She had lost track of too much in the last six months.
The sky was bright with diffuse light, but the sun hadn’t yet risen far enough to cast shadows when Mary woke from a sleep of formless, ominous dreams. A bird was singing. The mad bird.
She sat up, dazed with the sudden influx of memories. Rachel. Mary reached out to press her hand to Rachel’s forehead, and she was convinced it wasn’t as hot as it had been yesterday, and her breathing seemed easier.
Mary rose stiffly and ran her fingers through her tangled hair, then she frowned, distracted, when she saw Yorick lying in the grass near the road. He was gnawing on something, and she walked over to him to see what it was. He gave her a warning growl, but when she spoke his name sharply, he surrendered his prize.
A doughnut-shaped bone. A shank bone, in fact, from a cow. And it had been cleanly cut with a meat saw.
Mary let Yorick have the bone, and her first reaction was enervating fear.
“What’s wrong?” Rachel was trying to sit up, leaning on one elbow.
“I’m not sure, but someone was here last night. They muzzled our trusty watchdog with a piece of shank meat.” Mary was looking around the camp as she spoke. It was on the table: a blanket-wrapped bundle.
She went to the table, cautiously unfolded the blanket. Inside, she found drawstring bags of various sizes made, like the blanket itself, of handwoven wool. They came from the Ark.
Of course, they did. Where else would they come from?
Yet this parcel was so unexpected, she might as easily believe it came from the moon that shone so brightly last night. She opened a small bag and found it filled with ground bark, and on a torn scrap of paper, written in ink in tiny, precise letters, the words, “Make into tea for fever.” In another bag filled with dried rose hips, the assurance, “Good for vit. C.” Another bag filled with crushed leaves was designated, “Comfrey, B12.” On the lid of a jar of yellow ointment, “Poultice for wound.”
And there was a small, brown bottle with a dropper in the cap. The slip of paper was tied around it with a string: “Laudanum—three drops in cup of water.” And Mary began to laugh, even though her eyes were blurred with tears.
Laudanum. Something to ease Rachel’s pain.
Another bag was filled with strips of cloth for bandages, another with dried apple slices, another with a plucked and dismembered chicken, and the last with barley. And the leather cosmetic case—Mary had brought it with her to the Ark. She opened it, found her brush and comb, toothbrushes, soap, cuticle scissors, a jar of aloe and oil.
Finally there was Rachel’s sketchbook. The paper for the admonitory identifications had come from the back of it, but Bernadette had been careful to tear out a blank page.
And it had to be Bernadette who had come in the night with this gift. Who else would have access to the medicines? Who else could get Mary’s cosmetic case and the sketchbook from the household? Who else would leave the Ark at night, fearlessly traveling by moonlight a road as familiar to her as the forests around it, knowing exactly where Mary would go to camp because there was no better place nearer?
“Mary, please—who is Bernadette?”
Mary didn’t realize she’d been speaking aloud. She took the bottle to Rachel. “Bernadette lives in our household. Look at this, Rachel. Laudanum. Now you can get some rest from the pain. And she brought herbal medicines—she’s a nurse at the Ark—and bandages and a chicken and…” She couldn’t stop laughing, and she didn’t try, because Rachel was laughing with her, and there was hope in it.
The laughter died finally, and there were things to do—the first was giving Rachel a dose of laudanum—and nothing could dim the revived hope that was Bernadette’s real gift. Even when Mary removed the bandages from Rachel’s leg, the wound didn’t seem to look as bad as it had yesterday evening. At least, she told herself, it looked no worse. She didn’t bandage the wound, but cleaned it, applied some of the yellow ointment, and left it open to the air. She constructed a gauze tent with supports of sticks bound by tape, and placed it over the leg. Then she heated the leftover rabbit meat. Rachel ate only a cupful of broth, but she found Bernadette’s herb teas easier to get down.
Despite her lack of appetite, despite her fever, Rachel seemed encouraged. She wanted to sit up, and Mary rolled the bearskin to put behind her against the trunk of the spruce, then helped her wash her face and brush her teeth, and combed and brushed her hair. Rachel spoke only occasionally, and sometimes she repeated the same question or forgot what Mary had said. She didn’t seem to understand why Mary was determined to find some sphagnum moss. But that mental vagueness, Mary was sure, could be attributed to the laudanum.
Mary judged from the position of the sun that the morning was nearly half-gone when she was finally ready to leave in search of sphagnum. The fire was newly replenished, and she had tethered Epona on the bank of the creek where there was plenty of grass. Rachel lay quiet, and beside her, within easy reach, were a canteen, a cup, and the laudanum. Yorick refused to leave her.
Mary knelt at her side. “I won’t be gone long.”
Rachel’s eyes were heavy-lidded, but she brought forth a smile. “I’ll be fine. Good luck.” And her eyes closed.
Mary set off at a brisk walk, but before she had covered more than fifty feet, she stopped abruptly. She looked back at the camp, saw Rachel propped against the spruce, motionless. Mary felt a chill she couldn’t explain, but she shrugged it off. Rachel was only asleep. She needed that healing sleep.
Rachel was going to be all right, she was going to live.
Mary smiled in the warmth of that conviction and walked along the creek until it disappeared in an echoing culvert under the highway. She crossed the eroded asphalt, then again followed the creek into the forest. In places, salal and elderberry grew so thick she couldn’t push through them, and she had to make her way upstream on the rocks in the creek. But within a quarter of a mile the forest canopy thickened, the undergrowth thinned, and she was deep in cool, green rain forest. She angled away from the creek, but didn’t stray so far from it that she couldn’t hear it. In this forest it would be all too easy to get lost.
She was traversing a slope luxuriant with sword fern, when her foot caught in a hidden snare of roots. With a startled cry, she fought for balance, lost it, plunged into ferns over her head, and tumbled down the slope, futilely grasping fronds that ripped out of the soft ground.
Her descent ended as suddenly as it had begun, and she lay dazed in a tangled mass of crushed fern, nostrils filled with the heavy, dank scent of the earth.
And she was looking into the face of death.
A deer’s skull. It lay shrouded in broken fern only inches from her head. A pale spider crawled out from between the crenellated teeth. The bone was gray and rotten, stained with green moss, yet there was in the exquisite curves of its empty eye sockets a ghost of sentience that terrified her, and she didn’t understand the terror, didn’t understand the shivering of her muscles as she recoiled from that relic of life, didn’t understand why she was sobbing uncontrollably. On her hands and knees, she backed away from the skull, staggered to her feet, stumbled toward the sound of the creek, and when she reached its bank, looked up at the sky through dusky plumes of fir and spruce, and a cry of anguish tore out of her throat.
But sky and trees absorbed the sound, made silence of it. She felt the burning in her throat, felt the reverberations in her head, but the sound didn’t seem to exist here.