A Different Flesh

by Harry Turtledove

  Along with their crude weapons, they carried squirrels and rabbits, a snake, and a couple of birds: . Not a great day's bag by any means. They looked in wonder from Henry Quick to the bear and back again. You kills one asked. After a little while, he recognized it as the male that had brought him the marten fur.

  Understanding its hand-talk and responding took all the concentration and strength the trapper had. I kill bear, he answered.

  Bear hurt me, break leg bone.

  The sims grimaced. One gave an involuntary hiss of pain. Another pointed at the rude splint. Why stick!

  Hold bone pieces stil . Hurt less. Quick changed the subject; his leg did not hurt much less. He waved at the dead bear, cut up meat, take to your fire. He could not hope to eat a twentieth part of it before it spoiled.

  The sims could have done what they wanted with the bear no matter what he said, but his free giving of it seemed to take them aback.

  Come with us, eat with us again! signed the male he knew.

  He had prayed it would ask that. The band of sims, he knew, was his only hope of living through the winter, though he had scorned the thought not long before. It was his only hope of living longer than a few days, come to that.

  Even if his leg healed well, he would not be able to travel for months. And with the injury he had, he had a bad feeling it would not heal well.

  A male with a broken front tooth was signing at the one he knew best: Kil , it urged. More meat.

  Kil , another male agreed. No hunt, no walk. Lie by fire, eat.

  Cold soon. No food to give. No good to us. kil .

  In other circumstances, Quick might have agreed with those sims.

  He would be a burden for the band, and one more mouth to feed when they wein hungry themselves. Unless he could find a way to make himself valuable to them, he was done for. Take me to fire, then take all tools in pack, he offered.

  One of the sims, unfortunately, was smart enough to see the flaw in that. Kil , then take tools, it signed.

  He almost gave up then. Like a bul et, a spear going into his chest or a club breaking his head would put him out of his pain.

  But he had not shot himself, and he did not want to end as a feast for subhumans. He forced his battered wits to work. Take me to fire, make more tools. That was the best he could do. If it did not appeal to the sims, he was dead. The male that had brought him the marten pelt hooted.

  Make noise-sticks? it asked. He could see the eagerness on its broad features.

  No, he signed, hating to have to do it. But even had he had metal to hand, he did not know how to make a gun.

  Use noise-stick to kill game near fire.

  He happened to think of bows and arrows. They were rare in the Commonwealths, but some rich men back east liked to hunt with them, claiming they were more sporting than guns. Quick cared nothing for sport. He was interested in surviving. Make thing like noise-stick, but quiet, he signed.

  Kil far like noise-stick? the male asked. Not that far.

  Farther than spear.

  The sims shouted at one another, not so much arguing as to intimidate. Finally the male that had brought Quick the marten fur signed Take, and pointed at him. He tried without much luck to stifle a shriek as two sims hauled him upright. Others fell to butchering the bear.

  It Soon they were toting slabs of meat bigger than those a man could easily carry.

  That strength also helped the pair over whose shoulders he had draped his arms. Al the same, the journey to the band's clearing was a nightmare. It would have been dreadful even with careful men hauling the trapper. It was worse with sims. They were not deliberately cruel, but they were careless. Several times his broken leg hit the ground so hard he thought it would fall off. He rather wished it would. Mercifully, he passed out again before the hunting party got home.

  The anguish when his bearers let him down like a sack of meal brought him back to himself. Sims were all he could see as he peered blearily upward. Their thick odor clogged his nostrils.

  He felt blood flowing down his leg again. The thought of getting the sims to set the broken bone made him sweat but leaving it untended was worse.

  Take off stick, he signed. Take off boots, pants. The sims grunted in puzzle the hand-talk gesture for trousers meant nothing to them, since they had never seen any except his. He pointed, and they understood. Fix bone, put stick back and another stick on, hold bone in place. He thought of thing else. Hold me down. I yell, you do anyhow.

  the sims hooted in dismay when they saw how he was.

  He die, a female signed flatly.

  He live, he make for us, answered the male he knew. he live. That was another female. After a moment, he reconized it as the one that had wanted to couple with him. Well, no danger of that now, he thought, and even in torment almost laughed.

  The grizzled sim pushed forward. Maker it signed. Good. if Live.

  That was the most sign-talk the trapper had ever seen from it.

  He turned his head away. The sight of his red-smeared tibia sticking through his flesh was making him even sicker than he felt already.

  Push bone into leg, he signed. straight, like other leg.

  Till then, he had only thought he knew what pain was. again, the sims were not cruel on purpose; again, that did help. No one could have set the fracture without hurting him badly. That the would-be healers were inexperenced subhumans made things worse, but perhaps not by much.

  Some unmeasurable time later, his agony lessened, by a tiny fraction. He chose to believe that was because two pieces of bone were properly aligned. If not, he knew he could bear no more. His throat was raw from screaming; he could feel the blood slick on his hands, where nails had bitten into his palms.

  now sticks on, he signed. Tie tight. Hold bones in place.

  senses failed him before the sims were done. This time it did not return to him at once.

  When at last he woke again, the sun was in his eyes. It morning His leg felt better; It was, he realized an improvement on how it had felt the day before. He looked around. Most of the Sims were long gone from ring, the males to hunt, the females to forage.

  The female that had wanted him came out of the woods its arms were full of berries and roots it set down its prizes and came over to stoop beside him After a moment it rose again, to return with a chunk of food. His stomach twisted. He was not ready for food, but he had a raging thirst. Water, he signed.

  The sim handed him the piece of wood He began hollowing out the branch with his dagger. The work took most of the day. It was interrupted when he had void his bowels. After a while, an old female, wrinkling its broad, flat nose got a handful of leaves and carried the dropping away. He hoped the sim would clean him too, but it did not. sighing, he went back to his carving.

  When the rude cup was done, he explained with signs what it was good for.

  The grizzled male took some time to understand. When at last it did, it hurried off to test the marvel for itself. It came back with a wide grin on its face. Standing where he could see it, it held the cup over its hea and poured water into its mouth from arm's length. It got wet, but it did not seem to care.

  The female that had wanted him returned from another foraging trip. It handed him another piece of cold cooked bear meat. Eat, it signed again. This time he felt ready to try. The flesh tasted like beef, but was greasier. His stomach, long empty, churned uneasily.

  His bowels moved again not long after that The young female dealt with the mess in the same way the old one had before. It came back, though, with more leaves, and did a rough job of wiping him.

  Thanks, he signed. It only grunted; the gesture meant nothing to it.

  Back in the settled parts of the Commonwealths, where sims served humans, polite phrases had come into hand-talk.

  They had not, however, become part of the rough, abridged version this band used. Quick shook has head, sorry he could not express the gratitude he felt.

  The last thing he remembered when he fel asleep
that night was seeing the grizzled sim hard at work on another cup. The one he had made was in front of it. Every so often it would pick his up and study it, as if to remind itself what it was doing.

  The trapper woke before sunrise, shivering. He had thought of the pain in his leg as a fire before; now it was hot in the most literal sense. He put a hand to his forehead. Water, he thought. It was the last coherent thought he had for a long time.

  He never knew how long he lay in delirium; the hours and days stretched and twisted like taffy. Every once in while, something would lodge in his memory. He recalled, young sim bending over to peer down at him, its solemn face so close to his that it filled his field of vision. A mite was crawling across its cheek.

  The mite seemed more interesting to him than the little sim.

  He remembered tel ing the male that had brought him l, the marten fur how to get coffee stains out of linen. He went into great detail, though the sim knew nothing of either coffee or linen and understood not a word of English. Using hand-talk never occurred to him. After a while, the sims went away. Quick kept on talking until his mind clouded I again.

  He remembered being fed two or three times, all of them by the female that had wanted him. The first time, he choked on a piece of meat and had to struggle to spit it out.

  After that, the sim gave him only soft, pasty food. He watched it chewing meat and fruit before passing them on b to him, as if he were a just-weaned infant. He knew he should have been disgusted, but he lacked the strength. He did not spit out the food, either.

  Quick heard deep, racking coughing, and marveled that , his lungs and throat were not raw. Only gradually, over a couple of days, did he realize he was not the one coughing.

  A little after that, the noise stopped, or he stopped noticing it; he did not figure out which until much later.

  He remembered the female shaking him back into foggy awareness of the world around him. It held a plant in front l of his face, a plant with downy, gray-green leaves, each cut go into blunt lobes and teeth.

  The flower heads held many smal , tubular, pinkish-white flowers. They were sere and , brown now, well past their peak. Dusty maiden, the plant is was called, one of the thousands of little nondescript shrubs that grew in the woods.

  He laughed foolishly; he was a good way past his peak too, he thought.

  "Not quite ready for flowers, though," he said out loud. The sense of the words brought him closer to real consciousness. He was not far from being ready for flowers, and knew it.

  the female held the root against his lips. Eat, it signed over and over until he opened his mouth. It thrust the root he gagged, bit down. Dirt crunched between his teeth as did the root. It tasted horrid. When he tried to spit it out, the female

  sim held a hand over his mouth and would not him. It kept signing Eat.

  With no other choice, he did. tears of rage and weakness filled his eyes.

  The next thing he remembered was thinking it had started to rain.

  But when he opened his eyes, the sun was shining. Yet he was wet.

  Sweat covered every inch of his body. It dripped from his nose and trickled through his damp and matted hair. He put a hand to his forehead.

  It was cooler. His fever had broken. He drifted away again, but something closer to natural sleep than to the oblivion which he had wandered before.

  When he woke again, the female sim was trying to feed him another plant like the last one, but even more beraggled. This time, the sim broke off the root and forced it , into his mouth, the taste was just as bad as he remembered, but, gagging, he got the thing down. After he had swallowed, the female brought him a cup of water and held this while he drank it. He did not think the cup was the one he had made.

  He had another sweating spell during his next sleep, and stayed awake some little while when he came out of it. The same sim seemed to have taken over his nursing. It greeted him with yet another dusty maiden plant. He no longer tried to fight its ministrations. Enough of his wits were back for him to realize that, however acrid and revolting the plant it was giving him tasted, they were doing him good. He came awake again at dawn, thinking how hungry he was. He tried to raise himself up on an elbow. The effort left him gasping before he finally succeeded. But no matter how weak he was, he was at last in command of his faculties once more.

  He took stock of himself, looking down the length of his body. He whistled, soft and low. "No wonder I'm hungry," said out loud, his voice a rusty croak. The fever had melted the flesh from his bones.

  Every rib was plainly visible (he had no idea when the sims had taken off his tunic, and his legs were bird-scrawny.

  The splints, he saw with relief, were still on his right calf, it ached fiercely, but now the pain was at a level he could bear.

  Yellow serum oozed from the scab where the bone had stabbed through his skin, yet his right leg felt not much warmer than the other one.

  Despite the splints, the leg had a kink in it that had not been there before.

  He did not care. He was healing. A limp, even a cane the rest of his life, would be a smal price to pay. He marveled that he was alive at al .

  Because the agony in his leg had diminished, he was abler to take stock of his other bodily shortcomings, which were considerable.

  He felt raw, running sores on his back and buttocks, not surprising when he had been lying there so long. There were more on the insides of his thighs, from imperfectly cleaned wastes. But he was not lying in a great stinking pool of his own filth. The sims must have dragged him from spot to spot in their clearing. He had no memory of it.

  Most of the subhumans were already out looking for food.

  one of the old females that kept an eye on the kids while their parents foraged walked in front of him. Food, he signed.

  The old female fell back a pace. "Hoo!" it said in surprise; he must have been an inert lump so long that the sims no longer expected anything else from him. The old female brought him some berries. They were the unripe and overripe ones none of the subhumans had wanted.

  Again, Henry Quick did not care.

  Half-starved as he was, they still tasted wonderful.

  He tried to rol on his side, but even splinted, even beginning to mend, his leg would not let him. His bedsores for could think of no better name for them snarled as his weight came back down on them. He was not going anywhere, even so short a distance, for a while yet. He abandoned the slender dream he'd let grow again of getting back across the mountains before the snow fel .

  . The female sim that had been caring for him returned, with what looked like a chunk of log. The old female gave an

  excited hoot, pointed to Quick. Seeing him awake, the other sim dropped its burden and dashed over to the maiden plant. This time he took the plant from the sims hand and ate it , before he could be told to. Whatever was in that root was medicine better than most of what the doctors back in Cairo used.

  When he had choked it down, he signed Eat?

  Yes the female sim echoed, grinning hugely. One of the hatchets from Quick's pack was lying close by. The sim cut the log it had brought in.

  Punk flew; the log was old. Two or three more strokes served to split it.

  It was ful of at beetle larvae. They squirmed in the dirt.

  Youngsters came running up to pop them into their mouths.

  the female sim skewered several grubs on a twig, held over the fire, and brought them to Quick. The trapper paused, then sighed. If he was going to live with sims, he d have to live like a sim, and that was that. He screwed his eyes shut, but he ate. Perhaps hunger seasoned the bugs, for he did not find them as disgusting as he thought. Compared to the medicinal root, they were delicious.

  The female sim fetched him a cup of water. He wondered many times it had done that while his wits wandered.

  Not many human nurses would have been so patient.

  The water made his bladder fill up. He did not want to foul himself, not now when he was awake. He called to the sim
. When he had its attention, he signed, Fill cup piss from me Not piss on ground here.

  boo," the sim said softly, as the subhumans often did a meeting an idea they had not thought of. The sim put the cup between his legs. It took hold of his penis to put tip inside the cup as matter-of-factly as if it were holding his toe. Urinating without fouling himself was one of the pleasures that accompanied healing.

  he thought of something. Not drink from this cup, heed This cup, piss only.

  “Coo," the female said again.

  After al his improvement, the trapper still slept as mum as a young child. He was asleep when the hunting party males returned, a little before sunset. When he woke the next morning, most of them were gone again. The man that had brought him the marten pelt, however, crouched beside him, plainly waiting for him to rouse That waiting was as far as politeness went among sim They had no small talk. As soon as the male saw Quick's eyes on it, it signed. Make thing like noise-stick.

  Quick frowned. He had hoped the sim had forgotten the promise he'd made as he thrashed on the ground in anguish. He had only the vaguest idea of how to make bow, to say nothing of arrows. Unfortunately, the sim remembered.

  He would have to learn If it was going to propel an arrow, a bow had to be of springy wood. The trapper pointed to one of the spruces at the edge of the clearing. Fetch me little tree like that, has signed. He held his hands about four feet apart. The sim went into the woods. It soon came back with a sapling such as he had described. A knife lay close enough for him to reach it. He began cutting branches off the trunk.

  The sim watched for a while, then decided nothing was going to happen right away. It picked up its hatchet and a stout club and went off to hunt.

  Because Quick was stuck on his back, trimming the sapling was a slow, awkward job. He managed to twist enough to prop himself up on his left elbow. He used his left hand to hold the fragrant trunk and carved away with his right, but things still did not go well. He looked round for the grizzled sim. The old male could help, and would probably be interested in what he was up to He did not see the old male. Thinking back, he had not seen it since his wits came back. When the female that cared for him returned from a foraging trip, he asked about it. Dead, the female signed, a thumbs-down gesture old as the Roman arena. The sim amplified it with a racking burst of coughs. Quick recalled the paroxysms he had heard in his delirium.