"Zeddies, Ann Tonsor - Sky Road (Singer 2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zeddies Ann Tonsor)

"What's the problem?"
"Well, it could be worse," she said grimly. "These people are better medics than I would have imagined possible. Now I understand how you could survive with all those scars of yours.
They can set bones; they can stop some kinds of bleeding. But madre'dio, I don't have enough antiseptic, I don't have antibiotics, I don't have my flash sterilizer. I don't have enough gel or clips or even sutures. IVe got people unpicking embroidery and boiling the silk for me. I'm using sterile salineтАФat least I hope it's sterileтАФand some kind of alcohol to cleanse and then sewing them up. But sometimes that just isn't good enough."
She swallowed hard. "They have their own form of triage, it seems. Most of the people who got hit are either dead or ambulatory. Then there are the ones we'd be working hardest on if this were a Deltan field hospitalтАФhurt bad but will live with care. Those are the ones they're treating like expectants. It's killing me because I know I could save them if I had my equipment. Without itтАФI don't know, but they won't even let me try. This one, for instance. They told me to get away from him. They were going to do something, some word I don't know, but I gathered the result would be death in short order. I told them to wait for you. They got angry and said, 'See for yourself, then'тАФsome other word I don't know. They all backed off." One corner of her lip curled ruefully. "Just luce a bunch of docs resigning from a case. So I shot him up heavily and waited. His chest is crushedтАФbroken ribs and all kinds of internal injuries. I'd have to open him up to have even a chance of helping him, but they won't let me cut him."
Don't ask me to do this, he thought, but he could not get the words out. Instead he followed her to the ledge where the man lay. He was unconscious. Singer could feel the absence, deeper than sleep. Blood bubbled at torn lips with every breath. Pain coiled in the damaged body like a snake hiding. To touch the man would be like allowing the snake to sink its fangs into him.
"Is there someone here who knows this man?" he asked.
"He is our brother, stranger," one of the healers said, offended.
"Someone who loved him more than most."
There was silence. Finally one of the other wounded spoke.
"Is Kata still living? Kata knew him well."
One of the old people hurried out, returning in a few minutes with a thin, black-haired young man. The old one murmured a quick explanation to him. Kata glanced shyly at the strangers and crouched down by the wounded man, not meeting their eyes.
"This is Herat," he said softly. "He had hearth friends, but they are mostly gone now. He had a partner. She got sick and
died before we left our home. He was a good friend to me. He was herdmaster since I was a boy, and I worked the herds with him. He taught me everything, just like a foster father." He stole another look at Singer and Janet. There was a faint flicker of hope in his dark eyes.' 'Can you help him? I thought he would die."
Singer extended a hand in me Thanha way, silendy asking permission to touch, and the young man clasped hands with him.
"After me flying people took our herds away, he was the first to say we should go after them,'' Kata said.' 'He dressed himself for the war road, but I think he set his face toward the Road to the North, the Sky Road. Toward death."
The young man choked on tears he would not shed and fell silent, but Singer had a clear picture of the man who lay broken. Despair had stolen Herat's strength before the fire ships had come. Singer felt it touch him, too, cold and treacherous as ice that would split rock with its unseen probing fingers. He wished that Janet had not brought him mere, but he could not delay any longer. He was causing more hurt to the living and to the dying one. The Riders could deal with death when it came, but the pain of waiting and not knowing was hard for them to bear.
He took a deep bream and laid his hands on Herat's chest. The pain struck into him like venom. He felt sweat spring out on his face. He felt himself swaying and felt Janet steady him. Then he lost track of his own body in the awareness of the other. Herat was mangled internally by fragments of his own bones, splintered by the force of me blow he had taken. The flesh was cut and swollen. Blood seeped into torn lungs, into places where it was not meant to go. Singer had no words to analyze tiiis ruin. It overwhelmed and sickened him.
Again he felt Janet steadying him. She had names for each fiber. He could hear her at the back of his mind, calmly analyzing the damage. He left mat task to her and went on, searching beyond drugs and shock for the man himself.
What he found was like darkness at first. He moved through it as gendy and quiedy as he could. Someone was there, waiting, like a herd guard in winter waiting for me dawn. There was no thought in that half consciousness but a dull wonder that night could last so long. The numbness that wrapped him meant death, but it protected him from pain he could no longer bear, lb stir him and ask him to fight for his life would be recalling him to a hopeless battle.
Singer disengaged himself carefully, enough to look back at Janet and see that her healing ways had no help for these wounds, either. He found that the eldest of the healers had drawn near, as well.
Is your stranger friend satisfied now? Have you kept him in his pain long enough? The question came into his mind forcefully but silently and left a bitter taste. She was angry.
Yes, barasha, he answered humbly. We are satisfied. He was ready to let go now, to let her do whatever else could be done. But she cut him off.
You took this on yourself. Now it is your responsibility to see him through it.
Singer wanted to run again, but he was too deeply entangled with the wounded man. He could feel that the drugs were not as strong anymore. If he pulled himself away, he risked shocking Herat awake. He turned his back on the others, on praise and blame alike, and went back into the darkness.
Go on, brother, he whispered to the one who waited for him there. Kata sends you his love. There's nothing more to wait for.
The dying man moved farther on his trackless way without waking. Singer took the pain of that leave-taking on himself. He felt that body losing its hold on life, like lights going out one by one in a great city, like stars fading from a sky that would never know dawn. He had never known this man, but he knew him now, and cherished him, and was torn by his passing. He reached for the last trace of him and reached farther, until he was lost in the winter beyond the stars.
Living hands shook him back to awareness, and that hurt, too.
"Fool!" the old woman said aloud. "You want to play at being a healer? You want to interfere? Then take the full weight of it! Go down the road with them and see how it feels!"
Singer could not stop shivering. His hands felt like ice. He looked down at the old woman from what seemed a great distance. She was punishing him relentlessly for being a stranger. He was too tired to make her see otherwise. Herat lay between them, dead, with young Kata weeping quietly at his feet.
Janet was not paying any attention to the old woman. She had already moved on to the next. She looked back impatiendy when she noticed that Singer was not right behind her.
"Get moving. They don't have much time," she said, and he
followed her.
* * *
A lifetime later he moved to find the next moaning, bloody body and found that there was no next. He straightened up. It had become quiet in the tent. He could hear the hiss of snow against the smoke flap, the crackle of the small fire. His hands had touched raw flesh and burns and broken bones. Now he was numb and felt nothing, not even Janet's hand on his arm.
"Don't quit yet. There's someone else," she said, stiff-lipped. When Singer looked at her, she flinched but stood her ground. She pointed. A woman was rocking herself to and fro beside a small, blanket-wrapped bundle.
Oh, Hesukristo and all the other gods of the strangerfolk, not a child, Singer prayed silently. He reached back through his time with the strangerfolk soldiers for all the foul words they had taught him, but the bundle was still there.
"What happened?" he asked.
Janet turned back the wrappings carefully. "She got hit in the belly. I sewed up die artery so she's not bleeding to death, and I cleaned up as well as I could. But she's got a puncture wound right through into the liver, and I can't fix it, and I'm afraid to close up without fixing it. The boss old lady was hung up between fascination and outrage. She thought sewing people up was a max idea but thinks I'm making a hell of a botch of it, and she's right about that. If you can't help, I'll cut the damaged tissue out of me liver and close it as best I can, and then she'll probably either bleed to death internally or die of infection."
She explained stolidly, gazing at the gaping wound in the child's abdomen without flinching. She was as ruthless in her own way as any warrior, Singer thought.
"Give her to me," he said.
Janet really looked at him and hesitated for the first time. "You can't move her," she protested.
"Give her to me!"
He sat cross-legged on the ledge, cradling the child in his arms. She whimpered but stayed limp. Janet had given her too much of the strangers' medicine in her attempt to still the pain. Herat had welcomed that stupor, but the child fought it as a child would struggle to kick off an entangling blanket.
Fight, little one, fight! Singer encouraged her. He warmed himself at her small, sturdy spirit as if at a glowing ember. There was no poisonous flavor of despair in her thoughts. They were simple and clean. She wanted to get up. She wanted to live. He felt her legs tremble as she tried to kick and soothed her hastily. In her dream she was still running, reaching for her mother.
Singer reached to reassure her, but she whimpered in her sieep again, trying to get away. He was a stranger.
He started to weave a net for her in her dreams, like the game called "pathways" that Thanha children played with a string twisted around their fingers. His fingers twitched, wanting the strings of his thamla, but there was a strange weight on his arms. He would have to weave a pattern without his instrument.
It was moonlight he wove, the moonlight that trickled like lines of ice over the rocks where a boy her age had waited alone in a night as frosty cold as this one. He did not call for his mother. He had forgotten her face and her name. No one was coming to rescue him. Only a handful of notes from a half-remembered song stood between him and the fear of the dark. The boy sang for himself alone, but the child heard him. She was not afraid of him. She paused in her flight and followed the silver pattern of his song, and her pain and panic faded. Under cover of the music, he breathed on the embers of her strength till they glowed bright. Her heart beat faster, her blood raced, the insulted tissues reached and wove themselves together. He did not have Janet's skill, but the Delh'tani medic had already mended much of what was broken. The child's body found its own wisdom for rebuilding the rest.
Silence fell in the tent when he started to sing. It was a simple song, a child's song for the Lady of the Fountains. The voice was hushed and hoarse but woke echoes in their hearts. They were all alone with the cold and the sound of their own breath for company. They listened for another voice to answer them and feared that it would never come. Their hope was as fragile as a child's breath and as slender as a harp string, but still it sang in the night, weaving them together into the pattern.
Imperceptibly the tune changed, warming and rocking them. It resolved into words again, into a Thanha sleep song, reassuring and well remembered as their mothers' arms.
You will ride the wind, You will track a star; You will catch a dream, You will travel far.