Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [38]
“Nothing special. In and out for a quick match at a moment he needed it, was all.”
Her brows twitched, but she didn’t pursue the point further. “Well, come on in, let’s have a look at this.” She gestured at his sling. “How in the world have you managed?”
“I’ve had help.”
Dag followed her into her workroom, closing the door behind them. A tall bed, onto which he’d helped lift more than one hurt comrade over the years, stood out in the room’s center, but Hoharie gestured him to a chair beside a table, taking another around the corner from it. He slipped his arm out of its sling and laid it out, and she pulled a pair of sharp scissors from her belt and began undoing the wrappings. Upon inquiry, he favored her with a much-shortened tale of how he’d come by the injury back in Lumpton Market. She ran her hands up and down the bared forearm, and he could feel the press of her ground on his own, more invasive than the long probing fingers.
“Well, this is a clean break and a straight setting,” she reported. “Doing well, for what, two weeks?”
“Nearer three.” It seemed a lot more than that.
“If not for that”—she nodded at his hook—“I’d send you home to heal on your own, but you’d like these splints off sooner, I’d imagine.”
“Oh, yes.”
She smiled at his heartfelt drawl. “I’ve done all the groundwork I can for today on your young friend Saun, but my apprentice will be pleased to try.”
Dag gave this the grimace it deserved; she grinned back unrepentantly. “Come, Dag, they have to practice on someone. Youth to experience, experience to youth.” She tapped his arm cuff. “How’s the stump? Giving you any trouble?”
“No. Well…no.”
She sat back, eyeing him shrewdly. “In other words, yes. Off with the harness, let me see.”
“Not the stump itself,” he said, but let her unbuckle the harness and lay it aside, and run her experienced hands down his arm and over its callused end. “Well, it’s sometimes a little sore, but it’s not bad today.”
“I’ve seen it worse. So, go on…?”
He said cautiously, “Have you ever heard of a missing limb still having…ground?”
She rubbed her bony nose. “Phantom limbs?”
“Yes, just like that,” he said eagerly.
“Itching, pain, sensations? I’ve heard of it. It’s apparently very maddening, to have an itch that can’t be scratched.”
“No, not that. I knew about that. Met a man up in Luthlia once, must be twenty-five years back, who’d lost most of both feet to frostbite. Poor fellow used to complain bitterly about the itching, and his toes that he didn’t have anymore cramping. A little groundwork on the nerves of his legs usually cleared it right up. I mean the ground of missing limbs.”
“If something doesn’t exist, it can’t have a ground. I don’t know if someone could have an illusion of ground, like the illusion of an itch; folks have hallucinations about all sorts of bizarre things, though, so I don’t see why not.”
“A hallucination shouldn’t be able to do real groundwork.”
“Of course not.”
“Well, mine did. I did.”
“What’s this tale?” She sat back, staring.
He took a breath and described the incident with the glass bowl in the Bluefield parlor, leaving out the ruckus that had led up to it and concentrating on the mending itself. “The most of it was done, I swear, with the ground of my left hand.” He thumped his left arm on the table. “Which isn’t there. I was deathly sick after, though, and cold all through for an hour.”
She scowled in thought. “It sounds as though you drew ground from your whole body. Which would be reasonable. Why it should take that form to project itself, well, your theory about your right arm being lost to use forcing a, um”—she waved her hands—“some sort of compensation seems like a fair one. Sounds like a pretty spectacular one, I admit. Has it happened again?”
“Couple of times.” Dag wasn’t about to explain the circumstances. “But I can’t make it happen at will. It’s not even reliably driven by my own tension. It’s just random, or so it seems to me.”
“Can you do it now?”
Dag tried,