the counter, four mugs of mulled rum engulfed in his huge hands.
“I asked Walcott,” he nodded in the direction of the innkeeper, “to put the tiniest drop of brandy in four bowls of milk. Do you think that’s all right?” he asked, expression anxious. “The poor ghatti need to warm their bellies, too.”
“Always the good Shepherd taking care of his flock.” Doyce smiled at his earnestness. “I don’t suppose you have any dry clothes so that two other members of your flock can dry from the outside in as well as warm from the inside out? Our packs are in the stable and I, for one, am not about to venture outside until the rain stops.”
Looking up from her handiwork, Mahafny returned her smile, and Doyce found herself pettishly wanting to say ‘It’s not for you.’ “My next thought exactly. I suppose everything in the packs is drenched anyway.”
“An early and unexpected laundering,” Jenret confirmed. “Except without the soap . . . unless Doyce’s squirreled that away in her saddlebags as well. I think she carries a complete general store in there. Collapsible lanterns, cust-ables, who knows what else.”
The borrowed clothing felt warm and dry at least. Doyce, wearing extras of Mahafny’s, overlong in leg and sleeve but not overlarge otherwise, smothered a laugh at seeing Jenret in one of Harrap’s generous robes. It wrapped around him twice but exposed his shins and bare feet until he leaned back against a table and tucked his feet under him. Taking a hearty sip from her mug, Doyce decided she was developing a taste for cheap rum as the trickles of warmth coursed through her. Mahafny sat with an enigmatic smile on her face, self-possessed, self-contained, and she pondered how anyone could manage such serenity. Did she make a constant effort at self-control, or had it become second nature to her? The older woman looked at ease amidst these rough surroundings, a part yet not a part of it.
“Sometimes we see in others a potential that we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves.” Mahafny met her gaze for an instant, then looked deep into her mug.
But the last thing she could feel in herself was serenity, self-acceptance. “Why are you here? How did you know to come here, that we would be here?” It went beyond mere coincidence. The planning and gathering of suitable travel gear, the trading of the pacer and rig for two horses—that bespoke advance intent and insight, but whose, Mahafny’s or Harrap’s? Harrap boasted more facets than she’d originally envisioned, but she doubted that he had instigated any of this. It bore the eumedico’s signature of thoroughness and attention to detail. But why involve herself?
The chiding tone in Harrap’s rich, deep voice shamed her as effectively as a scolding. “Mahafny and Parm and I talked on the way back. We feared to see you set out with just the two of you and the ghatti against such evil. Mahafny and I are bot
h older, and we’ve seen much of the world, although we may have let it pass us by. Still, our wisdom combined with yours may be necessary to defeat the horror that we face.
“Don’t blame Mahafny, I can see it in your eyes. I broached the idea and she did the planning, along with what I gave her of Parm’s advice. After all, he was canny enough to ask old Ma’ow where he thought those,” he paused and forced his mouth around the word, “killers would flee. And to ask about shortcuts that only those from the area would know to reach here. If you hadn’t arrived, I don’t know what we would have done next, but Parm would have figured something out.”
“But this isn’t your battle,” Doyce insisted, rubbing the bridge of her nose, feeling the weary frown knotting her forehead. How could she make them see, make them turn back for their own safety? Harrap was too pure and good a man for this. And Mahafny ... for whatever love and respect she had borne for the woman from their earlier relationship, enough still existed to make her fervently wish the eumedico clear of this struggle. That, her mind nagged, and the fact that it seems so utterly convenient that she’d reappeared like a fairy godmother and asserted herself over me again after all these years of separation.
“But it is our battle.” Mahafny extended her hand along the table, reaching yet not quite reaching out to her. The hand quivered—palsy, age, fear? “Harrap is a Seeker, will-he, nill-he, and bears the spirit of Our Lady with him wherever he goes. It makes him a double-edged sword against the evil we search for. And I, well, I am not a Seeker as you well know, and that may lessen my esteem in your eyes. But I am a eumedico with octads of service in finding and eradicating the evils that invade men’s bodies and their minds. We have been rigorously trained to detect the falsehoods of the body, to look beyond seemingly healthy flesh to the cancer within, beyond the seemingly placid, fever-free brow to the turmoil contained there.” The silver-haired head balanced erect and proud on the thin, graceful neck, cool gray eyes luminous and intense as she waited for Doyce to contradict her, expose the falsehood behind the eumedico vow that she espoused. And Doyce knew for a certainty that she could not. And that Mahafny counted on it, testing her oath, her resolve.
“Jenret?” She hated herself for depending on him, for making him voice her rejection of their aid. She had not wanted him either, but now she needed him as an ally. If it came from them both, perhaps the others would listen, would turn back to safety, to the sanity of the worlds they both knew.
He had observed the interchange between Mahafny and herself too closely, with a secret sympathy equally divided; she had no clue which way he’d turn. “I say yes. I would have welcomed Harrap’s weight on the winch tonight. But ask the ghatti. They have a stake in this as well.” Still a chance, a chance, but a slim one, and she refused to open her mind to Khar, to influence her decision in any way. She would not beg for Khar’s support.
“Khar’pern? Rawn? Saam? Do they join us or not?” Her words husked tight in her throat, her eyes blinking back moisture that she denied, that she prayed wouldn’t run and betray her. Not this on top of every other indignity she’d faced and overcome.
Ghatti faces and bodies flickered and twitched, explaining the situation to Saam to make sure he had captured the nuances of human speech. Leaving Parm to hold their space by the fire, they glided to a halt in front of Harrap and Mahafny. The three briefly examined Harrap, satisfied by what they found, but two stalked around Mahafny, staring at her from all directions, sniffing her with implacable thoroughness. Saam leaped to the table, yellow eyes glowing with the intensity of his querying, Khar’s whiskers tickled at the back of the eumedico’s neck, testing, questing.
Composed, breathing evenly, Mahafny returned Saam’s stare with fortitude. She broke eye contact first, not surprising since few could sustain steady eye contact with an unblinking ghatt. Still, knowing Mahafny, it would have been like her to make Saam blink first. That’s score one for Mahafny, for normal behavior, Doyce mentally chalked it. Saam, two.
“Do I pass?” the eumedico inquired, one hand rubbing the back of her neck to erase the sensation of tickling whiskers.
“Yes,” from Rawn. “Yes,” from Khar. A meow from Saam.
“Yes. I’ve been outvoted,” Doyce thawed the words frozen in her throat. It was obvious that Khar sensed something reassuring about the eumedico’s presence; she’d put her trust in that, but she didn’t have to like it. “Welcome’s run a bit thin at this time of night, but you have joined us now, for better or for worse.”
Jenret’s robe billowed as he stood. “I for one will offer a warmer welcome on the morrow, though this one is heartfelt. Are there beds in this place? I don’t think the storm will ease before morning, and we’ve no hope of crossing until then.”
“Beds there must be,” Harrap’s brows caterpillared with worry, “but I never got around to checking. I hope there is room enough so that our slumbers may be seemly.”
Harrap’s wish was not to be: the inn contained one long, narrow attic space with beds dormitory-style, not unlike his old lodgings at the Bethel. However, the two men took beds at one end of the room along with some other guests, and the two women retired to the other end with the ghatti split between. Heat radiating from the chimney rising through the center of the room did little to dispel the chill, and the restless wind searched for shingles to pry loose, but the low-eaved room offered a sense of peace compared to the storm gusting and howling outside.
Doyce sat upright in bed, struggling to pull a comb through her wavy, tangled hair, still damp from their ride in the rain. Khar stretched across her legs, pinning her in place, and she bunched the woolen blanket around her waist to hold in the heat. The mattress felt hard and damp, made her shiver. Saam curled at the foot of the bed, as close to the edge as he could get without falling off. Holding a lock of hair straight out from her head, she flailed at the snarled end with her comb.
“Go easy, or you’ll have Harrap’s tonsure,” Mahafny scolded as she remade her bed to her own satisfaction. “Here, give me that comb. You’ve no patience left, that’s clear.” She pulled the tortoise comb from Doyce’s grip and propelled the younger woman a quarter turn away from her so that she could sit behind Doyce.
Easing the comb in and out of the tangles with short, expert movements, Mahafny clucked in disgust. “When did you comb this last? Your Lokka gets curried more often than you do your hair.”
“Hasn’t been much time lately for the niceties.” Much as she hated to admit it, the combing, the rhythmic stroking felt good, relaxing, and some of the tension flowed from her neck and back. She stifled a yawn. “Maybe I should pay the stableboy to do it when he’s finished with Lokka.”
“Not unless he can borrow sheep clippers. Now hold still, this end is going to have to be trimmed, there’s a permanent knot.” Reaching into her pocket Mahafny pulled out a tiny pair of surgical scissors and set to work snipping. “Thank the Lady you wear it short now, so this won’t be missed.”
“Do you always carry your scissors in your pocket?” Doyce asked, feeling herself go taut again, knowing Mahafny felt it as well. The scissors seemed a grim reminder of the trepanning instrument the eumedico had found on the floor of Asa’s barn and had pocketed.
“No,” the older woman answered shortly. “A bad habit of old age and more than likely to puncture my pocket or my fingers when I reach in. I put them there after I’d finished with Jenret’s bandages.” She sat silent for a moment. “Doyce, I know you’re not well-pleased to have me here. You’ve made it patently clear in every look, gesture, and word. I’m sorry, but I am somehow a part of this, despite your preferences or mine. Just be assured that I know the difference between then and now and give me the benefit of the doubt now as well.” With that, she administered a brusque pat to Doyce’s back and moved back to her own bed.
“Call it a truce, Mahafny. There’ve been too many cataclysms in my life of late.” Confused, she slid down in the bed, savoring the patch of warmth the eumedico’s body had left in her mattre
ss.
“Do you think he’d sleep with me?”
Doyce found herself bolt upright, blanket clutched to her chest. “Who? Harrap?” she asked, shocked, trying to keep her voice low. Now what was the eumedico thinking?
A snort of laughter answered her. “No, goose! Saam. You looked crowded with a bedful of ghatti.”
Quaking with laughter, Doyce buried her face in her pillow, choked, finally managed to respond. “I don’t think so, but it’s up to him. If he feels like it, he’ll shift over.”
Sleep came, but it took longer than she’d anticipated. Every time one or the other of them started to drop off, the other would break into giggles, blessed release after the tensions of the day.
She slept, a smile still quirking her face, dimpling one cheek. Khar nudged closer, tight into the hollow of pillow and neck, backbone against backbone, fitting the bumps. She tucked white paw over nose to warm her breath, fell into the shallow sleep that let her keep watch if need be....
Meadow, sun, tiny wildflowers, not showy, but sweet. Tiny purplish-blue flowers, each one rising up like the teeth of a double-sided comb, seed pods like miniature bean pods. White star flowers, five petals off a long, vase-shaped calyx, plump at the bottom. He picked these one at a time, then smashed the base against the palm of his hand, head cocked for the faint “pop.”
“Vesey,” the voice cried. “Come on, hurry up!” And the boy turned and ran toward the sound, broke the coupled hands and placed himself between, jumping and prancing, tugging back and forth between the restraining hands.
Briony sat in the middle, propped against the lunch basket, arms waving, giggling, head thrown back to watch the figures towering above her. Bare feet kicked and caught at the blanket beneath her. “Come on, Vesey,” Varon’s voice boomed. “You lead.” Varon and Doyce and Vesey encircled the blanket, hands clasped, feet whitely bare in the long green grass.
