He had still been a little boy, when he was first shown a man's severed head – its pigtailed hair floating, its ruined eyes half-open, bobbing in the vodka filling a large blown-glass jar. It had been his first sight of such a thing, and the only time King Sam had burdened a child with such.
"It was necessary, Bajazet, that this was brought for you to see. It is what is left of the man Manu Ek-Tam, who betrayed your First-father's memory, murdered your mother and your father's friends, then threatened the peace of the Rule."
The king had tossed a cloth over the thing.
"- Now, you need not waste an hour of your days on vengeance… but only reflect on your First-father's intelligence, courage, and competence in command… and the love your mother and your father's friends certainly felt for you." The king had gripped Baj's shoulder so hard it hurt. "The love we, your Second-family, also feel."
The child Baj had dreamed that night – though instead of his imagined superb First-mother, only a plump, plain woman, seeming to him a nanny or nurse, appeared hovering over, smiling, in the faintest of baby memories.
The old librarian, in description so many years later, had confirmed that dear one as his mother, at last.
CHAPTER 11
Someone was gently tapping the tip of her nose, and Patience slowly woke to it. Woke to hear someone calling, in the distance… chicken-birds clucking nearer…
"So fortunate, at least for the now." A high, chuckling woman's voice.
Patience opened her eyes to see a low ceiling of clay and wattle-stick… then a hugely fat woman sitting half-naked beside her in a heap of marbled flesh, great bare breasts, and the tufted red plumage of a feathered kilt. The woman had pleasant brown eyes, a button nose… a small pursed mouth with a drift of down across her upper lip.
"How… am I fortunate?" Patience wouldn't have recognized her voice; it sounded thin as string.
"Fortunate that handsome Pete Aiken, spared by you, is Chad's sister's only son." The woman's small mouth hardly moved as she spoke.
"All right," Patience said, though she knew none of them. "My… shoulder."
"I fitted it more perfectly into place while you slept, then souped, and slept again." Fat hands and huge, white, bare arms mimed the adjustment, then bandaging. "- I strapped it tight, though not too tight. Gave it its best chance… but…"
"But?" It seemed to Patience her voice now began to sound like hers.
"But damage done. In-and-out of joint, tears matters."
Patience lay still on what felt like stacked sheepskins. The hut held very little light. "Damage…"
"The arm is breathing blood, but is a little cool; its message-strings are hurt."
"How hurt?" Certainly now her voice.
"Unlikely hurt to withering. Perhaps hurt to a little weakness forever."
Patience stopped breathing, as if that might stop time for a moment. A left-handed woman – with a weak left hand. A crippled woman, crippled Person, with work still to do. "How certain are you?" The Shrikes killed their cripples…
"Certain as I can be," the fat woman said. "And I am a Catanianite, a scientific doctor." She leaned forward, lifted Patience like a child, and presented a clay bowl to her lips.
"I knew her son."
"Whose?"
"Catania Olsen's son. She was his Second-mother."
The fat woman set the bowl carefully down, leaned forward, and hit Patience hard on her left shoulder.
… When she'd come fully conscious again, and could listen, the woman said to her, "Fatuous lies that claim acquaintance with Greats-from-God are unwise lies to tell."
"That," Patience managed, "- is certainly true."
"You know copybook fatuous?"
"… I know the word very well."
"Here," the woman lifted the bowl again. "Broth from an unfortunate sheep."
Patience drank fat-thick saltiness – wondered for a moment where these tribespeople traded for their salt – and felt hot strength flowing down into her. When she'd swallowed several times, she said, "How long?"
"Two days – now three," the fat woman said. "And surprised me it wasn't more. You have Moonriser blood in you."
"Yes."
"I smelled it on your breath, but of what part-fathering beast I'm not sure. An animal, or perhaps selected men – certainly more than one – groaned seed for the Talents to mix in your mother." The fat woman took the bowl away. "My name is Charlotte. Called Charlotte-doctor."
"Thank you for your care," Patience said, and tried to ease her aching shoulder.
The fat woman chuckled again, apparently very good-natured. "My care would have been to peg you to the ground, then slice you into pieces before the children – little pieces, one by one – and kept you shouting all the while. That would have been my care, except that Chad Budnarik fears his sister's tongue, if nothing else. And spared Pete Aiken is her son."
"Isn't it remarkable," Patience said, "- remarkable that a woman's scolding may confound a brute?"
"Said," Charlotte-doctor smiled, "as if you'd met War-leader Chad Budnarik. No better word for him than brute, though I love him dearly, and have since I was a child."
Patience waited for another blow to her shoulder, but none came while she decided to guard her mouth. "Apologies," she said. That seemed safe enough.
"Oh, it's lies that trouble me," the fat woman said, "- not truths." She held the broth-bowl for Patience's last swallow, then set it down… and with great effort, burdened by massive breasts, a huge sagging belly – slowly got to her feet and waddled away to a curtained entrance, her thick, white, dimpled thighs trembling beneath the hem of her red-feathered kilt.
"The shoulder," Patience called after her – amused by the distancing of the question as she called it, "the" shoulder, not "my" shoulder. "When will I know how it does?"
The woman turned ponderously back to face her. "Within one WT week, unbandage and sling it, exercise it gently. If you leave it longer, it may grow to the joint, to move never. – Then, after two weeks slung and lightly exercised, you will know what that arm will be forever."
"… Thank you, Doctor."
The woman left, billowing the entrance sheepskin so sunlight flashed in for a moment.
Sliced, while she shouted. Patience lay thanking whatever Jesus or Weather Great for a so-far rescue. Content with lucky minutes, she drifted to sleep… and dreamed her Maxwell become a man grown, marvelous and fierce – though lacking humor – the son, truly, of six-hundred years of ice and sacrifice.
… When she woke, Patience knew it was night – the small hut now quite dark – and found she needed to shit. But find a possible pot how? She tried to sit up… and did, though that made her dizzy. She sat in cool darkness, taking deep breaths. A poop-pot – and her sword. What else could a lady require? These savages would keep her Merriment… let its wonderful blade rust in their trophy hut.
Really… really have to have that pot. Prompted, Patience rolled carefully off her pile of sheepskins, favoring the bound left shoulder absolutely, and began – not crawling – but hitching along naked over a rammed-dirt floor. Would have grimy buttocks and no choice about it. She scooted slowly along, then reached out with her right arm, feeling at the near corner for the thing – there must be one, though clean since there was no smell of it. She found that corner empty, then went along a wattled wall for the next… Soon, would be just in time.
Then, as if in a staged comedy, the hut's entrance hide was paged aside, and rich yellow lamplight came pouring in, with the silhouettes of two big men behind it.