Finders-Seekers

by Gayle Greeno

  Doyce hitched herself across the floor, hesitant as to what the darkness hid between her and Mahafny. But no obstacles impeded her fanny-dragging, and at last she sat beside the eumedico, who bent again to blow on the lamp wick. Khar’s still form leaped into view, flame and shadow dappling the black, buff and gray striping, making her seem to shiver and move in the light, but the only real movement came from the rise and fall of her slow, shallow breathing. Awkwardly, Doyce bent and brushed her face along the ghatta’s flank, rubbed her cheek against the satin fur, then pressed her ear down to listen for the heartbeat.

  “She refused to leave with the others when I ordered her to. She came back after me!” Her voice climbed high and wailing, quivering with self-accusation. “It’s my fault, she wouldn’t go! She knew how much I need her! She’s the only one who ever came back for me, to stay with me! Mother let me go, you let me go, Varon and Briony, Vesey, Oriel! Every one of you deserted me, wouldn’t stay when I needed you most—everyone except Khar!”

  Mahafny fought back a strangled sound. “Hush, Doyce, hush. No, no, never alone, always around you people who’ve loved you, who love you, if you’d let yourself feel it and return it. Harrap and Jenret. And me—again. The only way I could save you before was to let you go. There are three more of us right here who love you—if you’ll let us.”

  Snuffling, throat constricted with the effort to imprison her sobs, she pulled herself upright, grateful for the lifeline of control Mahafny threw her way. But dignity cost more than she could afford, as she forced herself to wipe her bleary eyes and running nose on the knee of her pantaloons, no other alternative. Unsanitary but effective.

  “Are Harrap and Jenret all right?” She gulped, tried hard to level her voice.

  Mahafny shifted from one hip to the other and blew at the wick, a golden shaft of light piercing the dark before it faded. “Well, as I said, they were alive when last I saw them. They’re being held in another hut. Without the ghatti to transmit for us, I don’t know any more than that.”

  “Then Rawn and Saam and Parm did escape?”

  “Again, I hope so, I believe so. But I’ve not had word, and if they’d contacted one of the others, I think Jenret or Harrap might have risked having them try to ’speak me while you were still unconscious. If only Khar would come to.”

  Yes, if only Khar would regain consciousness. If only, if only. She cast her mind toward the ghatta, but again touched nothing beyond random thoughts, the ebb and flow, the spinning toward the vortex of a communion she didn’t recognize. She sat, mind keyed, waiting, hoping, but there was nothing. Except Mahafny waiting at her side, silent, compassionate.

  After what seemed an eternity of emptiness, Doyce looked up. “If you turn your back to me, mayhap I can untie your bonds. My fingers feel like sausages, but it’s better than sitting and doing nothing, better than just sitting and waiting.”

  “And waiting for what, I don’t know. If it will keep you occupied, fine, though I don’t hold much hope.” With that Mahafny obligingly turned her back to Doyce.

  Tight-knotted leather thongs, each knot smooth and hard as a nut. No edges that she could discern as she let her clumsy fingers grope, numbed and balky, blind to solving the unyielding puzzle.

  “A bit like surgery, tying a knot one-handed in a spot that you can’t see,” Mahafny commented, wincing as Doyce fumbled and reworked her way over and around and under the intractable bonds.

  “I suppose. But usually if you tie sutures, you’re not called on to untie them. You get to cut them later.” She spun on her hip to face the eumedico. “Mahafny! I don’t suppose there’s any chance you’ve been forgetful lately?”

  “Doyce, I’m not the one who’s had a blow on the head.”

  “Your pockets, Mahafny! Did you forget and leave your scissors in your pocket again?”

  The eumedico chuckled. “Yes. And I’ve two punctures in my thigh to prove it!”

  Doyce scrambled, forcing awkward, tied hands in the direction of Mahafny’s pocket. Who had ever thought a pocket could be so elusive, but with her hands locked behind her, the eumedico’s pocket floated tantalizingly close yet impossible to reach. How could her fingers have become so fat and stupid? A chance, she begged, just give me a chance to do anything rather than sit and wait for Lady knows what. Wrong, dammit, wrong angle! And she jammed with blind, heavy-handed frustration at the pocket’s slit.

  “Just wait a moment!” Mahafny protested. “Don’t rip the clothes off me. Here,” she struggled to her knees.

  “Let’s make the path a bit straighter and easier to negotiate.”

  And with that her hands blundered, snagged, then slid into the pocket and her fingers touched metal. “Ouch! Got them!”

  “Warned you they were sharp. Now, for pity’s sake, I hope you can tell the difference between my wrists and the rawhide.”

  The work went finically slowly; the scissors sharp but small. The thin blades and the short handles gave her little leverage; Doyce found herself holding the blades apart, slicing with one blade or the other to make tiny incisions. To hit the same strand in precisely the same place took time and concentration, especially since she couldn’t see a thing. More than once she nicked and slashed herself where she’d inserted her own fingers under the strips of leather she worked at to protect Mahafny’s wrists. A long flap of loose skin dangled annoyingly on her knuckle where she’d sliced at the wrong thing, but luckily there was little pain.

  “Wait. They didn’t do as thorough a job when they retied me. I think I can snap it now.” Mahafny sat straight and composed herself, only the thinned mouth and corded neck and shoulders attesting to the struggle behind her back. “Nnmph! Ah, got it!” She brought her hands in front of her, each wrist braceleted with the remains of her leather bonds. “Give me a moment to flex my fingers, and I’ll set you loose.”

  But Doyce’s face set in shock as a hand jerked back the curtain covering the doorway, and an Erakwan woman ducked through the low entrance. Elderly, that much was clear from her iron gray hair, tight-plaited behind her, and her toothless mouth and sagging breasts, for she was bare from the waist up. But her naked arms and legs below her short leather apron skirt were muscular and hard, no soft, loose excess flesh of old age. And the knife at her side looked honed to a killing thinness from a lifetime of daily use.

  She balanced a white birch bark slab for a tray and on it she carried a bowl of what smelled like food, a water gourd, and a saucerlike clay dish with herbs steeping in boiling water, wafting an intense, enlivening smell of the outdoors through the hut. Her free hand held a better lamp, underlighting her face and penetrating to the ceiling of their dwelling.

  Doyce froze and prayed Mahafny would keep her hands immobile, not reveal by an involuntary movement that they were unfettered.

  But the old woman scrutinized one, then the other, and chuckled. “No matter.” She nodded her head at Mahafny’s hands. “You safer in here dan out in woods, dat you seen. Folk more dan‘rous than Erakwa out der, hah?” A heavy but decipherable accent. “You t’ink leave, silly, now. Mebbe later, we ‘cide what do wid you. You need eat, and t’ings for sick anmul. Doan know why I save, but I try. Mebbe reason I not know.” And with a swift grace she bent and placed the tray at Mahafny’s feet, her metallic-brown skin shiny soft in the light, an odor of animal fat, warm and richly sweet, emanating from her body.

  With a practiced movement she backed out the door, her foot hooking behind her to nudge the skin covering the entrance. Never once did her dark eyes leave them, frank, intense, assaying, but good-humored. She chuckled again as she left, a skittering sound like a squirrel kicking and rustling amongst dry leaves. “S’eep now. Wait for day.”

  Mahafny balanced the water gourd to Doyce’s lips, then took a sip herself. “A welcome of sorts, I’d say.” Removing the scissors from Doyce’s lax fingers, she began to slice away at her companion’s bonds.

  Hands free at last, fingers protesting, throbbing and tingling at the unrestrained rush
of blood, Doyce chafed at her wrists and sniffed the saucer, considering the blend of scents. “I think I recognize most everything in it. Cinnamage and marsh star to reduce swelling. Harrabalm for fever, something else familiar but that I can’t place. Worth a try, I think. Not poisonous.”

  “How are you going to get Khar to swallow it?”

  The nicks and cuts oozed, bled, as she clenched her fingers, aware of her clumsiness. “I’ll have to dip a piece of shirttail in it and drip it into her mouth; she’ll swallow, even though she’s unconscious.”

  Drop by drop, she did. Some of the liquid spilled, missed its mark, and Doyce cursed each precious drop that soaked into the earthen floor, but continued. After a while, Mahafny eased her aside and took over, and Doyce sampled the food that had been left. She couldn’t identify it, but it was filling and required a concerted effort to chew, each mouthful expanding spongily as it mixed with her saliva. Some sort of dried meat pounded together with berries, nourishing to travelers or hunters, and easy to transport.

  While she chewed, she examined her surroundings. Longer than it was wide, the hut’s walls and ceiling blended into a crescent, bent saplings arched overhead and lashed together, then covered with slabs of bark, the inner side of each piece a silky gray. No windows, a small smoke hole at the top that revealed the inky night; a low door at either end. She eased toward the door at the far end of the hut and squatted beside it, teasing the leather flap aside with a wary finger. A war club slapped the flap back into place with finality. She sucked at a bruised knuckle.

  “House arrest, you might call it.” Putting the strip of cloth back into the saucer. Mahafny checked the ghatta’s pulse and rose, stretching widely. “Your turn again.”

  Doyce sat and began to drip more of the mixture into Khar, holding the corner of her mouth open with one hand. She resolutely forced herself not to try to make contact with the ghatta, not yet, not until Khar could somehow indicate the necessity. The pain’s cadence danced partner to her own, and a change in that would alert her to any change in the ghatta’s condition.

  “She’s probably had all she should.” Mahafny took the scrap of cloth from Doyce’s hand. “Take the rest yourself. You’ve had a bad knock on the head as well.”

  Rocking back on her heels, Doyce smiled, her head pounding in reminder. She had tried to convince herself that the pain she felt was all Khar’s, but part of it resoundingly remained her own. “As you have reminded me time and again, humans and animals do not have identical physiologies or identical tolerances for the same drugs; thus animal experimentation is valid only up to a certain point.”

  Mahafny held out the saucer to her. “In this case the relationship may be closer than we realized. Certainly the Gleaners seem to think so. Now take the medicine.”

  “And I’m too tired to care one way or the other. I’ll take it.” She grimaced as she swigged down the dregs of the Erakwan tisane and grabbed the water gourd, sloshing her face in her hurry. “Phew! A sure sign of efficacy—bitter !”

  “Rule number one,” Mahafny intoned with mock solemnity.

  “If it tastes good, it won’t work. I remember.” She slid over beside the older woman, their shoulders touching. “Now, one final thing before I try to sleep. I’m going to open my mind and see if I can reach any of the other ghatti—they’ve got to be out there somewhere.”

  With a restraining hand on her knee, Mahafny hesitated. “You’re not afraid of whom else you might reach? Is it wise to broadcast too widely?”

  “Don’t know. I’ll damper it down if I feel the faintest tug of something or someone I don’t recognize. I know Parm’s and Rawn’s speech signatures well enough. Saam’s, too—if it mattered.”

  She sat silent, hands outstretched, palms up on her knees. Keep the spine straight but not rigid, the balance within as well as the balance without. Deep, steady breaths to center, to regulate herself, to send her mind aloft as far as she could, eager for kindred touch and conversation. She pressed harder, farther outward than she ever had before, but sensed nothing, either good or ill. Just mocking emptiness interspersed with the normal night sounds beside and beyond her. Some might call it peaceful, but she yearned for contact, communion.

  With a sigh, she reeled herself inward. “I don’t know where they are. Not a touch,” she confessed. “You get so used to it, you know. And when it’s not there, it’s like being bereft of something ... an amputation.”

  Silver and pewter in the light, Mahafny nodded in understanding, not analyzing but accepting, and Doyce relaxed.

  “There are blankets over there. None too fresh, I suspect, but I hope no vermin. Now go to sleep. I’m going to blow out the larger light.”

  Woodsmoke and dried sweet grass, a touch of dampness, perfumed the blanket, not a bad smell by any means, she reassured herself as she wrapped it around her. Easing herself as close to Khar as she could manage, she fell asleep, one hand warding the comatose ghatta.

  “ ’Lo? Hello, Doyce?”

  Insistent as an insect the voice buzzed and bored through her head, droning against her pain. Wary, unsure of where she was, she hunched upright and tried to concentrate, blanket shawling her shoulders. A bare pinprick of light, a badly burning lamp, met her eyes and she remembered, mentally touched the steady waves of pain from Khar, and clamped down hard on her lip.

  “Doyce? Sorry, sorry. How’s Khar? Oh, woe! Anyway, Harrap said I should ’speak you, even if you slept. Sorry, sorry.”

  Parm, dithering away as usual. How near she couldn’t judge, but despite his dithering, he was concentrating, arrowing a single concise thrust of mindspeech directly at her, no leakage to invite intruding thoughts.

  “Where are you? How are Harrap and Jenret?”

  “Oh. They’re fine. Still tied up, but they’re fine. Except for the bruises. And the sprained knee. And they’ve got sand fleas in their hut! Ooh! And then....”

  “Where is their hut?” Despite herself, Doyce fairly shouted at the flustered ghatt. Thank the Lady for mindspeech so she didn’t rouse Mahafny, let alone the whole camp.

  “You’re at the southern end, they’re to the west. They’ve got lots more Erakwa guarding them ’cause when Jenret tried to break free, they....”

  “Worse than a silly ghatten!” Rawn’s voice broke in, hoarse, tired. “He didn’t have any more sense than Parm here, but he’s learned his lesson and none the worse for wear. We three are here, back at the attack clearing, about a half league south from your camp. Trying to get closer when it quiets down more. Once we get the lay of the land we’ll try to figure out something.”

  Parm sounded his treble next to Rawn’s deeper voice. “Saam says to say hello. Oh, and Lokka, too. I got the horses rounded up and away when we couldn’t do anything else.” His chest-puffed pride in his ingenuity was deflated by sadness at not having been able to accomplish anything more.

  “Well, there wasn’t,” he continued, as if reading the subtext of her thoughts.

  “He can be clever,” Rawn’s grudging commendation made Parm’s mindpattern caper and glow. “We snagged the bridles off, at least, but I don’t think we can get them on again if we have to.”

  “Never mind. We’ll manage. I think you’ve all done wonders,” Doyce encouraged. “What do you sense from the Erakwa? Do you have any idea how we’re going to get out of here?”

  “They’re clustered ‘round the campfires—very hard to read, mostly shuttered from us. The young ones sometimes let a random thought escape. What little we can pick up doesn’t sound good, but it’s not all bad.” She wondered what Rawn was hiding from her. “We’re trying, we’re trying to figure a way out, but right now everyone’s bone-tired and sore....” He lapsed off, embarrassed. “Oh.” For a moment he sounded so like Parm dropping one of his “oh, and by the way’s” that Doyce wanted to chuckle. “You didn’t feel the brush of something earlier, did you?”

  “No. Such as what?” What had she missed while asleep, the drug making her sleep more soundly and dreamlessly
than usual. She concentrated hard, trying to read between his words and images, wondering what he refused to tell her.

  “Well, nothing. Never mind. All for now, we’ve got work to do. Sleep well.”

  “Lady Mess, Harrap said to say. Bye!” Parm’s cheeky tone echoed, and their voices faded. Comforted, smiling to herself, Doyce rolled over and fell solidly asleep.

  Morning. Milky-pale daylight seeped through the smoke hole in the roof and slender chinks of light startled the eye, horizontal here, vertical there, where bark slabs had curled loose or hadn’t overlapped. Fuzzy light, more a quality of lessened darkness, around the hides hanging over the two doors. Daybreak sounds and smells, birds, a scolding, angry jay, people rousing, fresh fires being kindled, food smells rising, the murmur and padding feet of half-awake people passing on morning business. But the hut itself remained in cool and silent semidarkness, cavelike.

  Exhaling long and loud, Doyce shivered and sat up, sore to the bone and wondering again where she was. The sight of Mahafny erectly seated, silver-star hair combed and caught up in a twist, yet strangely, without her white coat, threw her back in time to the Hospice training school.

  “Ooh, late for rounds,” she groaned. What tickled round the periphery of her brain, enticing, demanding a weak but emphatic entrance? She brushed at her face as if to clear the cobwebs inside. But another voice still echoed inside her head.

  “Doyce, Khar’s awake.”

  And with that, everything came back with such certitude that she could hardly believe she’d forgotten. The fruitless chase, the Erakwa, the capture, Khar. She scrambled on hands and knees to her folded tabard where Khar rested. The rhythmic waves of pain she’d shared the night before had receded but still lapped through her, along with an enfeebled consciousness.

  “How is she?” she asked, and mentally projected the thought as well.

  “Here, Oh, hurts to think!” And then with greater urgency, front paws scrabbling, eyes focused cockeyed but desperate, “Oh, need to go! Need to go!” The front paws scrabbled again, but the hind legs did not bunch and respond to bring her to her feet.