Raised By Wolves 2 - Matelots (85 page)

“Gaston… did… finish,” I admitted through gaps in my laughter.

My matelot returned to us and sighed with relief at my state. I embraced him and he held me solidly.

“He’ll be well,” Striker said, and patted Gaston heartily.

Then Striker sobered somewhat. “You two must return to us. Don’t be tempted to stay in Port Royal, please. I don’t want to face another damn raid without you.”

“We will return,” Gaston assured him.

Then there were others about us, bidding us farewell. I was able to look them in the eye and share their smiles. And then, all too soon, we were upon a boat rowing to the Lilly with our things.

Once I was no longer among men we knew well, I took to avoiding the curious stares, and quickly dropped onto a space of deck Gaston chose beside one of the larboard cannon. Pete and Gaston were with me, and beyond them, Farley from the Queen and our wounded and maimed. With all my duties toward civility and movement now past, I found I was overcome with exhaustion. I curled on the deck with Gaston’s thigh beneath my head and slept.

It was evening when I woke; the sun was setting in a brilliant display in our wake. Gaston handed me a water skin and regarded me with sad eyes.

“I feel better,” I assured him. And I did.

He looked away, watching the colored clouds over the rail. I studied him and sipped water.

“We are becoming more alike,” he said after a time.

“Is that not the way of it?” I asked.

He shook his head and did not turn to regard me. “If I become more like you, it is wondrous; but your becoming more like me, I feel that is ruinous.”

I mulled over my recollection of the morning’s events.

“I believe we are reaching a greater understanding of one another,” I said. “I feel I understand how you are when it grips you now, at least in part. I know how I wished to avoid others after and…” I sighed.

His smile was grim. “And I understand what it is like to have to handle me when it occurs.”

I chuckled. “I was so angry at you for finding amusement in it, and then mere moments later I knew you were amused by the irony and not me.”“I have bruises all about from where you fought me,” he said. “I was scared: first to almost lose you, and then for you to fight me so.”

We smiled at one another, our gazes locked as they had in the room in Puerto del Principe; neither looked away. We at last moved together and kissed. On my part, it had not occurred because I felt the need to end our gazing, but because our bodies had begun to move together of our own accord, as if drawn by some thread between them.

When our lips parted, Gaston whispered, “Pete was studying his plate earlier, and he remarked that it is good we are rich, since we no longer have anything to show for our raiding. He is wrong.”

I grinned. “Oui.”

The Gods had chosen to give us much this voyage.

The winds were fickle as is often their wont, and thus made slow work of a relatively short voyage. Sadly, the delay served in lessening our crowding in an unfortunate manner, as the wounded, and the slaves unaccustomed to sea travel, began to die. When the second man from the Queen began to thrash with fever – Mally, a man we knew, though not well – Gaston asked Farley if he could examine his patients. The young physician seemed somewhat in awe of my matelot’s reputation, and also a bit defensive of his own abilities, but he stood aside and let Gaston inspect them.

“It is infected,” Gaston pronounced after examining the long, ragged wound on Mally’s upper thigh. “Though it only appears a little red upon the skin, feel how hot it is beneath the stitches. There must be something left inside the muscle that is causing it. I would suggest it be opened and another search made for debris, perhaps a piece of his breeches. Then, if the putrefaction has not seeped through all of the surrounding muscle, it could be cauterized. It will scar badly and leave him deformed, but it will save his life. This kind of infection will not turn to gangrene and take his leg, but slowly kill him with fever.”

“What are you speaking of?” Farley asked. His pinched features took on a keener edge as every muscle in his face seemed to tighten, and his voice became unpleasantly shrill. “He fevers because he lost a great deal of blood, and thus upset the balance of his humors. A poultice will draw the heat out, and I have been seeking to bring the humors into balance with a broth of…”

“Men fever when the body is diseased,” Gaston said gruffly.

“I was taught, at a fine school of medicine, that a fever is the result of an excess of ...”

“That is incorrect,” Gaston cut him off with a sigh. “Men are comprised of bone, muscle, organs, and blood, and it is all flesh.”

Farley snorted, it was meant to be derisive but came out a bit more incredulous. “Sir, then what of phlegm? The body has a great deal of phlegm in many forms.”

“Phlegm is a secretion of organs,” Gaston said, “much like excrement is a product of the bowels. It does not comprise the body, anymore than a cow is made of milk because it produces it.”

“That is not as many learned men…” Farley attempted to continue doggedly.

Mally’s matelot had been listening to it all, and he cut Farley short by grasping Gaston’s arm and saying, “Save him, please.”

Gaston nodded, and I handed him his bag before he could reach for it. I went to the cook fire and began heating the iron for cauterizing in the coals, and set a cup to boil to cleanse the instruments he would use.

I thought Farley would argue with Mally’s matelot, or retreat in a huff; but instead, he stayed silent and watched Gaston with interest.

I was, of course, familiar with the humors and the theories as to their balance and function. I found it odd that, until Gaston had spoken just then, I had not truly known he eschewed them. I had simply assumed it was a part of his repertoire as a physician that had not yet had cause to be put to use in my presence. In thinking on it, I knew that many would ascribe aspects of his madness to those theories; and yet he had not made mention there, or with any of the ailments suffered by the Spanish in the church. Nay, truly, I had not once heard him mention the humors, nor had Doucette.

As this had occurred in the afternoon, all about us had been awake to hear the exchange; and the rest aboard quickly knew of it, as whispers were passed all around. Soon the vessel was quiet except for the omnipresent creaking of the rigging and wood, and the rushing of wind in the sails and water beneath her hull. Thus, Gaston had quite the audience as he dosed Mally with enough laudanum to keep him still and reopened the wound.

There were indeed bits of fabric deep within the cut, and around them were pockets of pus. Once they were removed, Gaston drenched the area in rum and then cut away the swath of flesh that had previously been sewn closed. When he finished, Mally had a short trench on the outside of his leg, which Gaston cauterized. I fought the urge to retch at the smell.

Throughout it all, Farley observed in silence. When Mally’s fever subsided a day later and it appeared he would live, the young physician came to sit with us.

“I was taught…” he began hesitantly, “to not question what I was taught.” He grimaced.

Gaston nodded, and then he spent the remainder of our voyage teaching while Farley questioned. I thought it all time well spent, as I learned much in the bargain, and I felt we had made new friends. After his success with Mally, many another man asked for Gaston’s opinion about his own wounds, or the wounds of his matelot.

On the morning of the seventh day of our supposedly-short journey, I sat with Pete and watched Gaston work. Since my matelot was instructing Farley, the man was always at his side and Gaston did not need my assistance. So I had taken to sitting with the Golden One, who had been quite morose since we left the fleet. He had the demeanor of a man being taken to his execution, and he had expressed little humor at my attempts to cajole him from his melancholy.

“AMan Should Do What’EBe Born Ta Do,” he said after we had been sitting silently for a time.

“You mean Gaston?” I asked. “You feel he was born to be a physician?”

He nodded. “Aye, But All Men Too.”

I agreed with him about Gaston: teaching and healing appeared to bring such peace to him that I found it hard to believe it a mask his Horse fretted to shed.

But Pete’s words made me think of other things as well.

“What were you born to do?” I asked.

The question seemed to pain him, and as I felt turmoil in my own soul at asking it of myself, I well understood.

What had I been born to do? I had been bred like a fine hunter, with the best possible sire and dam, to be a lord. But nay, I was a centaur and not a wolf. Since that was the truth of my heart and soul, then was that what I was born to be and not the other? I supposed the answer lay in who decided upon the destiny, and not in what one was destined for, as that would vary based upon the decision-maker’s perspective. I chose my soul as the seat of power in the matter.

“IBe Born Ta Kill Men, Na Heal’Em,” Pete announced at long last.

Pete’s far less esoteric rumination reminded me that I thought too much; but then, perhaps, that was a matter of perspective as well.

But when I regarded the matter as Pete had done, as a matter of vocation, I was once again left with a thing I had often thought: that I possessed few skills but those used to harm or exert control over others by way of might or wit. Which, sadly in my opinion, made me very much a wolf. Whatever my soul might profess, I was suited to the trade my parents had intended: I possessed little talent for creation, and no other skill of any practical import.

“Me, too,” I told Pete.

He nodded sagely.

“What other thing would you be if you could choose?” I asked. “I would be an artist.”

H shrugged. “Don’Wish Ta Be Nothin’Else.”

I studied his profile, and remembered our naming him a lion and not a wolf or any other creature. He was the master of his domain. As Gaston had once said, Pete was all Horse. And with that thought, I was blessed by a moment of epiphany regarding his mood.

“You feel that doing this thing… taking my sister as wife, is a thing you were not born to do?” I asked.

“Aye,” he sighed.

“How so?”

“There Be Those Men That Live As They Should, hatMarry An’Make Babies, An Live In One Place, An Work At ATrade, An’… INa’ Be One O’’Em.”

“And Striker has tied himself to her and all of that, and therefore tethered you as well,” I said.

“Aye,” he said with a truly heavy sigh.

“And it chafes,” I said.

He nodded, his gaze somewhere past the bow.

“Gaston feels the traces of love chafe as well, at least he did,” I said. “I found their weight reassuring. We have come to view it as we are not chained together, so much as we are harnessed to a cart, or chariot, which is the embodiment of our love for one another. It is a thing we haul about. We have found it is sturdier than expected, and light enough in design as to not be an encumbrance. Yet it is ever there, and we have a tendency to load it down with things, such as his need for children, or the requirements of my inheriting. So sometimes it is heavier to haul than at others. I once envisioned all matelots as teams pulling chariots across a vast plain. I thought of Striker and you as wolves, but I think now that you are a well matched wolf and lion.”

He had turned to me with a contemplative frown as I talked, and when I finished he smiled. “ILike That.”

Then he shook his head and sighed. “IWish’EDid Na’ Have Ta Go An’

Load AWoman In The Cart.”

I nodded sympathetically. “Aye, like our Damn Wife, and my damn inheritance, it makes it harder to haul; but as we have chosen to be hitched together, we share the load.”

He gave me a rueful smile. “Aye, IMade Me Choice, An’She Be AThing He Says We Must Haul.” He shrugged with insouciance, but his eyes were somber. “INa’ Make’Im Do It Alone.”

He looked to me and his smile broadened. “Ya Na’ Be Born Ta Kill Men.

Ya Be Born To Think The Thoughts Others Can’t.”

I was perplexed by this; even more so, when Gaston awarded me the look he gave me when I was an utter fool, upon my relaying the entirety of it to him that night.

“You are a physician,” Gaston said. “You are as compelled to heal as I, but whereas I tend their bodies, you seek to tend their hearts and souls. You have surely saved me from certain death.”

I frowned at that. “I do not…” Then I felt it foolishness to attempt to gainsay him. I did seek to mend and aid many I encountered, and perhaps likening what I considered philanthropy to my attempting to heal hearts and souls was correct.

“Thank you,” I said. “I have not viewed it as such.” I smiled. “You are gifted in the art yourself.”

“Only if you say so, and only with you.”

“Do you wish for more?” I teased.

He grinned. “Praise, or an expansion of my curative abilities?”

“Both.”

“You may shower me with the former, but I do not wish to be encumbered by the need to heal any other of woes of the heart or soul,”

he said seriously.

“I would not have you do so,” I said in kind. “I find great reassurance that I will always have a personal physician well-versed in healing all that might ail me.”

Then I asked, “Do you feel you are called to be a physician?”

He sighed. “Oui.”

“What do you wish to do about it?” I asked.

“Nothing, now, except that which I am already engaged in,” he sighed as he looked about his deck full of patients. “Once we reach Port Royal, it will cease, and I will think on it.”

I decided that was such a great stride I would not ask him for more.

Several days later, the men crowded upon the Lilly cheered mightily when we at last caught sight of Jamaica. Sadly, it was Negril Point, our land, and our home, that we spied first.

“I am gripped by a compulsion to dive over the side and swim ashore,” I told Gaston quietly as we stood at the rail and watched it slide by. He sighed. “As am I.”

“But…” I said for both of us.

He sighed again and shrugged. “But. We must do what we must do.”