Harry Turtledove - A Different Flesh

sim held a hand over his mouth and would not him. It kept signing Eat.

With no other choice, he did. tears of rage and weakness filled his eyes.

The next thing he remembered was thinking it had started to rain.

But when he opened his eyes, the sun was shining. Yet he was wet.

Sweat covered every inch of his body. It dripped from his nose and trickled through his damp and matted hair. He put a hand to his forehead.

It was cooler. His fever had broken. He drifted away again, but something closer to natural sleep than to the oblivion which he had wandered before.

When he woke again, the female sim was trying to feed him another plant like the last one, but even more beraggled. This time, the sim broke off the root and forced it , into his mouth, the taste was just as bad as he remembered, but, gagging, he got the thing down. After he had swallowed, the female brought him a cup of water and held this while he drank it. He did not think the cup was the one he had made.

He had another sweating spell during his next sleep, and stayed awake some little while when he came out of it. The same sim seemed to have taken over his nursing. It greeted him with yet another dusty maiden plant. He no longer tried to fight its ministrations. Enough of his wits were back for him to realize that, however acrid and revolting the plant it was giving him tasted, they were doing him good. He came awake again at dawn, thinking how hungry he was. He tried to raise himself up on an elbow. The effort left him gasping before he finally succeeded. But no matter how weak he was, he was at last in command of his faculties once more.

He took stock of himself, looking down the length of his body. He whistled, soft and low. "No wonder I'm hungry," said out loud, his voice a rusty croak. The fever had melted the flesh from his bones.

Every rib was plainly visible (he had no idea when the sims had taken off his tunic, and his legs were bird-scrawny.

The splints, he saw with relief, were still on his right calf, it ached fiercely, but now the pain was at a level he could bear.

Yellow serum oozed from the scab where the bone had stabbed through his skin, yet his right leg felt not much warmer than the other one.

Despite the splints, the leg had a kink in it that had not been there before.

He did not care. He was healing. A limp, even a cane the rest of his life, would be a smal price to pay. He marveled that he was alive at al .

Because the agony in his leg had diminished, he was abler to take stock of his other bodily shortcomings, which were considerable.

He felt raw, running sores on his back and buttocks, not surprising when he had been lying there so long. There were more on the insides of his thighs, from imperfectly cleaned wastes. But he was not lying in a great stinking pool of his own filth. The sims must have dragged him from spot to spot in their clearing. He had no memory of it.

Most of the subhumans were already out looking for food.

one of the old females that kept an eye on the kids while their parents foraged walked in front of him. Food, he signed.

The old female fell back a pace. "Hoo!" it said in surprise; he must have been an inert lump so long that the sims no longer expected anything else from him. The old female brought him some berries. They were the unripe and overripe ones none of the subhumans had wanted.

Again, Henry Quick did not care.

Half-starved as he was, they still tasted wonderful.

He tried to rol on his side, but even splinted, even beginning to mend, his leg would not let him. His bedsores for could think of no better name for them snarled as his weight came back down on them. He was not going anywhere, even so short a distance, for a while yet. He abandoned the slender dream he'd let grow again of getting back across the mountains before the snow fel .

. The female sim that had been caring for him returned, with what looked like a chunk of log. The old female gave an

excited hoot, pointed to Quick. Seeing him awake, the other sim dropped its burden and dashed over to the maiden plant. This time he took the plant from the sims hand and ate it , before he could be told to. Whatever was in that root was medicine better than most of what the doctors back in Cairo used.

When he had choked it down, he signed Eat?

Yes the female sim echoed, grinning hugely. One of the hatchets from Quick's pack was lying close by. The sim cut the log it had brought in.

Punk flew; the log was old. Two or three more strokes served to split it.

It was ful of at beetle larvae. They squirmed in the dirt.

Youngsters came running up to pop them into their mouths.

the female sim skewered several grubs on a twig, held over the fire, and brought them to Quick. The trapper paused, then sighed. If he was going to live with sims, he d have to live like a sim, and that was that. He screwed his eyes shut, but he ate. Perhaps hunger seasoned the bugs, for he did not find them as disgusting as he thought. Compared to the medicinal root, they were delicious.

The female sim fetched him a cup of water. He wondered many times it had done that while his wits wandered.

Not many human nurses would have been so patient.

The water made his bladder fill up. He did not want to foul himself, not now when he was awake. He called to the sim. When he had its attention, he signed, Fill cup piss from me Not piss on ground here.

boo," the sim said softly, as the subhumans often did a meeting an idea they had not thought of. The sim put the cup between his legs. It took hold of his penis to put tip inside the cup as matter-of-factly as if it were holding his toe. Urinating without fouling himself was one of the pleasures that accompanied healing.

he thought of something. Not drink from this cup, heed This cup, piss only.

“Coo," the female said again.

After al his improvement, the trapper still slept as mum as a young child. He was asleep when the hunting party males returned, a little before sunset. When he woke the next morning, most of them were gone again. The man that had brought him the marten pelt, however, crouched beside him, plainly waiting for him to rouse That waiting was as far as politeness went among sim They had no small talk. As soon as the male saw Quick's eyes on it, it signed. Make thing like noise-stick.

Quick frowned. He had hoped the sim had forgotten the promise he'd made as he thrashed on the ground in anguish. He had only the vaguest idea of how to make bow, to say nothing of arrows. Unfortunately, the sim remembered.

He would have to learn If it was going to propel an arrow, a bow had to be of springy wood. The trapper pointed to one of the spruces at the edge of the clearing. Fetch me little tree like that, has signed. He held his hands about four feet apart. The sim went into the woods. It soon came back with a sapling such as he had described. A knife lay close enough for him to reach it. He began cutting branches off the trunk.

The sim watched for a while, then decided nothing was going to happen right away. It picked up its hatchet and a stout club and went off to hunt.

Because Quick was stuck on his back, trimming the sapling was a slow, awkward job. He managed to twist enough to prop himself up on his left elbow. He used his left hand to hold the fragrant trunk and carved away with his right, but things still did not go well. He looked round for the grizzled sim. The old male could help, and would probably be interested in what he was up to He did not see the old male. Thinking back, he had not seen it since his wits came back. When the female that cared for him returned from a foraging trip, he asked about it. Dead, the female signed, a thumbs-down gesture old as the Roman arena. The sim amplified it with a racking burst of coughs. Quick recalled the paroxysms he had heard in his delirium.