The Warrior Who Carried Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

turned her legs to look at the wound. The flesh across both calves was purple and one was split open, but the cut was not clean and the bone had not been splintered. She understood the Fox’s kindness. He had used the blunt back of the axe. I will not weep , she told herself, as she tied up the wound. Blood seeped through the lace, tracing intricate patterns of fruit and flowers. Then, using her arms to climb up the rock behind her, she managed to stand. The pain was not as terrible as she had feared it might be, except when her feet moved from the ankle at the first step. She went dizzy and nearly fell again. She found, however, that if she kept her feet absolutely flat, lifting them up like plates of meat from the thigh, taking tiny steps, then she could bear it. Fortunately it was late afternoon, cooling with long shadows; she had slept through the worst heat of the day. A bondhouse they had said. A bondhouse would mean a large farm. All the land here was desert, gravel and rock. A farm would have to be on lower ground, by the river, nearer Deeper and Wider, from where the boats left. How far away, how far away was that? There were only six hours of light left. She began to walk.
    If the ground was even slightly uneven; if her feet dragged, or if she shuffled, then she could feel more flesh tear, and her nerve ends seethe with pain. Each time it had to be a clean lift, up and then down. Sometimes she had to stand still, to let the pain subside. She stood with her eyes closed and waited; she could not risk sitting down. “For my father, who is like the earth,” she whispered at each step. “For my brother who starves. For my brother who crawls.” The shadows lengthened, and the lace went black and caked; her feet blistered from the heat of the ground, then started to bleed as well. Finally as night came on—night that would be so terrifying because it would mask the road and the precipice beside it—the track dropped away in front of her in a zigzag down the rock, and she saw the ribbon of the river, a slate of grey reflection of the darkening sky, and the irrigation canals like patterned mirrors around the fields. She saw a long house with people in the yard drawing water and bringing in wood. She saw the house, and the steep slope and realised she could never walk down to it.
    “Hello! Hello!” she shouted with her new voice, and it cracked and went harsh. “Help! I cannot walk. Hello!”
    She listened to her own forlornness in the wind. Finally she fainted, and fell.
    Pain shot up from Cara’s legs and through her whole body, wakening her. “Ah. Ah. Ah,” she gasped, and sat up in the darkness.
    “Duhdo duhdo genzu,” whispered a slurry voice that smelled of stale breath, nonsense words that had come to mean an offhand apology. Whoever it was stumbled off in the darkness to a door that opened out onto a darkness which was only slightly less impenetrable. Cara saw the stars in the sky, before the door swung shut again.
    “Oh, no,” Cara groaned. Now she was awake with the pain. She lay on a blanket on a hard stone floor. Already her fingers had found holes in the cloth. She knew enough of bonded life to know that someone had probably died on it. From all around her came the serried noises of people sleeping. She had seen such bondhouses before. There would be she knew, two rows of partitions made probably of hanging blankets. Between them, whole families, exhausted, thin and ill-clothed, slept on the stone. There would be a small shed some distance away for people to die in, and a trough between the stable and the bondhouse for what were called in Cara’s language, Gifts to the Earth.
    A baby started to cry. Its mother did not wake. Someone groaned and turned over, but the infant still wailed, untended. How many hours more of this did she have, Cara wondered, the pain in her leg like fire smouldering in embers, how many more hours of hunger, fierce thirst, and a need to pass water? Cara decided to move.