He was filthy and stinking with dried sweat and pain, the straw-prickles were all through his clothing, and he wanted at this point just to have his cabin to himself and his misery to himself, with maybe a jar of water by him and a few cold cakes or whatever there was, for whatever number of days it took to get over this.
But he admitted to himself that he was glad that she was there, and that he did not have to drag himself about to get the necessities, that the rags would get reheated as often as they cooled and that supper would arrive and there was someone to see Jiro got water. The last time he had been sick—
—gods, he had no idea how he had gotten water up the hill then: he never had remembered half those days, except finding himself on his face in the dirt, by the downed rails, down at the stable where he had decided to knock the fence down so Jiro could come and go where he pleased, and water himself from the rain-barrel or the spring.
And run free if his master died there.
He shut his eyes and rested in the coming and going of the pain. The next time he was aware of Taizu by him she had brought a pan of warm water and clean rags to wash his face, but he ordered her off and did it himself, stripping off his shirt and at least washing off the prickles that were driving him mad.
She renewed the hot compresses on his leg, and took the rags away to heat again.
It felt ineffably better after that second warmth had sunk in. He leaned back against the wad of quilts and rested half-aware until he smelled rice boiling and looked up and saw Taizu, in a clean shirt, cooking dinner.
He moved the leg tentatively. Mistake.
But he moved it again, and again, because he had nothing else to do, no other necessity weighing on him, and nothing to save his strength for. Taizu was there to water the horse; Taizu was there to cook his supper; Taizu was there to boil up the compresses, leaving him to tend his own hurt, and to keep it from stiffening.
He gritted his teeth and kept at it the next day, and sat on the edge of the porch and worked the leg with slow patience, thinking—
While Taizu was down at the spring fetching up water—
That he was fortunate at least that it was not worse, and most of all that he was not alone, because he knew that he would have limped about and protected the leg as best he could, protected it the way he had favored it before....
You're off your center, master Saukendar.
He had done it to himself once, because he had had no choice. He had had to walk and carry and work, or starve; and Jiro had needed care for his own wound. He did not intend to repeat the mistake.
So he lay about with a woman to wait on him, he rested on his back on the porch and drew the leg up and drew it up a little more to the limit he could do it without pain. Then finally, hurting and out of patience and determined to see how far it would bend, he wrapped his arms about his knee and hugged it to him, hard and hard and harder, until he got another pain out of it that half-blinded him.
But it was bending, he thought, more than he had thought it would.
Then he got the notion that it might bend a little more. The drawing that had happened over the years was bad healing. Tear the damned thing. Give it more flex than it had. Make it do what it was supposed to do. So he pulled it harder, and harder, between bouts of gray and haze. He had seen a fox gnaw its own leg in a snare, to be free. He had not been sure whether it was stupidity or courage. He still was not. He worked until he was soaked in sweat, and wrapped himself in his blanket and lay still and played the invalid while Taizu was in sight; but when she was not he took the problem again and again, a little gain this day, a very little gain, but something: he was sure of it.
He made himself a stick to walk with. He was tolerably agile, once the leg was bound stiff, at getting up and down off the porch, getting to the latrine, getting to the rain-barrel to wash, getting about the cabin the little that he must.
For the rest he kept the leg unbound, and lay about the cabin or on the porch and worked it until the tears ran from the edges of his eyes—while a fool girl who was gifted by the unjust, priest-bribed gods with perfect balance and perfect health, stood out there in the yard whacking away at a damn tree.
"Don't you think you should be up and about, master Saukendar?" she chided him the fourth night. "Don't you think you should walk with it? You told me—"
"I'm working on it," he said shortly.
But the next day—all her suggestions came at times that if he did what he had intended to do in the first place it looked as if he was moved by her advice, and it maddened him—he took to walking without the bandage; and took to slow bending with the foot of his lame side on the first porch step and the sound one on the ground, time and time again, not caring now whether Taizu saw him about it, because he was used to the pain or the pain was less, he was not sure.
Knee straight over the foot while the leg bent, absolutely true. If the damned knee was going to stiffen, let it stiffen in the bad directions, not the good one, let it stiffen so it could no longer make the motion to the side that would tear the sinews and betray the balance. This time when it healed, let it not be on horseback, with the leg out of line; or swinging an axe to try to build the first shelter he had had up on the mountain; or simply curling up to last through the pain and the cold, finally, because he had come to the mountain in the rains, and sat under the scant cover he had been able to contrive and tried only to keep from freezing until he could limp about and put a little more solidity to his building.
Thanks to the village he had not died in those first days, thanks to the village who brought the supplies that time within sight of his shelter; and he had not even said a kind word to them for their trouble. He had waited till the boys had left and then crept out of his lean-to and carried them to cover little by little, in such a haze of pain and fever as made those days hard to recollect at all.
It was, perhaps, the only way the villagers of Mon had known that he had lived, when they had come with more food for him, that the food they brought was gone; and that the shelter was larger. It had been at least three visits they had made, laying their offerings of food at the edge of the clearing, before he had even come out to acknowledge them.
Damn, he had been crazed in those years. They looked at him like he was a holy man and he was nothing more than a rabbit content to burrow in and nibble the gifts they threw, surviving till the hunters came.
Even Ghita had decided finally he was not worth the effort. Just not worth the effort and the lives and the notoriety he might gain if they went on trying to kill him.
Maybe Ghita had known that sending assassins against him would have been a favor to him—to stir him up and make him move. Maybe it would have kept him going—longer—if there had been real enemies, instead of just the fear of them. He had taken care of a few of Ghita's men, early on. But his enemies could have taken him—if Ghita had really cared to do more than send a few assassins, he could have had him. And the village would have paid dearly for helping him; perhaps lord Reidi would pay—merely for tolerating him on his border.
Damn.
Patiently, bend after bend, the knee exactly in line, the foot on the second step this time. He bound the leg when he walked; he swallowed his pride and used a stick for balance, like an old man.
Taizu said not a thing more. He only noticed her looking at him once, when he had advanced his foot to the second step, and when he was bandaging his leg again and splinting the knee. She just stood there and stared, and never offered a word.