Hammer & Air (5 page)

It took me long moments to breathe again, and the shudders that racked my body didn’t seem to want to stop. Finally, I relaxed enough to lean my head back against his shoulder, and his harsh breath rang in my ear with his words.

“It were a promise,” he grated. “I sealed it.”

There will always be us.

I swallowed and nodded weakly. Yes. There would always be us. I’d promised. I may have thought of myself as a coward, as the weak one, but I vowed to have enough strength to keep that.

Hammer pulled the blankets up around us and collapsed on me, still inside me, with my spend drying on his hand and my cock. I grunted, surprised, and he hauled me sideways—still in my body. Usually he spent some time cleaning us—it were part of our ritual of fucking, and it seemed a sweet thing, out of character with my gruff, visceral Hammer. Not tonight. Tonight, like any other howling, raw-boned animal, Hammer wanted me marked with his come and his sweat. I understood in a way that went under my skin, but that I couldn’t put words to, not the words in my science books, anyway.

His arms anchored me to him, and I felt his breathing even out, and sometime before he slept, I muttered, “Hammer, we’re going to have to find other words for this.”

“Mine,” he muttered, hauling me tighter. His cock were spent and flaccid, though, and it flopped limply out of me, leaving me stretched and sore.

I guess that were what he had. He had me. Maybe he were right. Words would bollix the whole works up.

The next day the wind picked up. The trees around us were mostly cedars and redwoods, but I could smell the metallic zing of snow. Autumn were nearly over. The underbrush were turning brown with the cold, and the deer were fat and sleepy with the reserves they’d eaten during the wild harvest.

The mountain lions were feasting well, also.

Hammer were a smith. We’d both lived our lives in the town. We’d eaten slaughtered animals and vegetables harvested from gardens. He were proud of the conies and partridges he caught in his snares, and he weren’t stupid, but he weren’t a woodsman either. I were proud of the wild tubers and greens I recognized, and the herbs and medicines I gathered for just-in-case. I’d read as much as I could about the way the world worked, but I knew no more than Hammer.

We stumbled along, walking as far as we could through the woods in a day, keeping west and choosing our camp based on things we needed, like water and shelter and firewood. Some nights we found all three, and those nights, if Hammer were lucky with a snare, we’d stay and dig some tubers and store up on our food. I’d worked with our tough wool blankets, a tarpaulin, and some cord in the bottom of my pack and could set up a passable tent over the fire Hammer built in the evening. If we let the fire burn to embers, we could sleep in relative warmth, although the ground weren’t comfortable in the least.

We got proficient at things, and when we lived through a week of tramping through snow, I started having hopes we might see spring and a time when we arrived at a town that didn’t have fliers posted with Hammer’s crime written on them.

One day, Hammer ran down a deer, bashing it on the skull in one mighty swing of his arm, the smith’s hammer at the end. The thing twitched for a bit—were still twitching, in fact—when I caught up with them, panting and blowing because I hadn’t been expecting the impromptu hunt. I settled down with the knife Hammer had given me, and that I’d learned to keep sharp, and I went about dressing the thing.

It were another one of those things I’d read about and guessed about. There were some parts you’d want to eat and some parts you wouldn’t, so I stripped the parts I wouldn’t want to taste out of the middle of the deer and threw them into the brush, thinking that scavengers would come and do their part of the clean up. I started stripping off the skin and thinking of asking Hammer to make a fire right there, so we could roast the carcass and strip the meat from the bones, and just when I opened my mouth to say that, there were a scream from the rock behind me that almost made me wet myself.

I were crouched in front of the deer, and Hammer were leaning against the tree next to me, waiting for the moment he could help. Suddenly, Hammer were behind me, screaming fiercely at whatever were making that screeching noise.

My first thought were the knife. How were Hammer supposed to defend himself when I had the knife! But as I scrambled around and saw Hammer, engaged in a life and death struggle with a giant mountain cat, I realized that a knife would have been clumsy and useless in Hammer’s massive fist. He were doing just fine with the weapon he’d used so well just an hour ago on the deer.

The creature screamed and ducked as Hammer swung the smith’s hammer like a mace at its head. A bitter claw lashed out, catching Hammer on the arm, but Hammer swung again and caught the thing with its long teeth and ice-curdling scream. It screamed again, this time in pain, and its jaw cracked and swung open. It whimpered then and retreated—I’d say, to lick its wounds—but it were clear to see that the creature would die eventually. At the moment, it were still strong and healthy, and still armed with claws, but its jaw were hanging by a bit of skin and naught else. It could still kill us now, but Hammer had ended its future right quick.

But Hammer’s sleeve were soaked in blood, and he stood there, shaking, as the thing slunk off, probably to glare at us from the underbrush until we left the offal for it to lick. I came up next to Hammer, trying not to panic. The smith’s tool fell from his weakened hand, and I almost failed, even in that.

It took a minute of shaking so bad I couldn’t raise my hand to tend him, but finally I stopped concentrating on what I’d do if Hammer died, and started concentrating on how to make him live. First, I pulled the flask of melted snow I kept at my waist and rinsed off my hands before I went anywhere near his wound. Then I took the knife, even as he stood there shaking, and sliced the tunic off his body. He looked at me when the first blast of snow-scented wind hit him, and I mumbled “Bandages” before slicing off the clean fabric from the undamaged arm off and wrapping the wound immediately.

I ran to my pack and pulled out a blanket, then, and walked him, trembling, back to the tree he’d been leaning against so casually just moments ago. I settled him down, and his teeth were already starting to chatter, and I remembered all I could about watching him build a fire.

I did well, all things considered, and soon had a pot of melted snow boiling away. I added yarrow, five-finger, and agrimony to the mixture, and then some rose hips for health. I poured a mug of the mixture, straining the herbs out of it, and made him drink it. He didn’t complain about the bitterness, which were good since we had no honey left in our stores, and I took the pulped herbs and a strip of Hammer’s shirt and started cleaning out his wound.

“What were you thinking?” I muttered, peeling back the original bandage. “I’m the one who had the knife, dammit!”

“I were thinking I liked you with your guts in,” Hammer snapped back, and I sighed.

After dipping my cloth in the decoction, I worked gingerly at the mess of deep scores on his arm. “I prefer you with your skin intact myself,” I muttered, the tenth time I made him wince.

“Look, Eirn,” he said after he hissed and I retreated again. “It’s going to hurt. You can only make it last longer if you don’t just buckle down and do it, right?”

The thought made me shudder, but it were winter, and we were cold enough, and dammit, Hammer were wounded and needed me to be brave. I weren’t often, but this time, I had no choice.

With a grim set to my jaw and a hand red from the boiling water and the herbs, I took that pad of cloth and ground it into Hammer’s flesh, looking for all the dirt I could find.

He didn’t scream, gods bless him, but his head did loll back, and his eyes glazed over. I guess, sometimes, the body just quits responding to anything so it doesn’t have to respond to pain. I used that time to scrub deeply, and to layer a boiling poultice on the arm to draw out any sickness in it.

When that were done, I pulled out Hammer’s other shirt, and the sweater he’d turned his nose at and bundled him up, dressing him like a child and then throwing another blanket over his shoulders and making a pillow for his head with my clothes and the rucksack. He came to a little as I were settling him down, and tried to tell me I needed to let him finish the deer, and I told him sure, in a bit, after he’d rested a little.

I finished the deer. It were growing dark by this time, so I set up the tent without the fourth wall of blanket, and used the light of the fire to finish skinning the corpse. I kept the skin. I figured we’d probably taken out the one predator for a bit of territory, and knew I’d have time the next day to boil some water and use it to scrape the skin, then use the deer brains to tan it. By the time I were clean and ready to go sit by Hammer and tend him some more, the deer were on a stick, roasting at the fire, ready to be made into jerky to feed us for the next few weeks.

Hammer’s wound were clean, but the skin around it were hot, and I treated it once again. For perhaps the first time in our lives, I heard him complain about something.

“It weren’t permission to go rooting around in my skin, Eirn.”

I tried a smile, but he were pale, and the smile were hard to dredge up and harder to hold.

“Well, you get inside my body most every night. Figure this were returning the favor.”

“Yeah, but I hope it feels better than this,” Hammer grunted, and he sounded fretful and insecure. I kissed his cheek—an odd gesture for us. We did not hold hands nor nuzzle nor touch at odd moments as I’d seen other people do. We lay down together. We fucked. There were some sweetness then, some softness in our touches, but standing, shoulder-to-shoulder on any given day, we were more likely to be mistaken for brothers.

Hammer surprised me. He leaned into the kiss, so I smoothed the hair back from his forehead and kissed him again, and kept our cheeks together for a moment.

“You’re wonderful at fucking,” I whispered. “It always feels good. Every night. And I wish I could make this thing on your arm feel better, but I’m not a healer. I’m stupid, and I don’t know what I’m doing. We need to get you to shelter, Hammer. You’ve got to sweat this out in a real bed, and I need to wash you down and keep you from getting too hot or too cold.”

Hammer shook his head and gave me a weak shrug. “You’re not stupid, Eirn. If anyone can get me better, it’s you.”

I tried. We spent the next day and night at the camp, and I washed and poulticed his arm as often as I could. I also used the brains to tenderize the deer hide, but I thought it might have needed more soaking and scraping than I had time to do that day. It didn’t matter. I needed it to help me shore up Hammer’s pack, because we couldn’t live here in this little hollow by the tree. There were no water, for one thing, and the ground were too clustered with stones and trees for another. No. We had to find a better place—a place where Hammer could get well.

We had no idea how deep the woods went, or how close we were to some of the towns in the western kingdoms, but west we’d started and west we continued. I carried as much of Hammer’s gear as I could, and I’d tend to his arm every time we stopped, keeping a store of herb infusion in the skin at my hip. (Since I were drinking this, too, I can tell you the taste were nothing to throw a parade about, but Hammer never complained.)

By our fifth night, I almost despaired. The snow had gotten worse, and the trees had gotten thicker until it felt like I were kicking and ripping at an impenetrable wall of white-splintered-wood, just to make any headway.

If it had been myself alone, I would have burrowed under the brush and covered myself with the blankets and let the warmth of the ground and the coating of snow insulate me from the cold. But Hammer were with me, and his skin were hot to the touch, and the night before lying next to him were like lying next to a furnace, and I couldn’t help but wonder when even Hammer’s enormous vitality would burn out from throwing all that heat.

On that fifth night, Hammer started to babble.

“I didn’t lose my hammer, did I?”

“No, it’s in your hand!”

“Good. That old bugger in the smithy used to hide it so I’d bend over. Hated that game. Getting buggered weren’t so bad, but losing my hammer… first thing I ever cast. It’s a good hammer, you think, Eirn?”

He stumbled in the twilight, and I wrapped my arm around him, hoping for anything—a canopy of trees, a trickling stream, an old dead tree—anything, anything that would make camp easy for me, so I could tend to him. His arm had actually healed, but the fever that shook him like a brittle branch in an ice storm might be the end of him.

I had a plan to curl around his body and never wake up, if that happened, and had the poor sense to say so.

“Bloody horrible idea,” he muttered. “Didn’t kill that buggering fucker and haul you out into the middle of nowhere so you could curl up and die.”

“Didn’t get hauled out here to the middle of nowhere to watch you do the same,” I snapped. “Now put one gods-be-damned foot in front of the other and keep going, dammit!”

He did. I begged, I cajoled, and prayed—oh, gods, I prayed. I prayed to every god I’d ever heard of: the god of sunrise, the god of children, the god of clouds, the god of joy, and the more I prayed, the more I hoped the gods would simply see my Hammer for the bloody great man he were and save him from sheer merit, because my prayers were angry and for shit.

Any world that would do this to Hammer didn’t deserve my prayers, but Hammer did, so I kept praying.

The sun had gone down completely and I were about two steps from dropping to the ground and burning the choking underbrush around us, just to keep us warm, when I saw the glow of a lamplight in the dark.

“Oh… oh gods… I take it all back. Keep moving, Hammer. I see a house!”

“A what?” He were groggy and surprised, and I really didn’t blame him.

“I swear it’s a cottage. I can see it from here. Can’t you see it?”