Ambrosia descended from vision. She opened her eyes, looked at Morlock, and shrugged.
Morlock tapped his nose, meaning, What about his nose?
Ambrosia shook her head. It was dead (or so Morlock guessed).
“We should take care of it now,” Morlock observed.
“You are sure of that,” she said.
He thought this remark over. Morlock was sure, and Ambrosia was likely sure as well. But Kelat would not be.
“What do you mean?” the young Vraid said. He was still obediently holding his hands over his face. If he had as obediently worn his face mask, he would not be facing mutilation now. On the other hand, if he were merely obedient, he wouldn’t be much use on a quest like this.
“Your face will be well enough, though it will have some bruising for a while,” Ambrosia said. “Your nose is in a more serious condition.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“We’ll know in a couple of days. You can lower your hands now.”
They talked even less than usual that night.
The next day, Kelat wore his face mask. Morlock and Deor talked over the idea of using impulse wells to heat clothing in winter. It was purely theoretical, since they had no impulse wells or the means to make them at hand, but it was a way to combat the perpetual gnawing chill, if only in imagination. It seemed to raise everyone’s spirits.
At the end of the next day they inspected Kelat’s face again. The bruising was horrific: blackish purple smeared across his face, darkest on the nose. The very end of his nose was a greenish gray: gangrene was beginning.
They showed it to him in a mirror and explained what it meant.
“Cut my nose off?” he said, obviously surprised at the thought of it. “Can’t you heal it? Surely you can heal it! I’ve seen the wonders you can do when you try.”
“The flesh is dead,” Ambrosia said with unwonted gentleness. “I’m sorry, Kelat. But dead is dead. It will have to come off.”
Kelat looked at each of them, as if he expected someone to disagree. He shouted, “No! No! I’d rather die.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” Ambrosia said impatiently.
“You don’t know—”
“It’s you who don’t know, sir. That’s why you are in this uncomfortable position. But that’s all that it is—not a matter of life and death.”
“It is to me!”
“Kelat, my friend,” Morlock said. “There are things worth dying for. We all believe that, or we wouldn’t be here. But vanity isn’t one of them.”
“This isn’t vanity.”
“It is.”
Silence.
“Let me go away,” the young man said quietly. “Let me go away and die in the wilderness. You can keep my rations and have . . . have that much good from this mess.”
Ambrosia’s eyes filled with tears and she looked at Morlock.
“No,” he said pitilessly. “You have not yet been of much use on this quest, young Prince Uthar, but what use you could be you still can be. We didn’t bring you along to judge perfumes or the bouquets of fine vintages, you know.”
Kelat glared at him with hatred.
“But if you insist on leaving when the journey is at its most dangerous,” Morlock continued, “you must, of course, take your rations. If you find the courage to live, out among the snows, you’ll need them.”
“Shut up! Shut up!”
Silence again.
“I’ll kill you someday,” Kelat remarked in a conversational tone.
Morlock shrugged his crooked shoulders, and there was no more talk of Kelat wandering off in the night to die.
They lay Kelat on his back. Ambrosia fed him a painkilling drug she had in her pack, and they arranged shears, bandages, snow, and herbs near at hand.
But when she lifted up the shears, her eyes grew wet again and she whispered, “Oh, Morlock. Oh, his beautiful face.”
Morlock was not attached to the young man’s beautiful face and he didn’t like the way his sister’s hands were trembling. He took the shears from her. He put his left hand over Kelat’s eyes, to restrain him physically and to keep him from flinching, and swiftly snipped off the gangrenous nose. Deor deftly caught it, and Ambrosia and Morlock busied themselves with sewing up the edges of the wound and bandaging it before Kelat lost too much blood.
“You’ve redleaf?” he asked her at one point.
“Yes. We’ll have to give it to him to chew; we can’t make tea.”
Then they were done. Kelat would have gotten up groggily, but they made him lie down again. “Rest!” said Ambrosia. “It’s all any of us can do tonight.”
Kelat lay back down and saw Deor awkwardly holding the severed nose.
“Might need it,” Kelat said thickly, as if he had the worst cold in history. “Make soup out of it.”
Deor reflected briefly and then said deliberately, “Snot soup? I remember—”
Kelat gasped, then laughed, spraying blood out of his mouth and nose hole. “Sorry!” he said as the others cleaned him up. “Sorry!”
“My fault,” said Deor, not very sincerely to Morlock’s eye.
“Snot soup,” Kelat whispered, and chuckled. He said no other word until morning.
The drug that Ambrosia had given him made Kelat sleep, but his sleep was restless and he kept waking and dozing all through the night. At no waking moment did he get the cruel relief of forgetfulness, the delusion that it had all been some terrible dream: it was always the pain in his face that woke him.
The next day he rinsed his mouth with melted snow, forced himself to eat a few bites of food, and then bound on his snowshoes and shuffled with the others along the narrow road northward. He wore his mask, of course. In fact, he had decided he would wear it, or something like it, for the rest of his life.
The pain was pain. He didn’t relish it, but he could bear it. The shame of his stupidity—that would be with him for the rest of his life: every time he looked at a mirror; every time he chose not to look; every time someone looked at his face; every time they chose not to look.
The day was cold and searingly bright. He was so sick of the endless cold, the endless snow and ice. And now the shame, like vomit, filling his gorge. Maybe death was better than this.
But he would not be weaker than the others. Not again. Whatever burdens they bore, he would bear them, too. He would show them, and himself, that he could.
He found himself walking next to Morlock, with the others some distance ahead.
“I’ll never forget what you said to me,” Kelat remarked quietly.
Morlock looked at him with those gray eyes, bright and cold as the horizon, and waited. There was a calm in him that nothing could touch. Kelat envied it and hated it.
“I’ll always remember,” Kelat continued, “that you gave me something to live for, even if it was only hate.”
Morlock relaxed indefinably. “Well. I have natural gifts in that direction. So Ambrosia is always telling me.”
“And you’re not worried about me acting on the hate?”
Morlock shrugged his crooked shoulders. Kelat waited, but he didn’t say anything more. They walked together in silence for a long while.
That afternoon, as the sun was eastering, Kelat was walking alone while Morlock and Ambrosia conversed in low voices ahead of him. He couldn’t catch everything they were saying, but finally he heard Morlock say, in an annoyed tone, “People are born every day with faces worse than he has now.”
Ambrosia replied heatedly, “Those people are not the King of All the Vraids.”
“Is Kelat likely to be?” Morlock sounded surprised.
“Someone has to be. You can say it doesn’t matter, that a civilized people wouldn’t care what its leaders looked like. But the Vraids are, at best, semicivilized.”
“A civilized people doesn’t have leaders,” Morlock replied.
Ambrosia laughed, taking it as a joke. Morlock did not laugh, and Kelat wondered why. She glanced back toward him and he didn’t meet her eye, or give any sign he had heard them. He didn’t want to betray any sign of weakness. He was painfully aware that this was itself a sign of weakness, but he couldn’t help that. It was his only way forward, his only plan of action.