He picked up the tray and hobbled out.
Kennard, his face twisting, shook his head. “I suppose you got all that? He means they’ll have to cut his leg off soon or he will die.”
“And it’s so damned unnecessary!” Larry said violently. “All it needs is lancing and antibiotics, and a little sterile care—” Suddenly, he started.
“Kennard! That pot they brought the honey in, do you still have it?”
“Yes.”
“I’m no good at making a fire with flint and tinder. But can you make one? A very small one in the pot? Enough, say, to sterilize a knife? To heat water very hot?”
“What do you—”
“I have an idea,” Larry said between his teeth, “and it just might work.” He pulled his medical kit from his pocket. “I have some antiseptic powder, and antibiotics. Not much. But probably enough, considering that the fellow must have the constitution of—of one of these trees, to live through a clawing like that and still be walking around at all.”
“Larry, if we kindle a fire they will probably kill us.”
“So we keep it in the pot, covered. The old fellow looks intelligent—the one who spoke Darkovan. If we show him that it can’t possibly get out of a clay pot—”
Kennard caught his thought. “Zandru’s hells, it just might work, Larry! But, Gods above, are you then apprenticed to be a curer-of-wounds among your people, like my Cousin Dyan Ardais?”
“No. This knowledge is as common with the boys of my people as—” he sought wildly for a simile, and Kennard, following his thought as usual supplied one: “As the knowledge of sword-play among mine?”
Larry nodded. He took over then, giving instructions: “If the chap yells, we’ll be swamped, and never have a chance to finish. So you and I will jump him and keep him from getting one squeak out. Then you sit on him while I fix up his leg. We’ll get just one chance to keep him from yelling—so don’t muff it!”
By evening their preparations were made. The light was poor, and Larry fretted; though the light from the fire-pot helped a little. They waited, breathless. Had their jailer been changed, had he died of his terrible wound? No, after a time they heard his characteristic halting step. The door opened.
He saw the pot and the fire. He opened his mouth to scream.
But the scream never got out. Kennard’s arm was across his throat, and a crude, improvised gag of a strip torn from Larry’s shirt-tail was stuffed into his mouth. Larry felt slightly sick. He knew what must be done, but had never done anything even remotely like it before. He held the knife in the fire until it glowed red-hot, then let it cool somewhat, and, setting his teeth, made a long gash in the swollen, festering leg.
There was an immediate gush of greenish stinking matter from the wound. Larry sponged it away. It seemed there was no end to the stuff that oozed from the wound, and it was a sickening business, but finally the stuff was tinged with blood and he could see clean flesh below.
He sponged it repeatedly with the hot water heated in the second pot; when it was as clean as he could make it, he sprinkled the antibiotic powder into the wound, covered it with the cleanest piece of cloth he had—a fragment of bandage remaining in the medical kit—and took the gag from the man’s mouth.
The man had long since ceased to struggle. He lay blinking in stuporous surprise, looking down at his leg, which now had only a clean gash. Suddenly he rose bowed half a dozen times profoundly to the boys, and backed out of the room.
Larry slumped on the floor, exhausted. He wondered suddenly if what he had done had really endangered their lives. The trailmen’s customs were so different from theirs, there was really no way of telling; they might consider this just as evil as killing a rabbit.
After a while, at Kennard’s urging, he sat up and ate some supper. He needed it—even if he had the feeling that he might be eating his last meal. They fed the small fire with fragments of vine from the dead leaves, and toasted their mushrooms over it. For a while they felt almost festive. Much later, they heard steps, and looked at one another, with no need for words.