by Lee Abrey
Then I was gone.
****
I drifted back to the world on a sunny afternoon, still in and out of consciousness then finally I stayed in for more than a moment. I couldn’t keep my eyelids open. Someone thumbed an eyelid up, looked inside me with green cat’s-eyes, then disappeared.
After a little while, a minute or an hour, I couldn’t tell, I opened my eyes. Mother smiled and tucked her dark hair behind one ear.
“Polo,” she said, “praise Galaia, you’re awake. Want some water?” I managed to nod. She had to call in a nurse to get me sat up. When had I become so big my mother couldn’t pick me up? I felt weak and small but was still adult-sized.
Somewhere in my fever dreams, I remembered an overheard discussion about amputation. To my intense relief, although I hurt a lot, my limbs were all there. I recognised the nurse’s green eyes. Then as she and Mother helped me sit up, my world was overwhelmed with pain. I panted, feeling sweat run down me, unable to speak or move. The nurse went to tell a doctor I was awake.
“Thanks,” I said, catching my breath, as Mother gave me water, “is Azrael alright?” She nodded.
“He’s been very ill,” she said, “you both have, but you’re on the mend.”
“Did he keep his hand?” I said. She smiled.
“Aye, doctors are saying it’s a miracle. Both of you nearly died.” She sank back into her chair. My right hand was caught up in the mass of bandages round my forearm. I reached out and held her hand with my left.
“Oh Polo,” she said, blinking the tears away, “I thought you were going to die, and after that awful fight we had.” I squeezed her hand, wondering what we had fought about. Oh, me going back to live with her. “I wrote to your father,” she said, “but that was only last week, I haven’t heard from him yet.” I managed to smile.
“Sorry about the fight,” I said. She blinked and smiled through her tears.
“They told me you tried to save the Crown Prince,” she said. “Theo’s talking about ennobling you.”
“Me?” I said. I was flummoxed. “I was one of several people trying to help.”
“But you got the dragon off him,” she said, “and it attacked you instead of him.” She looked at the mound of bedclothes where a cage supported the blankets away from my hip, and began to cry again. “And you nearly died.” I looked at my arm. I’d thought I’d lose it for sure after overhearing the doctors umm-ing over amputation, but then someone said there was no point amputating when the infection was right through my body.
I remembered seeing the wound during a brief moment of consciousness, angry and red, suppurating, swollen with whatever it was dragons carried on their claws and teeth. I carefully flexed my fingers.
It wasn’t as bad as I was expecting. It hurt down deep, but not so I had to scream. I let go of Mother and began using my good hand to undo the bandage. Mother shook her head and stopped crying.
“Don’t take that off, dear.” She wiped her eyes with a pretty handkerchief.
“It feels alright,” I said, “this is a bandage to stop me moving it too much, not to hold it together. It’s stitched. I want to see it.” I didn’t add that I was looking at my arm because I was afraid to lift the covers and look at my hip. That felt quite bad.
Mother made anxious noises as I unrolled the bandage. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t interfere between my parents, but couldn’t help trying. “So,” I said, “if Father comes back, promising to stop drinking again, what will you do?” She blinked a lot then said,
“I can’t choose between you.” I sighed.
“I’m not asking you to choose me or him,” I said. “I’m asking you to choose for yourself. He’s not going to get better with you mothering him, he needs to want to do it for himself.”
That was quite well put, I thought, for the recently unconscious. Since I first heard the word ‘alcoholic’ when I was about eight, I’d read up on addiction. Despite me explaining the whole concept of alcoholism and co-dependency over and over to Mother, she still didn’t get it. “Father is still in denial,” I added, not pointing out she was too, “so whatever you do, it’s not going to help.”
“I can’t abandon him, Polo,” she said, and added in a dramatic tone, “he’s the man I love.” My turn to shake my head. “I’ve been thinking,” she said, “about the fight we had, how you told me that staying here was good for you. That you’re doing well at school.”
I set my mouth in a line. I knew what was coming. It was what I wanted, but not how I wanted it. She made a little nodding movement with her head. “And of course you’ll need physiotherapy,” she said, “that’s going to take a while.” The last of the bandage fell away from my forearm. I looked at it. It was nasty. I looked at Mother. She looked at my wrist and winced.
“That does sound like a good idea,” I said, sounding strangely calm, considering how I felt and what my arm looked like. It looked like it would never be usable again. And I felt like my mother didn’t really care about me at all. “Gives you a chance to try what you can with Father,” I said, parroting what she usually told me, “without having to worry about it affecting other people.” Like your son, I didn’t say aloud. I paused but couldn’t stop. Sod the moral high ground. “Forgive me for noticing,” I added, smiling sweetly, “or for not pretending to have lost my memory, but wasn’t that why you moved to Torc in the first place? Why you dumped me on Uncle Theo? So you could help Father?”
As I was expecting, she got angry and stormed around the room. We shouted at each other some more, and she said I was a heartless, cold boy. Simply. Filled. With. Vitriol. I told her she was enabling an addict, was a co-dependent on his drug, needed his disease, and was as bad as an alcoholic herself, addicted to the behaviours that locked them together in a spiral of destruction.
At first, I was enjoying the fight. It felt good to let out some of the anger I felt at what seemed to be my life destroyed, against someone who deserved it.
Unfortunately it escalated rapidly. Fortunately, the shrieking and shouting caught the attention of the staff, who rescued me. I hadn’t counted on Mother’s usual debating methods, involving throwing things or trying to hit me, or that I usually ran when she was violent. It’s easy to laugh at a hostile woman when you’re big and able-bodied, but provoking her whilst trapped in a bed with only one good arm proved a bad idea.
Although I fended off a chair cushion with my left arm, I instinctively blocked a book with my right, the recently unbandaged one. I screamed, and blacked out for a few moments. A nurse grabbed Mother before she could throw anything else, but I didn’t really notice what was going on. I did know when Mother was gone because the room went quiet. I was busy, cross-eyed with agony that encompassed my being. It was all I could do to cradle my arm and lay there, tears streaming out the corners of my eyes.
An edge of the book had caught me right across the five neat rows of stitches that followed the jagged claw marks down my forearm. Once I could breathe again without sobbing, I turned my arm over. To my relief, the book hadn’t burst the stitches. The wound was worse than it had felt all bandaged up. All five of the dragon’s claws had ripped into me, and the wounds were all throbbing now. I was lucky Kristen was so small, but still the slashes were deep, her foot with outstretched claws about the size of a small woman’s hand.
Remembering the Dragon queen, Murray and Virginia, I nearly laughed aloud. I remembered drinking their blood. Poppy-juice gave some weird dreams! The green-eyed nurse tsk-ed at me for taking my bandage off but said it was alright.
“That’s your second lot of sutures,” she said, “we had to reopen the wound to let it drain.” She shook her head. “You’re bloody lucky to be alive.”
“Can I see my hip, please?” I said. She paused.
“It’s worse than your arm.” I nodded and managed a grimacing smile.
“That’s how it feels,” I said, “I need to see it.” She sorted my arm out first, re-bandaged it, then rolled me gently onto my side and deftly
peeled back the dressing on my hip.
“This is ready for changing too,” she said, “smells alright now, good sign. Before, phew, it was putrid.” My hip looked awful, and I tried to take her word for it that it was much better. “You had drains in, and pus was running out,” she went on, with the casual explicitness of the medical professional, “I gagged a lot at dressing changing.” She was pretty, the nurse, a redhead with green cat’s-eyes, a touch of emerald sparkling in the iris. I was alive. I wanted her.
“I used to have to clean out the pigsty and the cow byre,” I said, trying to find a common ground, “I do gag, don’t often go all the way.” Smooth, I thought. She grimaced.
“I didn’t heave with yours,” she said, smiling. “Pigs and cows do smell bad, or at least their manure does. However, I think boils, on human or animal, are worse than pig shit.” My turn to pull a face.
“Now you’ve reminded me,” I said, “we had a pig that was susceptible to boils, awful smell.” I was so suave, talking about pus with a pretty nurse.
“Mind you,” she said, wiping my hip and down the thigh with an antiseptic lotion while I tried not to wince too visibly, “this was worse. It wasn’t like the normal infections. One of the doctors said it was more like a crocodile bit you. For a while we didn’t think the antibiotics were going to work, and then overnight you were over the worst. We had you on a lot of poppy-juice. You probably don’t remember.”
“I remember bits.” I said. “The stitches going in for the second time. And I had some very strange dreams.”
“Not you too?” she said, laughing. “I was just talking to the Crown Prince, he’s prattling about two dragons called Murray and Virginia, and how they helped him heal himself.” She giggled and I managed not to splutter, blush, faint or any of the other things that might have alerted her. Instead I smiled and shook my head slightly at such silliness.
“Nothing so dramatic here,” I said.
Kristen had slashed me to the bone in both arm and hip. On the bright side, they didn’t think she meant to on the hip so it wasn’t as bad as the arm, but on the dark and depressing side, the hip had been more infected and was less well healed. Because Kristen was launching herself into flight, she only caught me with two toes from each foot. Could have been worse. She might have turned and clawed me again, or played noughts and crosses on my hide. The wounds on my arm were about eight inches long, five parallel tracks from one set of claws. The ones on my hip were a bit longer, nine inches, made of two pairs of slightly angled tracks, the distance between narrowing as they ran from my upper thigh and over my hip. It looked worse than my arm, but, as the nurse said, the infection seemed to be under control.
“She jumped,” said the nurse, “see? You were lying down by then, they said, and she used you as a springboard. You’re healing well. This was a mess only a week ago. If you asked me I’d have said, poor bugger, if he lives he’s going to lose that leg and maybe part of his torso too. And your arm of course. As for the prince, well, how he’s hung onto his left hand I don’t know.”
“And his right?” I said, remembering Azrael was wounded on both.
“It wasn’t as bad as the left. Slash across the inside of his arm down across the bone here.” She ran a hand along the underneath of my upper arm to demonstrate. “And his cheek’s fine now but for a while there he was up like a balloon.” She puffed her cheeks to show me.
“Can I see him?” I said.
“The doctors are coming,” she said, “now you’re awake properly. They’ll say if you’re allowed up.”
“I want to use a toilet,” I said.
“Hold it until after the doctors come, or you can use a bedpan.” I decided to hold it.
****
Chapter 23 – The Truth About Grandmama
With the doctors came Fenric, who stayed until they left. He helped the nurse get me into a wheelchair, out of the chair onto the toilet seat, then left me to do what I needed. I was white-faced and sweating by that time. The pain in my hip was severe. That leg needed to stay as straight as possible to avoid pulling at the wound which meant leaning to my right but hoping I didn’t fall that way as I would hurt my bad arm trying to stop. Somehow I got done, then the nurse came and was about to wheel me down the corridor when a bell began ringing.
“I’ve got to go,” she said, “back soon as I can.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said, “I’ll potter along here.”
“Don’t you use your right arm! The prince’s room is that next one on the left!” She ran off.
It took me some time to get to Azrael’s room. I’d lost a lot of weight and felt so weak. How long had I been in hospital? Judging by how much I needed a shave it was weeks, not days. Controlling a wheelchair one-handed was difficult, and it took several attempts to learn not to hit the wall. I had to stop to catch my breath. I dropped my good foot to the ground to help with both propulsion and steering, but my bad leg was sticking out and hitting the wall meant I hit it with the foot. That jarred the hip.
Pain was very warming. I was soon so hot I thought the fever had returned. It was fifteen feet to the doorway but felt like miles.
“Polo!” Azrael saw me as I was still trying to negotiate the doorway.
“Hang on,” I said, “still trying to work this bloody thing.” Finally, I managed to get in. Azrael was propped up on pillows, looking woozy, right cheek showing the marks of tiny stitches in a line of red and purple. I rolled up to the bed, where I managed to stop without jarring anything. I was going to offer my hand but he didn’t appear to have a good one. I patted his leg gently instead.
“I thought you were going to die,” he said. I smiled.
“Not me,” I said, “Haka doesn’t want me for a sunbeam.” He laughed.
“You shouldn’t joke about Haka.”
“I think,” I said, “if she’s real, the goddess of death has a sense of humour.” I paused. “By the way, something strange happened while I was ill.” He raised his eyebrows, and winced. “You alright?” I said.
“Aye,” he said, carefully using the fingers on his right hand to gently rub near his cheek. “A bit tender. I can just use this hand, thank the gods. For a while I was being hand-fed.”
“We’re alive,” I said, “and on the mend. We both know why. I have two words for you. Murray and Virginia.” I paused. “Yes, that’s three words,” I added, “but you know what I mean. Blood. And dragons.” His mouth dropped open, and he hurt his cheek again. I tried not to laugh. It wasn’t out of trying to save his feelings. It was more that if I laughed properly I’d hurt something.
Azrael agreed we shouldn’t tell anyone else, at least not until we figured out what was going on, then Saraia arrived, and the redheaded nurse. The nurse said the doctors had insisted that my mother be banned from the hospital. That suited me. I always thought it was Father who was possibly mad-and-dangerous, but now realised I’d overlooked the most obvious candidate in the family.
After helloes I left Azrael and his mother to their visit. The nurse rolled me back to my room.
“You hungry?” she asked, as she helped me back into bed.
“Starving.” I said.
“That’s my boy,” she said, “I’ll get something sent in.”
“Nurse?” I said.
“Aye?” she paused, about to hurry off.
“What’s your name?”
“Anastasia,” she said, “but Anna is what I’m called.”
“Nurse Anna,” I said and smiled. “Thanks for everything.” She smiled, showing a set of dimples, then dashed out the door.
A solicitous male orderly brought the food and laid it out for me so I could manage one-handed. There was vegetable soup with bread and butter. It tasted so good. I ate every bit and asked for more. After that I slept until I was woken for the evening meal.
They were trying to wean me off the poppy-juice, so dosed me up on mindweed tincture. It was a very pleasant experience. Fenric dropped in again and shared a pipe with me, whic
h was possibly overkill but was fun. He was the one who told me I had been unconscious for three weeks. I couldn’t believe it, but the orderly said it was true. Besides, I had the beard to prove it. I didn’t like that at all.
****
The next day, after the orderly shaved me, I rolled my wheelchair erratically outside. The infirmary was on the ground floor of the citadel, near the Green and the kitchen garden. With the bioplas paths I could roll about, but it was tiring.
I had never been shut up indoors before, or in bed for three weeks. Suddenly, it was midsummer, and hot. Everyone was dressing more casually as the heat mounted. Girls bounced about in silk and cotton dresses, giving up bras and even knickers, judging by what showed through the sheer fabrics in full sun. Some were in shorts, though I didn’t see how the very short ones were comfortable, as you stuck to anything you sat on. I didn’t mind. It made for interesting people watching. Interesting woman-scenting, too. Girls in heat in the heat. I discovered being in a wheelchair put me at eye-level with bodies rather than faces. Thigh-level rather than eye-level.
A number of lasses came up to say hello and to wish me better then, giggling, trooped off to go swimming, something I was banned from. A woman was walking near me, lean as a whippet, wearing a simple pair of longish shorts and cotton top. There was something familiar about her. She was barefoot, wearing sunglasses, and had silver hair, but didn’t look more than thirty. She walked up to me and with one finger eased her glasses down her nose, looking over them at me. Her eyes were unlike anything I’d ever seen in a person. In an instinctive reaction to a predator, my gut contracted.
The various cat’s-eye markings were named. My coloration was orbital metallic, a circle of metallic colour on an iris of one colour. My mother’s emerald orbital ring surrounding a black opal iris was orbital opalescence. Solid opalescence was similar to Azrael’s solid crystalline, which in his case meant solid blue eyes with a scattering of diamond lights. In solid opalescence, each flake of crystal was a myriad of colours that flashed in the light, with each glittering opal flake set on a solid colour, possibly also set with a scattering of lights.