A Gift Upon the Shore (37 page)

The laughter died finally, and there were things to do—the first was giving Rachel a dose of laudanum—and nothing could dim the revived hope that was Bernadette's real gift. Even when Mary removed the bandages from Rachel's leg, the wound didn't seem to look as bad as it had yesterday evening. At least, she told herself, it looked no worse. She didn't bandage the wound, but cleaned it, applied some of the yellow ointment, and left it open to the air. She constructed a gauze tent with supports of sticks bound by tape, and placed it over the leg. Then she heated the leftover rabbit meat. Rachel ate only a cupful of broth, but she found Bernadette's herb teas easier to get down.

Despite her lack of appetite, despite her fever, Rachel seemed encouraged. She wanted to sit up, and Mary rolled the bearskin to put behind her against the trunk of the spruce, then helped her wash her face and brush her teeth, and combed and brushed her hair. Rachel spoke only occasionally, and sometimes she repeated the same question or forgot what Mary had said. She didn't seem to understand why Mary was determined to find some sphagnum moss. But that mental vagueness, Mary was sure, could be attributed to the laudanum.

Mary judged from the position of the sun that the morning was nearly half-gone when she was finally ready to leave in search of sphagnum. The fire was newly replenished, and she had tethered Epona on the bank of the creek where there was plenty of grass. Rachel lay quiet, and beside her, within easy reach, were a canteen, a cup, and the laudanum. Yorick refused to leave her.

Mary knelt at her side. “I won't be gone long.”

Rachel's eyes were heavy-lidded, but she brought forth a smile. “I'll be fine. Good luck.” And her eyes closed.

Mary set off at a brisk walk, but before she had covered more than fifty feet, she stopped abruptly. She looked back at the camp, saw Rachel propped against the spruce, motionless. Mary felt a chill she couldn't explain, but she shrugged it off. Rachel was only asleep. She needed that healing sleep.

Rachel was going to be all right, she was going to live.

Mary smiled in the warmth of that conviction and walked along the creek until it disappeared in an echoing culvert under the highway. She crossed the eroded asphalt, then again followed the creek into the forest. In places, salal and elderberry grew so thick she couldn't push through them, and she had to make her way upstream on the rocks in the creek. But within a quarter of a mile the forest canopy thickened, the undergrowth thinned, and she was deep in cool, green rain forest. She angled away from the creek, but didn't stray so far from it that she couldn't hear it. In this forest it would be all too easy to get lost.

She was traversing a slope luxuriant with sword fern, when her foot caught in a hidden snare of roots. With a startled cry, she fought for balance, lost it, plunged into ferns over her head, and tumbled down the slope, futilely grasping fronds that ripped out of the soft ground.

Her descent ended as suddenly as it had begun, and she lay dazed in a tangled mass of crushed fern, nostrils filled with the heavy, dank scent of the earth.

And she was looking into the face of death.

A deer's skull. It lay shrouded in broken fern only inches from her head. A pale spider crawled out from between the crenellated teeth. The bone was gray and rotten, stained with green moss, yet there was in the exquisite curves of its empty eye sockets a ghost of sentience that terrified her, and she didn't understand the terror, didn't understand the shivering of her muscles as she recoiled from that relic of life, didn't understand why she was sobbing uncontrollably. On her hands and knees, she backed away from the skull, staggered to her feet, stumbled toward the sound of the creek, and when she reached its bank, looked up at the sky through dusky plumes of fir and spruce, and a cry of anguish tore out of her throat.

But sky and trees absorbed the sound, made silence of it. She felt the burning in her throat, felt the reverberations in her head, but the sound didn't seem to exist here.

She didn't seem to exist here.

Hold on. Damn it, hold on. You can't let go now
.

She sank down on a boulder warmed by the sun, sagged forward across her folded arms. She felt no physical pain, except for the aches that would turn to bruises later, but she couldn't stop trembling. She might have hurt her baby, she might have disabled herself, and what would happen to Rachel then?

Hold on
. . . .

She took deep breaths and let them out slowly, and finally she felt the mantle of numbness, dark and weighted, settle into place again.

Yet she had lost something in that spasm of panic. She wasn't sure what it was until she remembered her mission here: sphagnum moss. Until she thought,
It won't help
.

What she had lost was hope.

Or perhaps she had only lost the illusion of hope.

“No! Rachel will not
die
!”

She listened to the words, teeth clenched, then rose and set off into the forest again. Sphagnum moss. She found it growing on the flank of a nurse log in a silent glade that reminded her of the forest around the tree at Amarna. She cut enough to fill one of the cloth bags, and on the way back downstream, she gathered fern fiddleheads for the chicken stew. Barley to give it substance, and fiddleheads—added at the last moment—for their piquant flavor and color.

She held on doggedly to the remnants of hope.

But when she reached the camp, even those eroded remnants began to slip out of her hands.

She heard Yorick's whining bark as soon as she crossed the highway. Heart pounding, Mary ran to Rachel, found her uncovered, sprawled with one arm over her face, the gauze tent knocked aside. She had vomited into the litter of needles by the sleeping bag. Mary knelt beside her, pulled her arm away from her face. She was weeping, tears glistening in the dry furrows of her skin. She said in a panting whisper, “Mary, don't let me die alone . . . stay with me. . . .”

Mary gathered her into her arms, felt the shuddering tremors of her body, felt her cheek hot against her own, and it was a long time before the trembling abated, until finally, with a sigh, Rachel relaxed, and Mary eased her down, looked into her dark, sunken eyes, and still could find no words. Rachel touched Mary's cheek with fingers as tremulous as butterflies. “I'm all right now. Must've been a nightmare.”

Mary nearly gave in to the waiting tears. No nightmare could be worse than what Rachel faced waking. The pain was wearing her down like the sea constantly battering its shores. Mary opened the canteen, filled the cup, and added three drops of laudanum. Such a small bottle, so little of the precious fluid left.

Rachel grimaced at the bitter taste, but downed it eagerly, and Mary rose, dug a depression into the soil with her boot heel, and kicked the vomitus into it, then knelt to right the gauze tent over the leg. Had the red shadow tentacles extended so close to the knee earlier this morning? She straightened the sleeping bag and said, “I found some sphagnum, so maybe we'd better try the World War One remedy.”

Rachel winced. “Maybe we'd better just let it be.” Then she studied Mary, finally nodded. “All right. Try it. After that, there's nothing left but the ax.”

Mary turned away as if she'd been struck, and Rachel sighed. “I'm sorry. Just more gallows humor. I don't
want
to die. I want more than anything to live. And I don't want to die like this.”

“You're not going to
die
!”

Rachel laughed briefly. “That would be a very unnatural state of affairs. You didn't get converted at the Ark, did you?”

Mary rose. “I have to take care of your leg. The sphagnum—I don't know whether I should try to sterilize it, or if that would—” “Mary, please . . .”

The aching appeal reached through to Mary, and she sank to her knees. She didn't try to speak.

Rachel said, “If the sphagnum or your friend's herbal remedies help, no one will be more grateful than I. But I've had to face the fact that nothing is likely to help, that I'm dying, and you must face that, too. I have some things to say to you, and I want to say them now while I'm still clearheaded.”

Mary pulled in a deep breath, shifted position until she was sitting cross-legged. “All right, Rachel.”

“First, when you see your friend Bernadette, thank her for the laudanum. That was an act of mercy.”

“But I won't ever see Bernadette again.”

“Yes, you will, you must. Mary, you must go back to the Ark.”

“What?” Mary stared at her. “No, Rachel. Never!”

“Just until your baby is bom. I'm sure the good Doctor will take you back if you put on a show of penitence. You can't deliver this baby alone. If I thought I'd forced you into that, into something that could cause you untold pain, that might . . . kill you . . .”

“You didn't force me into anything, and women
have
been known to deliver their own babies successfully.”

Rachel shook her head impatiently. “But it's too much of a risk!”

“If I go back to the Ark, I might never be allowed to leave it.”

“I can't believe you couldn't outsmart that man, that you couldn't manage to escape with your baby. But if you die because of me—Mary, please,
promise
me you'll go back to the Ark.”

Mary rested her hands on the curve of her belly, felt a tentative movement there, and wondered if there was any way to make Rachel understand that she would willingly face death—for herself and this child—rather than go back to the Ark. Yet she couldn't let Rachel suffer even this small additional anxiety. She said, “I promise you, I'll go back.” A false promise, but that didn't matter. Rachel was satisfied.

“Thank you.” She took a deep breath and for a moment seemed to be gathering her strength. “There's something else I must talk to you about. Mary, I always had the advantage in this relationship—what exists between you and me. I'm twice your age, and the odds have always been in my favor that I'd die before you did.”

Mary laced her hands tightly. “Where's the advantage in that?”

“Only that it was never likely that I'd have to grieve for you. It was always likely that you'd have to grieve for me.”

“I never should've left you.” Her eyes squeezed shut against the pain that threatened to escape the dark mantle. “If I'd stayed at Amama . . .”

She felt Rachel's hand on her clenched fists. “That's exactly what I must talk to you about. I can't stop you from grieving for me— that's a part of love—but I don't want you to add the salt of guilt to the grief.”

Mary shook her head, but she couldn't speak. She wanted to say, to shout,
You're not going to die
. But she could no longer believe that any more than Rachel did.

“Mary, what if Luke had never come to Amarna? I still could've cut myself badly, and you'd be with me, but what could you do? There's no medicine available at Amarna to cure blood poisoning or gangrene, and for you to try an amputation would be futile. Whether you were with me or not, the outcome would be the same. And these last ten years have been a bonus of sorts. We kept each other alive. And living. I'm grateful for those years. I've had good company and even accomplished something for posterity. What more can a human being ask?”

Mary accepted the forgiveness she saw in Rachel's eyes as she had promised to return to the Ark. She accepted it for Rachel's sake, because it was an extraordinary gift, and to refuse it would be to deny the love Mary felt for her and to burden her with more pain.

“That's all I have to say, Mary.” Rachel let her eyes close. The laudanum was beginning to slur her words, slow her breathing. “So, now . . . you'd better try the sphagnum. And fix me some herb tea. I'll try to keep down some food later.”

Mary rose, looked around dazedly. Things to do. Yes, she had things to do. The sphagnum for Rachel's leg, the fire—it was down to embers—and tea and the stew. Oh, yes, things to do . . .

In the long reaches of the night Mary was wakened by Rachel's nightmare. Another dose of laudanum let her return to quiet sleep, and Mary added more wood to the fire, huddled over it to warm herself, then went to the bank to look out at the moon-silvered sea.

I have even accomplished something for posterity
.

The books.

Rachel hadn't mentioned them. Perhaps she didn't consider it necessary.

She couldn't have finished the Herculean task of sealing and storing all the remaining books in the last six months, but enough to make her feel she could die satisfied with her contribution to posterity.

Mary thought of the books with a kind of hunger, a longing for words and their boundless range of expression. And she remembered how in another era she had ached and sweated over words, how she had hammered at them, molded them, cast them into harmonies that would ring in a reader's mind like a struck bell.

Mary Hope had been a writer.

She had forgotten that, and it should not be forgotten.

Rachel Morrow had been an artist. She had shaped insight into images, and that should not be forgotten. That it was possible for a gifted human being to perform such metamorphoses should not be forgotten. That it was possible for any human being to reach for the potential within the mind, to reach for understanding, for a new metaphor, a new image, a new harmony, to reach for the spectrum of emotion and conviction called love—that should not be forgotten.

Grief is a part of love
.

Mary watched the ghosts of breakers tumbling onto the sand and felt the impatient stirrings of life within her.

This child would remember.

The day began in fog that obliterated the sea, yet when Mary looked straight up, the fog had a blue cast from the sky beyond. She knew that if she were standing a hundred feet higher, she'd be in full sunlight, looking down on clouds snugged into the contours of the shoreline. But she found an equivocal satisfaction in being submerged in the silent fog that made watercolor-wash patterns of the trees, that drew the limits of her world close and centered them on a crackling fire.