The Healer (32 page)

The blue appendage was mushrooming out of his meli and at the same time spreading over his skin. He, in turn, was struggling to contain it. He'd pull it back and for a moment seem to have the upper hand, only for it to spill out of him a second later even more.

Both guards backed away in fear and horror. Meera sucked in her breath and looked to Payne. He was tearing off his clothes, first his vest and then his shirt. Bare-chested, he threw himself on the ground, head to toe beside his brother as planned.

“Stake me, too,” he told them. “But first free his arm and wrap us tight. Quick. No time to lose.”

Meera jumped at his command but couldn't get Wyn's arm free, and in trying, accidentally touched the blue excrescence. A lancinating pain shot up her arm, and with a cry she fell back. Gasping, she crawled forward to try again.

One of the guards rushed in to help, and together they got the stake out. With a knee he pinned Wyn's hand against the ground while she wrapped his and Payne's arms together. Payne ordered her to make it tighter. When she had done this, he had her anchor the two arms down with a double pair of spikes.

“Now stake the rest of me.”

She did, working fast, then knelt beside him. His chest was pale in the twilight, his meli dark red.

“What else?” she asked.

Already he could feel the impulses prickling up his arm, the rising heat, as though he were edging closer to an open flame. He could see that she was worried and tried to cheer her up.

“It's going to be fine. This is how we planned it.” He paused, then grinned. “Wyn and I haven't been this close for years.”

She managed a smile, then touched his hand and whispered luck. It seemed a small thing to offer him, insufficient for the magnitude of the moment, but it was all she could bring herself to say.

Payne closed his eyes, hiding his disappointment. He needed luck; luck was welcome. But he wanted love, and that, it seemed, he'd have to earn.

For those of a certain disposition, a certain morbid curiosity, the Pen by day had its rewards. By night, though, it was an altogether different proposition.

Meera set her watch at the midpoint of the semicircle they had lain out, just inside the dribbled line of juice, whose dark viscosity remained visible against the milky brown of the canyon floor. She had her lance, and she had her satchel of food and water. She had some extra clothing and a knife, as well. The guards had gone.

Unlike the flesh and blood from which they sprang, Concretions made no distinction between day and night. They existed and ceased to exist equally by sun and moon, whether the sky was blazing bright or dotted with stars, pink with dawn or black and blue with night. Likewise, they produced their raft of sounds regardless of the hour.

Meera had prepared herself for this, but there was really no preparing. The nighttime noises were simply too spooky and unnerving,
especially the more human ones. Some of the cries and laughs and rambling colloquies came so close to human speech that with half an effort she could almost hear words. It came as something of a shock to realize early in her watch that she was trying to.

It was an attempt, she guessed, to tame her fear of the unknown, by making the strange less threatening, by taking something beastly and turning it into something familiar. The trick worked too, after a fashion, which is to say her fear of imminent assault and injury diminished (although, as a body was not designed to sustain such a heightened state of fear for very long, it might have been that she simply exhausted her stores). It was less successful when the sounds were particularly loud or close, for then her heart would race and she would jump to her feet in a panic, or if she was on her feet already, pacing back and forth as she did throughout the night, she would freeze and turn, widening her eyes and brandishing her pike.

Which is how the first hour passed.

Meera hypervigilant and jumpy. Conks whooping like demented peacocks, echoing hysterically off the canyon walls. Payne and Wyn staked out head to toe like pieces of a puzzle. The stars above like pinholes. Twilight giving way to night.

Gradually, the temperature fell. There was heat in the ground, but that, too, slowly dissipated. She would have liked a fire but didn't want to call attention to herself. She spread a blanket, put on a jacket and had a bite of food.

A nearby sound, a crunch of rock, brought her to her feet. Heart thumping, she peered into the darkness, spear in hand. The noise recurred; it seemed behind her. Whirling around, she rushed to Payne and Wyn.

They had not moved or been disturbed that she could see, though because of their peculiar orientation she had to circle them to get a proper look. Payne had insisted on the head-to-toe position so that their left arms, their healing arms, could be in contact, hoping that this
would optimize at least the first two stages of the healing. As a result, no matter where she stood, one of their bodies was upside down.

Payne looked the same as he had from the beginning, and at first glance so did Wyn. His face was taut, his jaw clenched, his eyelids half-closed and fluttering. But he wasn't thrashing around quite so much, nor straining at the stakes, and his breathing was less harsh. The blue excrescence, pallid as a ghost, still pulsed in and out of him. It seemed to have neither shrunk nor grown.

She heard the noise again, this time sounding something like a footfall, but heavier and more menacing, and closer, much closer than before. She had the urge to scream at it, but couldn't find her voice. Which angered her.

The sound drew nearer.

Leveling her lance, she cried out. “Go away. Whatever you are. Leave us alone.”

More crunching, near the fence. Something shadowy skulking toward her.

“I said go away. You're not wanted here.”

An indistinct and gravelly voice answered her, sort of human, sort of not.

She barked at it, “I said be gone!”

The dark shape halted, looking squat and not quite so menacing. “If that's the way you want it. But if it was me, I'd be grateful for a little company.”

“Bolt!” she cried.

“Come or go?” he asked soldierly.

“Oh, come,” she said. “Please. Come.”

He was carrying a small pack, as well as a pike, which he purposefully drove into the ground with each step. Crunch, it went, crunch, crunch.

“You scared me.” She was trembling.

“That's good. Worse thing for both of us is sneaking up unannounced.”
He eyed the prostrate men, keeping a safe distance. “Now that's a pretty sight.”

To Meera it was he who was pretty. She was amazed he had come. It was so far beyond the call of duty, an act of almost unparalleled bravery and courage to be inside the Pen at night, especially with a creature on the loose that had him terrorized, him and all the others, drivers and guards alike. But here he was, saying how it only seemed fair that she had company. With a gruff humility he confessed his fear was much abated by the sight of Wyn, its principal source, staked out like the animal he was and immobilized on the ground. The other creatures in the Pen did not worry him near so much, and as for the darkness, he turned out to be no stranger to it, having frequently spent nights alone under the desert sky outside Gode.

He knew the stars, and after he had settled down and they had shared some food, he told her stories to pass the time. One, about the coming of the People, was similar to one she knew. These were pretesque, pre-human people, the ancestors of them all. In her story they originated from a string of pearls that fell from the heavens and burst open upon hitting the ground. In his they sprang from the eggs of a serpent. He pointed it out to her, the serpent, a zigzag chain of stars, some faint, some bright, that stretched across the northern horizon. Mobestis, he called it, although it also went by other names. It had lived in the Great Sea in the Great Beginning, before swallowing all the water, which is how the deserts were born. After that, deprived of its home, it was miserable, but being a serpent could not weep, and the Creator, taking pity, had raised it to the sky, where it could live again in the sea, the Sea of Night. And it could drink all the water it wanted (and here Bolt pointed to the dark material, the infinite blackness, between the stars); and it did, it drank to its heart's content. And in gratitude it gave a gift to the Creator. It laid a clutch of eggs, which fell to the earth, then hatched and brought the People to the land. The white of the eggs was the source of the People's mind and spirit; the
shell, of their physical strength and endurance; the yolk, when mixed with the mud of earth, of their breath and blood. And the People grew strong and multiplied. And they were One People, for this was long before the rift, the Great Split, occurred.

Here the story ended, and before long the moon appeared, which evoked a new round of stories, until, at last, neither of them had any more to tell. They fell silent, and for an instant the Conks did, too. The sudden stillness was startling, almost deafening, as only the stillness of the desert could be. The night seemed to swell around them.

Meera stood and wandered over to the brothers, who by the wan moonlight looked ghostly and pale. In their splayed-out, topsy-turvy symmetry they could have been the imprint of a new species, a new People, come to haunt the old ones. Or replace them, or maybe just remind them how it was before they had become sundered, when the two races were still one.

Up-canyon a Conk broke the silence with a plaintive cry.

Bolt joined her. “How long you expect it'll be?”

“This? I have no idea.”

“What's usual?”

“For a meli healing? There's no such thing. Two, six, twelve hours. More.” Her own healing, if she could call it that, had seemed to go on forever. This, she suspected, would take longer.

Bolt gestured at the one who had given them such grief. “You think he's hurting?”

“Wyn?” She almost laughed. “Oh yes. I can pretty much guarantee it. And I think the more he comes back from wherever he is, the more he regains himself, if he does, the more it's going to hurt. That thing is so much a part of him. Getting rid of it might feel like getting rid of a part of himself. It's a ploy they use, making you think it'd be worse without them, worse without the pain.”

The blue thing, the spillage, seemed to have grown more opaque. And slightly smaller and more compact, although possibly it was
merely less blurry and more distinct. Taking no chances, Bolt kept his lance poised.

“What do you think it is?”

The question took her by surprise. “Oh, Bolt. You don't know?”

“Well, it's a Conk. Least it wants to be. Wish it would make up its mind and get it over with. Then at least we can settle this thing.”

She had a sudden vision of bloodshed. “No. Please. Give them time.”

“We got all night.”

“It may take longer.”

“Twelve hours is what you said.” He pointed his pike at Payne. “You think he's even working at it? Looks to me like he's asleep. Maybe we ought to wake him up and remind him why he's here.”

“He doesn't need reminding.” She tugged on Bolt's arm until he turned away and left the two of them in peace. “I've got another story. This one's true. It's about me.”

Bolt stayed until daybreak, then left to get some sleep. Meera had packed an open-sided tent for protection against the sun, and she set it up, centering the canopy on Wyn and Payne. She was careful not to touch the blue Concretion, which was smaller now, or at least smaller outside Wyn's body, and thus easier to avoid. How big it was on the inside, and what, in fact, its character had become, she could only imagine.

Wyn had to be exhausted. He continued to strain against the stakes, but with less and less frequency and but a fraction of his previous strength. His breathing had become more shallow, and his pulse, visible between the cords of his neck, was as rapid as a sparrow's. His eyes, to her relief, were finally closed, but his eyelids continued to tremble.

Sometimes a patient had to be brought to the very brink of death before he could be brought back, before he could be healed. It required
the deepest kind of faith and trust and, ultimately, surrender. Payne had spoken to her of this, and she herself remembered lying on the healing bed with Wyn. She had loved him very much, or what she had felt was love back then. Otherwise, she would never have consented. Theirs had not been a one-night stand as she had told Payne, but a longer and deeper affair, lasting several months. Wyn had never threatened her. For all his swagger he had a streak of insecurity when it came to women, or at least when it came to her. He needed proof of her affection, and by the same token, he had to prove that he was worthy of it. Which is why he had insisted on the healing, despite knowing of her bloodline and the risk it posed to both of them.

She'd been so young. So full of romantic ideas and so vulnerable to words. Flattered into thinking she had the power to relieve him of his insecurity, she had agreed to do what he asked. Undeniably, she'd been swayed by his entreaties, but she was not coerced, as she had laid it out to Payne. She had gone ahead not against her will, but willingly. With trepidation, to be sure, but with excitement, too, with daring and with passion. He had bound their arms together, hers to his, his to hers, and she had surrendered to him.

Now she knelt beside him and whispered for him to do the same. Surrender to his brother. Have faith in him.

Through the morning she stayed beside them, sharing the cover of the tent. She felt sleepy but forced herself by various means to stay awake. She sang songs. She recited fragments of poetry. Near her boot she found an anthill, and for a while she counted ants. In the absence of food it seemed odd that they would take up residence inside the Pen. She searched the ground for carrion, following the antline until she caught sight of a millipede, or a caterpillar, something rather large and furry with many legs. It was lying on its side, looking dead, but strangely, the ants disregarded it, marching past as if it didn't exist. She hadn't known that ants were so particular about their diet, when all at once, the creature wriggled. Well, she thought, that explained it.
The ants didn't want it because it wasn't dead. When it righted itself, she changed her mind about what it was. Too big and broad and lumpy for a caterpillar or a millipede, and much too quick. It shot across the sand as if it were on wheels. And was it her imagination, or was it making some sort of squeaking sound?