A Different Flesh (29 page)

When he woke again, the female sim was trying to feed him another plant like the last one, but even more bedraggled. This time, the sim broke off the root and forced it into his mouth, the taste was just as bad as he remembered, but, gagging, he got the thing down. After he had swallowed, the female brought him a cup of water and held his head while he drank it. He did not think the cup was the one he had made.

He had another sweating spell during his next sleep, and stayed awake some little while when he came out of it. The female sim seemed to have taken over his nursing. It greeted him with yet another dusty maiden plant. He no longer tried to fight its ministrations. Enough of his wits were back for him to realize that, however acrid and revolting the roots it was giving him tasted, they were doing him good.

He came awake again at dawn, thinking how hungry he was. He tried to raise himself up on an elbow. The effort left him gasping before he finally succeeded. But no matter how weak he was, he was at last in command of his faculties once more.

He took stock of himself, looking down the length of his body. He whistled, soft and low. “No wonder I'm hungry,” he said out loud, his voice a rusty croak. The fever had melted the flesh from his bones. Every rib was plainly visible (he had no idea when the sims had taken off his tunic), and his legs were bird-scrawny.

The splints, he saw with relief, were still on his right calf. It ached fiercely, but now the pain was at a level he could bear. Yellow serum oozed from the scab where the bone had stabbed through his skin, yet his right leg felt not much warmer than the other one. Despite the splints, the leg had a kink in it that had not been there before.

He did not care. He was healing. A limp—even a cane the rest of his life—would be a small price to pay. He marveled that he was alive at all.

Because the agony in his leg had diminished, he was able to take stock of his other bodily shortcomings, which were considerable. He felt raw, running sores on his back and buttocks, not surprising when he had been lying there so long. There were more on the insides of his thighs, from imperfectly cleaned wastes. But he was not lying in a great, stinking pool of his own filth. The sims must have dragged him from spot to spot in their clearing. He had no memory of it.

Most of the subhumans were already out looking for food. One of the old females that kept an eye on the youngsters while their parents foraged walked in front of him.
Food
, he signed.

The old female fell back a pace.
“Hoo!”
it said in surprise; he must have been an inert lump so long that the sims no longer expected anything else from him. The old female brought him some berries. They were the unripe and overripe ones none of the subhumans had wanted. Again, Henry Quick did not care. Half-starved as he was, they tasted wonderful.

He tried to roll on his side, but even splinted, even beginning to mend, his leg would not let him. His bedsores (he could think of no better name for them) snarled as his weight came back down on them. He was not going anywhere, even so short a distance, for a while yet. He abandoned the slender dream he'd let grow again of getting back across the mountains before the snow fell.

The female sim that had been caring for him returned, bearing what looked like a chunk of log. The old female gave an excited hoot, pointed to Quick. Seeing him conscious, the other sim dropped its burden and dashed over to him.

It had also been carrying another dusty maiden plant. This time he took the plant from the sim's hand and ate it before he could be told to. Whatever was in that root was better medicine than most of what the doctors back in Cairo had. When he had choked it down, he signed
Eat
?

Eat
, the female sim echoed, grinning hugely. One of the hatchets from Quick's pack was lying close by. The sim struck the log it had brought in. Punk flew; the log was old. Two or three more strokes served to split it. It was full of big, fat beetle larvae. They squirmed in the dirt. Youngsters came running up to pop them into their mouths.

The female sim skewered several grubs on a twig, held them over the fire, and brought them to Quick. The trapper gulped, then sighed. If he was going to live with sims, he would have to live like a sim, and that was that. He screwed his eyes shut, but he ate. Perhaps hunger seasoned the grubs, for he did not find them as disgusting as he expected. Compared to the medicinal root, they were delicious.

The female sim fetched him a cup of water. He wondered how many times it had done that while his wits wandered. Few human nurses would have been so patient.

The water made his bladder fill up. He did not want to piss himself, not now when he was awake. He called to the female sim. When he had its attention, he signed,
Fill cup with piss from me? Not piss on ground here
.

“Hoo,”
the sim said softly, as the subhumans often did when meeting an idea they had not thought of. The sim held a cup between his legs. It took hold of his penis to put the tip inside the cup as matter-of-factly as if it were handling his toe. Urinating without fouling himself was another of the pleasures that accompanied healing.

He thought of something.
Not drink from this cup
, he signed.
This cup—piss only
.

“Hoo,”
the female said again.

For all his improvement, the trapper still slept as much as a young child. He was asleep when the hunting party of males returned, a little before sunset. When he woke the next morning, most of them were gone again. The male that had brought him the marten pelt, however, crouched beside him, plainly waiting for him to rouse.

That waiting was as far as politeness went among sims. They had no small talk. As soon as the male saw Quick's eyes on it, it signed.
Make thing like noise-stick
.

Quick frowned. He had hoped the sim had forgotten the promise he'd made as he thrashed on the ground in anguish. He had only the vaguest idea of how to make a bow, to say nothing of arrows. Unfortunately, the sim remembered. He would have to learn.

If it was going to propel an arrow, a bow had to be of springy wood. The trapper pointed to one of the spruces at the edge of the clearing.
Fetch me little tree like that
, he signed. He held his hands about four feet apart. The sim went into the woods. It soon came back with a sapling such as he had described. A knife lay close enough for him to reach it. He began cutting branches off the trunk. The sim watched for a while, then decided nothing was going to happen right away. It picked up its hatchet and a stout club and went off to hunt.

Because Quick was stuck on his back, trimming the sapling was a slow, awkward job. He managed to twist enough to prop himself up on his left elbow. He used his left hand to hold the fragrant trunk and carved away with his right, but things still did not go well. He looked round for the grizzled sim. The old male could help, and would probably be interested in what he was up to.

He did not see the old male. Thinking back, he had not seen it since his wits came back. When the female that cared for him returned from a foraging trip, he asked about it.
Dead
, the female signed, a thumbs-down gesture old as the Roman arena. The sim amplified it with a racking burst of coughs. Quick recalled the paroxysms he had heard in his delirium.

Once more he was frustrated because he could not make the polite expressions of sympathy speech would permit. After some thought, he signed
Bad for band
.

Bad for band
, the female agreed.
Toolmaker
. All sims could use and make tools, of course, but as with people, some were better than others. The grizzled sim had lived long enough to gain a great deal of experience, too. If it had not passed on all it knew, the band would indeed suffer. Henry Quick wondered how much he could help there. What hurt the band would also hurt him.

By the end of the day, he had the trunk of the spruce bare of branches and a notch carved in either end.
Good help
, he signed to the female. It smiled back at him. He realized he had to make a conscious effort to smell it these days, probably, he thought, because by now his own odor was as strong as its.

About then the males came back. They were smeared with blood but triumphant; they carried a plump doe already cut in pieces. The females and youngsters greeted them with glad cries. The band would feast tonight.

The male that had brought Quick the marten fur ambled over and picked up the would-be bow. It scowled, eyebrows working on the heavy brow-ridges.
Not like noise-stick
, it signed ominously. Had it had a sign for
fake
, it would have used it.

Not like
, the trapper admitted, adding
Do like, when done
. The sim grunted a noise redolent of skepticism. Quick's eye fell on the hind leg from which another male was carving chunks. He had intended to use another bootlace as a bowstring, but he had only two, and the sims would need more bows than that … assuming he could make any at all. Sinew might serve in place of leather.

Save
—he signed, and then paused, grinding his teeth: he did not remember the sign for “sinew.” Eventually, by pointing to the tendons in his own wrist and at the back of the sim's ankles, he put across his meaning. The male gave him a dubious look no butler would have been ashamed of, but went over to the sim acting as butcher and passed the message along. That male shrugged as if to say the trapper was daft, but eventually set beside him several glistening white lengths, each with bits of flesh still clinging to it.

He did not work on the bow for several days after that. His fever returned. It was not strong enough to drive him into delirium, but it did leave him shivering and miserable. He glumly crunched the dusty maiden roots the female sim brought him and wished he felt more like a human being, or even a healthy sim.

Because he was still aware of his surroundings, he really noticed then the care the female sim gave him. It fed him, got him water, cleansed him, hauled him from place to place to keep him from lying in his own dung. It might not have been as gentle as a human nurse, but it was more conscientious than most.

Not only was this spell of fever less severe than the last had been, it was shorter. Yet even after Quick began to feel better, he kept waking up chilled. Only when he saw the sims also clutching themselves, building thicker piles of bedding, and huddling close to the fire did he understand that the weather was changing. Autumn was drawing near, and hard on its heels would come winter.

The sims did what they could to get ready for it. They brought in stones and brush, which they began to work into a windbreak. As the days went by, it grew thicker and taller and extended all the way around the clearing, with a couple of thin spots through which the sims could push. They also stacked up great heaps of firewood; once the snow started, it would not be so easy to collect. Quick's hatchets helped them there. They could not have cut so much wood with their crude tools alone.

Some of them even realized it. The male that had brought him the marten pelt hefted its hatchet when it saw he was watching and signed,
Good
.

It was less happy, however, over the trapper's efforts to make arrows that were worth anything. Finding really straight lengths of branch was hard enough. Getting points on them proved worse. Because the sims used stone tools, Quick had assumed they could easily chip out little stone arrowheads. But the tools they were used to making were hand-sized choppers and scrapers. They had never done the fine, tiny flakework arrowheads required. If Quick had shown them how, they could have duplicated his efforts. He had no skill in shaping stone, though, and soon discovered that knowing what he wanted was very different from knowing how to make it.

By the time the first frost appeared on the windbreak, he no longer worried about getting knocked over the head for failing to produce. If the sims decided to do that, he could not stop them, but that fatalistic certainty was only a small part of what gradually let him relax.

Far more important was that the sims accepted him. They had grown accustomed to him lying by the fire, and no longer saw him as much different from themselves, except that he could not move. His chief worry now was what would happen if a youngster tripped over his broken leg while playing. Where the young sims had once crowded up to gape at him, now they were so careless around him that he sometimes wondered if they remembered he was there.

The leg still hurt. It also itched savagely; he rubbed the flesh round the healing gash raw until he understood the itch came from far within. He healed despite the itch, little by little. Milestones were small, but he treasured them: the day he could sit up, the day he could roll onto his side to air the sores on his back and behind, the day those sores started to scab over.

Milestones or not, he remained immobile, save when a sim dragged him along. Except for his annoyingly trouble-some work on the bow, he had little to do but lie by the fire and watch the members of the band. Just as they accepted him, so he came to think of them more and more as individuals, as people, rather than as subhumans, animals to evade or exploit.

Looking back, he supposed the beginning of that process came when he finally decided that thinking of “the male that had brought him the marten skin” by that clumsy handle was more trouble than it was worth. He decided to call it Martin and have done. Giving the sim a man's name helped him think of it as being more like a man.

One by one, he named all the sims. Most of his names were just tags in his own mind. The sims had so much trouble reproducing the sounds of English that they could not use his names themselves, which made him hesitate to apply them. Martin, however, soon learned what noise meant him. (With a man's name, Martin was also harder to think of as
it
.)

The female that cared for Henry Quick also rapidly figured out what names were for. He called her Sal.

Even though he continued to improve, he knew how dependent on her he still was. He whittled away at a couple of branches, slowly turning them into crutches, but he was not ready to try them yet. A fall, a slip, would put paid to weeks of slow recovery. In any case, he had nowhere to go now that the weather was changing.