Hyllis Family Story 1: Telekinetic (21 page)

The men came around the corner
in three ranks of two and Daum said, “Don’t shoot yet.”

Tarc
noticed that his dad sounded nervous. It made him feel better about the way his own heart had started trip-hammering again.

Suddenly
, one of the men in the third rank turned to his right, evidently having noticed Sgt. Garcia in the doorway. “Now!” Daum said, the cart shaking as he stood.

Tarc
pushed out his bow and sent an arrow on its way. He looked down for another arrow as his ghost guided first his own arrow, and then Daum’s, then his own again. Daum’s had been aimed much better to begin with. Tarc had to push his own about eighteen inches to the left. The two arrows struck home, each one driving into its target’s head through the left eye.

Tarc
pushed out his bow to send another on its way.

Daum had already shot a second arrow.
Tarc reached out to guide Daum’s even before he loosed his own, but this caused Tarc to aim his own arrow poorly. It was so far off that he abandoned his arrow. He wouldn’t have been able to put it on target even riding it hard with his ghost the entire way.

Daum’s arrow fell toward a man
from the second rank. The man turned towards Daum and Tarc when one of the men they’d shot in the first rank fell against his leg. Tarc guided another arrow home into a man’s eye.

Daum shot another. Rather than trying to shoot his own
, Tarc guided Daum’s. Garcia had one of the soldiers backing away, but the other two were both closing around Pike. Daum’s arrow, guided by Tarc, struck one of Pike’s assailants. It had been aimed too low for Tarc to lift it to the man’s head so Tarc was forced to bring it home on the man’s side. As Tarc had feared, the man had mail or something on. He stumbled to a knee when the arrow punched into him, but the arrow bounced away. The man rose and turned, looking for the source of the arrows. He shouted, pointed and started toward the wagon at a dead run, hoping to get to them before they could get off another arrow. Unfortunately for him, Daum had already shot another, this one high enough for Tarc to send it into the man’s eye.

Tarc
looked back to the others. Garcia had vanquished the man he’d been fighting and now ran toward Pike and his opponent. Pike’s man, realizing he stood alone, turned to run.

Tarc
gasped a huge sigh of relief, but Daum said, “We can’t let him get away, he’ll bring the rest down on us!” and loosed another arrow. Again it was too low for Tarc to lift it to the man’s head. Fearing some kind of armor again, Tarc pulled it low and sent it into the man’s thigh.

The man fell and struggled
on the ground. At first Tarc worried that he would be called upon to bring another arrow into the man even after he’d fallen, but then Pike was there to cut the man’s throat.

Daum said, “Sorry, I should aim higher so you can hit them in the head, huh?”

Tarc nodded as he leapt off the wagon. Pike sagged back in the doorway, holding his side and Tarc ran to him.

Tarc helped Pike into the back of the wagon. He had a large slash in his side. Worse, it had cut into a loop of bowel. Tarc held the opening in the intestine shut with his ghost, but some of its contents had already spilled into Pike’s abdomen. Tarc wondered whether it was worth the effort. He knew that a bowel wound like that would almost certainly give the man a lingering death from peritonitis.

Still,
he thought,
maybe Eva would know something to do?

Daum drove the wagon while Garcia scouted ahead and
Tarc sat with Pike who groaned and said, “Shit! I’m done for.”

Tarc
thought of denying it, but knew Pike wouldn’t believe a kid his age. Pike probably didn’t even know Tarc was in training to be a healer.

The wagon pulled into the yard behind the tavern. Daum leapt down and gathered an armful of weapons out of the back, saying, “Captain, can you make it down the stairs into our cellar with Tarc’s help?”

The Captain nodded. Though he
grunted and murmured, “Fat lot of good it’ll do,” he put his left arm over Tarc’s shoulder and kept his right hand across his abdomen and over his wound.

By the time
Tarc and the Captain got down the stairs into the cellar, Daum had a lamp set up and had moved a number of crates away from one of the walls of the cellar. He then stood jiggling a wooden panel. Tarc sent out his own ghost for a brief second and realized that the panel was pegged at its four corners with hidden pegs that Daum was moving with his own ghost. Jiggling the panel took pressure off of them momentarily so they could be moved. Tarc felt surprise as he considered that Daum couldn’t tell where he was pushing if he couldn’t see what he was pushing on. He realized that his father must be pushing blind, presumably where he knew the pegs were. The panel came free and a large unfinished cavity behind it was revealed.

Daum picked up the weapons he’d brought down
and took them in, laying them on the floor. “Tarc,” he said, giving his son a knowing look, “you stay with the Captain, I’ll go get Eva.” He turned and headed back up the stairs.

Though the space had a dirt floor, there were four crates along one wall.
Tarc guided Pike over to it and helped him lie down on the crates. At first Pike tried to lie with his left side toward the wall but Tarc turned him. “You need to be this way so my mother will be able to see your wound.” Once Pike had groaned into place Tarc urged him to roll up a little on his side. “On your side… stuff will drain out of you better.”

“Won’t help,” Pike
grunted, “I’m a dead man.”

Once he was up on his side,
Tarc, still holding the edges of the laceration in Pike’s bowel together, began using his ghost to push the spilled intestinal contents down and out of the wound.

A few minutes later Eva came down the stairs. Pike grunted and rolled back on his
back so she could look at the wound. She held her lamp up near the wound even though Tarc knew she was really examining it with her own ghost. She could have done it in the dark, but didn’t want to have to explain. She sat back on her heels and said, “It nicked your intestine. For you to have any chance, we’ll have to wash the wound out.”

Pike
sighed, “Not worth your time. No one survives wounds to the bowel.”

“Not true. The opening is very small. There’s some chance… if we do
everything
right.” Eva handed him a bottle of the syrup she condensed from poppy seed pod tea, “Take a couple of swigs of this.”

He sighed and did so.

She stood, “Tarc will stay with you. Just let me give him some instructions.”

“Don’t waste his time.” Pike said in a depressed tone, “Let me give Garcia some advice, then
just put me out of my misery. I’ve seen too many men die of gut wounds to want to go that way.”

Eva ignored him. L
eaning close to Tarc’s ear she whispered, “You won’t be able to hold that shut long enough for it to heal. We’ll have to put sutures in it. I’ll bring you sutures and a drawing of how to pass the needle…”

Tarc
had seen Eva put a couple of sutures in someone’s skin before and been nauseated. He drew back in horror then leaned to Eva’s ear, “No!” he whispered vehemently, “I, I couldn’t. I don’t know how!
You
do it!”

Eva sighed as she leaned back to
Tarc’s ear, “We’d have to pull the wound open wide for me to put instruments in there and suture. He’d have too much pain. You can do it with your talent, just sending in the needle and its thread.”

Tarc
sat back wide eyed, trying to think how to protest. When he’d seen Eva suture before she’d used some kind of funny silvery tool to hold the needle. She said it had been passed down from her ancestors. She’d also used a tweezers in her other hand. Her tools were kept in a little pot that she baked in the oven between uses. It would indeed be hard to work in Pike’s narrow wound with tools like that, but surely Eva didn’t
have
to use the tools?! He pictured her holding the needle with her fingers and realized they were even bigger and would require an even larger opening to work through. Besides, fingers had germs all over them and would bring even more infection.

He
was
Pike’s only chance he realized with a flip-flopping sensation in his abdomen.

Eva had already gone upstairs.

Glad he’d already emptied his stomach, Tarc turned back to Pike and, suddenly worried, checked to see if his ghost had kept the hole in the bowel closed. He felt gratified to realize that, even talking to Eva, he’d managed to keep it together. If anything had leaked, it had only been a tiny bit.

Pike
grunted and said, “You don’t need to sit with me boy.”

“I’m happy to sir.”

“Leave me to my God damned misery! I don’t want you here watching me die.”

For a moment taken aback,
Tarc wondered if he should do as the Captain demanded. Then he remembered his mother telling him that, “when bad things happen, people lash out. They have to be angry at someone because something horrible has happened and they take it out on you.”

Tarc
didn’t know how to smooth the waters though, so he just sat there.

Pike said, “Go
, dammit!”

Trying not to sound surly,
Tarc said the only thing he could think of, “My
mother
told me to stay.” He wondered if he could move around the corner and still hold Pike’s bowel wound closed. Remembering how he’d gotten a headache keeping Jacob from bleeding to death and thinking about how it became more difficult to do things with his ghost over a distance, he decided to stay.

Pike said nothing more.
Tarc sat by his side until Eva came back. Daum and Daussie came with her carrying several of the large bottles with the sterile saltwater.

Pike
looked up at Daum, “Where’s Garcia?”

“He’s taking the wagon back out and leaving it several streets away.”

“With Shogun?!” Tarc asked.

Daum nodded
then turned and started up the stairs.

“Why?!”

“The soldiers took him. We don’t want them wondering how we got him back.”

While
Tarc had been talking to his father Eva had been bossing a surprisingly docile Pike. She had him lying on his back at the edge of the crates so his wound was accessible. She unfolded a scrap of paper on which she’d drawn the wound in Pike’s intestine and diagrammed the stitch to close it.

Daussie leaned over to look at it, “How in the world are you going to do
that
!?” she whispered. “You didn’t even bring your needle grabber!”

Tarc
realized that Daussie must mean the tool Eva used for suturing people’s cuts. Then
he
wondered how they would suture Pike without Daussie learning about his talent. Eva turned to Daussie and said, “You find your Dad and tell him to cut your hair.”

“My hair!?” Daussie exclaimed, her hand involuntarily going to her head.

“Yes, your hair. Those strangers are going to be everywhere tomorrow and you don’t want them recognizing you as…”

“Why can’t
you
cut it?” Daussie interrupted plaintively.

“Because,” Eva said impatiently, “You’re going to ask your d
ad to cut it like he cuts Tarc’s”

“Like
Tarc’s!” Daussie exclaimed with horror.

“Yes!
Like a
boy’s
. The worse it looks the better. Then we’ll bind your breasts and wind cloth around your waist to thicken it. We
want
people to think you’re a boy!”

“What?”
Daussie said, aghast.

“Daussie,
” Eva sighed, “
those
men are going to be
raping
pretty girls. Do you want to be one of them?”

“But, but… the deputies…
the…” Daussie stuttered to a stop, angst writ large on her face.

“The deputies are either dead, or will be soon. Ask your dad
about it while he’s cutting your hair. Now,
git!
” Eva pointed up the stairs, then turned back to Pike and unwrapped a small cloth package with trembling hands. It had a curved needle with some odd kind of thread on it.

Tarc
looked over at his mother and saw tears pouring down the face of the woman he’d always thought of as unflappable. Her chest made a little gasping motion and he realized that she was sobbing. Despite the brave front she’d shown Daussie, his mother was terrified too. With a tremendous shock Tarc abruptly recognized that his mother was an attractive woman in her own right. Thinking of her only as his mother, he’d never considered the possibility that she might also be subject to a sexual attack by these invaders.

Tarc
glanced at Daussie, but she had whirled to go up the stairs. He looked back at his mother thinking that the revulsion and self-pity he’d felt when killing those men earlier in the night paled in comparison to what his mother and sister must be feeling now.