Califia's Daughters (23 page)

N
INETEEN

T
HE ARROW CAME ON THE SEVENTEENTH OF
N
OVEMBER.
For the next six days, Dian lay in the grip of blood loss and fever. Looking back, she could never decide whether she remembered the period as a myriad of tiny days or as one endless one, for she had no clear time reference in which to lodge her memories. Those memories were many and elemental: light and warmth and comfort and pain and fear. The strong hands and placid, ugly face of her rescuer—whom she slowly grew to recognize as a stranger, and a woman, not Isaac—were a constant presence, although for one period they were inexplicably absent. The renewed terror and loneliness and pain of Culum's loss overwhelmed her, but at last the half-familiar hands and the warm, bittersweet drink returned, accompanied by a voice that told her over and over that Culum was safe now, safe and cleanly buried and sleeping content in the knowledge that she was well, and Dian allowed herself to be soothed, even though she knew he was not safely underground, knew that he would never be, for she had abandoned his bones on the banks of the stream.

It was the dreams she remembered most clearly, after her mind had cleared. The visions of Culum's beloved and traitorously abandoned body torn by crows and coyotes haunted her and made her rage, until Tomas and the strong hands returned to calm her. Faces came and spoke to her, though she could hear no words. Isaac came—the real Isaac, not this caring stranger, and Miriam, and Peter, and Carmen came to unsaddle her horse and Teddy sang her a voiceless song. She waited for Kirsten and Judith, but they remained hidden, until she wondered if she had angered them. She called to them, begged them to forgive her, for leaving Culum and for destroying the beautiful sleeping bag, but they stayed away until the seventh night, the night the fever reached its climax.

Kirsten and Judith came together, sitting on the veranda in the warm sun of a summer's afternoon. They both looked young and happy and smiled at her with love, although something about them made her feel uneasy. She started to tell them how glad she was to see them, but Kirsten raised her hand to stop her. Kirsten started speaking, and to Dian's relief, this was one voice she could hear.

“When I was young,” Kirsten began, and smiled again. “When I was young, there was no death in the world. Nobody I knew had died. I did not know that anybody could lose a child.” She stopped, and she and Judith sat beside each other, gazing calmly at Dian, who knew then what was wrong: there was no baby in Judith's arms. She cried out, but the old woman again held up her hand, and continued. “Death came when I grew older, when I grew old enough to begin to understand what it took to make a life.” Her eyes grew sad, and her face began to fade. “Some of us who are given great pain are given the ability to know great joy as well.” She looked intently at Dian, then the vision faded completely, leaving only an echo: “Take care of yourself, child. We need you here.” They were gone, and Dian dropped into the first true sleep she had had in many days.

         

Late the next morning Dian's nose woke her. Her body lay on its side, limp as an old dishrag, but when her eyes opened, they joined her nose in rejoicing at life, even though what dominated her vision was completely unidentifiable. The object before her looked like the wool duster Judith used, a brown fluff on a stick, except that this one seemed to be rattling. Dian regarded it blankly for a couple of minutes and had just become aware of a faint trickle of puzzlement when the brown fluff rose and turned to look at her. A cat, of a most unusual shading, light body and black boots and eyes almost as blue as her own. And it was indeed rattling, for the noise it made could hardly be called a purr.

Feeling reassured that neither the universe nor her sanity had changed too drastically, Dian looked beyond the odd cat into the room. Although she had been there for some days, this was the first time she had seen her surroundings with lucid eyes. After studying the room for a few minutes, however, she wondered if she was indeed fully lucid. The room . . . sparkled. Not that it glittered—far from it, the furnishings were simplicity itself. There were chairs with cushions, a low wooden table, a brown and gray rug on the floorboards, a fireplace with carved mantelpiece, curtains on the windows, and a black pot near the fire from which came the marvelous smells that had awakened her. None of this was the least bit showy or out of the ordinary. The room sparkled because of the perfection of each object, how it was placed in relationship to the others, the way the colors blended to form a whole. She drank it in for several minutes, this woman who rarely noticed the ropes of cobwebs and mismatched oddments of furniture in her own house, and then closed her eyes. She must still be feverish, she thought.

The next time she was awakened by her ears. A rustle and thump came from behind the door. When it opened, Tomas bounded into the room, pausing to shake a small snow drift from his fur before he crossed the rest of the room in one great leap that sent the cat flying for high ground. He thrust his big head gently into Dian's chest, and when she started rubbing his ears he shut his eyes and crooned with pleasure. It took several minutes to relieve him of the most urgent messages of greeting, but when she weakly gestured for him to lie down, he flopped down on the floor next to her bed and sighed gustily with pleasure.

Dian's rescuer had come in behind the dog, dressed for the outdoors in jacket and gloves, a pistol on her hip, and her arms filled with a variety of leather pouches, reed baskets, and unglazed pots. She leaned against the door to shut it, her eyes lighting up when she saw her patient's response to the dog. She turned to unload her burden carefully on the table, talking over her shoulder in that husky voice that had soothed Dian's dreams.

“It's good to see you awake. I thought you might be joining us today.” Her arms free, she unfastened her deerskin jacket and the belt of her holster and hung both near the door, took off her gloves, and paused beside Dian's bed to rest a cool hand on her patient's forehead. “I'd like you to have something to eat, then later on I'll help you get clean and clothed. All right?”

Dian nodded, distracted by the intoxicating smells. The woman went over to the fireplace and pulled the pot from its hook, which loosed billows of fragrant steam into the room and set Dian to swallowing, although whether from residual queasiness or hunger she could not have said. The woman spooned some of the pot's contents into a small bowl and picked a spoon out of a drawer under the table. At Dian's bedside she hesitated, put bowl and spoon on the wooden stool previously occupied by the cat, and went through another door, which Dian had not noticed. Returning with an armful of pillows and quilts in autumnal colors, she inserted them behind Dian's shoulders and head. When she was satisfied with the angle, she took up the bowl, sat on the stool, and began to feed Dian.

The first mouthful confirmed Dian's suspicions that she was still feverish. It looked like gray gruel, but it hit the tongue like a taste of paradise and settled her stomach instantly; Dian thought that she could eat it forever. She had no idea what it was, other than something with the texture of mealy porridge, but the exquisite salty–sweet flavors filled her with well-being, and she felt like a charged battery, tingling with energy down to her toes. It was the most completely nourishing food she had ever tasted, and even as the woman was removing the supports from her head, Dian slipped into a sound, dreamless sleep. And woke an hour later with two questions pressed against the front of her mind: Who was the woman, and did she have a toilet?

When Dian's eyes came open this time, the cat was gone and the woman was sitting in front of the fire, sewing together the bottom of Dian's eviscerated sleeping bag, strong fingers working the needle with ease and precision. Looking at her, remembering her first sight of those hands by lamplight, Dian could not imagine why she had mistaken her rescuer for Isaac. Granted, this was not a pretty woman, although her smooth skin was a beautiful coppery brown and her eyes were dark and compelling. Her body was too thick and muscular to be considered graceful, her face disfigured by a long scar that ran from forehead to chin, narrowly missing her left eye. Dian later found that it had been left there by an enraged mother bear, many years before.

In spite of her outer ugliness, the woman was possessed of an air of self-assuredness, of quiet strength and balance. She sat there like Kirsten, or like Ling after one of her meditations, in the hold of a serene centeredness. Dian wondered if her fever was rising again.

Then the woman looked up from her work, and her eyes crinkled a welcome. She pushed the bag off her lap, picked up a cup that waited on the hearth, and anticipated Dian's questions, both of them.

“You probably want to know who I am. My name is Robin.” She came to sit next to Dian, holding her patient's shoulders up so she could drink from the warm cup. Again, that wash of marvelously right flavors. Did fever affect the taste buds, or was it just that she hadn't eaten in so long? When the cup was empty, Robin put it on the small table.

“I'm sure you'll need a toilet fairly soon. I could bring you the pan, or if you feel up to it I'll take you to the toilet. Do you think you could manage a bath?”

Dian became immediately aware of how very dirty she felt, despite the numerous sponge baths she vaguely remembered over the past days.

“I must be getting better,” she told Robin with an attempt at humor. “I feel filthy.” She started to sit up, and stopped abruptly as the pain shot up and down her leg.

“Don't you dare break open that hole of yours. I'm nearly out of things I can use for bandages.” The woman pulled the covers back from Dian's body, which, the invalid noticed for the first time, was covered only in a long, soft, sleeveless shirt. With care and apparently no effort, Robin lifted her from the bed and carried her through the cabin, past a closed doorway, and into a small bathroom. “Relax your leg muscles completely,” she ordered, lowering Dian onto the ancient, cracked, but apparently still functional porcelain throne. “Don't try to get up. I'll be back in a few minutes.”

She reappeared through the doorway a discreet minute later with two large pails of steaming water, which she emptied into a large, half-filled tub in the corner of the tiled room. She went out and returned with two more steaming containers, emptying them, too, into the standing water. When she was satisfied with the temperature, she turned to Dian.

“Ready?”

She lifted Dian, steadied her, and helped pull the shirt over her patient's head. Looking down, Dian was shocked at the state of her body. Her right leg was swollen and discolored from hip to knee, an ugly purple-green with the remnants of dispersing blood. The entrance wound was red and angry, and trails of blood seeped down her leg when the bandages were eased away. Her hip bones jutted out under the pale skin like those of an ancient cow, and an assortment of half-healed scrapes and bruises on her arms and, her fingers told her, her scalp and face showed where she had fallen.

“Mother of God,” she muttered.

“It's actually looking a lot better.” Robin's eyes crinkled again at Dian's snort of disgust, then she added seriously, “The fever's gone, but the infection isn't. I want you to get in this bath and soak. It'll hurt, and it'll bleed, but we've got to get the poison out.” She watched Dian for a moment to make sure her patient's good leg could hold her, then went over to a shelf that held the baskets and pouches she'd carried in that morning. She took a handful from two and a smaller amount from a third and piled the various leaves and twigs into a square of white cloth. She hesitated, bent to look more closely at the oozing wound on Dian's leg, then added two or three other bits before tying the cloth up and dropping it into the water. The air was instantly filled with the heady fragrance of a wooded stream. She turned back to Dian. “Now, for you.”

The tub was long enough for Dian's leg to remain relatively straight, but the process was still torture. Robin kept coming in with yet more hot water, until Dian felt near to passing out, but then her torturer returned with a cup of hot, sweet liquid with a familiar bitter undertaste, and the dizziness retreated.

She soaked until her fingers puckered, and Robin washed her body and hair and finally lifted her out onto a towel. Dian could barely stand, leaning against Robin's vastly reassuring shoulder with passive tears leaking from her eyes. She did not notice the clean sheets on the bed, barely felt the gentle hands that wound a fresh dressing around her upper leg. When Robin had finished and pulled the blankets up around Dian's shoulders, Dian was already asleep.

Twelve hours later, when the watery morning sunlight slanted through the cabin windows, they did it all over again. And twelve hours later, with darkness long fallen, again. This time Dian lay for a moment, looking ruefully up at her rescuer.

“You were probably looking forward to a nice peaceful winter, and here you are using all your firewood to heat water and watching your supply of food go down my throat.”

Robin gave Dian her eye-wrinkling smile. “There is all the time in the world for peace and quiet. And there are more deer than anyone knows what to do with in this part of the world; provisions are no problem.”

“Well, just be sure you don't starve to feed Cul—to feed Tomas. He can hunt for himself, although it's a good idea if you take the meat off the bones for him.”

“I've been doing that. Although it took me a while to figure out why he'd bring me rabbits and just stare at them, salivating furiously. I think your dog considers me a slow learner.” Then the wide face grew serious, and Robin rested a hand on Dian's shoulder. “I buried them, you know. Your other dog and the woman. I didn't want to leave you alone, but your mind was so troubled, you couldn't sleep, so I rode back along your tracks and found them. I dug two holes, one for each of them, well away from each other, far above the water line, and brought the woman's two horses back here. Your dog is safe now.”