“Face wounds bleed a lot, but they heal fast, too. See if you can get a bandage or a handkerchief or something on it, would you?”
I stepped over a few enemy casualties as I went over to him. I stood on top of one to get a better view of Adam’s head. That still left me shorter than Adam, and the cut was near the top of his head. I stepped down, piled two more muggers on top of the first, and then stepped up to the top of the heap. Better.
“I didn’t know you were carrying a six-gun,” I said as I worked.
The wound was a laceration, a tear in the skin. I cleaned it a bit with my handkerchief, and Adam handed me his own from his pouch as well.
“I wasn’t. That was my penlight.”
“Your penlight? Then what about the bullet I heard go through that guy’s throat?”
“It wasn’t exactly a bullet. It was a fifty caliber Gyro-Jet.”
“I haven’t heard of one of those things in twenty-five years.”
“That’s when I built one into the bottom of my penlight. Back when I was in high school. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Ouch!”
“Well, hold still. I’m surprised that it did as much damage as it did. I’d always thought of those little rockets as being one of those neat ideas that didn’t quite work out. They were too inaccurate to hit anything at a distance and too slow-moving up close to make much of a hole.”
I used my handkerchief as a compress and Adam’s, which was bigger, to wrap around his head to hold the compress in place.
“Yeah, well, I had some ideas about that. I figured that if I could grip the rocket tight for a while, until it built up some pressure behind it, it would come out of the barrel fast enough to do you some good without giving the gun too much of a kick.”
“There, that should do it, at least until we get home. So your idea worked. But I don’t see how you could do that with the other five rounds.”
“What other five rounds? How much room do you think there is in a penlight? It was a single shot. All that talk about the other shots was just showmanship.”
“Adam, if it works, it’s sound engineering. Do you need help getting home?”
“Nah, I can walk okay.”
“Good. Then how about you helping me?”
I was beginning to realize that I was more bashed up than I had thought.
“All right. I’ll carry you if you carry the lantern.”
“Deal.”
I counted eight of them still on the floor as we limped home. One must have snuck out.
“Treet, I think somebody around here doesn’t like us anymore.”
“You think that this was a hit of some kind? Bullshit! It was a mugging. Our sin was hubris. We deserved worse than we got. We’ve been strutting around these islands with two-hundred-year’s pay in our pouches like a couple of oil-fed Arab assholes. With that kind of money on us, we were sure to get mugged. Maybe most of the people here are peaceful, but every place in the world has an underworld, and you know it!”
“Bullshit right back at you. Those guys weren’t thugs. Their clothes were too clean, and they didn’t have any calluses on their hands. They were students or office workers or some such. What’s more, they didn’t know jack shit about fighting, or a couple of old farts like us couldn’t have taken out so many of them like that.”
“Maybe you’re right. They could have been young priests or something. Anyway, it was kind of fun, towards the end, there. Thugs or not.”
“You got some strange ideas about fun, Treet. They had to be part of some kind of a political outfit. The islands don’t have an underworld,” Adam said, shaking the blood out of his eyes.
“How do you know that?”
“Because nobody in this whole place puts locks on their front doors. They mostly don’t even have front doors,” Adam said.
“You’ve got a point there.”
“Did you notice that all those guys used clubs, instead of knives or guns like hoods in the States would use?”
“It figures, considering the way everybody here always wears what amounts to bulletproof clothing,” I said. “Then there’s the fact that I’ve seen darn few decent knives since I got here, and no firearms but our own.”
“Yeah. Just another case of technology modifying human behavior,” Adam said as he staggered home.
We got to my place, pushed aside the heavy curtains that did duty for a door, and got through the zigzag hallway that gave some additional privacy before Roxanna caught sight of us.
She stared at the two of us for a second and then screamed, and I mean the full-lunged, movie-heroine-being-eaten-again-by-the-monster, 130 dB ear bone smashing air-raid siren variety of noise.
Painful. My ears hurt worse than the rest of me.
Adam’s women were still at my place, and they came running. Once assembled, all of them, servants included, promptly went into hysterics right along with Roxanna. You’d think that they’d never seen someone come home bloody before.
I don’t know. Maybe they hadn’t.
“Roxanna!” I shouted above their noise, “Stop acting like a silly little girl! It doesn’t suit you, and anyway, I thought you were made of better stuff than that! Get hold of yourself!”
Adam wearily put me down and we stood there bleeding while they took a few more minutes to calm themselves down. Finally, they managed it, and the decibel level dropped below 110.
“Better,” I said. “It’s pretty sad when the injured have to tend to the healthy before they can get any help themselves. Now, Roxanna, send someone out for whatever passes for a doctor around here. And send somebody else for the police. I want to report an assault with the intent to murder.”
That last statement of mine got them all to screaming again. We continued with our standing and bleeding for a while longer, and I added shaking my head to our repertoire. These people were so admirable in so many ways, but they were just not the sorts you wanted on your team when you had an emergency going on.
Eventually, the same lady doctor who patched us up last time arrived. Adam’s head was sewn up, this time with the aid of some novocaine from our first-aid kit, and then she went over both of us, tending to dozens of abrasions, lacerations, and contusions. We were even more bashed up than I had thought.
I got my nose reset, and was given something that was supposed to save the teeth that had loosened up during the ruckus. There was a bump on the back of my head the size of half a grapefruit. It was so big that when I put my hand on it, my fingertips couldn’t reach my skull. We both got rubbed down with something that was supposed to help bruises, and towards dawn, we were finally permitted to go to bed.
I had to be led there, since by that time, both of my eyes had swollen shut.
THIRTY-ONE
Our much-needed rest lasted for about eleven minutes, at which time the duke arrived, with two sleepy guards in tow.
“I’m sorry to have to get you both out of bed, but then your actions have forced me to be up for hours, so I’m probably being more than fair. Now then, we’ll have a formal hearing, and quite possibly several full legal trials before this mess is settled, but for now I want to hear your versions of what happened this night.”
Adam gave him a straightforward explanation of what had happened, and I confirmed his statement.
“So you say that you were attacked without provocation, you admit to carrying and using concealed firearms, and you admit to leaving dead and wounded men in a public walkway without even attempting to render them any medical assistance?”
“Yes, Your Grace. As to the wounded, well, please remember that we were badly wounded ourselves, and that their friends who had run off had to be close by. We assumed that as soon as we were gone, they would obtain the necessary help,” Adam said.
“True enough, to the extent that they got their associates to a medical woman as soon as the two of you had left. That doesn’t excuse you from your legal duties, however. But then you don’t know your legal obligations here, do you?”
“I suppose not, Your Grace. But please consider that they also left the scene without rendering aid to us,” Adam said.
“That has already been made self-evident. Well. I think that I can tell you that you needn’t worry overmuch about the upcoming trial. Even though you were responsible for at least four deaths, the evidence is pretty clear that you were deliberately attacked. Your other crimes were, at worst, misdemeanors which will probably be payable with fines that you can easily afford.”