The Reindeer People Read online

  As she worked over her hand, she wondered why she did it. What good to bind the poor crumpled fingers, to spread soothing unguent on the torn flesh, to bandage from sight the bloody and broken places? The new pain of having her broken fingers straightened changed the cadence and pitch of Elsa’s moaning. As Tillu carefully drew one finger straight, Elsa gave a sudden gasp. Her heels drummed against the hides she rested on. Then she was still, at last unconscious.

  Tillu seized her opportunity. Elsa would not feel the pain now. She would do the rougher healing. She snapped the wrenched shoulder back into its socket. She looked for and found a better knife than her own and used it ruthlessly to cut through the leather and wool and bright woven bindings of Elsa’s garments. Tillu laid her tunic open, to reveal the blackening bruises down the left side of her rib cage. Her fingers probed delicately, and she decided no ribs were broken. A small frown creased her brow. She wondered briefly why the woman bad been beaten so, and who had done it. She did not appear to have been raped; merely mauled and left to die. Perhaps she had broken some tribal rule.

  Tillu shook her head at her own curiosity. These were not questions for a healer to ask. She had seen women of other tribes beaten this badly, sometimes by a rapist, sometimes by a lover or father. Kerlew’s strange prediction that Elsa would not return with bear grease rose in her mind. Had Heckram done this? It might be so. She had seen men just as repentant and guilty as he seemed to be. It was possible. And none of her worry. Over the years, she had learned to ask no questions. The answers never made the healing any easier. She covered the poor battered body gently. Her lingers touched Elsa’s skull, gently probing through the thick, black hair. She found the spot, as she had known she would, and felt her stomach turn over as she touched it. No blood flowed from it. All the damage was within.

  Turning her back on Elsa, Tillu drew closer to the fire. She felt chilled and weary, more than the long ride through the cold night and her interrupted sleep could explain. It was this ‘healing.’ A healing that was more a preparation for burial. There had not been many of this kind in Tillu’s life, but each one dragged at her, making her question her skills. This Elsa would die. Any of her other injuries, she might have survived. But Tillu could no longer ignore the signs. Still she did not call for Heckram and the others yet. Elsa had been strong. Her dying would take days and nights. Their vigil would be long enough. Let them rest now.

  She unrolled a piece of scraped, bleached hide. On it she arranged packages and bundles of herbs, tossing spoiled bits into the fire as she selected others and put them in two small piles. Her fingers and nose knew each dry leaf, each curl of bark, as she sorted. Here was strong-scented yarrow that could start a woman’s flow of blood or treat a wound, and the long leaves of deer tongue for an emetic. Here was the curling bark from the bear-berry shrub, good for urinary disorders, and the long dandelion root for a tonic or a mild laxative. Some herbs she had known from her lessons when a child, others she had learned from the folk she moved among. Their names might vary from people to people, but not their properties. Tillu chose carefully. Into the first pile went those for cleansing bleeding wounds and ones for easing the pains of cuts and gouges. Into the second pile went those that eased pain and encouraged sleep.

  She turned next to the wooden box Heckram had brought along. Opening it, she began to assemble her tools. Her mortar and pestle were the ball and socket from a reindeer calf’s joint. Tillu scooped up the first pile of herbs and began to grind them together. The fine powder was mixed with lukewarm water. She soaked a fresh bandage in it, and wrapped it dripping over the bound fingers. She wiped blood from Elsa’s face, noted that her torn cheek no longer bled. She tried to ignore the bulging of her closed eyes.

  The second mixture she hesitated over. Elsa’s wounds were severe. She knew she must increase the strength of the mixture for it to have any effect. But Elsa was already weakened. Too much would … perhaps be merciful. Tillu pushed that thought aside. True healers refused such decisions. Her profession was to repair the body and cure the illness. Let others decide when someone was beyond her help. Her vocation demanded that she always believe her patients would survive. Her hand hovered over the neatly arranged piles of herbs. After a long hesitation, she picked up two night berries and added them to the small pile before her. Death’s Seeds, Benu’s folk had called these, and another folk had named them Bitter Sleep. She wanted a mixture that would heavily sedate and separate Elsa from her pain, but still allow her to bid her family farewell. If ever she opened those eyes again.

  Tillu crushed the berries and herbs together into a coarse mixture, added it to water, and set the vessel to heat by the fire. It might never be needed, but if Elsa awoke to pain, Tillu did not want her to have to wait for relief.

  She placed her palms on the earth and pushed herself upright. The walls of the hut swung slowly before her for an instant; she had stood up too rapidly for one so weary. She rubbed at her gritty eyes as she stumbled over to sit beside Elsa. She tucked covers gently against her. ‘Rest now,’ she told Elsa. ‘Rest.’ With a sigh, Tillu leaned back against a cool sod wall.

  A sound turned her head. One of the women was coming back into the hut. Something about her face … A memory twisted elusively through her mind, and then Tillu realized she was seeing Elsa’s features subtly reflected in this older face. A relative. Behind her came a handful of men that Tillu didn’t recognize. Last came the other woman who had been in the hut when Tillu first arrived, followed by Heckram. Tillu sighed to herself. He should be resting. He looked weary and bedraggled, and angered at something. She hadn’t noticed before the tracings of gray in his black-bronze hair. It reminded her of a wolf’s pelt. There were lines in his face that had deepened this night, and she wondered suddenly how she could have thought he was a young man. He was older than she was.

  The people filed in silently, their very silence a continuation of whatever argument had created the tension stretched among them. It was plain the other men had not seen Elsa’s injuries before. Their faces reflected various emotions, and cloaked others. One was the headman of the village. Tillu did not need to be told of his importance. His rumpled black hair attested that he had been roused and dressed hurriedly, but he had not neglected to deck himself with a necklace of amber beads. His clothing was richer than that of the others, the furs softer and more lush, the colors of the woven strips brighter and wider. The skinny whelp beside him must be his son. Tillu disliked him instantly. His face mirrored none of his father’s concern for Elsa. There was only the avarice of one fascinated by blood and pain. He licked his narrowed lips and peered at the girl. Muscles twitched around his eyes as he stared.

  The third was a barrel-chested bear of a man. Had Tillu not seen him, she would have supposed Heckram an anomaly to the herdfolk. But this man, too, showed the marks of mixed blood. He stood half a head taller than Heckram, and his hair was brown bleached by the sun with streaks of gold. He had started life with a good face, Tillu judged, but along the way had spoiled it. There was a heavy cast to his features and his eyes didn’t seem to open completely. A waiting, hiding man. His clothing was plain, but well made. Its reserved color and simpler braid suggested wealth more than the gaudy decorations the headman’s son wore. Moreover, this man bore himself as the son should have, but did not. As he gazed on Elsa, he expelled a deep sigh like a hiss, and crossed his heavy arms across his thick chest. He was the first one to break the silence.

  ‘If she had accepted my offers,’ he said sternly, ‘I would not have let her go out to the spring alone at night, to take her chances with beasts. Why is it some men claim what they cannot care for? You’ve only yourself to blame for this, Heckram. I understand why you did not report it to Capiam until now. No man of any pride would want to admit a thing like -‘

  ‘Joboam.’ The headman’s voice stopped him. The woman seizing Heckram’s arm aborted his swing at the man rebuked as Joboam. Tillu made herself smaller, crouching by her patient as she scowled at this d
rama. This sort of tension never did an injured person any good. If there was any more disturbance …

  Heckram shook the woman off and stepped clear of her. Tillu wondered if he were aware of the way he put his body between Joboam and the woman on the floor, it was no beast,’ he growled. ‘A man did this. And I went for the healer first, because I knew this is exactly what you would do. Stand over her and make useless remarks, seeking to fix the blame on someone rather than finding out who did it.’

  ‘It could have been a demon,’ Capiam’s son breathed. His eyes glowed at the prospect. No one paid him the least attention. Tension sang between Joboam and Heckram. They could have been alone in the hut.

  The woman who had clutched at Heckram’s arm spoke abruptly, changing the direction of everyone’s stare. ‘Capiam. Are you the herdlord or not? Do you lead this sitor? Then there is someone among us who has done this thing. If you lead us, then it is you, not my son, who must answer for letting one such as that live among us.’

  The very softness of her voice made the accusation sharper. The herdlord’s son gasped. The jaw of the other woman sagged open an instant. Then she snapped it shut and her gaze hardened.

  ‘She’s right,’ she said, her voice cracking. ‘She’s right! Never has there been a time when a woman was afraid to go to the spring alone! Never has a woman been savaged like this, on the very edges of our camp! What are we coming to, when there is among us one who can do this? Where are you leading us, Capiam?’

  Her voice went shriller with every word, and suddenly she was gasping. She clutched at herself and sank slowly down on the floor, her face caving in as her tears found her.

  ‘Who are you to speak to the headman like that, old woman!’ Joboam demanded in a voice laced with fury.

  Heckram spun on him, the cords in his neck leaping out like plucked bowstrings. The headman’s son scrambled backward in his hurry to be out of the way, stumbling against Tillu’s pot of pain potion and nearly upsetting it. Heckram took a step forward and suddenly found the little healer woman thrusting herself in front of him.

  ‘Quiet! Quiet!’ Tillu hissed furiously. In a moment more, they would be fighting, and she would have more heads to bind and hands to set. Not tonight, she promised herself. ‘Out! Men out!’ she added firmly as they showed no signs of obeying. ‘Elsa needs quiet. Elsa needs rest. Other men, out! Healer say, Heckram stay here, help take care of Elsa,’ she added shrewdly, thinking to occupy one of the combatants. ‘You. Headman.’ Capiam might not have recognized her word, but he recognized the finger that jabbed at him. ‘Take men away, not let them fight here. Talk in morning, not now. Not now! Out. Quiet!’ she hissed again when the headman’s son opened his mouth.

  For a long instant they held their positions. Then Capiam clapped his son on the shoulder and propelled him from the hut. ‘Joboam?’ He made the burly man’s name a question and a warning. Joboam clenched a fist and let Heckram see the small movement of it. Then he backed from the hut, his eyes on Heckram as he departed. Heckram stared after him like a snarling dog.

  Tillu gave in to the rubberiness in her knees and knelt beside the keening mother. She put her arms around her and rocked with her, letting her take the comfort of weeping, and feeling a small relief herself in the rhythmic movements. One day she would trust too much to her status as a healer. She had gambled that she could order a headman from a tent and not be beaten for it. She had been right, but now she trembled at what might have been the consequences had she been wrong.

  The other woman came to take her place, her tears and soft cries mingling with her friend’s. Tillu eased away from them. Healers had no time to grieve. Instead, she moved to her herb chest and took from it chamomile and sleep’s ease, bilin root and willow bark scrapings. She put fresh cold water on the hearth to heat while she mixed and measured her herbs. When the water boiled, she took it from the fire, added the herbs, and set it aside to steep. These were the herbs for sleep, and to ease the headaches of weeping. All would need them this night.

  She turned from her work to find that Heckram, too, had obeyed the orders of the healer. He sat flat on the floor by Elsa, her unresponsive hand resting in his. He was looking earnestly into a face that looked less and less like Elsa. With a sinking heart Tillu wondered how long it would take her to die. For now she could have no doubt of the pressure building inside the skull like the festering inside a closed wound. She did not understand this injury. It could not be lanced like an infection or a boil, could not be eased down with a poultice like the swelling of a twisted joint. Nothing to do but watch her die.

  The tea had steeped to a honey darkness. She chose a dipper at random from those hanging from the rafters, looked about, and found the carved wooden cups. The women had wept themselves to silence. They leaned against one another and watched her passively as she brought them tea. ‘You should rest,’ she told them, and each nodded, believing she spoke to the other. She left them holding one another and took a third cup to Heckram. She offered it to him, but he did not notice it. When she touched it against his empty hand, he started as if she had stabbed him. Slowly he put Elsa’s hand down, tucking it gently beneath the covers. Then he took the cup Tillu still held.

  For a long moment he just held the cup as he continued to look at Elsa. Finally he shifted his gaze to Tillu, and she regretted telling him to help with Elsa. She saw now the effort it had taken for him to hold that lax hand.

  ‘She’s dying.’ She read the words from the shape of his lips, the sound barely breathed out. He was not questioning her, was not asking for a lie to ease himself. He was telling her what he knew, passing on information to the healer. She bowed her head in assent. The next words he spoke made no sense to her. ‘I didn’t love her enough,’ he confessed. Then he lifted the cup and drained it, scalding as it was.

  Tillu waited to receive the empty cup back from him. He gave it to her, then stretched out slowly on the floor hides. His reaching hand touched, not Elsa, but the edge of the hide that covered her. She heard his stiff swallowing and turned to leave him alone. The women were talking still, in soft, thick whispers. They no longer wept or ranted. The passion of their grief was spent for now. Soon they would sleep.

  As Tillu would now. A little distance from the fire, she made a place for herself, baring the floor’s covering of birch twigs as she took one of the hides to cover herself. She stared into the fire and then closed her eyes, letting her mind glide just under the edge of sleep as she kept her ears alert for the slightest stirring from Elsa.

  The fire had burned low. The softening shadows in the hut, the gentle sound of breathing, calmed the night. Heckram lay silent, listening and staring. The healer’s brew had not put him to sleep. Part of him wondered if there was any left in the pot, if a second cup would let his mind sink into emptiness. But the other part of him was too occupied to think of rising and looking for a cup of soothing tea.

  He was trying to remember the first time he had touched Elsa as a man touches a woman. He couldn’t. It had been during a time that no longer seemed to fit into the general context of his life. He had awakened to his manhood later than most boys, and been prey to that awakening for a shorter time. He tried to remember the Heckram of those days, a male with burning blood like a leaping, snorting sarva in its first rut. Like a sarva, he had bounded from one willing female to the next, sharing but a moment with each, taking his pleasure with eyes closed, his own heart loud in his ears. It was a time he regretted.

  No member of the herdfolk condemned him. Did not all, men and women, pass through the first heat of knowledge, to emerge as adults? The older folk turned their eyes aside from the excesses of youth, trusting to time that these things would pass, or deepen into permanent relationships. Heckram had been so steady and sober a youth, and was now so settled and responsible a man. Yet those two lives were divided by that wild season. He had fought like a sarva, too, finding insults in the most innocent of teasing, and battling all, youths his own age, and those years older. He had not
won all his fights, nor bedded every woman he courted. But though he couldn’t seem to remember his losses in either kind of struggle, his victories were equally blurry.

  Elsa had been one he had won, but he could not remember much of the conquest. Like him, she had been flushed with the first touch of fertility, but she had been younger, so much younger. He tried to remember something, a word in the dusk, a touch, the shape of a bared young breast. Nothing. She had been but one of the many for him. It made it so much worse to know that of her many, he had been the one.

  It took a few seasons to cool his blood, but when his passage was complete, he saw himself in a cold hard light. It did not matter to him that no one else faulted him for his conduct. He found his own peculiar shame in knowing that the heat of his body had never touched his heart. Elsa, so simple and trusting, had found ways to let him know that she would come to his call. She had been willing to wait for him to feel ready for commitment, never doubting that in time he would want her. Now he wished he had found the courage to turn her aside, to find some gentle way of telling her to find a better man. She might have had children by now, be a wife and a mother. So much she had missed waiting for him.

  He waited for tears to come, but his eyes were dry, the lids abrasive when he closed them. He sighed, then stiffened at an answering sigh from Elsa. In an instant he was on his knees beside her, whispering ‘Elsa? Elsa?’

  She answered with a trailing moan that rode on her breath. It was followed immediately by another. He took her lax hand. The fingers twitched lightly against his rough palm. He closed his hand over them, hoping she could feel he was there.

  A rustle of garments, and the healer was beside them. Her hair straggled about her face and her eyes were old as she bent closely over Elsa to peer at her. As she straightened, she looked into his face. Slowly she shook her head at him. ‘Don’t torment yourself,’ she whispered softly. ‘Don’t hope.’