The Prince of Shadow (33 page)

“The lions,” he whispered to his companions. Better prey than carrion. “The lions, not the jackals.” And then he fell.

“Llesho!” A voice he recognized—Lling—called to him, too late. He heard the sound of horses, and cringed within himself. The guards would take him, and they would strangle him for the jackals. “The lions,” he murmured in his fever.

“Llesho, it's me, Lling. Can you hear me?”

Small hands with hard calluses brushed the hair from his forehead. “He's really sick, Kaydu. I don't care how much daylight we have, he can't go any farther.”

Daylight? “Dark,” Llesho objected, “Adar?”

He wanted Adar, wanted his brother, the healer prince, to hold him and tell him it was just a dream, a nothing fever that he would bathe in herbs and whisper gentle prayers over. But Adar's hands were soft as were none of the hands that touched him now, and the air was too thick to breathe, not the cool, sharp air of Adar's dispensary, tucked into the high mountains overlooking the Great Pass to the west. He coughed and felt liquid bubbles shift in his chest, coughed harder and couldn't stop. Another voice in the darkness—not Adar, but male, and scared, muttered, “He's coughing up blood, prop him up so that he doesn't choke to death.”

They moved him, and he screamed. He couldn't help it, though he knew it was dangerous, and the guards would come. A breathy “Shhh” warned him, but he couldn't hold it in, couldn't even form the thought to fight it, and the scream went on endlessly, until even Thebin lungs held no more. Llesho gasped and struggled for air that he sucked in with desperate rattling wheezes, but his blood was filling up his chest cavity faster than his indrawn breath could replace itself. He coughed and choked and vomited blood on himself until the hands on his shoulders rolled him onto his side and a voice above him swore softly. “Oh, Goddess, what are we going to do?”

“Make him drink,” Kaydu said, and something fell next to him, was picked up and offered, and he reached for it with his lips like an infant reaches for his mother and the water poured over his mouth, and he tried to swallow, but felt the water coming back up thicker than it went in.
Oh, Goddess.
If this was her favor, then Llesho did not ever want to anger her.

“I'll go for help,” Lling's voice, close to him, said, and he muttered, “Adar,” through the chattering of his teeth. He was so cold all of a sudden; he felt his body shiver convulsively, and he grasped at the tunic of the person who held him. “Cold,” he managed, and Kaydu was arguing with Lling, “Where will you go? Who do you expect to find out here but Master Markko's men? You know what he said about being taken again—he'd rather be dead.”

“That doesn't mean he
wants
to be dead. I'll ride ahead. We're on a path, there must be a village somewhere.”

Lling went away then, and someone put a blanket over him. The blanket smelled like horses, and he tried to cringe away from the hands that held it there, but the voice he knew as Hmishi hushed him with soothing words, and the words turned into a song, the prayer song for a sick child. He knew the words:

It was a simple prayer; Adar knew much better ones, with harmonies sung with the lower throat voice while the upper nose voice sang the rhythms, broken by the ring of finger cymbals between the choruses. For state occasions, the birth of a prince or princess, or a plague, prayer wheels and gongs would join the song, and the entire order of healers would sing together in polytonal synchrony. Llesho had listened with wonder as his brother led the healing monks in petitioning the goddess to ease the birth of their sister. They'd been too successful for Llesho's young taste, and the little princess had been stubborn and loud from the moment of her birth. Llesho didn't want to think about that, though, because then he would have to remember that she was dead on a garbage heap somewhere and not even given the honor of a funeral. How would she ever find her way back to the world if she didn't know how much she was missed, how they had mourned her?

Why hadn't Adar saved her, if he was alive? He was a healer, after all, and knew all the chants and songs, and all the ways of herbs and the power of touch that only the most gifted healers practiced. Why hadn't he saved their sister? “Adar! Adar!” he called, while the voice over him broke from its song to whisper, “Hush, hush, hush.”

“Hot,” Llesho fretted, and pushed at the blanket.

“Take it off him,” the voice of Kaydu said, and he could see her, standing over him with a sour frown on her face.

“But he was cold a minute ago,” Hmishi objected.

“Fevers do that sometimes, if they are high enough,” Kaydu answered, still frowning, but she didn't sound as severe as she had a few moments ago, and Llesho was grateful when the blanket was taken away. He was still too hot, but without the blanket to hinder him, his restless limbs could move. “He'll complain that he is cold soon enough,” she continued. “When he does, use this—” she handed over a head-cloth so fine he could see her face through it. “Drape it over his shoulders, to comfort him, but don't cover him for warmth. Let the air cool his skin.”

But neither of them was Adar, and as the chills seized him again, he called out for his brother, gasping his cry, “Cold, Adar, cold.”

Hands that were not his brother's covered him with a wisp of cloth and he wrapped his hands in it and curled himself around it, trying to warm himself in its folds, but he couldn't get warm, couldn't get warm, and he rocked himself, and the arrow bit deeper when he moved.

“Lions,” he said, “lions, lions, lions,” and he would have shouted if he could, because they would not understand. He wanted to go to the lions now, not wait until he was food for the jackals, and he heard the wind in the grass, and the moans of the women and the old men driven beyond endurance in the Long March. And he heard the crying of the children, and knew he was one of them, but he was a prince and must not cry, must not cry, but his face was wet, not a prince after all, but a slave. Were slaves allowed to cry?

Horses then, and Lling, saying: “There is a village about a mile down this track. I found a healer. She said she would come.”

Then Llesho heard the robes of a woman stirring the underbrush, the smell of herbs and sunshine on her hem.

“The boy is sick?” she asked. Kwan-ti. He looked up at her and smiled. “I knew you would come,” he said, and closed his eyes. He was safe now, though she was not Adar, and he had thought her dead.

“Are you a healer?” Hmishi asked, and Llesho would have laughed at him if he could have. Didn't he recognize Kwan-ti, their old healer from Pearl Island? But Lling did not correct him, and Kaydu was explaining Llesho's wound as if to a stranger.

“An arrow, here.” Kaydu gestured to her own body, to a spot just above her left breast. “We did not take it out, afraid that he would bleed to death, but the wound has sickened, and he has fever and coughs up blood.”

“He's conscious some of the time,” Hmishi said. “But he makes no sense when he talks.”

“We'll see what we can do.” The healer knelt down at his side and touched the stub of arrow jutting from his chest. It should have hurt like fire piercing his heart, but it didn't. All he could think about was the cool touch of her fingers, and the scent of mint and honeysuckle that clung to her like a perfume.

“The village is more than a li distant, his condition too serious to carry him so far,” she said, “But I have a small house here in the wood that I use when I need to replenish my supplies. It's just this way—”

Llesho did not open his eyes to see what she did, but her hand disappeared from his chest, and he guessed she must have pointed, for she added, “The first bit is uphill, but it is only a short hike, and then the way is level. Lift him onto a blanket, and we will each take a corner. You can come back for the horses when we have a roof over his head.”

Hmishi's hand on his shoulder tightened, and he heard his friend say, “You did not ask who we are, or how our companion came to have an arrow in him.”

Why did Hmishi sound so suspicious? Surely he knew the healer as well as any of them. “Kwan-ti,” Llesho called out to her.

“She's not Kwan-ti,” Hmishi murmured a quiet warning, but the healer contradicted him with a mild rebuke:

“It will not hurt to let him think I am someone he knows, and if he wishes for her presence, perhaps it will help him. Come, before it rains, or worse. Your attackers may have reinforcements nearby.”

She moved away briefly, but after a moment returned. “We have to lift you now,” she whispered. “It will hurt, but just for a few minutes, and then we will try to make you more comfortable, yes?”

He nodded to signal he was ready, and she favored him with a smile in reply. “Now,” she said, and his companions lifted him and set him on the blanket. He gasped, still shocked at how much the wound could hurt when he moved, but he stuffed his fist in his mouth to stifle the scream. He would not give their position away to the guards. But he couldn't quite remember what guards he was watching out for, so he let his head fall to the side, and escaped the pain into a dark well of oblivion.

Chapter Twenty

“YOU'RE going to be all right, Llesho, but this will hurt. I'm sorry.”

Kwan-ti's voice reached him from somewhere in the fog that dimmed his eyes and clogged all his thought processes. He thought she was wrong, though. He could feel Master Markko's poison burning in his veins, and he knew he was dying. Llesho smiled at her anyway. The bed was soft and smelled of sweet grasses, and when she spoke, her voice held the dark at bay. The paste she smeared around the arrow jutting from his chest chilled him to the bone, but with that icy contact, the pain went away.

“Kaydu, Hmishi,” Kwan-ti called to his companions in the voice that demanded instant obedience. “Tie these.”

Soft clothes wrapped Llesho's wrists and upper arms, wrapped his legs and his torso so that he couldn't move.

“No!” He started to panic, but Kwan-ti settled him with a hand on his forehead.

“I have to take the arrowhead out, Llesho.

“Lling, bring the knife from the fire, and plenty of cloths. Kaydu, bring the tub of hot water, and Hmishi, bring the jar, there in the window.” She never stopped stroking his brow, but Llesho heard the scurry of footsteps away from his bed and back again, felt cloths draped over his shoulder, heard the hiss of a hot knife in water.

“Hold him,” she said, and the knife pierced Llesho's breast, cut deep, past the blessed ice of the surface, into the pocket of infected, rotting flesh, and deeper, until the tip of the knife scraped bone, and Llesho was straining against the restraints that held him, screaming as if his throat would turn itself inside out. Oh, Goddess, what had he done to deserve this? Why wouldn't she just let him die in peace?

Hands left him. He heard footsteps running, and a door opened and banged shut again. The hands that remained still held him immobilized for the healer's knife, but they shook. It must have been Lling who sobbed at his feet, because he recognized Kaydu's voice growling prayers and imprecations at his head, subsiding after a while into a muttered string of words, “Finish it, finish it,” over and over like a mantra. So Hmishi must have run from the house.

Then the arrowhead was out, lifted away, and Kwan-ti called for boiled cloths and stroked the weeping slime from his body, dipping into the wound itself to clean out the poison.

“Could be worse,” she muttered through gritted teeth. “Just a bit of fecal matter smeared on the tip of the arrow. A soldier's trick, not the work of a magician. Deadly enough if left untreated any longer, but we caught it in time, I think. Now, hand me that jar.”

Kwan-ti's hands went away. Llesho heard the grind of a stopper being pulled from the jar in question. Kwan-ti smeared something into the wound that crawled over his flesh like jackals over carrion. With a sick moan, Lling followed Hmishi out the door.

“What are you doing?” he demanded. “What is it?”

Llesho squirmed while she pasted a cool mash of leaves and moss over the mess and wrapped a bandage tightly over the whole strange patch in his flesh.

“Something to help clean away the dead flesh,” she answered, the cool humor in her voice at odds with her earlier tension. “We'll leave the packing in until the maggots have done their work, and then we'll see what we have.”

Maggots! If he'd had the strength, Llesho would have been beside his friends outside, vomiting his disgust along with his dinner. But he hadn't the strength to lift his head nor had he had any dinner. When he reached to tear away the bandages and their foul infestation, the soft ties still held his arms trapped at his sides.