Lois Bujold - Passage

“You never know,” said Berry. “If they weren’t busted to pieces when they went under the towhead, sometimes they come up again all waterlogged and get picked up downstream by folks. What was your cargo?”

“Barrel staves, mostly, and bear and pig hides. Kegs of bear grease and lard. I don’t care for the staves, but I regret the other. A passel of bears and pigs, those were, and not easily come by.” He glanced at his ash spear, leaning in a corner.

“Your staves would likely be too warped to be anything but firewood, later, and the hides, well, it’ll depend on how long they soak, and if they can be dried again without going moldy. Some of your kegs might make it, if they’re good and tight.”

Chicory brightened at this news; his partner Bearbait looked less enthusiastic.

Fawn finished washing and drying the wounds, then traded places with Dag, who bent in for a close inspection with both eye and ground-sense. Dag reported, “You’re well gouged and scraped, and your joints are wrenched sore, but nothing’s dislocated or broken. Bleed pretty freely last night, did you?”

“He was a sight,” confirmed Bearbait. “I was ready to bust him in the jaw for laughing like that while looking like that.”

“But the bleeding’s mostly stopped on its own, now.” Dag gently worked out a few deep splinters with his ghost hand and tweezers. “The rips are too ragged to make stitching you up worthwhile, I think.” He fingered a hanging ribbon of skin, considered whether to detach it with knife or scissors, then, on impulse, ripped its ground crossways in a slice as thin as paper. The strip fell away into his hand; he pitched it into the fire. “Did that hurt?”

“What?” said Chicory, trying to crane his sore neck to see over his shoulder.

The tiny bit of the Raintree man’s ground in his own felt little different than a normal ground reinforcement; not even as odd as a mosquito or an oat. Dag removed the other two bad strips the same way, trying for as fine a slice as he could. They did not bleed. Better stop here and think about this one, eh? “You’re going to have scars there.”

Chicory snorted indifference. “I’ve done worse to myself.”

Dag didn’t doubt it. “Give me your say-so, and I’ll put a little Lakewalker-style ground reinforcement in the deepest gouges to fight infection, which is the biggest danger left. Then have Fawn put some ointment on and wrap them up so the scabs don’t crack when you move. In a few days, a clean shirt should be enough to protect them while they finish healing.”

Chicory’s brows arched wryly. “If I had a shirt, I could wash it, sure, if I had a bucket. And soap.” He hesitated. “What’s that thing you say you want to put in me?”

Fawn translated, “A touch of Lakewalker magic healing.”

“Oh.” Chicory looked both impressed and alarmed. “That’d be a new start, for sure. All right…” He craned suspiciously as Dag laid in lines of ground, but his lips parted as his hurts eased. “How de’! That’s a strange thing. Never had a Lakewalker offer me anything like that before!”

“I aim to be a medicine maker to farmers, once I learn more of the trade,” Dag explained. “It isn’t anything anyone’s done before.”

“Mighty strange place, this big river,” sighed Chicory.

Plans were made to deliver the boatwrecked men to a town two days down the river, where Chicory hoped to find an old friend who would help them to shoes, clothes, and enough gear to commence walking home. Meanwhile, Berry undertook to watch for signs of their lost boats. The exhausted men slept in piles and didn’t wake again until the Fetch tied to the bank for the night and Fawn had to clear the decks of her kitchen to start supper.

Dag wasn’t sure if he wanted to wrap a cloak of husbandly protection around Fawn, or clutch her to him like a talisman against such a concentration of strange farmers. Just who was supposed to be protecting whom? But with fifteen people crammed aboard the Fetch, privacy—not to mention private conversation—was out of the question.

Dag quickly learned that Chicory’s crew were mainly his friends and neighbors from a small town on a feeder creek to the lower Beargrass, southwest of Farmer’s Flats and so not in the direct path of last summer’s horrors, news both Dag and Fawn took in with relief—his covert, hers warmly expressed. Chicory had acquired his tag of Captain by getting up a troop of local volunteers to go help out when the troubles began, when the malice had grown advanced enough to kidnap and mind-slave Raintree farmers, marching them to attack other settlements in turn. By the looks they exchanged, Barr and Remo were inclined to mock this self-appointed rank; Dag, the more he listened, was not.

Ford Chicory proved to be an excellent tale-teller. He was no blowhard like Boss Wain; his place at the center of his tales was as often as the butt of the joke as the hero, but he had a knack for holding his listeners in thrall either way. After dinner, aware of his audience and perhaps in return for the boat’s hospitality, he even told a creepy ghost story that had both Hawthorn and Hod bug-eyed and half of the crew pretending not to be.

Tales now being as readily exchanged as coins in a dice game, everyone clustered around the hearth as Chicory and his crew learned in turn about Berry’s quest, Dag and Fawn’s West Blue marriage, and—inevitably, Dag supposed—Dag’s place in the campaign against the Raintree malice. Dag did not willingly volunteer his words, but with Fawn, Whit, the crew of the Fetch, and once in a while even Barr and Remo chiming in, he didn’t need to do much more than adjust their Dag-tales for overenthusiasm. As the Raintree men’s picture of him shifted from itinerant medicine maker to ex—patrol captain, they grew warier—Dag could not decide if this was a relief or an annoyance—but Chicory’s attention sharpened.

“I’d seen old blight bogle lairs when I was out hunting, from time to time,” Chicory told Dag. Dag wondered how often the man had ventured into forbidden territory above the old cleared line, but now did not seem the time to ask. Chicory went on, “Gray patches, all nasty and dead. It didn’t take no high-nosed patrollers to convince me to stay off ’em, no sir!”

Dag let his groundsense flick out. A successful hunter like Chicory might well possess a rudimentary groundsense like Aunt Nattie’s, if some passing Lakewalker had climbed his family tree a few generations back. It was impolite to inquire, though, and since Chicory seemed to have led an irregular wandering life far from his birth kin, he might not know himself.

The Raintree man continued, “I’ve met your patrols, run across your camps—they never invited me in, mind, more like invited me to move along—but I’d never seen Lakewalkers run before.”

“They went streaming past us like rabbits, when we got up north of the Flats,” said a crewman in a faintly scornful tone.

“Now, that was the women and their young shavers, mostly,” said Chicory in a fair-minded way.

“Malices snatch the youngsters first, by preference,” Dag said. “When a malice goes on the move, Lakewalkers have learned to get the little ones out of the path as fast as they can, with the rest—off-duty patrollers, other adults—for rearguard. Likely you didn’t get far enough north to meet the rearguard, or the malice might have taken you, too.”

“We met plenty of them mud-men,” Bearbait put in, face darkening in memory. “Both before and after they lost their wits. Ugly mugs, they were.”

“The malice makes them up out of animals it catches, you know,” Fawn said. “By groundwork.” She went on to describe the grotesqueries of the mud-man nursery she’d seen at Bonemarsh Camp, with such simple directness that she seemed unaware of how thoroughly she was topping Chicory’s ghost story for keeping folks awake in their bedrolls later.