Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [61]
The boat carpenter’s wife reminded Fawn a bit of Clover—before this dire sickness had fallen on her, she might have been plump and cheerful. Now her round face was pallid and sheened with cold sweat. The brown hair at her temples curled damply from the tears of pain that leaked from the corners of her eyes. Breathing shallowly, she clawed at her belly, skirts bunching in her sweaty hands. Fawn was aware of Hod creeping out of the cabin door to stare, and Hawthorn as well.
Her husband knelt down and caught up one of her frantic hands; they clutched each other. He looked up at Dag in heartbreaking appeal. “What’s wrong with her, Lakewalker? She didn’t cry like this even when our baby was born!”
Dag rubbed his lips, then knelt down by the woman’s other side, pulling Fawn with him. “Happens I’ve seen this trouble before. In a medicine tent up in Luthlia, a long time ago.” Fawn glanced up at him, knowing just when he’d spent a season in such a tent. “They brought this fellow in, taken sudden with gut pain. Did this come on her sudden?”
The carpenter nodded anxiously. “Two days back.”
“Uh-huh.” Dag rubbed his hand on his knee. “I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a person’s insides”—not the best choice of words, Fawn thought, with maybe half the people here suspecting Lakewalkers of cannibalism—“but down at the corner of most folks’ entrails there’s this slippy blind pocket ’bout the size of a child’s little finger. The medicine makers never could tell me what it does. But this fellow, his had got twisted around or swollen up or something, and took a roaring hot infection that blew it up like a bladder. By the time he came to the medicine maker, it had busted clean open. No, not clean. Dirty. It spilled his guts into his belly just like a knife wound would.”
The keeler boss, at least, looked as though he knew what this entailed, and his lips went round in an unvoiced whistle.
“The infection spread too fast for even the maker’s best ground reinforcements to stop it, and he died about three days on. Funny thing was, when his gut busted, his pain actually eased for a while, since the pressure went down. I guess it fooled him into thinking he was getting better, till it was too late.”
The carpenter’s voice went hushed. “Is Cress’s belly going to bust inside like that, then?”
“It hasn’t yet,” said Dag. “This is a right dangerous sickness. But the groundwork to fix it isn’t really that deep. There’s a host of belly-ills no medicine maker born can cure, especially in women, but this…” He let out his breath. “I can try, leastways.” He nudged Fawn. “Spark, would you take off my arm harness, please?”
Dag could manage that himself, but having Fawn do it directed their spectators’ eyes to her, the patroller’s farmer bride. Purposely? She unbuckled the straps and drew off the wooden cuff and the fine cotton sock beneath that she’d lately knitted for Dag to stop the cuff rubbing up blisters, and set them aside. The presence or absence of the arm harness made no difference to Dag’s ghost hand as far as she knew, but she supposed Dag thought it would alarm the carpenter less not to have that wicked hook waving over his wife’s belly.
“What I can do—what I can try to do…” Dag looked up and around, and Fawn suspected only she realized how much uncertainty and fear his stern face was masking. “First I want to wrap a ground reinforcement around the swelling. Most of you don’t know what ground is, but anyway, you won’t see anything. Then I want to try and pry that swollen end open so’s the pocket will drain back into the gut the way it’s supposed to. That part I think may hurt, but then it ought to ease. There’s a danger. Two dangers. Look at me, you husband, sister.” His voice softened, “Cress.” He smiled down at her; her pain-pinched eyes widened a trifle. When he was sure he had their attention, he continued, “That little pocket’s stretched