The Sea Peoples(16)
“He breathes, but he doesn’t feel unconscious,” said Pip. “Even when he’s asleep, you can feel that he’s there.”
For a moment the two women’s eyes met, and Pip felt the sudden vibration of shared awareness between them.
Thora was frowning. “Is the armor shielding . . .”
“No,” said Deor. “You know how a dead body feels—an empty sack of meat in the shape of a man. This is something like that, not quite as bad, but nearly. John’s body is breathing, but—”
Deor put his hand to John’s forehead again: “His spirit is not there, the thing that makes us what we are. Not asleep, not even the deep sleep that comes of a blow on the head. It’s gone, gone elsewhere. There’s a link, but it’s faint. And—”
He jerked the hand back and seemed to slump, taking a shuddering breath.
“—and it has gone to no good place. We may have his body, but the enemy has still taken him prisoner. This is less of a victory than we thought.”
Thora took a deep breath of her own and got to her feet, looking around her.
“Well, wherever his soul is wandering, we need to get his body out of here.”
Evrouin’s swarthy face had gone grayish-pale as he stared at the Prince’s suddenly visible body and murmured a Latin prayer; then he crossed himself, shook his shoulders like a dog coming out of the water, and helped them strip off John’s armor and clothing. In the background Fayard was yelling at his crossbowmen, who scrambled back to glare in bewilderment at the man lying where they knew nobody was, then faced outward in a defensive circle. Most of them crossed themselves first, amid a mutter of Catholic prayers in Latin—she was Anglican Rite herself, and used to hearing them in her own language.
Pip knelt beside the fallen man and as Deor held his head slowly, carefully dribbled a little water into his mouth; you had to be very cautious getting someone to drink when they were unconscious because it was so easy to get water into the lungs.
“You’ve found him!” said a lilting voice full of relief. Then sharply: “Don’t move him! Let me past!”
That was young Ruan Chu Mackenzie, one of John’s Montivallans from the Tarshish Queen—hence the joy—and Deor Godulfson’s boyfriend. He wore a kilt, had an accent that was almost a parody of Irish speech, and altogether seemed implausibly Celtic for someone from what had once been the United States and who obviously had at least one Chinese grandparent judging by his looks and the Chu part of his name. But Pip knew odder things had happened since the Blackout—what they called the Change where he came from.
More important, he’d been trained as a medic, what his people called a healer, as well as an archer. He unslung the baldric that held his yew longbow and quiver and set them aside as he knelt at John’s side and gave him a quick, competent once-over that included taking his blood-pressure with a little kit from his haversack.
That made Pip reassuringly confident of John’s physical presence again. He was her own age, just twenty, broad-shouldered and long-limbed, four or five inches taller than her five-six, with brown hair and green-brown hazel eyes that showed as Ruan’s thumb pushed back an eyelid. His pleasantly smooth features were just losing the last of the adolescent puppy fat.
But she was also acutely aware of how the personhood was gone, that lively sense of humor and the ear for music and the ability to see the absurd that had delighted her and were somehow there in potentia even when he slept. Now even their shadows were gone from his face, and he hadn’t had enough years to groove them into skin and flesh.
“Nothing! Pulse slow but normal, and the pupils contract, and that evenly. Sure, and it can’t be a concussion,” Ruan said. “His skull is sound as a bell, see?”
“You’re right,” Deor said.
“And head wounds bleed,” Ruan added.
They all nodded without thinking, having plenty of experience. They did, like bastards, even if they weren’t serious at all. The skin under the scalp was full of blood vessels, and even without a cutting edge they broke easily if a blow hammered skin against bone.
“I can’t feel any place where the bone’s depressed, either, and it’s not spinal damage,” Ruan said. “It’s not a healer of bodies he needs, but a bhuidseach.”
Seeing Pip and Toa uncomprehending, he translated: “Bhuidseach. Spell-wreaker, one who walks with the Powers. Like Deor. This thing with the Prince is ill-wreaking, not the natural course of things on the ridge of the world as wounds and illness are, but a bending of the shape of things. Sent of a living will to harm.”
Toa grunted thoughtfully; Pip swallowed. Her Uncle Pete had been fond of pre-Blackout adventure stories of a type she privately called Men with Swords and Things with Tentacles after something her mother had said. She’d read a few from his collection herself on visits to Darwin and found them amusing, though often wrong about how swords were actually used.
She sincerely hoped they were as wrong about the Things and their appendages, but you could never tell.
Then Ruan grabbed a pair of passing stretcher-bearers. They came willingly enough, since the foreign allies were popular. The whole Baru Denpasaran army knew that it was the catapults of the Tarshish Queen and the rapid-fire prang-prangs from the Silver Surfer and the knowledge of siegecraft that came with both that had made it possible for them to take this fort without crippling losses. And the fort squatted on the main water channels to the rice paddies of the western half of the island. It had been a hand around their throats.