Healers (18 page)

Taken aback, he practically muttered, “Nothing! I’m just…” He petered out. Then gaining resolve he continued, “Taking Paul home. They’re making him worse!”

“Stephen Spencer,” his formerly mousey wife said, sudden steel in her voice, “These people,” she waved a hand at the Hyllises, “have been doing the
very
best they can for your son. You can
see
it in their eyes. They aren’t charging you money! They’re just
trying
to help Paul… Whether they succeed or not, they’re doing their best and you’d better
not
disrespect them!”

Daussie’d been thinking of Paul’s mother as a subservient individual, completely dominated by her husband. Now it was Mr. Spencer who appeared to be cowed. He stared at his wife for a moment, jaw working, then he turned and started walking towards town.

Eva muttered, “I’m afraid we haven’t made a friend there.” She knelt beside their patient, “Paul, your pneumonia has spread to another part of your lung. Fluid has been reaccumulating in the parts of your lung we’ve cleared earlier. I can tell you’re having a hard time breathing, and I’ll bet you don’t want to go through another coughing episode, but you’re starting to drown from the inside again. Do you want to try another treatment?”

He moaned, but nodded. “I can barely breathe,” he said with a little gasp, “you’ve got to do something.”

Eva said, “Okay, we’ll try it in a minute. We’re just going to talk over a different strategy.” She motioned to Tarc and Daussie to step aside. Mrs. Spencer stepped with them. Eva said, “I’m thinking we should try to do a big section of lung all at once. It will be quite a bit worse for him than doing one of the little sections. But I think it will be better than doing so many little sections, one after another. ‘Get it over with,’ so to speak.” She looked back and forth at her little audience of three to see what they thought.

Daussie and Tarc glanced at one another feeling helpless. Mrs. Spencer said, “I think that sounds like a lot better strategy, as long as a big one doesn’t kill him?”

Eva sighed, “I wish I could be sure it wouldn’t.”

Struck by an idea, Daussie said, “Wait! Let me look…” She stopped herself before she said “look something up,” but both Tarc and Eva knew what she was saying as she turned and strode toward the wagon.

Eva turned to Mrs. Spencer, “I hope she’s just had a good idea. Tarc and I’ll go ‘look’ with her. We’ll be back in a minute or two.”

When they reached Daussie in the wagon, she was carefully searching through their medical books. “What’re you looking for?” Eva asked.

“The nerve to the lung. If Tarc could block it, Paul wouldn’t cough when he pushed the fluids out into the bronchi.”

Eva frowned, “But Paul’s got to cough. The coughing helps move the fluids up and out of the lung. Certainly he needs to cough them up and out of his throat and mouth.”

“Tarc can push them up and out! And I’ll bet it’d be easier if everything wasn’t jerking around because Paul was coughing.”

Eva turned her gaze on Tarc, “Do you think that’s true?”

Tarc nodded, “Yeah, squeezing lung isn’t all that difficult but it’s a little harder pushing the fluids along in the bronchi when they’re jumping all around.”

Eva said, “Okay, I think I know where to look.”

A few minutes later, they were all tracing the course of their own vagus nerves with their ghosts. Eventually they found the branches that mostly fed the lungs. Tarc said, “I guess I can cool that main branch down and we can see what happens. I think I shouldn’t try to squeeze out a really big area of the lung until we see what happens with the nerve blocked.”

They all trooped back over to Paul. “We think we’ve figured out a way to do this without you feeling like you have to cough quite so much,” Eva said. “But we might need you to cough on purpose at some point to push out some of the fluid. We’ll
tell
you to cough if that happens, okay?”

Paul nodded. Tarc had already found and started cooling the pulmonary branch of Paul’s vagus nerve. Moments after Paul gave them the nod, they rolled him up onto his right side and Tarc started squeezing a section of his left upper lobe. Fluids flowed out of the lung tissue and into the bronchi. Tarc started pushing the fluids along while Daussie fluttered her hands over Paul’s ribs and transported dollops of the fluid away.

Just when Eva was thinking she was going to have to ask Paul to cough the fluids out, they reached areas in his throat that weren’t numb because Tarc’s nerve block hadn’t covered those areas. Paul coughed a few times, bringing up large quantities of sputum, but the coughing episodes didn’t seem as paroxysmal and painful as they had been before.

Tarc set to work pulling that section of upper lobe back open so it would fill with air. Paul sounded hopeful as he rasped, “Oh, that wasn’t as bad even though it felt to me like I coughed out just as much stuff. Is that right?”

Eva said, “Uh-huh, you up to having another treatment?”

“Um, sure, if it’s not any worse than that one.”

This next time, they tilted the litter head down, put Paul on his left side leaned over towards his face and Tarc squeezed out half of Paul’s left upper lobe. The volume of material Paul produced almost made it look like he was throwing up. Once Tarc reinflated that section of lung, Paul sighed with relief as he breathed better.

They had stepped away to let Paul have a rest when Tarc glanced back toward their booth, thinking they had been gone for a long time. Embarrassed, he said, “Oh-oh, we forgot about Mr. Miller and his friend with gout!”

Daussie looked up and saw Miller and his friend staring at them from their seats about twenty feet away. They had astonished looks on their faces.

Eva called out to them, “I’m so sorry. We’ve been taking care of this young man and were pretty upset that he wasn’t doing well. We forgot all about you!”

The man with the gout shook his head. “You just take your time. I can see that the young man’s a lot sicker than I am!”

Eva turned to put a hand on Tarc’s shoulder, “You rest. Daussie and I’ll go take care of this gentleman.”

Tarc glanced at Daussie’s somewhat pinched face. “Daussie’s been working her talent pretty hard too Mom,” he said. She’s been transporting a fair amount of fluid out for me and I think she’s got a pretty good headache.”

Eva looked at Daussie and immediately saw she wasn’t feeling well, “Oops, sorry. I’ll take care of him. There’s not much we can do besides willow bark tea anyway.”

Over the next several hours, working around making dinner for the caravan, Tarc, Daussie, and Eva performed several more treatments on Paul. Though the fluid tended to reaccumulate, and the inflamed lung certainly didn’t work normally, they were able to get him to the point where he felt like he was breathing fairly easily before they went to bed that night.

The next morning, Paul was having trouble breathing again and their ghosts found he had reaccumulated fluid. They performed a couple of treatments early in the morning before starting breakfast for the caravan.

Once breakfast was set up, Tarc took his own eggs and a slab of hot buttered bread. He went to sit by the wagon and eat. He’d just begun, when someone thumped down beside him. He looked up.
Lizeth!

She grinned at him, “Hey,
you’ve
been scarce.”

“Um, yeah, we’ve been taking care of a really sick patient. It’s been taking up a lot of time.”

Lizeth drew back with a mildly alarmed look, “Didn’t you guys read the rules about healing here in Realth?!”

“Well, yes. We aren’t charging people for it.”

She gave him a considering look, “If one of your patients gets worse instead of better I’m not sure the king’s guardia will care all that much whether you charged or not.”

“Well, this guy would have
died
without treatment. He’s got pneumonia.”

Lizeth’s eyes widened a little.
Everyone
feared pneumonia, almost 50 percent of people who got it died. “You
really
think you’re helping him?”

Tarc wasn’t surprised that Lizeth doubted. People who believed in healers were less common than those who thought they caused harm. Not sure how to respond, he merely nodded.

“Okaaay,” Lizeth said slowly. “I hope you’re right, but I’m still worried for you guys. I’d hate for you to wind up as slaves here.”

“Me too.” Tarc said, sounding depressed. “Even if
I
could let this guy die, I don’t think my Mom could.” He glanced around, thinking he needed to get back to helping make breakfast. Adding insult to injury he saw Sam standing across the way, staring at him with a furious expression. He was in Lizeth’s blind spot since she was facing Tarc. Mentally, Tarc sighed.

In case it wasn’t clear that Sam was pissed, he pointed at Tarc, then back at himself. Then he held his left hand out in front of himself and struck it—hard—with the right fist.

This time Tarc’s sigh was audible. Not knowing what upset him, Lizeth said, “I guess I can see you guys being in kind of a bind then. If you really think you can help these people, then ethically, I guess you should. Is that what’s got you down?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah.”

Having tracked the direction of Tarc’s eyes, Lizeth looked behind her, but Sam had stepped out of sight before she’d turned fully.

Tarc said, “I’d better get back to work. There’s a lot to do to feed all of you guys.” He managed a weak grin.

Once the caravan’s breakfast had been served, they did another treatment on Paul. Most of the family then started for their booth, while Tarc took the bay horse and headed off to get wood.

Considering the expression on Sam’s face when Tarc had been talking to Lizeth earlier, Tarc worried Sam would show up to follow through on his promise of a beating. But the Hyllises had to have wood. He wondered uneasily how to deal with Sam if it happened. Tarc badly wanted to continue dealing with him nonviolently, but feared that if Sam really tried to give him a beating, he wouldn’t be able to restrain himself from lashing out.
Maybe with a little warning I could just make him slightly dizzy so he’d break off an attack?
Resolving not to be caught unawares like he had last time; Tarc kept his ghost out a little ways. Sam wasn’t going to surprise him by stepping out from behind a tree like he had last time.

Tarc made it to the wood sellers and purchased several bundles without any sign of Sam, however, he suspected the risk was significantly higher on the way back than it had been on the way out. As he returned, he pushed his ghost out even further, hoping against hope he wouldn’t find Sam lurking in the woods.

In the deepest part of the path through the woods, just where you might expect someone to set an ambush, Tarc’s ghost detected someone in the trees on the left. Though it was always difficult with his ghost, Tarc had an uncertain feeling the person standing there wasn’t as bulky as Sam.

He stopped and thought, wondering why someone else would be hiding off the trail in the woods here. Maybe they were hunting? Looking for mushrooms or other products of the forest? Tarc waited for a while, but the person didn’t move. Perhaps he’d misjudged Sam’s size, or, he realized, perhaps someone else could be up to no good.

Tarc thought about his options. He’d like to confront Sam and get it over with. Perhaps slowing the flow in Sam’s carotid just enough to make Sam a little bit dizzy and clumsy. Then Tarc could take a few blows and deal one or two back, then cry uncle. Ideally, Sam would win, but find the fight difficult enough he wouldn’t try it again. While waiting for his wood, Tarc had tried this idea on the woodsman’s hound. He’d slowed the flow to animal’s carotid as it trotted near Tarc to be sure he could slow flow just a little in a moving target. The animal had stumbled a couple of times and looked confused, but once Tarc allowed full flow again it shook its head and moved on, apparently unharmed.

So, if the person in the woods was Sam, Tarc wanted to approach as if unsuspecting, all the while reaching out for Sam’s carotid with his ghost. However, if this represented an ambush by a robber, Tarc didn’t want the man getting the drop on him.

He reached back and checked the draw of the throwing knives strapped between his shoulder blades. None of them hung up. Tarc wasn’t wearing his forearm sheaths. He crouched and pulled the throwing knife out of his left ankle sheath. It was the hardest place to get a knife from in an emergency, so a good one to have in his hand.

After another minute of thought, Tarc walked the bay horse a short distance off the trail on the right and tied it loosely to a sapling. He crossed the trail to the left and slowly approached the man in the woods. He used his ghost to keep himself from stepping on anything that might make noise, while keeping the bole of the tree the man was hiding behind between the man and himself.

He stopped. Tarc had let his ghost collapse in, just keeping it large enough to show him the waiting man. But he’d heard something. He didn’t know what the sound was, but he didn’t think it came from the man on the other side of the tree.

Re-expanding his ghost, Tarc found six more men a little farther off the trail!

One of the men lay on the ground with two of the others standing over him. Tarc felt pretty sure the two men over him held swords touching his back. The swords were cool and therefore hard to detect with his ghost from this distance, however, the men’s postures suggested they held swords. Two more men stood nearby and one sat on a fallen tree, watching.

Worried about what else he might have missed, Tarc expanded his ghost to a maximum. He found another man farther away down the trail on the right. Tarc thought the one he’d been sneaking up on and the one far away were probably scouts for the five surrounding the man on the ground. He recognized the sound that had tipped him off now. The little cluster of men around the one on the ground were talking quietly.

He’d come on a robbery!

One of the men knelt and started going over the man on the ground. Tarc’s ghost could feel the man’s hands searching for money and other valuables.

Tarc dithered a moment. He didn’t want to attack these men, but they shouldn’t be allowed to rob people either. Even worse, Tarc feared they might decide to kill their victim to keep him from reporting their activities. And, even if Tarc
did
just let them rob the guy on the ground, Tarc would soon have to pass this point on the trail himself—at which point these men would presumably attack Tarc.

Tarc took a few quiet steps closer to the bole of the tree the scout hid behind. Reaching out with his ghost, he slowed the flow in the scout’s carotids. As soon as the man started to sag, Tarc stepped quickly around the base of the tree and grabbed his arm, lowering him so he wouldn’t fall with a thump. Using the throwing knife he had in his hand, Tarc slashed the man’s sleeve off his arm and stuffed it into the guy’s mouth. The scout had been armed with a bow. Tarc pulled the string off the bow and used it to quickly bind the man’s wrists behind him. The man’s rope belt went around his head, holding the gag in place. His pants were pulled down around his ankles and knotted there with a bit of vine to keep them from being kicked off.

Tarc took the pressure off the man’s carotid and he woke to find the point of a knife just above the surface of his right eye. Tarc whispered fiercely, “You’ll lie here quietly. If you don’t, I’ll be back to stick this knife in your eye, understand?”

Right eye fluttering shut while the left one crossed the midline to stare at the point of the blade, the man nodded microscopically. Tarc smelled piss.

He pulled the knife out of his right ankle sheath and stood with a knife in each hand. He began walking quietly toward the men clustered around their victim on the ground. He knew there would be no way to render all five men unconscious and wondered if he was about to have to break his promise not to kill.

The closer Tarc got, the better his ghost could feel cool things like the swords the men held against their victim’s back and the trees surrounding them. Tarc worked to keep behind trees as he approached. He had an “aha” moment when he realized the bandit closest to him had a bow, arrow nocked and aimed at the man on the ground.

Tarc could picture it now. Someone walking down the path, unsuspecting. Suddenly, a swordsman or two in front, the same behind, and a bowman to the side. Even if you felt confident enough that you might challenge or charge the swordsmen blocking the trail one way or the other, hoping to break past them, the archer would cut you down as you ran.

The bowman posed a problem for Tarc in that he might shoot their captive or at least
threaten
to if Tarc interfered with their little enterprise. Even if Tarc tried to make him dizzy by cutting flow in the carotid, he might drop the string and shoot their captive.

Tarc reached out with his ghost, found the semicircular canals in the archer’s inner ears and gave the fluid in there a little spin. As he had hoped, the archer, overcome with severe vertigo, twisted, leaned hard to the side, and staggered off into the brush at the side of the little clearing. He did drop the bow but his aim had swung wide before he did.

As the other four bandits stared after their comrade, Tarc stepped out from behind the tree and said, “Let your victim up, I don’t want to hurt you.”

The four men turned goggle eyed to stare at Tarc. To them he’d simply appeared where their compatriot with the bow had been standing. All of their attention had been focused on the bowman’s staggering exit, so, like with a magician’s misdirection they hadn’t noticed Tarc stepping out.

If Tarc had looked dangerous, perhaps they would have responded differently. However, they saw a teenage boy holding a couple of small throwing knives. Since they held swords, Tarc didn’t appear the least bit threatening to them.

The one who’d been sitting on the log barked a laugh as he stood. “Boy, I don’t know what you did to Ezra there,” he waved his sword vaguely after the bowman who’d staggered away and could be heard throwing up in the brush. “But if you want to live,” he snarled, “you’ll drop to your knees and place yourself at our mercy. Jessup,” his eyes flashed to one of the men standing over their victim, “if he’s not on his knees by the time you reach him, run him through.”

Jessup turned and stepped towards Tarc.

Thinking,
Aw crap!
Tarc let his first knife fly. When it plunged into Jessup’s eye, the man convulsed, his sword flying end over end away from his thrashing hand and barely missing a comrade.

The other swordsman standing over the victim gathered to plunge his sword into the prone man. Tarc could almost hear him thinking
, I’ll make sure this one’s out of the fight first. Don’t want him rising up and causing trouble.

Tarc threw his second knife and reached back for a knife out of his shoulder holster. When Tarc’s second knife drove itself into the swordsman’s eye socket, the man simply collapsed like someone had cut his strings.

The big swordsman who’d been sitting on the log charged.

Tarc threw a third knife and reached back for a fourth.

As the big swordsman fell, his sword clanging uselessly on a hidden rock, the bandit who’d been kneeling to go through the victim’s pockets raised his hands and slowly lifted himself to a crouch.

Making sure the bandit wasn’t about to return, Tarc glanced in the direction of the bowman who’d staggered away. He turned his attention back to the crouching bandit with the elevated hands, then glanced down at their victim.

Dark leathers, dark hair. A sick feeling came over Tarc.

Sam!

Uncertainly, Sam’s head rose from the ground. Since no one stopped him, he pushed up, lifting his shoulders and looking around. A moment later, he was looking back at Tarc. At first startled, then he looked calculating and finally sneeringly angry. “What?! Did you hire these assholes to try to put me in my place?! Are you thinking
this
is going to get me to back off?!”

Tarc simply stared at Sam, wondering what Lizeth saw in him.