Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [96]
He had slightly more hope of the full patrol of twenty-five he sent home that afternoon, carrying both a warning to Hickory Lake of their neighbor’s impending winter shortages, and a much more urgently worded plea for Hoharie or some equally adept maker to come to his aid. To stay at Bonemarsh, Dag selected the best medicine makers—for patrollers—his company had, including several veteran mothers or grandmothers, whom he figured for already knowing how to keep alive people who couldn’t talk or walk or feed themselves. Small ones, anyway. They can work up.
He hadn’t expected them to work up to him, however. “Dag,” said Mari, with her usual directness, “the bags under your eyes are so black you look like a blighted raccoon. Have you had anybody look you over yet?”
He’d been thinking of quietly hauling one of the better field medicine fellows out of range of the grove to examine him. Mari, he realized glumly, was not only at the top of that list by experience and ground-sense skill, but would corner any substitute and have the story ripped out of him in minutes anyway. Might as well save steps.
“Come on,” he sighed. She nodded in stern satisfaction.
He led off to his stump of last night, or one like it, sat, and cautiously opened himself. It took a couple of minutes, and he ended with his head bent nearly to his knees. Still hurts.
He heard a long, slow hiss through her teeth that for Mari was as scary as swearing. In a tone of cool understatement, she observed, “Well, that don’t look so good. What is that black crap?”
“Some sort of ground contamination. It happened when I…” he started to say, ground-ripped the malice, but changed it to, “when I tried to draw the malice off from Utau, and it turned on me. It was like bits of it stuck to me, and burned. I couldn’t get rid of it. Then I closed up and passed out.”
“You sure did. I thought you were just ground-ripped—hah, listen to me, just ground-ripped—like Utau. Does that, um…hurt? Looks like it ought to.”
“Yeah.” Dag turned his groundsense on himself, closing his eyes for an instant to feel more clearly. Two of the gray patches on his left arm, separate last night, seemed to have grown together since like two water droplets joining. I’m losing ground.
Mari said hesitantly, “You want me to try anything? Think a bit of ground reinforcement might help, or a match?”
“Not sure. I wouldn’t want to get this crud stuck to you. I suspect it’s”—lethal—“not good. Better wait. It’s not like I’m falling over.”
“It’s not like you’re dancing a jig, either. This isn’t like…Utau’s ground, it’s like it’s scraped raw, shivering and won’t stop, but you can see it’ll come right in its own time. This…yeah, this is outside my ken. You need a real medicine maker.”
“That’s what I figured. Hope one shows up soon. Meantime, well, I can still walk, it seems. If not jig.” Dag hesitated. “If you can refrain from gossiping about this all over camp, I’d take it kindly.”
Mari snorted. “So if this had happened to any other patroller, how fast would you have slapped him onto the sick list?”
“Privileges of captaincy,” Dag said vaguely. “You know that road, patrol leader.”
“Yeah? Would that be the privilege to be stupid? Funny, I don’t seem to recall that one.”
“Look, if anybody with more skill shows up here to hand this mess on to, you bet I’ll be on my horse headed east in an hour.” Except that he could not ride away from what he carried inside, now, could he? “I have no idea who the Raintree folks can spare or when, but I figure the soonest we could get help from home is six days.” He stared around; the afternoon was growing hazy, with a brassy heat in the air that foreboded evening thundershowers.
Mari glanced toward the grove, and said quietly, “Think those folks will last six more days?”
Dag let out a long breath and heaved himself to his feet. “I don’t know, Mari. Does look like we need to rustle up some kind of tent covering to gather them under, though. Rain tonight, you think?”
“Looks like,” she agreed.
They strolled silently back to the dead grove.