“Or . . . or I could do something completely different. What’s the completely different thing I’m going to be doing?”
“You’re going to help Ariadne.”
“ . . . or I could do something even more fun than that, like carving poetry into my thighs with a meat cleaver.”
“Sounds intriguing. Let’s save it for a special occasion. In the meantime? Help Ariadne.”
“But why?” I asked, feeling grouchy and put upon. “I’m useless at doctoring. You know that. Remember that time up near Sohanchi? If Latoya hadn’t stopped me, I would have put a tourniquet around that poor man’s neck to stop his head from bleeding.”
“You don’t have to doctor anyone. Just be with my sister while she works. Get her talking and keep her talking. It’ll help. She’s probably feeling overwhelmed right now.”
“And you think I’ll be able to calm her down?”
“No . . . but I think you’ll be able to piss her off. Ariadne’s a bit like you, Mistress. She always does her best work when she’s angry.”
THE FORECASTLE HAD been sort of transformed into a makeshift surgery. Emphasis on sort of, emphasis on makeshift. There was a single trestle table, where Corto lay groaning, and a box or two of rags. Wounded men, slumping against the bulkheads or hunching on the deck, took up the rest of the space. The decks themselves were sodden with blood and—well, other things. There were streaks of foulness along the wood, marking the paths where men had been dragged along by their good limbs.
All that was delightful enough. Add a smell that could have been wafting from hell’s own crotch, and it was no wonder that Ariadne was starting to crack by the time I got there.
She was using both hands, daubing ineffectually at a gut wound with one and trying to tie a bandage tight with the other. But she found the time to look up at me with burning eyes when I came through the hatch.
“Not one word, Darren,” she warned me, voice icy. “Not one, single, solitary word or there will be consequences.”
I said, “Spinner.”
“That was a word. Did you think I was kidding? I swear, Darren, I will kill you so hard that—”
“Spinner,” I said again, and tapped one of the walking wounded. “Go get him. He can help sort out some of this mess.”
Ariadne snarled. “Are you saying I can’t handle it?”
Ariadne had a magical way of making irritation bloom in me, like some fast-growing thorn-bush. I glared at her. “I’m saying that if you can’t handle it, princess, you’d better let me know so that I can make other arrangements. My men need care and they can’t wait until you’ve finished with your breakdown.”
“Who’s going to treat them if I don’t do it?” Ariadne wiped her bloody hands on a rag and threw it into an overflowing bucket. “Spinner? Because let me tell you, the only thing Spinner knows about surgery is that it’s a bad sign if the patient’s head falls off.”
“You’re exaggerating. He can stitch wounds.”
“And what do you think I’m doing right now? Making soup?”
She stalked over to Corto and peeled back one of his eyelids, squinting down at the eye’s glassy surface.
I followed her. “You do know that the wound’s on his thigh, right?”
“Deep gash in his thigh and another in his forearm. Yes, the gushing blood was my first clue.”
“So why are you looking at his face? Are you planning to kiss him better?”
“I gave him opium, smartass. I’m checking to see whether he’s good and doped yet.” She released his eyelid. “He is. So make yourself useful and cut his trousers away.”
De-trousering men is not my area of expertise, but in a pinch, I can manage. I split the seam from waistband to cuff and peeled the cloth back from the wound. It was an ugly sight under there, a mash of blood and ragged flesh. Ariadne began to sort through the mess with her fingers and a long iron needle.
There are few things quite as unpleasant as the sight of someone piecing bits of torn flesh back together, as though they’re sewing a meaty sort of quilt. I broke the silence not because I felt like talking, but because I needed the distraction.
“How did you learn to do this, anyway?” I asked. “Surgery isn’t one of the typical accomplishments of a noblewoman.”
“I read about it,” she said, squinting at a wiggly pink thing that I couldn’t identify and didn’t want to. “And I snuck into the hospice to watch the physicians, too.”
“But why?”
“I spent my whole childhood watching my sister getting pounded into raw meat every other day. I had to find some way to help.”
She hissed in frustration. Corto’s raggedly-torn flesh wouldn’t close cleanly. There were gaps between her stitches, with pink-red serum leaking out. “He’s going to get wound fever.”
“That’s to be expected.”
“Yes . . . but with a wound this deep, he’ll get it bad. Wish I had some mouldy bread.”
I raised an eyebrow. “I know you’re trying to get used to peasant food, but you don’t have to go that far.”
“Don’t try to be clever. Twit. I need mouldy bread to put on the wound.”
“I’m beginning to have second thoughts about letting you near my sailors.”
Ariadne snorted, impatient, and then paused in her work long enough to jerk down the shoulder of her shirt. “See that?”
It was a raised knot of flesh, a circular scar. Ariadne let me get a good look at it before she adjusted her shirt and picked up the needle again. “When I was seven, a spider bit me there. I hate spiders, the creepy little bastards, but I was never afraid of them before that. Darren, you can’t even imagine. First, it swelled up. That was the overture. It felt so hot that I thought I had a live coal under my skin, and I couldn’t touch it without screaming. Then it split across the middle and pus dribbled out—are you covering your ears? Darren? Why are you covering your ears?”
Reluctantly, I lowered my hands. “I don’t like hearing about pus. Blood is fine. Pus, not so much.”
Ariadne rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “How did my sister end up with such a wimp?” She knotted the end of the suture, bit off a trailing end, and threaded the needle again. “Anyway. The spider bite turned into a massive weeping sore. My parents called physicians and they did all the usual things. They bled me, they purged me, they cupped me, they read my horoscope, they rubbed the wound with a moonstone, they dosed me with pomegranate juice and crushed amber—all of that.”
I nodded. Those were common treatments, though not everybody could afford them.
“But nothing helped. After about a week, I was fiery with fever and my head ached until I thought it was being squeezed in a vice. I was miserable and I hated the world, so I slipped away from my nurse and went to find my sister. Found her playing in a corner of the kitchen.”
“Playing?”
“Yes. Does that sound strange? I suppose it does. This was when her mother was still alive. She did get to play sometimes back then.”
I perked up. All the details about Lynn’s life in the Time Before Melitta were precious to me, since Lynn didn’t remember much and revealed even less. “What was she playing with?”
“Spoons. Wooden spoons. The girl liked spoons, don’t ask me why. I guess if you don’t own any toys, you work with what you have. I went and plumped down next to her. Hoped that she would cheer me up, at least. But she got one good look at my crusted weeping sore and she shot to her feet and ran away, yelling for her mother to come help.”
“Why? Elain wasn’t a healer, was she?”
“Elain was a servant from the day she grew big enough lug a bucket down the hall until the day she died. But when you’re small, you go through a stage when you think your mother can solve any problem.”
I frowned, casting my mind back to my own childhood. “I don’t think I went through a stage when I believed my mother could solve any problem.”
“Me neither,” Ariadne admitted. “Probably had something to do with m
y mother being an evil hellbeast. Damn. The opium’s wearing off.”
Corto’s pupils were still tiny pinpoints, but his limbs were starting to twitch. Ariadne, annoyed, drummed her fingers on his chest. “I hoped it would last longer. I still have to stitch the gash on his arm.”
“Nothing’s stopping you.”
“Well, no—but he’ll kick.”
True enough. I considered putting him out again with a quick blow to the back of the skull, but that kind of thing never works out quite as well as one would like. Instead, I unrolled another length of bandage and lashed his wrists and ankles to the legs of the trestle.
He struggled reflexively against the bonds, so I gave his face a little slap to orient him. “Relax, Corto. You spent all day being a hero. Lie still now and bask in the glory.”
Sweat prickled on his forehead, though he tried to smile. “You’re going to watch the vixen while she cuts on me, right? Make sure that she doesn’t slice off anything important?”
“It’s a matter of opinion what’s important,” Ariadne said, snipping off a loose thread with a large pair of shears.
Corto’s eyes shot back to me. “Get me off this table.”
“I’ll watch her,” I said, pulling the final knot tight. “Don’t worry about it. You just drift. Let yourself tap out, if you can.”
I folded a piece of cloth into a wedge and held it towards him. With a groan of resignation, he took it between his teeth and braced himself, pushing back against the trestle as Ariadne cut the sleeve of his shirt away.
The wound there wasn’t quite as messy, but the flesh was mangled enough that Ariadne had to do more patchwork. Corto’s chest moved faster and faster, and through the cloth that gagged him, he grunted. I watched, deeply grateful that I wasn’t the one on the table.
“Anyway,” I said, to keep my mind off of it. “You were saying?”
Ariadne looked up. “I was . . . Oh, yes. Lynn ran off screaming for her mother, and in a few seconds, both of them came running back. By then, I’d come over all strange. My head was so light, I thought it was going to lift me off the ground. Well, Elain looked at the sore and she went and fetched a piece of mouldy bread.”
“Why did she have a piece of mouldy bread kicking around?”
“You know, I forgot to ask. Maybe she was going to feed it to the chickens, or something. This was properly mouldy bread, too. Looked like a piece of furry blue carpet. Anyway, Elain wanted to put it on my open sore . . .”
“On the sore?”
“Yes, and I didn’t want to let her and she said . . . I’ve never forgotten this. When I was little, I visited my sister in the kitchens every chance I got. Usually two or three times a week. And I saw Elain every time . . . we became quite chummy by the end. But she never managed to call me by my name. She was probably afraid—servants often are, when you start to get familiar. Whatever the reason, she never slipped—it was always ‘yes, my lady’ and ‘no, my lady’ from her. Except that day. There she was, sitting beside me with a piece of rotting bread, wanting to smear it on my back, and she said, ‘Please, Ariadne.’ Just that. ‘Please, Ariadne.’ She was so determined. So I let her do it.”
I couldn’t imagine this ending well. “What happened?”
“She scraped the mould off the bread, rubbed it on a rag, tied it against the sore, and then she pulled out a pallet and made me take a nap. Lynn lay down next to me and we both fell asleep. That was the only time we ever slept in the same room, I think. And do you know, when I woke up, I felt better. My head didn’t feel like it was going to burst, for a change, and the swelling in my shoulder was down. Elain put more mould on it before she sent me upstairs.”
“Didn’t your parents notice anything?”
“Of course not. My parents never saw me during the day. I was presented to them for ten minutes each evening before they went to supper, and they’d nod at me from across the room and ask whether I was being good for my nurse. They might have noticed the smell, but I didn’t smell all that good before Elain rubbed rot on me. The sore was leaking pus, and pus stinks. My nurse did realize that I’d been up to something, because I had ashes and straw all over my frock. So she gave me what she considered to be a spanking. In other words, she patted the air next to my hindquarters and I dutifully shouted, ‘Ow! Ow!’ But nobody noticed that there was bread mould all over me. The next day, I was feeling so much better that I snuck down to the kitchens and made Elain do the whole thing again. By the next week, there was beautiful new pink flesh over the entire sore. Next month, nothing but a scar.”
“But . . . mouldy bread? That makes no sense!”
“It made no sense, but it worked. The cures that the physicians tried made perfect sense, but didn’t work. Life is strange, what can I say? But since it did work, I plan to smear a lot of mouldy bread on open wounds, and let somebody else worry about the whys and wherefores.”
She knotted a last suture, and squinted critically at her work. “There. That’s the best I can do.”
Somehow, miraculously, all the shreds of flesh on Corto’s arm and thigh had been replaced by a few neat lines of stitching. I nodded, impressed in spite of myself. “Not bad. I’ll recommend you to my friends.”
“Don’t have much of a choice, do you?” Ariadne said. But there was new confidence in her movements as she stripped blood from the blades of her shears. “All right. Bring on the next one.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Lynn
IT WAS EASIER to cope while I was moving. So I interrogated prisoners, helped clear and swab the decks, supervised the hoisting of a new sail, cooked up a mess of plum duff, served it, counted the casks of salt beef, and scoured the brass knob at the centre of the helm. When I couldn’t think of any other mindless tasks to do up top, I retreated to Darren’s cabin, found her second-best pair of boots, and gave them an unnecessarily violent polishing.
It was long after dusk when Darren came in, and she was fairly rippling with smugness, as if she’d made a great discovery.
“You know something?” she asked, as she peeled off her blood-stiffened coat. “Your sister will be a fine surgeon one day, if she isn’t hung first.”
Had she only just figured that out? I bit back a sarcastic remark, with some effort, and brushed the second-best boots again.
Darren threw herself back on the bunk and scratched her belly. “Report,” she ordered.
For a fraction of a second, I was tempted to scream real loud and break something instead, but I shook it off. “Ten prisoners. I made a first stab at a debrief, but they’re so jacked up on dajiki root, they thought that I was a pink elephant who was holding them prisoner in the lair of the mushroom king. I’ll have Ariadne give them a purge before I talk to them tomorrow. We’ve got three dead, and I made duff for dinner, and you’re getting blood on the bunk, and for the love of flying fuck Darren are you actually going to go back to Torasan Isle?”
Darren froze, all her casual ease evaporating into the atmosphere. I brushed the boots again.
“You don’t want me to go?” Darren asked hesitantly.
She was not at her most insightful that day. I brushed the boots once more. If this went on, I was going to wear right through the leather.
Darren sat upright, suddenly wary. “It’s a trap, right? That’s what you’re thinking. If I step onto the Isle, Konrad is going to pop out of a box, shoot me through the eye, skin me, and use me as shoe leather. Is that what you’re worried about?”
I was tempted, so very tempted, to say yes. I had to brush the boots three more times before I could force myself to tell the truth.
“It’s not a trap,” I said. “Your brother wants you back.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Darren. Think. Torasan is a not-very-large house with a not-very-large treasury in the middle of a very, very large war. In the past year, you’ve become a crazy famous pirate with your own fleet of ships and so much money that you could wipe your arse with silk. Does it really surprise you
that your brother suddenly wants to be your best friend?”
Something crumpled in her face. Darren had been hoping, then, that the letter from Konrad had more to do with brotherly love than politics. After everything she’d seen, how could she still be such a hopeless innocent?
“My father never asked me to come home,” Darren said, defensive and wilted all at once. “Not even after I started to rake in the cash.”
“That’s because your father made a big public deal about banishing you, and he probably thought that his testicles would wither and retract into his body if he ever changed his mind. Plus, he spent his entire life pissed drunk, so he probably couldn’t form a thought as complicated as Me want money.” I paused. “You’re not going to go gooey about your father now he’s dead, are you?”
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