"Four Legs and a Tale (Part III)"

Joel is incensed when his sister returns with the oaf from the manor. “You said you were going for the reeve!” He glares venomously at Kev, who stares dumbly the scene before him. Joel sits with Sian’s head in his lap, stroking the long flaxen curls as he would a horse’s mane. He’s been bathing the manhorse’s brow with a rag damped from the waterskin, but when Roanne asks if it’s helped, the boy shakes his head. “I think the arrow was poisoned,” he says. He glares more heatedly at Kev. “You’ll be useless!”

“No more than you,” Kev retorts, finally finding his voice. He ventures closer, squinting in the dim light. Joel has kept the fire going, but after the bright sun outdoors, the cave is shadowy and apt to play tricks on the eyes. “Is that … is it … What is it?”

“We’ve named him Sian,” Roanne says, staying close to Kev’s side.

“Someone tried to kill him,” Joel adds, indignantly.

“What is he?”

Joel makes a disgusted sound. Roanne keeps her tone calm though she’s inclined to cuff her brother’s ear. Kev isn’t really an oaf, but he isn’t Lirosi, either, and Joel has learned to mistrust anyone descended from the marauders. “He’s hurt, pierced by an arrow,” she says. She leaves Kev to kneel at the manhorse’s side. His flanks rise and fall too quickly, his chest moving in shallow time with his breathing. His tawny hide is dark with sweat, his chiseled face flushed with fever. She looks to the wound in his hip. It’s seeping, and she notes with alarm that the hide around the head is blistering. She meets Joel’s worried eyes. “Are you sure it’s poisoned?”

He answers, whispering. “Would a fever come so fast if it wasn’t?”

She bites her lip, looking again at the blistering around the wound. Whoever shot Sian surely meant to kill him. Her gaze drifts back to his face. So handsome, so innocent. Why would anyone want to hurt him, let alone make him die slowly? “I don’t know what to do,” she confesses.

“We have to remove the arrow.”

She and Joel start as one. They’ve forgotten Kev’s presence, but his is the voice, cracking and splintering, that urges them to action. He produces a knife and kneels beside Joel, who snorts with derisive laughter. Roanne recognizes the blade as Kev’s little toy knife, the one he uses to clean his fingernails since it’s good for nothing else. “What are you going to do?”

“It’s barbed,” Kev says, peering closely at the arrowhead. The greater part of it is buried in the manhorse’s flesh, but deliberately jagged points are visible where it joins the broken shaft. “We’ll have to cut it out.”

Joel snorts again. “With that?”

“Just a tiny cut,” Kev insists. “To widen the hole.”

“That pitiful thing won’t cut porridge,” Joel says, scornfully.

“Let him try,” Roanne snaps at her brother. He scowls, but he relents. Kev studies the arrowhead, assessing the task before he commits. Roanne watches, grateful that she’s decided to trust him. His moppy brown hair falls over his forehead; he brushes it back with the hand holding the knife and almost pokes himself in the eye. Joel scoffs. The manhorse stirs feebly at the sound, surprising Kev. It’s as if he hasn’t realized that Sian is alive. Fearful that he’ll change his mind, Roanne grasps his wrist. “Do it,” she whispers. “Please.”

Swallowing nerves, Kev nods. “Hold his head,” he tells Joel.

“I’m already holding his head.”

“Joel, just do what he says.”

“But—oh, fine.” Her brother leans forward and cradles the blond head in his arms. Kev also bends, his own head obscuring Roanne’s view. She busies herself tearing strips from her shirt to blot the bleeding once the arrow is free; she must first remove her tunic, so she turns away though Kev won’t be watching. The manhorse makes a plaintive, wrenching sound in his throat; and she hears his hooves scrabble at the dirt floor. Kev swears vigorously, Joel grunts with the effort of holding Sian still—he’s only eight years old and hasn’t the strength to restrain a full grown man—and when Roanne has straightened her tunic in place, she finds Kev kneeling astride the manhorse, digging at the wound as if his knife was a spoon. Sian screams, kicking his hind legs, and with a triumphant yelp, Kev brandishes the barbed arrowhead in a bloody fist. In the next breath, he cries out in pain.

“Oaf,” Joel spits, struggling valiantly to calm the manhorse.

“It’s burning!” Kev cries. “My hand is burning!”

Roanne springs forward, knocking him from his seat on the manhorse’s flank and driving his open palm into the cool soft earth. She scrubs it back and forth to get the worst of the poison off his skin; when he finally stops yelling, she soaks a strip of her shirt from the waterskin and binds the hand herself, tenderly, hoping he won’t be scarred. His breath comes hard, in quick little sobs, but when Roanne meets his eyes, he manages a watery smile.

“Better?” she asks.

“Fuck,” he replies.

“Smear on some of this.” The unguent jar lands with a thump from where Joel has tossed it. Sian has gone quiet, more or less; he whimpers in his fever sleep and all four legs jerk now and then, one at a time. Blood oozes from the open wound on his hip, staining his coat the colour of sunset.

“Help him,” Kev tells Roanne.

“Are you all right?” she asks first.

He nods, shaken but honest. “Go.”

The wound is blistered and bloody; Kev’s feeble little blade ground some meat while digging out the arrowhead. The cut is tiny, but the hole is deep and red. She fears it will need stitches. She flushes the wound with water, then applies more unguent and seals it all with the bandages made from her shirt. Joel offers to stay while she fetches Mam’s needle kit.

“I’ll stay,” Kev says. “I won’t be missed for a while.”

“You go with Roanne,” Joel says. He’s not about to let a fool from the manor mind his charge; it’s in his face as much as his voice, and when his sister considers this, she decides it will be better to have Kev accompany her to the camp. Mam can look at his hand, for one thing, and maybe offer some unwitting advice for tending the manhorse’s fever. The tricky bit will be explaining to her mother what happened to her shirt.

 

* * *

“What happened to you?” is the first thing she hears when she ducks inside the family tent. Mam is crouching by the fire pit, stirring up coals before she lays the cook stone atop them. She’s making bread and minding the younger children whose mothers are at their chores—everyone helps where they can, for the good of the tribe. Roanne’s mother makes the best flatbread and has boundless patience with little children, so she is excused from beating rugs and milking goats. She always has a smile for Kev despite his marauding blood. Roanne takes full advantage of this to avoid answering the first question.

“Kev burned his hand. Will you look at it?”

Mam straightens instantly. “Let me see.” She doesn’t ask why the boy has come to her rather than be tended at the manor; her daughter is less welcome there than Kev is at the Lirosi encampment.

Kev hesitates. “It’s stopped hurting,” he says, skittishly.

“She’s not going to hurt you worse,” Roanne scolds.

Mam reaches for the boy’s bandaged hand. “I suppose I should ask how it happened.” She gives her daughter a dark look. “I’m sure it has something to do with the state of your shirt.”

“I made bandages from it,” Roanne says. She cranes her neck to watch Mam unwrapping the strip of homespun linen. “We didn’t need them all,” she adds when it seems her mother might ask.

Mam makes an absent-minded noise as Kev’s burned palm is bared. Roanne turns to scout out the needle kit while her mother is occupied; she only manages a few steps toward the inner curtain when she’s called back by Kev’s startled squeak.

“It was burned, I swear!”

      Eyes wide, Roanne peers around her mother’s flank. “It’s not burned now,” Mam says in an odd voice. She glances sharply at Roanne. “Tell me what happened.”

Roanne thinks fast. “I made him scrub it in the dirt.”

“Why would you do that, child?” Mam’s black eyes snare Kev. “How did you hurt your hand?”

He’s speechless; no help at all. Roanne can hardly blame him. She didn’t expect this, either. The fuss he’d made in the cave had given every sign that he was really truly scorched. His hand is grubby as usual, his skin pink and perfect underneath the grime. Mam suddenly notices something else.

“Where is your brother?”

The children trade glances. Mam abruptly jerks on Kev’s arm, demanding attention, obedience—anything, Roanne realizes, to quell a rising fear. “We left him outside,” Kev says, telling only a bit of the truth.

It’s not enough for Mam. Lips pursed, she inspects the hand caught in her grip as if she is willing Kev’s future into it. She closes her fist and looks him in the eye. “You have touched a dark object,” she says, bluntly. “Roanne, where is Joel?”

“He’s fine, Mam. Why do you say Kev touched a dark object?”

“Will you lie to me and say he did not?” Mam glares violence at the manor boy. “Speak up! What was it? What did you touch?”

Kev trembles, unable to free either his hand or his gaze. Lirosi women are feared by those who know no better—and by some who do. They have the gift of inner sight, it is said, and Roanne is often dismayed by her mother’s talent for guessing what her children choose to keep from her.

“It was a … an … a-arrowhead,” Kev stammers.

“We found it in the wood,” Roanne hastily adds. “He picked it up and started yelling.”

Mam lets Kev go and begins herding the younger children outdoors. She calls for Lidia; when the younger woman answers, she is told to watch the little ones. Mam collects her shawl. “Show me,” she commands, fixing her eyes on Kev because Roanne is halfway immune to them.

 

To be continued …

copyright 2013 Ruth R. Greig