by Sharon Shinn
And then the wagon moved even farther on, and she saw flesh and hair at the extreme end of the bundle of rags.
“Stop!” she shrieked, coming to her feet while the wagon still rocked on its way. “There’s a person—somebody—stop the wagon!”
Paul hauled on the reins, calling out in confusion, but Elizabeth had placed her hand on the side and vaulted clumsily over while the rig was still in motion. She landed in a heap on the sand, then picked herself up and began running toward the collapsed figure. Behind her, she heard more shouts and questions as the men stared after her.
“Rufus! Bring my satchel!” she cried over her shoulder, lifting her skirts and trying to run faster. The sand pulled at her feet, making it hard to keep her balance. She could not generate any speed. Sweet Jovah singing, yes, that was a body, possibly a corpse—see the hair fanned out, dark against the gold of the sand, a woman, a young woman. “Bring water!” she added, still running, still panting.
In a matter of minutes, she had skidded to a stop beside the body and dropped to her knees. Sweet lord of the lost and lonely, it was a woman, so battered and bloody that her face almost could not be seen through the discoloration. Elizabeth checked instantly for a pulse, sure she would not find one, equally sure the woman could not have been dead for long or she would have already served as feast for some of these mysterious desert creatures. She was as astonished as she had ever been when she felt, against her two fingers, a slow and constant beat.
“You’re alive,” Elizabeth whispered. “How did you manage that?”
Rufus was beside her that moment, crouching down and offering up her medical kit. “Is she—can she be—”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “Water first. Soak a cloth for me and we’ll squeeze some drops into her mouth.”
Paul and Silas arrived seconds later, standing on either side of the body and staring down at miracles. Elizabeth was ready to be irritated with them for their helpless stupefaction, but it lasted only a moment. “What can we do?” Silas asked quietly. “Can she be moved?”
Elizabeth shook her head. “I don’t think so. Not yet. Bring the wagon over. Prepare to set up some kind of shelter over her. Blankets. A fire. Her skin is so cold.”
“Is she in shock?” Paul asked.
“I don’t know. Shock, exposure, dehydration, infection—any of it, all of it. Rufus, can you take this pill—yes, this one—and grind it up and mix it with the smallest amount of water you can use? We’ll get that down her throat to start with. I’ve got to check her body for injuries. Paul, do we have any juice? Honey? Something with sugar. Water and sugar, we’ve got to get sustenance inside of her.”
Elizabeth talked as she methodically tested the woman’s limbs for breaks, pushing back the edges of the loose clothing to examine the forearms, the biceps, then the long, thin legs. This woman was battered everywhere, as if she had tumbled down a ravine for miles or been trampled on by small hooved animals. No bones appeared to be broken, although the skin was ripped and bloody in places, and red marks of infection had begun to rim some of the rawest patches.
“What happened to this poor creature?” Elizabeth murmured more to herself than to anyone who might be listening.
“Stoned,” Rufus said quietly.
Her hands at the throat of the woman’s clothing, Elizabeth stilled and looked over at him. “What do you—stoned? By whom? Why?”
He shrugged. He was holding a wet cloth to the woman’s mouth and squeezing droplets of water between her cracked lips. “By the men of her family. For some infraction. That’s what the Jansai do.”
She stared at him. “That can’t be true,” she said flatly.
“Ask her,” he said, “if you can save her.”
Shivering from a sensation that was not cold, Elizabeth slowly unfolded the front of the woman’s tattered outfit to check for damage on the torso. There were no large swaths of blood on the fabric, so she wasn’t really expecting wounds on the chest, but she had to make sure. The soft flesh over her bosom and rib cage was less marked than the rest of her body, as if she had crouched low or curled in a fetal position to protect her vital organs. No stab wounds to the heart or lungs, no scar across the major arteries, no gash in the slightly swollen belly—
“Sweet Jovah singing,” Elizabeth whispered, her hands slack on the cool, flawed flash. “She’s pregnant.”
Rufus looked over at her sharply, then nodded. “That would do it,” he said. “Guessing she’s not a married woman, though she looks old enough. How far along is she?”
Elizabeth shook her head slowly, unable to fathom it. “I don’t know. Three months—maybe four months. She might have been able to conceal her condition for that long. You probably can’t tell when she’s standing and wearing this loose gown.”
“Can you save the baby?” he wanted to know.
“I don’t know if I can save her,” she answered sharply.
“Yes,” he said. “You can.”
The others arrived then with the wagon and went to work with economical efficiency, spreading a tarp over the injured woman and building a fire. Elizabeth felt so terrified and helpless that she almost couldn’t imagine what to do next. Which of these drugs in her satchel might harm the baby in this woman’s womb? She didn’t know—she didn’t know. But unless she forced healing medicines down her throat, the woman and her baby would both surely die. She must try. She must do something.
“Is she taking the water? The powdered tablets?” she asked Rufus.
“All of it. And a little honey. But I don’t think she’s conscious.”
“I want to get her clean. And I want to move her to a blanket, off this sand. Can you help me lift her? Carefully—very carefully.”
In a few moments, they had the woman lying on a clean tarp, completely stripped and covered with another blanket. Working slowly and gently, Elizabeth freed one arm, wiped it clean of blood and sand and dirt, and smeared it with manna root salve. Then the other arm, then each leg, and then the front and back of the woman’s body. Last, she washed the woman’s battered face, with its exotic high cheekbones and determined, pointed chin. She combed out the matted dark hair, then tied it in a knot on the top of her head, just to keep it out of the way.
Strange—unbelievable—this woman had been abandoned in the desert to die, but she was wearing still a ransom in jewelry, four or five necklaces, dozens of gold bracelets, one silver bracelet, a few rings. Maybe not so strange, Elizabeth thought. People who didn’t mind throwing away a life might not mind throwing away a fortune in gold and gems.
“I don’t know,” Elizabeth said when she was done, talking half to herself and half to her patient. “I don’t know what else I can do for you.”
“She looks better already,” Rufus said in an encouraging voice. “A little color in her cheeks. Under the black and blue.”
“I wish she’d wake up. Tell us her name, what happened to her.”
“How long do you think she’s been unconscious?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. Less than a day, I think. She’s not completely dehydrated, so she’s had water sometime in the last day or two.”
“She wasn’t covered with sand, so she hadn’t lain here all that long,” Paul added. He and Silas were standing over the three on the ground—like the others, feeling helpless and useless.
Elizabeth glanced up at him. “Yes. Right. So that means she was conscious, and even mobile, yesterday. That’s good.”
“What else can we do?” Silas asked.
She should have thought of this sooner. “Put up a plague flag,” she said.
None of the men moved. “What’s that?” Paul asked.
She was confused. It was as if someone had asked what the Gloria was. “A plague flag! It’s what you put over your house or your camp when you want an angel to come down and pray for you.”
The three Edori exchanged glances. “But what—”
She braced her hands on her knees, exasperated. “Haven’t you—
don’t the Edori call on the angels for help?”
A small hoot of muffled laughter from Silas. “Never. What can the angels do for us?”
Not worth arguing about, certainly not now. “Well, I think they can help this poor girl. So let’s put up a flag.”
“But there’s no plague here,” Paul said helpfully.
“No! It doesn’t have to be plague! It can be any emergency! It’s just—that’s just what they call it!”
“And what do we use for a flag?”
“Anything! A bright shirt, a small blanket, something that will whip in the wind and catch the attention of someone flying overhead. Find a tree or—well, there are no trees here—a pole, something, anything, as high as it can be. Just so—just so someone sees it.”
The other two Edori went off to carry out this mission while Elizabeth and Rufus hovered over the injured girl. The most they could do for her now was get liquid in her body, Elizabeth reasoned, and wait for the drugs and the salve to take effect. So she dripped a little more water into the half-open mouth and watched the throat unconsciously clench and swallow.
“Can you make some broth?” she asked Rufus quietly. “We’ve got some sugar in her; now we need some salt. I can’t give her too much, I don’t want her to throw up, but just a little—”
“I’ll make stew,” he said, “but you’ll have to eat some, too.”
She looked up, startled. “What? Oh, I’m not hungry.”
“But you’ll eat some, too,” he repeated steadily. “Because I predict you’ll be bending over this girl for the rest of the day and most of the night, and you won’t be thinking about yourself because you’ll be thinking about her. So you’ll have some, too.”
She smiled and leaned in to kiss him. “Very well, then. You take care of me while I take care of her.”
Which was a strange thing, she thought, as she continued dribbling moisture down the woman’s throat. To have somebody care for her at all. She wondered who had been supposed to be watching over this girl and failed so miserably that she would end up pregnant and almost dead, lost in the Breven desert. By the god’s own grace, Elizabeth’s path had not been so brutal, hard though it had been. She felt a fierce surge of protectiveness and pity for this stranger fallen inadvertently under her care. I will watch over you now, she thought. No more harm will come your way.
By nightfall, the woman was no better, and no one had responded to their signal of distress. “How long does it usually take?” Silas wanted to know. “For an angel to drop by once you put up a flag?” He and Paul had lashed together their tent poles and forced this post into the sand. From its top hung one of Rufus’s shirts, a rather woebegone scarlet, listlessly stirring in the light breeze.
“I don’t know. A while, I imagine,” Elizabeth answered. “How often do angels fly over the desert? Over this very spot?”
“Not so often, I would think,” Rufus said. “What do we do if no one has arrived by daybreak?”
Elizabeth looked over at him. “I’m not sure she can travel.”
Paul spread his hands. “Then we leave you here with the wagon and one of the horses, and one of us rides back to Cedar Hills with all speed.”
“No. That will take too long,” she said sharply.
“Two days, maybe three,” Paul said. “Can she live that long?”
“I don’t know,” Elizabeth whispered.
“Maybe it’s better to put her in the wagon and see how she stands the journey,” Silas said.
Elizabeth wrapped her arms around her body, hugging herself as tightly as she could. “I don’t know,” she said again.
“Decide in the morning,” Rufus suggested. “Maybe she’ll be better by then, our sick one.”
“We can’t let the fire die,” Elizabeth said.
“This is all the fuel we have,” Silas said. “If we burn it all night, there will be none tomorrow.”
Elizabeth tried to choke back a sob. Too many questions, all the answers wrong. How could she save this desert waif when circumstances were so desperate? “Just for tonight,” she said, forcing herself to speak calmly. “In the morning, we’ll know more.”
“We’ll take turns standing watch and tending the fire,” Paul said.
“No need,” Elizabeth replied. “I’ll be awake with her. I’ll feed the fire.”
“You’ll be watching her,” Paul said gently. “We’ll take turns guarding the fire.”
Even so, the night was too cold for a woman so hurt to endure. Rufus lay down on one side of her, lending his considerable body heat, and Elizabeth pressed herself against the stranger’s other side. She did doze from time to time, waking as the men stirred the fire or when the woman beside her made a whimpering sound in the night. Every time she woke, Elizabeth sat up and ministered to her patient, tilting water into her mouth, pasting a concoction of medicine onto her tongue. Quite late, sometime after midnight, Elizabeth got out the jar of manna root and reapplied that all over the woman’s body. It did not have the systemic efficacy of the god’s pills, but it would do its small bit to heal and soothe. And she had to do something.
Rufus was awake as she finished this task. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Go back to sleep.”
“How is she?” he asked.
“I can’t tell. Still breathing. She doesn’t seem as cold. She might be able to heal, even if we can’t get her back to Cedar Hills, but we don’t have enough fuel and supplies to stay out here as long as it would take.”
“And there’s another danger you’re not aware of,” he said gravely. “The men of her family may come back, looking for proof of her death.”
Elizabeth was so shocked that for a moment she could not speak, and then so furious that she had to turn her head away. At the moment she wanted nothing so much as one of this woman’s relatives to come close enough for her to claw his eyes out.
“How do you know so much about the Jansai and how they treat their women?” she asked at last.
“You forget,” he said, his voice very dry. “I was a guest of the Jansai for a little while myself.”
That drew her attention back to him, and she gazed at him wonderingly. Rufus and Paul. Imprisoned by Jansai, their family members murdered or sold into slavery. “You must hate her, then,” she said. “And all her people. How can you help her? How can you not stomp on her face and leave her to die?”
A small motion of his shoulders. “She is not the one who harmed me. The Jansai women are not to blame for the actions of their men.”
“But—”
“And if it had been a Jansai man, lying here in the desert, broken and bleeding,” he interrupted, “I would not have left him here to die, either. Not I, not Paul. It is not the Edori way. We cannot willingly bring pain to another living soul, not our enemies, not anyone. It is one reason the Edori fell so easily to the Jansai raiders, because we could not believe anyone could mean us harm. We were always so sure that they recanted and felt remorse. We were always so sure they had changed their ways.”
Elizabeth bent her gaze down to the face of the sufferer on the blanket. “People who can do things like this,” she said, “are not capable of remorse.”
“Yovah believes all souls can be saved, and he puts his Kiss in the arm of every Jansai man and woman,” Rufus countered. “And you are here to tell me you know something Yovah does not? They can be saved. They can be converted. We have just not found the right words, we mortals, that is all.”
His words reminded her. “Did you see her Kiss?” Elizabeth asked. “When I cleaned her body? It is glowing with the strangest light.”
“Really?” he asked, true innocence in his voice. “And that’s unusual?”
“Yes, it’s—oh, you Edori and your strange beliefs and your ‘Yovahs’ and your no Kisses!” she hissed in exasperation. “They say—don’t you remember, I told you once—that the Kiss in your arm will light with fire when you meet your true love. But I have never heard of a Kiss just sparkling with light for no reason at all.
”
“Unless one of us is her true love,” Rufus said with a smile. “Paul, perhaps. Or even me!”
“I would think some other man has been before you with his own version of true love,” Elizabeth said tartly. “But where is he now? Why didn’t he protect her?”
“Perhaps he is close, then,” Rufus suggested. “In a caravan camping nearby.”
Elizabeth felt a spike of alarm. “With the members of her family, perhaps? Come looking for her body?”
“Perhaps. Perhaps he does not love her after all, but merely used her and now cannot forgive her for being so weak.”
“Do you really think her family will seek her out here?”
He nodded. “I’m afraid I do.”
“Then there’s no other choice,” she said. “We’ll have to drive on in the morning. Covering her in the bottom of the wagon so that if any Jansai caravans come upon us, they will not see we carry her.”
“Perhaps an angel will arrive before we have to break camp,” Rufus said in a comforting voice.
Elizabeth felt her lips twist. “When did an angel ever appear when you most needed one? Never in my life.”
But she wronged the whole divine race with that bitter belief. For in the morning, while they were still sipping hot tea and stamping some feeling into their cold toes, a shadow formed over the campfire and grew gradually larger. Elizabeth glanced up quickly, shot with sudden hope, to see the gorgeous, symmetrical wings fold down as an angel made a graceful landing a few yards from the wagon. He was a blond and white shape against the gold of the desert, all pristine, snowy feathers and curling yellow hair. He strode forward, a pleasant smile on his face, and spoke before Elizabeth could address him.
“What can I do to help?” the angel asked. “My name is Obadiah.”
Chapter Thirty
Flying harder and faster than he had ever flown. His wings making great scooping motions, gouging out the air before him, his whole body straining forward as if the very tension of his muscles could slice open the treacly air. The body in his arms still and almost weightless, the face against his chest showing no consciousness at all.