Angel-Seeker (29 page)

Indeed, the hurt man yowled and tried to twist away from his torturers, but by then, the liquid was splashed all over his open cut and working its painful magic. After a moment, he lay still, panting and scowling.

“Now. We'll put some manna root on it—but first, I think, some numbing salve. You see that blue jar? Yes. That's dera leaf. It doesn't have any restorative powers, but it shuts pain down for a little while. Always use that if someone has a burn or a deep wound—or a cut like this, that you're going to suture, or any time you're about to do something else that might cause additional pain.”

“Jovah and all the angels bless me,” the man muttered.

Mary patted him rather absently on the shoulder. “You'll be just fine. You don't have any alarming symptoms, and you haven't lost nearly enough blood to put you in danger.”

“It looks like a lot of blood to me,” Elizabeth said doubtfully.

“Head wounds are always gushers. That's usually not your biggest concern in a case like this. It's concussion.”

So Mary explained the symptoms of a concussion while she gently layered a sticky gray ointment over the cut. The injured man seemed pleased with her ministrations for the first time, giving a loud sigh of contentment and slightly unclenching his body. They spread manna root cream over the gray ointment and let it soak in a moment before Mary began to thread the needle.

“I need you to push together the edges of the wound for me so it's easier to sew—yes, like that—you're very good at this,” Mary praised.

“What are you doing?” the man asked apprehensively, lunging away from the healer's hands.

“We're attempting to repair your scalp,” Mary said. “Lie still.”

The Edori man dropped to a crouch beside them. “Would you like me to hold him now?”

“Yes,” said Mary. “I think he's going to be troublesome.”

The Edori straddled the patient, using his knees to clamp the man's arms to his sides. The hurt man yodeled with indignation, but all three of them ignored him.

“And his head?” the Edori asked.

“Yes,” said Mary. “If you can keep it still.”

So the Edori placed his broad hands on either side of the patient's head and essentially rendered it immobile.

“Very good,” Mary said with satisfaction, and began to sew. Elizabeth kept her hands just ahead of the healer's, closing the open gash with her fingers until the needle could do its work. Even so, the wound still looked pretty raw once the black thread was crisscrossed over it to hold it shut, and Elizabeth was predicting their patient would have the god's own headache by the time the numbing ointment wore off. The same thought had occurred to Mary, because she was rifling through her satchel to put together a little medical kit to send home with the hurt man: a small vial of the salve and a handful of white lozenges.

“What are those?” Elizabeth asked.

“Drugs. Sent by the god. They'll ward off infection.”

“I've never seen anything like that,” Elizabeth said, and Mary handed her one of the small, perfectly shaped pellets. It appeared to be constructed of a white powder that had been mixed with some kind of adhesive and set in an exceptionally fine mold, for it had no rough edges or irregularities. Elizabeth marveled at the god's workmanship.

“Where did you get it?” she asked.

Mary gave her a quick look. “The angels pray for medicines when there's a need. They have different prayers that result in different pills of all sorts of colors. They bring me the extras, because the
god always sends more than the job requires—and now and then, if I'm running low, I ask Nathan or Calah to make a special request. It's very handy.”

Elizabeth handed back the pellet. “I'd like to know those prayers.”

“Oh, only the angels can make such requests. Jovah can't hear anyone else's voice.”

The Edori stood up, but looked down at Mary with a smile. He was still poised with one foot on either side of the patient's chest, as if ready to drop down again at any moment and subdue him. “That's not true,” he said.

Mary glanced up at him. “What's not true?”

“That the god can only hear angels' voices. Yovah hears the voices of all of his people.”

“Yovah?” Elizabeth repeated.

Mary shrugged impatiently and began repacking her satchel. “The Edori have their special name for the god.”

“But he is the same god, and he is the same to all people.”

“Yes, well, we can discuss religion some other time,” Mary said, and then turned her attention to the patient. “Listen. You. Can you sit up? Good. How do you feel? Now, I'm going to tell you what you must do for the next few days. . . .”

As soon as the man's head was lifted cautiously from her lap, Elizabeth came to her feet and shook out the folds of her dress. Between the dirt, the starch, the soap, and the blood, this poor garment had suffered a rather grueling day. Elizabeth had a feeling the rest of her days as Mary's assistant might be just as messy.

“Let me see your hands,” she said to the Edori.

He gave her an easy smile that was impossible to resist. “Nothing wrong with my hands,” he said.

She held her own out imperatively. “Let me see.”

He acquiesced, extending them palm down, so she took hold of them and flipped them over. Scraped raw and filled with splinters. She thought she had glimpsed those abused palms as he lay them against the hurt man's face. “What exactly did you do?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Pulled the beam off him. Didn't take the time to put my gloves on.”

Mary was still giving instructions to the man with the head wound. “Mary,” Elizabeth said. “I need the needle to get these slivers out, and then I need to spread his hands with something. What should I use?”

“Get a fresh needle, for one thing, and then—oh, the manna root's as good as anything. And two of the white pills. Five, if any of the splinters go too deep.”

“Well, let's go someplace where we can be comfortable,” the Edori said, and led her to an empty wagon that still smelled of pine and cedar. They seated themselves, and then Elizabeth grasped the man's right hand. “I can't believe this doesn't hurt,” she said, examining the dozens of chips of all sizes that had embedded themselves in his skin.

“It does,” he said, smiling again. “But not so much as a log falling on my head.”

“I'll try to be careful.”

Indeed, she was fairly good at this particular chore, since field hands at James's farm had always come home with splinters when they had spent the day repairing the fences. The Edori never flinched or protested, though she knew that more than once the point of the needle probed painfully deep.

“What's your name?” he asked after she had been working on him for about five minutes.

“Elizabeth.”

He waited a beat, then supplied his own. “I'm Rufus.”

“Hello, Rufus,” she said, not even lifting her head.

A moment of silence, and then he tried again. “So how long have you been living in Cedar Hills?”

She answered as briefly as she could. “About two months.”

“And you like it?”

“Sometimes.”

“Where did you live before?”

“On my cousin's farm.”

“Why did you leave?”

“I wanted to learn how to sew up the heads of careless men.”

He laughed. “Why don't you want to talk to me?” he asked next.

That was so unexpected that she actually looked up at him. “What?”

His eyes were so dark that she thought he must be able to see even in pitch black. “Why don't you want to talk to me?” he repeated gently.

She flushed and returned her attention to his hand. “I'm trying to concentrate.”

“You don't like Edori,” he hypothesized.

“I don't even know any Edori.”

“You don't like men?”

She dropped his right hand and picked up the left one. “I don't like some of them,” she said dryly.

“Well, there's no reason not to like me,” he said cheerfully. “Could we have dinner tonight? Or some night?”

This caught her completely by surprise, and she transferred her gaze to his face. She couldn't remember the last time her social interaction with a man had been preceded by something so innocent and friendly as a dinner conversation. “I don't know,” she said.

“Won't Mary allow you any free evenings?” he said, giving her that easy smile again. This was ridiculous; she was not the kind of woman who melted at a friendly grin. “Maybe if I talk to her.”

“No, that's not it—it's just that I—why do you want to have dinner with me?” she floundered.

“Because I got paid yesterday, and I haven't had dinner with a pretty girl since I left Semorrah, and I thought it might be nice,” he said. “And look! Yovah sent me you.”

“Why do you do that?” she said, her voice almost petulant. “Call the god by a different name?”

He laughed. “Oh, there are many things the Edori do that are different from your ways. We don't live in houses, we don't rely on the angels to care for us, we don't ask the priests to set Kisses in our arms—”

She almost stared at that. “You don't have a Kiss? But how can you—how does the god know who you are and where you are?”

Rufus shrugged. “He knows. He watches over all of us.”

“But how do you—how can you tell when you're in love?”

Now he looked amused. “And the Kiss can tell you this?”

She was furious with herself for betraying such girlishness. “They say,” she said stiffly. “The legends. That when you meet your true love, your Kiss will glow with fire. But if you have no Kiss—”

He was laughing. “I think I will be able to tell, all on my own, when I've fallen in love. I won't need the god's guidance for that.”

She shook her head and went back to work on the maltreated hand. “Well. Whatever you say.”

“No, whatever
you
say,” he said gaily. “Will you have dinner with me? If not tonight or tomorrow, sometime next week? I can wait till you're free.”

She shrugged. “Actually—tonight or tomorrow—either would be fine. You might just want to stay home and wrap your hands tonight, though.”

“Oh, no,” he said. “I never choose solitude and brooding when there's any other option.”

She shrugged again, but she felt a tiny, almost unnoticeable curl of pleasure unroll beneath her ribs. He wasn't an angel, of course, and he didn't even have the social status of one of James's field hands, so naturally she intended nothing more than some light conversation and, she hoped, a meal better than the one she might expect at Tola's. But it was still no bad thing to have a man call you pretty and to ask to spend time in your company. “Where would you like me to meet you?” she asked.

“In the square? Does that suit you? When are you done working?”

“I don't know. I'll ask Mary.”

He seemed jubilant at the thought of the outing. She thought he might be the kind of man whose standards were not particularly high, who was pleased by everything, so it meant very little that he was pleased by her. “I know just where we can go,” he said. “I'll walk back with you and point it out. I can't remember the name.”

She teased out the last sliver of wood and then set the needle into the fabric of her skirt so she wouldn't lose it. “Salve now,” she said, “and I think we're done.”

That night as she got ready for bed, Elizabeth reflected that only the first few hours of the day had gone as she'd expected. Once she left the dorm to accompany Mary to the construction site, she was deep in unfamiliar territory, and the rest of the day held nothing but surprises.

They had returned to the center of town, where Rufus had pointed out a sidewalk cafe and Mary had looked amused. Then the
healer had towed her new pupil off to a series of appointments, to check up on a pregnant woman, to visit a sick child, and to doctor an angel with a sore throat. “Angels are never sick, so I'm sure she doesn't have an infection, but they're all just singing themselves hoarse,” Mary observed as they left the unfamiliar dorm. “A little honey and a little tea—you'll find that's almost as good as the god's drugs, sometimes, when it's nothing serious.”

They also paused briefly in the suite that Mary occupied in the central building. The front room was almost an apothecary's shop, lined with shelves of drying herbs and colored jars and smelling of sage and lemon. The back room, Elizabeth supposed, held a bedroom and perhaps a water room.

“Why don't you just come here in the morning?” Mary said. “We've got a handful of patients to check on tomorrow, but I'd like to show you a few things here. We might have time to mix up a bit more manna root. I noticed I was running low. Oh, there's lots to do here if there was only a free minute!”