I did not inquire, however, what Gyest wanted with a forge, considering it his own business.
Darg Sih obviously had Masrian blood. He towered over his men, ruddy brown of skin, shaved bald on the scalp and heavily bearded below, and with a pair of skew eyes, only one of which looked at you, while the other went about its own affairs.
We got to his camp, using some invisible track quite plain to the Sri, and arrived at sunset. The place was crowded with extra thieves, most yet mounted. They had been hunting the tiger with a couple of mares as bait, and a pack of dogs as prone to growl, snap, and fight as were their masters. Nevertheless, they had got the beast, an old one, that had no doubt reckoned a corral of horses as good as a banqueting table laid out for aged tigers. It had died cleanly, a spear-head lodged between its round ears, but by now the dog pack had
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savaged it, and some of the bravos had tapped its vitals, believing tiger blood a magic draft strengthening to heart and muscles. Remembering the beautiful slinking shape of a tiger seen days back at dusk, heading its prints away across the dunes, this rent and pilfered corpse stirred me to a confused, half-felt pity. How many aeons ago it seemed when I had been fourteen and stood above the two shot deer in the winter valley, pitying their death because I had grown aware of my own mortality.
Darg Sih, still astride his pony, bowed almost to his own belly before Gyest, and accepted koois and a bag of silver cash.
“You are welcome to me as my own life, Gyest. We have need of magicians.”
As they spoke, courteous bandits relieved the Sri of their cleaver-blade weapons. As far as I could see, they never had recourse to them in any case, and now made no objection. There was a lot of bowing and shaking of hands, and the gummy drink offered around, and even a cup of tiger’s blood (refused).
“What need of magicians do you have, Darg Sih?” Ossif asked,
“A man mauled by the old cat there. It has fine teeth before it dies, though no longer, for the women steal them for necklets.” Darg Sih laughed. “You will come and work healmagic? The men of the Red Camp tell me you wish the forge. That will be payment, yes? To heal my man?”
Gyest said he would look at the man and see what could be done. Darg Sih’s straight eye, meanwhile, had run up my uncovered face while the other gazed at my boots.
“Who is this one? Not Sri, not Hesk, not Seema-boy. Nor Masrian, I think. Who?”
“A northerner,” Gyest said.
“North-what is north?” demanded Darg. “And has the scut no tongue?”
“Tongue and teeth,” said Gyest, sounding amused, though probably this was a precaution. Insults and threats flew about in the bandit camps; if everyone kept smiling, they could be supposed friendly, but to ask for water with a solemn face might invite wrath.
“But I long to hear the voice of him,” said Darg. He leaned precariously, poked me in the chest, and grinned and said, “Eh, boy, thrill me with your speech.”
A year back this would have put me in a rage. Now I
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bowed low, and said, smiling of course, “The thrill of my voice to you, oh master, would not compare to my delight at hearing yours.”
Both his eyes popped, one on me, one on my belt. Plunging from the saddle with a bellow, Darg Sih embraced me, punching me in the back and roaring. I had spoken inadvertently in his own polyglot bandit language, heard as I came in the camp. He thought me a bandit now, regardless of racial characteristics and garb. He was pressing koois on me, the gum drink, tiger’s blood, and inviting me to couple with his women and his sons.
It was me he bowleggedly led, crowing, toward the tent of the mauled man, telling me the while of Gyest’s cleverness as healer. Gyest and the brothers followed, their women clustered close, returning bandit grabs, where they had to, with productions of snakes, phosphorescent lights, and careful laughter.
The camp lived in a diversity of dwellings-in huts of piled stones, in grubby tents, in wicker-work bothies. At its center a spring of white water opened in the rock, and made a pool where wizened fruit trees grew, and here, in a cave, lay an unconscious man, with most of his right arm chewed away. A boy wept at his feet. Darg swept him up and kissed him noisily, trumpeting that the magicians had come and all should be well.
Gyest and Ossif bent to examine the man. There were broad claw-marks on his breast, too, but they were clean and would close. The arm was useless. A city physician would long since have had it off and bound up the stump before a gangrene set in.
“It is his mare, you see, offered for bait,” Darg explained. “This one, he runs and leaps the tiger. Chunk! The tiger’s teeth meet in his wrist. He thinks it an appetizer, the old brown one.”
The boy wept in the doorway.
“I doubt he can keep his arm, Darg Sih,” Gyest said.
“His right arm!” Darg roared. “Consider, his knife handyou must save it.” He tapped his smiling jaw with a playful finger. “Save, or no forge.”
Gyest straightened, came over to me, and said in accurate if slightly halting Masrian, “I can only salvage, and then he may still die. The bandits of Ost Wilderness don’t understand that our magic is mostly illusion. We are not great healers. There’s only one here who can actually heal.”
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“No,” I said.
“You renounce the good Power with the bad, then? You have learned nothing?”
“I swore I’d never play sorcerer again, Gyest. I meant it.”
“You are long-lived,” he said. “How often will you force this denial from yourself in all the years before you?”
The man began to rouse, and started to cry out in weak stutterings of pain. The boy ran to him, and took his sound hand.
“It doesn’t move me,” I said to Gyest, as if this were some show he had ordered them to put on in order that I be impressed.
“But, Vazkor,” Gyest said, “when has human suffering ever moved you?” I had not expected that. It went through me like the distant cast of a spear, like hurt in a scar long sealed. “You have no compassion,” he said quietly, without anger, merely telling me a fact. “You survive all human ills. How can you expect to feel compassion? You must see that the sympathy any man feels for the plight of another is, at its core, simply a realization and fear that he, too, might suffer the same plight. We grow cold in the loins and about the heart when we confront disease, wounds, death, because we know they are also our heritage. But you, Vazkor, who have overcome any and all these devils of the flesh, how shall you tremble and ache for us?”
My mind slid back, as if he had directed it, to the shot deer at the pool, my fourteen-year-old pity sprung from my own terror at the aspect of death. I thought, too, of how I had worked among the victims of the yellow plague, trying to ease their wretchedness, as if thereby I would ease my own that I knew would come to me. It was exact, every word he spoke. Yet I should never have fathomed it without Gyest.
“Don’t chide yourself,” he said now. “Expect only what you can give. Which is pity, rarely, accidentally, some trigger sprung by nostalgia or regret. True sympathy you will never give. Yet how much more you are able to give. Ask the dying man if he would rather you wept for him or healed him.”
Darg’s hand fell on my arm.
“What’s this? Masrian you speak and my soldier howling like the she-wolf. Come, Gyest. Heal! Heal!”
My voice sounded rough as a boy’s when I said, “Gyest, get all of them out. If I must do it, I want no witnesses, no shouts of sorcery.”
The place was cleared; he spun them some yarn of me,
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that I had been tutored by a doctor-sage in Bar-Ibithni the Golden, and so on. Even the youth was taken away, sobbing, which left me the writhing, moaning man.
I healed him. No wonder now, no hubris, no surge of pleasure or contempt, not even my own questioning that I felt nothing. Just healing. The absolute, as I had finally been shown, does not need the accompaniment of pipes and drums.
He came to himself shortly. By then I had bound his arm with a strip of rag lying on the ground, to conceal its wholeness.