Ship of Magic

Page 200

“Me, too. ”

Like magic, the men who were even partially awake rose and flocked off to hear the gossip. Althea hoped the tale would be well-embroidered for them. For herself, she wanted only her hammock and to be under sail again.

It took him four tries to light the lantern. When the wick finally burned, he lowered the glass carefully and sat down on his bunk. After a moment he rose, to go to the small looking glass fastened to the wall. He pulled down his lower lip and looked at it. Damn. He'd be lucky if the burns didn't ulcerate. He'd all but forgotten that aspect of cindin. He sat down heavily on his bunk again and began to peel his coat off. It was then he realized the left cuff of his coat was soaked with blood as well as rain. He stared at it for a time, then gingerly felt the back of his head. No. A lump, but no blood. The blood wasn't his. He patted his fingers against the patch of it. Still wet, still red. Althea? he wondered groggily. Whatever they had put in the beer was still fogging his brain. Althea, yes. Hadn't she told him she'd been hit on the head? Damn her, why hadn't she said she was bleeding? With the sigh of a deeply wronged man, he pulled his coat on again and went back out into the storm.

The forecastle was as dark and smelly as he remembered it. He shook two men awake before he found one coherent enough to point out her bunking spot. It was up in a corner a rat wouldn't have room to turn around in. He groped his way there by the stub of a candle and then shook her awake despite curses and protests. “Come to my cabin, boy, and get your head stitched and stop your sniveling,” he ordered her. “I won't have you laying abed and useless for a week with a fever. Lively, now. I haven't all night. ”

He tried to look irritable and not anxious as she followed him out of the hold and up onto the deck and then into his cabin. Even in the candle's dimness, he could see how pale she was, and how her hair was crusted with blood. As she followed him into his tiny chamber, he barked at her, “Shut the door! I don't care to have the whole night's storm blow through here. ” She complied with a sort of leaden obedience. The moment it was closed he sprang past her to latch it. He turned, seized her by the shoulders, and resisted the urge to shake her. Instead he sat her firmly on his bunk. “What is the matter with you?” he hissed as he hung his coat on the peg. “Why didn't you tell me you were hurt?”

She had, he knew, and half-expected that to be her reply. Instead she just raised a hand to her head and said vaguely, “I was just so tired. . . . ”

He cursed the small confines of his room as he stepped over her feet to reach the medicine chest. He opened it and picked through it, and then tossed his selections on the bunk beside her. He moved the lantern a bit closer; it was still too dim to see clearly. She winced as his fingers walked over her scalp, trying to part her thick dark hair and find the source of all the blood. His fingers were wet with it; it was still bleeding sluggishly. Well, scalp wounds always bled a lot. He knew that, it should not worry him. But it did, as did the unfocused look to her eyes.

“I'm going to have to cut some of your hair away,” he warned her, expecting a protest. “If you must. ”

He looked at her more closely. “How many times did you get hit?”

“Twice. I think. ”

“Tell me about it. Tell me everything you can remember about what happened tonight. ”

And so she spoke, in drifting sentences, while he used scissors to cut her hair close to the scalp near the wound. Her story did not make him proud of his quick wits. Put together with what he knew of the evening, it was clear that both he and Althea had been targeted to fill out the Jolly Gal's crew. It was only the sheerest luck that he was not chained up in her hold even now.

The split he bared in her scalp was as long as his little finger and gaping open from the pull of her queue. Even after he cut the hair around it to short stubble and cleared the clotted strands away, it still oozed blood. He blotted it away with a rag. “I'll need to sew this shut,” he told her. He tried to push away both the wooziness from whatever had been in his beer and his queasiness at the thought of pushing a needle through her scalp. Luckily Althea seemed even more beclouded than he was. Whatever the crimpers had put in the beer worked well.

By the lantern's shifting yellow light, he threaded a fine strand of gut through a curved needle. It felt tiny in his callused fingers, and slippery. Well, it couldn't be that much different from patching clothes and sewing canvas, could it? He'd done that for years. “Sit still,” he told her needlessly. Gingerly he set the point of the needle to her scalp. He'd have to push it in shallowly to make it come up again. He put gentle pressure on the needle. Instead of piercing her skin, her scalp slid on her skull. He couldn't get the needle to slide through.