Even in the river darkness, her lips were blue. Her heartbeat was too quick, her breathing too slow and torn; though I rejoiced, as much as I had time for it, to hear no sound suggesting a punctured lung. I braced her against the base of the mast as well as I could, while the damnable boat chased its tail and the thing whose name I always forget—the boom it is, and well-named—kept swinging across, trying to kill me, because I could not attend to Lal and do all that pushing and pulling as well. I hate boats. I know somewhat more about them today than I did that night, and I hate them exactly that much more.
Once I was able to sit down to sailing, however, it became plain that Lal had given me the shortest possible course of lessons in making one of the things go where you want it to go. You shove the tiller over one way— hard left, in my case, so that the boat veered toward the right bank of the river—and then you pull the lines in the other direction, which should make the sail fill and the boat move properly forward. Of course, if you do not have a strong wind behind you, and don’t know how to make the best of what wind you have—both being true for me—then the sail flaps and sulks, while the boom thing comes around and breaks your head. Nevertheless, I pushed and jiggled and coaxed and cursed and ducked, and the boat wandered diffidently toward the bank, eventually stopping when it wedged its pointed prow into a tangle of overhanging tree roots. I tied it there and carried Lal ashore.
She never stirred as I undressed her to learn the extent of her injuries. I could feel the broken rib immediately— only one, thank the gods—but she appeared to be hurt nowhere else. I knew better, of course, but the strange and terrifying thing was that there were almost no marks on her body; nor on mine, for that matter. All her right side was hot to my hand, and when I touched her she twitched away and moaned, but did not wake.
Our provisions were not on the boat. I am fairly adept with herbs and simples, but not at night in a strange country. There was a spare sail tucked away in a compartment under the prow. I cut part of it into strips and set and bandaged her rib as well as I could. Then I forced some water between her lips, took off my own soaked clothes, and lay down beside her, drawing the remainder of the sail over us both. I held her all night to keep her warm, and myself as well. I had not expected to sleep, but I did, and deeply, nor did I dream at all.
Lal had hardly moved when I woke. Her breathing seemed more regular, but her skin was still too cold, and the blue tinge had spread to her face and throat as well. The vision in my left eye was only a little hazed now: one of the blows I never saw must have numbed a nerve. I still ached in many other places, but that would pass. I stood up in the thin, red mountain dawn and took in our situation. In front of me, the Susathi—not white-toothed yet, but not the placid creature of yesterday, either—in all other directions, nothing but stones and pale stubble and a scattering of the joker-trees. Unpromising, certainly, but nothing with a river in it is ever hopeless. I covered Lal with the sail again and limped naked down to the water to see about breakfast.
Fish in these mountain rivers generally stay well away from the shores, because of prowling sheknath. The way to call them in is to snap your fingers underwater—if you do it right, using the second joint, not the first, for some reason the vibration is irresistible—and then to tickle their bellies very slowly, until they practically fall asleep in your hand. My sister taught me that trick.
Coaxing up two fish of a proper size took time—time well-spent, as it turned out—but Lal was still asleep when I returned to her. Having lost my own knife, I used her swordcane to clean the fish and cooked them on sticks over a scanty driftwood fire as fragile and transparent as a baby bird. The good smell did not waken Lal for some while, but as I was beginning to grow truly alarmed, she opened her eyes and muttered, “Lost the yellow pepper. Sorry.” She was in too much pain even to sit up, let alone move to the fire. I fed her the little she would take, waking her when she dozed off, and gave her more water afterward. When she was asleep again, I banked the fire, borrowed her swordcane once more and went back to the riverbank. There, a few feet from where the boat was tied up, I had noticed several rocks blotched with smeary patches of a gray lichen that made them look as though they were rotting from the inside. This is called fasska in the north—crin, I think, in the eastern hills—and it grows only in high countries, and never plentifully. When I had scraped off what there was, I could have closed it all easily in one fist, except that you must not ever crush fasska so, else you destroy its virtue. If it smells at all bearable, you’ve already ruined it.
I carried it back to my fire very carefully, wrapped it in my shirt—which was beginning to dry, the sun having finally escaped the mountain peaks—and set about finding something in which to heat water. Our cooking gear was with our packs, wherever they were; in the end I was lucky to find a broken tharakki egg, almost a good half, the size of my cupped hands. I rigged an absurd arrangement of sticks to hold it properly over the fire, then filled it partway with water, which I prayed would boil at this height. Lal woke a couple of times and stared silently at me out of eyes that were too large and shone too dryly.
I talked to her while I worked, whether her eyes were open or closed. “Did he ever feed you this disgusting swill? It tastes like the dirt under your nails, but it’s useful when the spirit has taken the same beating as the body and they have to heal together or not at all. He made it for me the same day I came to him, and it’s a wonder I didn’t run off as soon as I could stand. One other time, too—you’ve seen that scar that runs halfway around my back? A rock-targ bit me half in two, and had a good start on the second half when I managed to shove an arrow into it. But by then I had screamed and prayed and wet myself and fouled myself with such fear that sewing me up was meaningless by itself. If he hadn’t poured enough fasska down my throat to wash away Corcorua market, I might still be staring at his ceiling. It’s that good, this muck, if you can only keep it down.”
Lal said nothing. My eggshell of water did finally come to a boil, and I dumped the lichen scrapings into it and covered them with a broad leaf to hold in the heat. You have to steep fasska forever, or at least until you truly cannot endure the smell an instant more. The best thing then is to add two dried kirrichan leaves while it cools; somehow they tend to make the drink, which always remains silver-gray as a slug trail, a bit more palatable—but we were as short of those as of everything else but fish. Lal would have to take her healing raw, no help for it.
Strangely, frighteningly, she put up absolutely no resistance when I made her sit up and began tipping the stuff into her mouth. I expected her to spit it back out—to the side, if my luck held. I expected snarls, curses, kicks in the shins with those horn-hard feet. What I got was a Lal who swallowed the fasska obediently, with no more protest than an occasional cough; beyond the slightest flinching of her lips, she might have been drinking ice-vine tea or red ale. When it was gone, she closed her eyes again and lay back silently, and did not stir for the rest of the day.
I bathed and cleaned her as was necessary, washed myself in the river, slept a little, fished again, and spent most of the time in studying our one remaining possession. I had never seen such a boat before; indeed, it seemed more kite than boat to me. It cannot have been longer than twelve feet, and in its broadest section hardly as wide as I am tall; and finally it was nothing more than round and flat sticks fitted so tightly together that you could scarcely see the grooves between. Some of the sticks—the mast, for example—were actually a sort of hollow reed, and many must have telescoped to allow them to fit in a traveler’s pack. The wood itself was far lighter than any wood I knew; the sails were like silk, but not silk. Two people could have lifted the entire affair out of the water, but it was plainly made to carry one deadly passenger alone. I could not imagine how Lal had assembled it unaided, nor how we should manage the rest of our journey downriver—and just how far was that to be?—on a miniature that marvelously delicate. The sun slipped back down behind the mountains while I brooded on this, and the small breeze sharpened. Night comes early in the high country.